Ramblefish

2007-10-07T07:49:00.000-04:00

I guess this is the end of the line. Two years of blogging has taken a toll, mainly in the fact that I've succeeded in boring everyone, especially myself. Opening your heart is very overrated in that it lends people the illusion that they're a part of your life, when they're not. I'm going to focus on fixing this life of mine and won't be pouring any more of my depleted energy levels into documenting the excruciating minutae of my tortured soul. Translation, I'm quitting the blog-life, or, as a wit once put it, "Before you get a Second Life, make sure you have a first one".

So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye...adieu, adieu...to yeu and yeu and yeu. It's been real, it's been fun, but it hasn't been real fun. And how fitting that most of this goodbye post represents plagiarised stuff from movies, articles, books and even a t-shirt. I guess when you're a serial cutter-and-paster, old habits die hard...

Ramblefish, out.

I can see clearly now

2007-10-07T06:23:00.000-04:00

ThinkGeek Products

2007-10-05T10:38:00.000-04:00

Clever? Certainly. Geeky? of course!

2007-10-05T08:04:00.000-04:00

The Perfect Halo 3 Review

2007-10-04T09:39:00.000-04:00

Even if you don't like games, this is very funny.

The 9/11 backlash against women

2007-10-03T12:25:00.000-04:00

A really good article about a very interesting angle of 9/11: how America blamed its women for feminizing it to the point where it became susceptible to attack.

Terror swept women back into the kitchen, argues Susan Faludi, and tore open the worst scar in American history. But it's Bruce Springsteen who makes the fear so real.

By Rebecca Traister

Oct. 3, 2007 | It may be pop culture heresy to rope together Susan Faludi's new book, "The Terror Dream," and Bruce Springsteen's new album, "Magic," both released this week. Faludi, author of 1991's "Backlash," is a diligent chronicler of the country's gender problems. Springsteen is a swaggering blue-collar cult hero whose critical thinking about American culture has made him an international rock star. Yet there is a neat perfection in the pairing of these two uniquely American storytellers, as if Mars and Venus had conveniently weighed in simultaneously, after six years of consideration, on what exactly has unfolded in this country, with which they are each so critically obsessed, in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Springsteen, of course, has already made one contribution to the national artistic accounting of 9/11 with "The Rising," his 2002 album that Faludi might crankily write off (as she does movies like "United 93" and "World Trade Center") as a piece of art that "seemed to have no purpose but to repeat what we already knew." On it, Springsteen gave voice to those whose lives had been damaged by 9/11: a firefighter who died, one who survived, widows both American and Arab. Five years later, he and Faludi are on related missions: to step back from the firsthand experience of events and attempt to pick out the patterns in all that's gone down since.

Faludi is characteristically grim in her reading of the country's tea leaves; she is unsurprised to report that the cultural signifiers are, as always, oppressive. Springsteen's music has always been buoyed by American symbolism; he's never been shocked by its misuse, but on this record, his grief and anger over its twisted meanings are palpable. Both "The Terror Dream" and "Magic" employ images of surrealist dread to describe the post-9/11 manipulation -- by media and politicians -- that has left us warped and brainwashed, and both deploy terrifying visions to make their points. On the title track and throughout his record, Springsteen describes the creepy carnival tricksterism of the Bush administration and the sinuous ways it has distorted his vision of America, while Faludi sees a vast national conspiracy to put women back in the kitchen and alpha males like John Wayne (or perhaps Bruce Springsteen) back in their lost positions of power.

Before she can pursue the big picture, Faludi must start where everyone else in America did: her personal experience of Sept. 11. There is her prophetic dream on the night of Sept. 10, in which she is shot while on a plane, a bullet lodged in her throat; she wakes only to discover that the world is under attack. Before the end of the day she has received the phone call that provides her book with its foundation myth: A reporter asks for her reaction to the tragedies, crowing to Faludi, "Well, this sure pushes feminism off the map!"

Not 24 hours out, and Faludi has been handed the key to how this plot will unfold: To her mind, Sept. 11 will give the nation, uneasy with the strides made by women in the decades leading up to the attacks, an excuse to stuff them back into traditional boxes. That first gleeful caller is soon joined by others, all anxious to know how quickly women will abandon their corner offices and get back to tweaking their meatloaf recipes.

Apparently, Faludi has spent the past six years writing down the license plate number of every drive-by offense against gender parity, and the first two-thirds of "The Terror Dream" is her obsessive catalog -- a simply staggering one.

There are the media stories promoting a never-realized post-9/11 baby boom and the "return of the cowboy/superhero" trend pieces. Here are the fawning portrayals of the macho Bush administration (she's looking at you, Graydon Carter), the newscasters heralding the death of the "girly-man," the breezily patronizing "We're at War, Sweetheart" headlines.

You'd almost forgotten the feeling of impotence provoked by 9/11? Faludi hasn't. Here's her recounting of the people lined up at the blood banks with no one to give blood to, the police faking "live saves" to cheer up rescue dogs on the pile, because even the canines were depressed. There's the adoration of the firefighters and of the "Let's Roll!" male heroes of Flight 93 -- remembered always for their college sports achievements and their regular-guy toughness -- while the stewardesses who boiled water to throw on the terrorists were written out of the myth.

Just when you think there can't be more, Faludi concludes Chapter 3 by asking, "If women were ineligible for hero status, for what would they be celebrated?" Well, see Chapter 4: "Perfect Virgins of Grief." From here on out you'll find the victimization of Jessica Lynch, and the tale of how widows -- especially stay-at-home-mom widows, and especially widows who were pregnant -- became the golden geese of the morning shows. She recalls articles about how lonely all those haughty, self-satisfied single career women were now that we'd been attacked by terrorists and they had no one to snuggle up with at night; the Bush administration's phony interest in women's rights in the Middle East; makeup tips on how to look like a pale, pure angel; the decrease in female bylines; the nesting obsession.

All the most shoot-yourself-now memories of 2001 (and 2002 and 2003 and 2004…) collected in one long slog through the jingoism and and overreaching proclamations made by anyone with a voice box. Each chapter makes you want to bang your head against the wall harder in the hopes that you may lose consciousness and forget all this stuff again.

It's a complaint that has been lodged against Faludi before: that she's a cherry-picker, rounding up the juiciest anecdotes that suit her argument and leaving the rest to languish. On the other hand: What a bumper crop of cherries! Like the MensAction.com blog entry about how "The phallic symbol of America has been cut off ... and at its base was a large smoldering vagina, the true symbol of the American culture." Oh. My. God. How about Frank McCourt's turgid ode to firemen: "They man a hose that could be a wild animal ... They hack and smash and isolate and drown that other wild animal, the old god fire."

Faludi faithfully records the outrageous assaults against female critics like Susan Sontag, Arundhati Roy, Barbara Kingsolver and Katha Pollitt, who dared to consider America's role in the attacks or express ambivalence about the ensuing patriotism. "Pollitt, honey, it's time to take your brain to the dry cleaners," went one headline, while the New York Post's Rod Dreher expressed his wish to "walk barefoot on broken glass across the Brooklyn Bridge, up to that despicable woman's [Sontag's] apartment, grab her by the neck, [and] drag her down to ground zero."

She more than makes her point: 9/11 unleashed a torrent of pent-up rage against women and feminism. Kingsolver tells Faludi that while the accusations hurled at her and her peers were meant to be infantilizing and patronizing, "if we were so silly and moronic, why was it so important to bring us up and attack us again and again and again? The response was not the response you would expect toward a child. It was more like we were witches." Post-feminist women had become scary, and the fury directed at them was symptomatic not simply of relief at returning them to the domestic sphere, but of the fear that they might not be willingly contained.

This collection of media moments is an invaluable document. And yet. One can't help thinking that, as in an ugly fight between lovers, some of the things that were said in the heat of the moment -- about the goodness of Rudy Giuliani; about how the attacks were retribution against the pagans, abortionists, feminists and gays; about "the end of irony" -- are better left unpacked, because if we dredged them up again, we might never get past them.

And yet, I want to thank Faludi for going to the library while the rest of us gave into baser instincts, drank a six-pack, and passed out. I want to thank her for adding it all up and making shape and sense out of six years of history. When she writes about how the attacks provoked "the denigration of capable women, the magnification of manly men, the heightened call for domesticity, the search for and sanctification of helpless girls," it's almost a relief: Of course! I knew there had to be an explanation! This must also have led to the fetishization of parenting, the mommy wars, the obsession with celebrity baby bumps, and stupidly expensive baby strollers! Wheee! Thank you Susan Faludi, for drawing the map!

Except that she hasn't. She doesn't really get to any of those things. In fact, while she has pulled through a critical thread, "The Terror Dream" does not show the full tapestry of post-9/11 gender relations.

There are oddly blank spaces in her argument. In her estimable effort to diagnose the toxicity of attitudes toward women, she eliminates events that do not fit her argument, and thus fails to tell the whole story. In the discussion of the big-dicked alpha-male Bush administration, why doesn't Faludi examine the roles of Karen Hughes and Condoleezza Rice and Harriet Miers? Hughes is brought up when she quits to spend more time with her family -- a move that supports Faludi's argument and merits consideration. But why not complicate the issue by exploring why, exactly, Mr. Guns Blazing president has put more women in positions of power than any chief executive before him? Faludi's argument is strong enough to withstand complexity. That she rarely acknowledges it only serves to weaken her claims.

Faludi devotes part of the book to tallying the diminished number of female bylines in papers, the paltry number of girl guests on TV. She's not the first to do this, and she's not wrong. "The silencing of women took place largely in silence," she writes dramatically at the conclusion of her passage on the media.

Eh. Sure. For a while. But in the years Faludi is describing, Jill Abramson ascended to the top of the New York Times masthead and Katie Couric took over the nightly news, albeit to ill effect. Why not explore the unearthing of feminism as a beat by young women like Ariel Levy at New York magazine, Sheelah Kolhatkar, formerly of the New York Observer, by Meghan O'Rourke at Slate, Jessica Valenti at Feministing, and by several of us here at Salon? Levy is mentioned in "The Terror Dream," but only as a cog in New York magazine's dastardly scheme to tell free-loving New York women they should be getting married; Faludi does not credit her for writing one of the better-received feminist books of the past decade, "Female Chauvinist Pigs." What about Linda Hirshman's "Get to Work" or Leslie Bennetts' "The Feminine Mistake"? It's not as though these women are working in echo chambers: Levy was on Oprah; she, Valenti and Linda Hirshman have all appeared on Stephen Colbert ... To talk about feminism! ... On television!

None of these developments make Faludi's argument less true: There was, and is, a paucity of women in major newspapers, magazines, political blogs, and on the talk shows. But it is possible to make that point while also acknowledging a simultaneous increase of women, besides Faludi, who are rattling the chains and getting heard.

Can a book that alleges that the United States re-embraced a John Wayne model of male leadership post-9/11 really only contain three references to the woman who may be the first major-party female candidate for president? What about the first female president of Harvard, the first female speaker of the house?

The first two-thirds of "The Terror Dream" offers a compendium of the offenses against gender civility without extending itself to contemplate how they have evolved and what they have come to mean now, in 2007. Faludi lays it all out, gets the reader good and riled, and then ... nothing.

That's because she is far less interested in the present or the future than she is with the past. Her real thesis (more complicated than "9/11 pushed us back into traditional roles") is laid out in the preface, but does not get fully realized until the book's bizarre structure becomes apparent. Her central idea is that Ernst Haeckel's hypothesis that "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" -- or, as Faludi translates for us, that the development of an embryo repeats in compressed form the evolutionary stages of its species -- can be applied to American history.

Faludi wants to show how "the way we act, say, in response to a crisis can recapitulate in quick time the centuries-long evolution of our character as a society and of the mythologies we live by." But because Faludi does the recapitulation part -- the reactions to Sept. 11 -- before she gets to the evolution part more than halfway through the book, her point gets muddied, and readers may wonder, upon beginning the final section, whether they walked into a graduate thesis on America's founding conflicts.

It's a pity, because this last section -- the phylogeny -- is brilliant and exhilarating. Faludi examines with great gusto the popular captivity narratives of 18th and 19th century America, including those of Mary Rowlandson and Cynthia Ann Parker. The stories themselves are fascinating, like that of Hannah Duston, captured in 1697 by Abenaki Indians, five days after having given birth to her 12th child. Before her captors could take her to Canada, Duston took a hatchet to them (two men, two women, six children) and escaped, only to return to collect their scalps. This bravery earned her the attention of that famously easygoing Massachusetts Bay preacher Cotton Mather, who was concerned that nice, passive women might get the wrong idea about their own self-sufficiency from Duston's story.

Faludi's point is that our behaviors in the wake of the supposedly unprecedented terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 were in fact practically written into our national DNA. "Our foundational drama as a society was apposite, a profound exposure to just such assaults, murderous homeland incursions by dark-skinned, non-Christian combatants under the flag of no recognized nation," she writes. "September 11 was aimed at our cultural solar plexus precisely because it was an 'unthinkable' occurrence for a nation that once could think of little else. It was not, in fact, an inconceivable event; it was the characteristic and formative American ordeal, the primal injury of which we could not speak, the shard of memory stuck in our throats. Our ancestors had already found a war on terror, a very long war, and we have lived with its scars ever since."

This argument is fluid and thrilling to read. It just should have been its own book, perhaps with Faludi's collected contemporary gripes appended as evidence of how in the narratives of the country's founding we can find the dental records of nearly every one of our modern impulses to contain femininity.

Faludi leaves us with a list of kidnappings and witch hunts that provide a fascinating tableau against which we are free to measure -- without much direct guidance from her -- our modern gender impulses. But again, the book feels unfinished, the work of connecting the dots left to the reader; Faludi has laid down a good strong drumbeat, but little melody to carry us through.

Which brings us back to Bruce Springsteen, whose album catalogs the very stuff that "The Terror Dream" is concerned with: Here is the cowboy George Bush, showing up 'round sundown on Election Day, "boot heels clicking like the barrel of a pistol spinning round" in "Livin' in the Future." There is the image of perfect, angelic femininity in a barmaid 'round whose hair the sun lifts a halo. Where Faludi has prophetic nightmares, Springsteen imagines, in the title track, a world in which bodies hang from trees in a tableau of post-Katrina racial horror

I'm not sure that one line from Springsteen's song "Devil's Arcade" wasn't actually written by Faludi: "You said heroes are needed, so heroes get made," and that the two of them aren't making identical points about the manipulative power of terror when Springsteen's magician in "Magic" evilly cajoles, "leave everything you know/ Carry only what you fear."

In Faludi's concluding chapter, "What If?" she takes a stab at hope, wondering, "What if the nation had responded to 9/11 differently? What if we hadn't retreated into platitudes and compensatory fictions? What if we had taken the attack as an occasion to 'confront the truth?'" Or, as Springsteen puts it in "Livin' in the Future," a song in which he retroactively reimagines Election Day: "Don't worry, darlin', now baby don't you fret/ We're livin' in the future and none of this has happened yet."

Both Faludi and Springsteen have always specialized in seeing the personal in the political and vice versa. Faludi tends to see dysfunction, in ways that have been exceedingly useful in the past, as they are here. Her failure this time is in her refusal to acknowledge the upside. Springsteen, of course, has always been a hope peddler, if not an optimist. Laced throughout both these texts are frustration, bewilderment, a desire to shake the country by its shoulders. With Faludi, the sense is that none of this comes as a surprise, she is just Charlie Brown kicking the football, only to have it yanked out from under her by a country that is still, yup, sexist. So it was written by Cotton Mather, so it will be post 9/11.

For Springsteen, the realization that "this is what will be" is both more startling and more painful. He is, like Walt Whitman before him, pained at the vision of his beloved nation torn asunder.

Both writers are furious. And I sort of want to tell them: Have a little faith. But maybe this is a moment in which there is little to believe in, and a lot to fear.

Elmo-nator

2007-10-01T08:55:00.000-04:00

The ElmoSapien project shows how to eviscerate an Elmo handpuppet and stretch its skin over a RoboSapien robot, load an Elmo "personality" into the robot and terrorize the neighborhood children.

Anything that scares kids is fine by me!

Indecision may or may not be a problem

2007-10-01T05:36:00.000-04:00

So, things are generally better for me, here in England and as usual, the source of this much-needed improvement lies in the mundane: finally got effing BT to give me a phone line, Sky are installing cable TV service tomorrow and Internet by the end of the week. In addition, I've been out a few times and while I can't say I'm totally comfortable with the pace of this place, it's getting there.

Of course, all is not suddenly fresh in the state of Denmark; the core issues that I struggle with are still there and will probably continue to be, seeing as they're themes that have accompanied me throughout most of my adult life: I am almost pathologically inclined to be alone and while I harp on about company, it's always a strain to tolerate people camping in my sphere. In addition, I tend to veer from an almost manic exuberance to a near-paralyzing depression that makes me unable to trust my own reactions at any given time; I feel like my own mind betrays me, and is therefore not to be trusted. I also have discipline and severe trust issues that prohibit me from extending myself and embrace opportunities that come my way, and this in turn translates into a deeply-rooted diffidence that seems to be at odds with the rest of my personality.

But it's not all bad. I also have very good qualities that I tend to overlook, because you only remember the bad things or how lousy you feel. For instance, I'm a very sound thinker with excellent decision-making skills, once I've identified the problem; I seem to acquire friends very easily and combine loyalty with honesty and (some kind of) wit in all my dealings. I'm an individual, unswayed by the prejudices of the mob; I'm selfless to a fault and the things I care about, I care about deeply. I'm also hung like a Trojan horse.

If I were to be completely honest with myself, a lot of my current problems are self-inflicted, though even that isn't an accurate characterization. Eleven years ago, I made several pivotal decisions which have since gone on to shape my life. I've been, at various stages, well-rewarded for these decisions but I've also come to rue them for different reasons. And anytime you make some tough calls, you're always going to wonder about where you'd be if you made different calls.

I guess that's because despite what religion, parents and politicians tell you, there is no good or bad (there's evil, but that's a different discussion): there are choices and all good choices have plenty of bad in them and even appalling decisions aren't without their rewarding moments. I made some choices, foremost among them the decision to sell out and try and make it professionally and, while my success has been on a modest scale, it's been a success, according to the strictest definition of the word: setting objectives and meeting them.

Maybe, my problem isn't making wrong decisions at all. Perhaps, it's that I'm at a point where old objectives are no longer cutting it and new ones need to come in and freshen the place up. Out with the old and in with the new, and while it's at it, the new needs to be more carefully thought out than in the past: I was 25 when I made those decisions and had the luxury of 'all-the-time-in-the-world'. It's different at 36, the risk-analysis is different and, hell, even my priorities are different.

It's a new day.

Iguana post #2

2007-09-29T08:26:00.000-04:00

This one sent me a rather attractive picture of herself, in black-and-white, looking very moody and somewhat quietl seductive. Oh, and I found the text of the ad and there doesn't seem to be a reference to English sheepdogs. I may have added that detail later and simply got my facts confused or, more likely, I wished I'd added it in to make it even funnier and then recalled it as fact. Either way, I'm a moron!

Hello, I am responding to your ad on craigslist for your apartment sublease. I am VERY interested!

About me:
I am a female photographer and Art Teacher. I am 25 and have lived in New York for 3 years now. I have a cat named Penelope who is as fat and lazy as can be. I would absolutely love to take care of Herman (hopefully he could forgive me for being a girl). I have attached a photo so that you can put a face with the name.

Here's my catch: My Aunt Linda is hoping to move home to New York (from Florida) because her husband passed away and misses family. I told her that she could stay with me for a year so that she could get on her feet. So basically.. I'm asking if its ok if we both live in the apartment.

Hope to hear from you soon!

All the Best,

Jennifer

917-XXX-XXXX

$1200 / 1br - Beautiful 1BR brownstone on 46th street and 9th Avenue
Reply to: hous-155037027@craigslist.org
Date: 2006-04-27, 12:45AM EDT

Kind of a unique situation: I'm moving to Italy for two years to study on a grant, in Rome, and I need someone to rent my apartment while I'm gone. I own it so there are no fees whatsoever. It's a beautiful apartment in a brownstone building, a first floor walk-up with living room, kitchen, bathroom and bedroom. It's 880 square feet, sunny and very, very cosy. In short, it's a dream. I'm 44 year old attorney, originally from Boston looking for someone I can trust with the apartment and..

...here's the catch (and the reason I'm offering it at this very competitive price): I'm looking for someone who will be able to look after Herman, my 8 year old pet iguana. He's a smashing little fellow but I can't take him with me. All you have to do is feed him and make sure he gets enough water, sun and so forth. He's very quiet and requires very little maintenance. Since his food is mostly lettuce, it won't cost much and since I won't be charging a security deposit, the money you save on that can go to his upkeep. It's a good deal anyway you look at it.

I'd prefer a single guy (Iguanas prefer men), a professional with solid job references. I'll make my decision based on meeting you and if I get a good feeling about how you'll treat Herman (and my apartment), we'll sign the lease on the spot. I'm sure this apartment won't last long so hurry up-but make sure you're up for the responsibility and willing to sign a 2 year lease.

Dice Stacking Movie

2007-09-29T06:35:00.001-04:00

I hear you: Huh? Well, watch this, doubters.

Elvis Duran punks an Egyptian in NY

2007-09-27T11:30:00.000-04:00

Thanks to Portia for sending this.

Battle at Kruger

2007-09-27T10:45:00.001-04:00

Carmen, remember we talked about this? It's just amazing.

A year of living Biblically

2007-09-27T06:43:00.001-04:00

The Year of Living Biblically is, in one word, fascinating. The guy who wrote The Know-It-All, a book about reading the entire Encyclopedia, recently spent a year trying to follow all 700 plus rules he found in the Bible. These rules ranged from the obvious Ten Commandments to the more obscure details of Old Testament laws, which ultra orthodox Jews might follow: leaving side hair uncut, dwelling in huts on certain holidays, strict dietary routines. To give some idea of the physical transformation he underwent, the book offers this photo.

There's a amusing interview with him at Newsweek online, that points to a couple of important things about anyone trying to literally (fundamentally) obey the many rules found in this very long book:

Q: Many women say some passages in the Bible can seem pretty misogynistic. Was that a problem for your relationship?

A: It was. Parts of the Bible say that the man is the head of the household and should make the decisions, which did not translate into reality in our household. She found that a disturbing part of religion. It was something I really had to wrestle with. One of the lessons of the book is, there is some picking and choosing in following the Bible, and I think that's OK. Some people call that cafeteria religion, which is supposed to be a disparaging term, but I think there's nothing wrong with cafeterias, I've had some delicious meals in cafeterias. I've also had some terrible meals in cafeterias. It's all about picking the right parts. You want to take a heaping serving of the parts about compassion, mercy and gratefulness -- instead of the parts about hatred and intolerance.

That has been my experience with both practicing religion and hanging around others practicing it in various degrees, including many who do it wholeheartedly. Everybody is picking and choosing parts they take literally and parts that they take metaphorically, but some admit this and others don't. Or rather some believe the distinction is obvious and necessary rather than arbitrary or personal. However the fact that very few people -- even those who are the most fundamental in any religion -- agree on which rules are fundamental is evidence of the personal nature of the decision.

Q: Once the experiment ends, you write about being feeling unanchored without your list of rules. Were you comforted by the restrictions of living Biblically? And do you think that's part of the attraction of organized religion for many people?

A: Oh, absolutely. We all talk about freedom of choice, but there's something very attractive about freedom from choice. Religion provides structure, mooring, anchoring. Should you covet? No. Should you give 10 percent to the needy? Yes. It really structures your life. After my year I felt unmoored, overwhelmed by choice. I have adjusted, but I'm still overwhelmed by choice, as we all are in America.

This too is profound. Many soldiers leaving the army (especially in peacetime) bemoan the loss of structure a well-regulated army life gave them. There is no doubt this escape from what Barry Schwartz, in his book The Paradox of Choice, calls "the tyranny of choice" is a large attraction of religion. It's joy should not be scoffed at. For instance I find that implementing a strict Never Lie rule in my own life has freed me up from having to weigh the plus and minuses of whether to do so, or keep track of what I said, or manage the blowback from when a ruse slips. Lying is not an option, so I am released from that struggle.

Q: Are you a more religious person as a result of this experiment?

A: Well, I don't want to give away the ending, but let's say I started the year as an agnostic, and now I am a reverent agnostic. Whether or not there is a God, I believe in sacredness. Rituals can be sacred, the Sabbath can be sacred however you choose to observe it.

My take on Burning Man, which I have attended about 10 times, is that it is 50% about supplying a ritual for the non-religious.

Q: Which is the greater learning tool, the Bible or the encyclopedia?

A: That's a tough question. The Bible project was a lot more difficult than the encyclopedia project. The Bible affected every single part of my life, it affected the way I walked, the way I dressed, the way I hugged my wife, the way I ate. The year was the most extreme makeover of my life. In terms of which is the better learning tool, the encyclopedia does contain a lot of biblical passages in the different books, so it might contain most of the Bible in it.

Q: It's been a little over a year since your experiment ended and you shaved your beard. How's the life of sin?

A: It's all right. I miss my sin-free life, but I guess I was never sin free. I was able to cut down on my coveting maybe 40 percent, but I was still a coveter. Flat-screen TVs, the front yard of my friend in the suburbs, a better cell phone, higher Amazon rankings.

Iguana Post #1

2007-09-27T05:48:00.000-04:00

Hi-

My husband and I are desperatly looking for an apartment in this area. And we would love to look after your iguana! We are in our late 20's- I work in retail and am a jewelry designer, and my husband works in movie and TV production.

My husband and I are free Sunday and would love to meet you and Herman. If we sound like the kind of tenants you are looking for, please give me a call at 917-XXX-XXXX.

Thank you,

Helen

Beyond the Multiplex

2007-09-27T05:42:00.000-04:00

A startling tour of American apartheid; a delightful, ultra-indie tale of call-center love; and a stark look at sugar's not-so-sweet side.

By Andrew O'Hehir

A still from "Banished"

Sept. 27, 2007 | Whether it's an old-fashioned Indian summer or a newfangled Al Gore-fueled catastrophe, the Eastern seaboard is enjoying a glorious autumnal heat wave, just as maple leaves begin to drift into backyards and prestige films begin to drift into theaters. Even in 85-degree weather, nothing signals fall like the New York Film Festival, a semi-official marshaling of the season's "important" cinema events. This year's festival opens Sept. 28 with the premiere of Wes Anderson's new movie, "The Darjeeling Limited" (look for Stephanie Zacharek's review tomorrow), and will end Oct. 14 with Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's animated "Persepolis."

I've grumped sporadically over the years about the NYFF's slightly snooty, Manhattan-centric tone of cultural superiority, so it's time to confess to some warm and fuzzy feelings toward the grande dame of American film festivals (this year is its 45th). For one thing, as festival programmer Richard Peña observed in a recent interview with S.T. VanAirsdale of the Reeler, the NYFF is actively and aggressively curated. "The public really feels that this is a festival that is carefully selected," Peña said. "They might disagree violently with our selections, but they feel like somebody has selected these films -- that somebody has said, 'This film and not that film.'"

Peña is taking a none-too-subtle dig at his neighbors to the south, the programmers at the Tribeca Film Festival, who have jostled their way to some degree of global prominence (and/or notoriety) by seemingly screening any damn movie that's less than four hours long and pretty much in focus. There's a lot to be said for his approach. The NYFF is not trying to be a chaotic, grab-bag global marketplace like Berlin or Tribeca, nor is it trying to be an industry-insider trade show loaded with world premieres, like Cannes or Sundance. Unlike all those festivals, the NYFF is primarily aimed at the public -- a highly selective public composed of upper-end New York aesthetes and socialites, yes, but still the public.

It's no longer true that the NYFF can define the market for imported or independent film in any significant economic sense, but Peña's highly selective roster of titles -- almost all of which have already premiered elsewhere -- still captures a lot of media and audience attention. Some of this year's offerings, like Julian Schnabel's "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" or Joel and Ethan Coen's "No Country for Old Men" or Noah Baumbach's "Margot at the Wedding" (starring Nicole Kidman), were almost foregone conclusions. Scheduling what the great Eric Rohmer claims will be his last movie, "The Romance of Astrée and Céladon," was also automatic. But every year, the NYFF committee comes up with some wild cards, like the post-Katrina documentary "The Axe in the Attic" or "Mr. Warmth," a film about the legendarily caustic comic Don Rickles. (That's right: Don Rickles. At the New York Film Festival.)

Even on a list of 29 features, there are some mystifying selections, like actress-director Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi's mediocre romantic comedy "Actresses," or B-movie god Abel Ferrara's incoherent "Go Go Tales," which plays like a spoof "Sopranos" episode. But I'll take the weird choices and the glitzy society parties, given that this year's festival is built around an extremely potent and diverse crop of foreign movies, of exactly the sort likely to play blink-and-you'll-miss-'em American engagements. These include Cristian Mungiu's Palme d'Or-winning "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," Hou Hsiao-hsien's "Flight of the Red Balloon," Carlos Reygadas' "Silent Light" and Lee Chang-dong's "Secret Sunshine," four movies likely to make my personal top 10 this year.

With the festival sucking up much of the media oxygen, this week's release calendar has a miscellaneous, potluck feeling. But that doesn't mean there's nothing to see. Marco Williams' extraordinary documentary "Banished" explores the buried but not-quite-forgotten history of various all-white communities in the South and Midwest (here's a hint: They weren't always that way), while Bill Haney's festival-fave documentary "The Price of Sugar" uncovers one of the Western Hemisphere's darkest secrets, the slavery-like exploitation of Haitian workers on the Dominican Republic's sugar plantations.

John Jeffcoat's "Outsourced" isn't a documentary, even though it addresses a hot-button contemporary issue. Instead, it's a highly enjoyable if lightweight romantic comedy, set in a call center outside Mumbai where Indian telephone workers sell patriotic kitsch to Middle American consumers. You can draw various conclusions from the fact that this skillful, sweet and engaging entertainment is being self-distributed, but none of them are encouraging. Let's see, what else have we got? Apparently some French dude named Truffaut made a movie about a juvenile delinquent in the late '50s. A lot of people thought it was worth seeing at the time. What does it look like now?

"Banished": American apartheid, long after the death of Jim Crow

When the aging retiree in Harrison, Ark., welcomes filmmaker Marco Williams into his home, it seems almost like the setup for a Hollywood comedy. With his mismatched outfit of high-water trousers and flannel shirt, crusty old Bob Scott seems like the irascible geezer who might just have a heart of gold; in his T-shirt, jeans and flowing dreadlocks, Williams seems every inch the big-city African-American intellectual. They sit down at Scott's table and have a pleasant conversation about life in Harrison. Scott likes living there because people are friendly, the cost of living is low and the Ozark scenery is lovely. But one factor was even more important to him and his fellow retirees, he says: "No blacks."

It is not just historical accident that Boone County, which includes Harrison, has only 40 or so African-Americans among its 34,000 residents. Nor that Forsyth County, Ga., Washington County, Ind., Pierce City, Mo., and dozens of other counties and municipalities in the Midwest and South are nearly or totally all-white today. From the end of the Civil War through the 1920s, many rural communities systematically purged their black residents, driving them out with implicit or explicit threats of violence. Sometimes these blacks were allowed to sell their land, albeit under duress and at discount prices. Often they were simply driven off, forced to abandon homes and land and flee for their lives.

Hardly anyone now living witnessed these events, but as Williams' film forcefully demonstrates, the wounds have nowhere near healed. Descendants of displaced African-Americans have passed the stories down as formative family legend, and while whites are far more eager to bury the past, many remain uncomfortably aware that something unsavory lingers at the farthest edges of community memory.

Williams focuses on three areas with distinct and disparate histories: Forsyth County today is a bedroom community on the outer suburban fringe of Atlanta, anxious to present itself as part of the tolerant New South, unshackled from the past. Yet Forsyth was the site of one of the most extensive ethnic cleansing campaigns anywhere in the country; as recently as 1987, a multiracial Martin Luther King Day march was viciously attacked by an angry white mob. Meanwhile, the descendants of black landowners driven out in 1912 have begun to seek restitution or reparations for land that was apparently stolen from them, a movement vigorously resisted by white legal and political authorities.

In Pierce City, Williams follows the painful quest of James and Charles Brown, two St. Louis brothers who discover that their great-grandparents were driven out of town in 1901, to find and remove ancestral remains from the local graveyard. Awkwardly and uncertainly, Pierce City's coroner and former mayor begin to help the Browns, and to approach their own sense of communal responsibility. But when the Browns demand that Pierce City pay for the exhumation and relocation, the tentative sense of brotherhood falls away. Why should we offer reparations, these well-meaning white citizens demand, for something we didn't do?

Back in Bob Scott's Arkansas town, the racism is more overt than in other communities. Williams has a surprisingly polite conversation with Thom Robb, head of the local Ku Klux Klan, who amiably tells him that cross burning is an ancient Scottish rite (not, of course, an act of racial hatred) but that on the whole he thinks Harrison is better off as a white town. At the same time, Harrison's white residents have done more to confront the problem than anyone in the other two areas: Local preachers have held days of prayer and atonement; volunteers helped renovate a black church in a neighboring county; a scholarship was established for African-American student-athletes from other towns.

"Banished" offers a startling tour into an unforgotten history that remains invisible to most Americans, with the erudite Williams, who is simultaneously polite and confrontational, as our host. It would be ludicrous to suggest that he doesn't take sides: Williams clearly believes that a major historical crime has been swept under the rug, and his film is loaded with moments of understated emotional power. When the black Strickland family of Atlanta find a neglected and overgrown family burial ground on white-owned land in Forsyth County, and kneel there in prayer not far from the current residents' Confederate-flag-bedecked pickup, all the legal questions and ethical quandaries fade into the background.

All the same, Williams never shies away from his film's unanswerable questions. Much as I longed for the Brown brothers and Pierce City officials to find some agreeable middle ground, both remain prisoners of history. James Brown springs his demand for reimbursement on the coroner who has befriended him, just after the latter has shipped and reinterred his great-grandfather's remains. In response, the town fathers retreat into specious and sentimental rhetoric (and refuse to answer Brown directly). Someday, perhaps, these century-old crimes will be forgotten and black people will move into places like Pierce City and Harrison, not knowing or caring about what happened there. But not yet, and not for a long time to come.

"Banished" is now playing at Film Forum in New York. Other engagements, and DVD release, will follow.

"Outsourced": Love in the fulfillment house, or the meta-outsourced indie comedy

Look, I'm not going to pretend that John Jeffcoat's romantic comedy "Outsourced" will change anybody's life, but it's an exceptionally likable film made on a shoestring -- hey, it's cheap to shoot in India! -- that couldn't find conventional distribution. If that's not a reason to root for it, what the hell is? Jeffcoat's sideways approach to a controversial social issue -- the relocation of customer-service jobs to India -- is fresh and never condescending, and the film is terrifically acted with above-average production values. Most Hollywood love stories cost 10 times as much and deliver half the juice, at best.

Actually, I wince to think what your average Hollywood director would have done with this setup: An American call-center manager is reassigned to a newly constructed building outside Mumbai, where he has to train his own replacement and ends up falling in love with -- well, with India, actually. Mind you, there is an awfully attractive Indian woman named Asha (the delightful Ayesha Dharker) involved, but acerbic Todd (Josh Hamilton) has to find out a lot about the country and its people -- and yes, about his own intelligence and conscience -- before he's ready for her.

Jeffcoat isn't afraid to make his characters both types and individuals, in the best comic tradition. Todd is likable, cynical and self-involved, while Puro (Asif Basra), the Indian manager who's going to get his job (at roughly one-eighth the salary), is hardworking, fast-talking and ambitious, with an unreadably sunny veneer. But from the beginning, we can see elements of emotional reserve and shifting intelligence in both these guys. They're always more than cultural stereotypes, and even the predictable power exchange between them -- Todd has to teach his call-center employees how to "sound American," while Puro and the other Indians have to teach him how to be a human being -- isn't as clichéd as that sounds.

Jeffcoat's depiction of the call-center world is funny, fascinating and almost anthropological; he never preaches at you on the morality, or lack thereof, of this distinct late-capitalist phenomenon. (As you may have discovered, it can be difficult to get call-center workers to admit they're not really in Chicago or Dallas.) As "Outsourced" gradually and gracefully moves Todd and the luminous Asha toward each other -- and toward the "Kama Sutra suite" of a sleazy tourist hotel -- it remains respectful of the tremendous distance between them. She, after all, has been engaged to a cousin since the age of 4, and he's on his way back to his Seattle condo as soon as the call center is down to six minutes per customer. I guess "Outsourced" is simply too bright and pleasant to become a huge hit, but it's a confident little genre film with near-classic charm.

"Outsourced" opens Sept. 28 in New York, Eugene, Ore., Portland, Ore., San Francisco, Seattle and Austin, Texas; and Oct. 5 in Los Angeles and San Jose, Calif., with more cities to follow.

Fast forward: The true "Price of Sugar" in blood, sweat and tears; "The 400 Blows" after almost 50 years
As I write this, it's still difficult to find accurate information about where and when Bill Haney's profoundly disturbing documentary "The Price of Sugar" will be opening commercially in the United States. Partly this is because the Vicini family, sugar barons of the Dominican Republic, have hired Patton Boggs, a major Washington law firm, to try to halt the film's release, or at least paint it as slanted and defamatory. Narrated by Paul Newman, Haney's film follows an Anglo-Spanish missionary priest, Christopher Hartley, as he tries to bring some justice to the slavery-like conditions under which Haitian immigrants cut sugar cane in the Vicini fields.

As Hartley remarks in the film, Americans may be dismayed to learn the true cost of the sugar they put in their morning coffee: Haitian workers are routinely imprisoned by armed guards and underpaid (or go unpaid for long periods), and those who run away or try to insist on minimal legal rights frequently disappear. While Hartley and Haney have succeeded in focusing international attention on the Dominican sugar fields, both the Vicinis and the Dominican population continue to insist that nothing is wrong. Hartley has been reassigned to Ethiopia by his church superiors, and public screenings have reportedly been interrupted by counter-demonstrators. (Scheduled to open Sept. 28 in New York, Los Angeles and other major cities.)

Every critic has their blind spots, and here's one I've never quite been able to explain to myself: I don't especially like the films of François Truffaut. I've often found them a little precious and self-congratulatory, a little too French in the most stereotypically winsome and fatalistic manner. Look, I agree that it's inexplicable, and on seeing Truffaut's prodigiously influential 1959 breakthrough, "The 400 Blows," for about the fifth time, I think I've come to terms with it.

Technically, the picture is superb, with its intimate technique, its many memorable shots -- especially that last one on the beach, when teenage runaway Antoine turns accusingly, or achingly, toward the audience -- and its simultaneously bleak and beautiful widescreen presentation of downscale street life in postwar Paris. For the first few viewings, I think I found Truffaut overly sympathetic to the delinquent hero (played so memorably by the young Jean-Pierre Léaud), and too ready to lapse into a romantic vision of a heartless, oppressive society bent on crushing the soul of the young.

Well, OK, "The 400 Blows" is about those things, but now I can see that Truffaut at least sometimes views Antoine from a dispassionate distance, about the same way he sees Antoine's maddeningly inconsistent, wounded and overworked parents. (I guess society has crushed them too.) I suspect I just didn't see this undisputed masterpiece when I was the right age for it to resound achingly in my soul or whatever. At the very least, "The 400 Blows" is a beautiful film that launched a major career and has shaped all cinematic depictions of rebellious adolescence ever since. Forget my curmudgeonly attitude and see it -- again, or for the first time -- for yourself. (Now playing in a new 35mm print at Film Forum in New York.)

The feminist who made me blush

2007-09-26T13:21:00.000-04:00

I have a lot of time for anyone not afraid to reveal themselves, warts and all, to the baying hounds. Three people read this blog whereas Pollit faces a potential audience of millions, all of them capable of judging her to the nth degree.

Political columnist Katha Pollitt has been vilified for airing her romantic dirty laundry. What's wrong with serious women writers exposing their soft underbellies to the world?

By Rebecca Traister

Sept. 26, 2007 | As a first-grader, I remember walking into a supermarket one night with my mother, and seeing my teacher manning the checkout line. I froze, red-faced with embarrassment. My embarrassment didn't stem from an understanding that Mrs. Briggs was working a second job at the supermarket because Palmer Elementary wasn't paying her enough to live on. I was way too young to get that. My horror was at the fact that she was my teacher, the official lady who had an official job teaching me how to read and recognize numbers and here she was in the supermarket where real life took place. She was dressed in different clothes and wearing an apron. She was a person! It was embarrassing! People have public lives and private lives. And when the twain meet, it makes you turn red.

That's probably why, a few years ago, when I read Katha Pollitt's New Yorker essays about learning to drive and web-stalking her ex-boyfriend in the wake of a brutal breakup, I was so taken aback: humiliated for her, embarrassed to have bumped into her this way, in different clothes and an apron! Pollitt and I are now professional acquaintances, but at the time, I had not met her. I knew her only as a columnist, having long loved her work as a political and feminist critic for the Nation. But I viscerally recoiled at these tales of her abandoning her pride, wallowing miserably and defensively as she compared herself to her ex's new girlfriend, admitting to her lack of self-sufficiency and confidence. The newspaper where I worked at the time ran pieces mocking both of her stories. I didn't write them, but I laughed at them.

Of course, I also read the essays with the engagement of a Talmudic scholar -- identifying with her in some places, happily and self-congratulatingly distancing myself from her shame in others, and appreciating her perhaps way-too-honest lyricism.

Now those two essays, in which she confessed to debasements like looking the other way after finding another woman's panties in the laundry, to not giving her boyfriend oral sex in the mornings, to the fact that he intellectually belittled her and that she -- the great feminist! -- stayed with him for seven years anyway, until he finally left her for someone else, are the centerpieces (and one of them the title) of "Learning to Drive," a new collection of Pollitt's writing.

Picking up these pieces again in book form, accompanied by other essays about Pollitt's daughter, the Marxist reading group she joined in part to impress her scoundrel boyfriend, and friendships with the women with whom her ex cheated on her, I have a much more intricate reaction than when I first read them. Instead of simply rearing back from them, I wonder: Is there ever a point at which it is a good idea for women, especially intellectual, politically engaged women, to strip off their clothes and caper naked as jaybirds in front of a line of would-be assassins?

Pollitt is used to her share of ad-feminam hit jobs. The publication of a collection of her feminist essays last summer prompted Ana Marie Cox to snigger brattily in the New York Times Book Review about Pollitt's "preserved-in-amber" version of feminism. "Learning to Drive" has already earned Pollitt two scalding reviews of a different sort, one from the New York Times and one from the Los Angeles Times, and both written by women appalled at the sight of a political thinker they both respect in her public life unmasked as, yuck, a woman, in the privacy of her own confessional essays.

The L.A Times' Susan Salter Reynolds is unapologetic about the terms of her disgust, admitting that "watching a feminist I've admired my entire life dissolve into a whingeing puddle in her late 50s is painful," and calling the book "self-indulgent." The New York Times' Toni Bentley is slinkier in her evaluation of Pollitt's "brilliant commentary on welfare, abortion, surrogate motherhood, Iraq, gay marriage and health care" next to this collection in which she "gets personal, and shameless." Bentley, a former ballerina, knows from personal and shameless; her graphic 2004 memoir "The Surrender" explored her devotion to anal sex. In her review, she names other female writers like Laura Kipnis, Daphne Merkin and Maureen Dowd, who have excavated their personal lives (not to say their intestinal tracts) for material, cracking nonsensically that they represent a new breed of "enraged, educated woman (vagina dentata intellectualis)," and wonders whether Pollitt is "giving up her dignity in a generous motion of solidarity toward the rest of us who have already blown our cover?"

First of all, of course "Learning to Drive" is self-indulgent. Memoir is self-indulgent. This hasn't stopped generations of great, serious writers from mining their private existences for wisdom, beauty or humor. As it happens, a number of Pollitt's essays are wise and very funny, and if not altogether pretty in content, then at least fine-boned in style. And in addition to being blood-and-guts revelations about her private devastations, they offer a view of the ways in which her political ideologies -- the things we respect her for -- have been woven throughout her romantic, social and familial life.

In the book's title essay, Pollitt describes her ineptitude behind the wheel of a car, and the infinite patience of her Filipino driving instructor, who calls her "Kahta" and tells her that observation -- of the distance between car and curb, for example -- is her weakness. "Observation is my weakness," she writes. "I did not realize that my mother was a secret drinker. I did not realize that the man I lived with, my soul mate, made for me in Marxist heaven, was a dedicated philanderer ... I noticed that our apartment was becoming a grunge palace ... I observed -- very good, Kahta! -- that ... I had gained twenty five pounds in our seven years together and could not fit into many of my clothes. I realized it was not likely that the unfamiliar pink-and-black-striped bikini panties in the clean-clothes basket were the result, as he claimed, of a simple laundry room mix-up. But all this awareness was like the impending danger in one of those slow-motion dreams of paralysis, information that could not be processed. It was like seeing the man with the suitcase step off the curb and driving forward anyway."

Describing the obstetricians who delivered her daughter, Pollitt writes, "[they] were beautiful, slender, delicate dark-eyed women -- they looked like they had been antelopes in a previous life. They wore high heels and little black dresses under their white coats ... you felt they should be drinking martinis at the Beekman instead of sticking their hands up your vagina." More painfully, she ponders whether, if she had changed as her ex wanted her to -- gotten her license and read Anton Pannekoek's "Workers' Councils" -- they would still be together. "It's a lucky thing I didn't get my license," she writes. "I would still be living with a womanizer, a liar, a cheat, a manipulator, a maniac, a psychopath. Maybe my incompetence protected me." Not the kind of thing you necessarily want to hear coming from a writer whose column this week is about the priority of low-income healthcare on the progressive agenda. But the contrast between the two offers a lesson: Big thoughts do not stave off small feelings.

Bentley gets close to the root of the antipathy toward the book: that maybe women who have serious careers writing about serious subjects shouldn't let their opponents see their soft underbellies, since once they do, their "covers" are blown and they'll never be taken seriously again.

Questions about the wisdom of personal disclosure get thornier if the writer is a vocal feminist. If a woman is critical of patriarchal practices, a stance that will inevitably lead to being called a man-hater, is there any gain or loss in disclosing that she is happily married to a man? Or that she is a lesbian? Or that she has recently experienced a breakup? What if she thinks that a personal betrayal, or a love affair, or a sexual experience, has shifted her ideology? What if she wants to make some extra money writing freelance essays?

I can testify that in a post-Bridget Jones, post-Candace Bushnell universe, the market for sex-and-love confessional remains hot. If you are a female writer, you're likely to get asked to do that kind of stuff -- along with pieces about motherhood and beauty and plastic surgery and weight loss. These days, those invitations come my way because I've done personal writing for Salon. But years ago, when my sole beat was reported stories on the New York film industry, I was puzzled to find that prospects for freelance work relied mostly on my willingness to pen dating diaries or vibrator reviews.

That's not to say that I was pressured to write on these topics any more than Pollitt was forced to write about her breakup in the New Yorker. It's also not to say that personal writing precludes more traditionally serious work: Maureen Dowd's ruminations on her dating life have not kept her off the Op-Ed page, and writing about her wedding menu has not prevented New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor from getting on the presidential campaign trail. The hanging out of Pollitt's dirty laundry has not slowed the stream of acid political commentary emerging from her Nation column.

But it's also true that by choosing to write personal pieces that lay bare some aspect of our femininity, journalists probably, at least incrementally, decrease their chances of being sent to, say, Iraq.

So why would someone like Pollitt -- so far out of the trenches of confessional journalism -- dive in headfirst? Well, perhaps she feels she has a lot to say about the way human beings trust and love and how the smartest among us willingly go deaf and dumb, how the most confident of us go soft, how the savviest get blindsided.

I don't know if it was a bad idea for her to commit these experiences to paper, but I do know that it makes other smart, confident, savvy women very uncomfortable. It might be easier to kvetch, as Reynolds does, about how Pollitt's personal admissions hurt the movement she's spent her life strengthening, making leftist politics look "like a series of silly cocktail parties" and her convictions look "like efforts to impress men."

Um. Yeah? That the American left has in many instances been principally guided by conversations held at swank cocktail parties should come as a shock to no one. And anyone who thinks it off-base to suggest that the development of political interests can be influenced by connections to the people we love is not being honest themselves. It's perhaps not attractive for a woman to admit that her politics have been partly shaped by her romances; such an admission reinforces the classical assumption that women have no head for politics and merely absorb the beliefs of their husbands. But how different is it from confessing, as many people do, that their first glimpses of political awareness were passed on by their parents? And if it were a man telling the story -- imagine Eric Alterman jocularly revealing that he went to his first Labor Party meeting because a pretty girl was walking through the door and he followed her, only to discover that what was happening inside inflamed more than his nether regions -- it would not be so scandalous.

The reaction to Pollitt's book also stinks of another kind of double-talking hypocrisy -- ageism and looksism. The book leaves Pollitt seeming slightly pathetic. But imagine the same book by a lithe twentysomething who writes about getting ditched by some prig, ponders her investment in Marxism, learns to drive as a measure of her independence, discusses how feminism informed and enabled her life as a mother, and ends up remarried, pondering the history of the Communist Party through the stories of her parents. If such a book were as beautifully written as Pollitt's, I bet it would be received with wild enthusiasm.

That, of course, is because critics don't expect young, beautiful women to give a damn about Marxism or communism or feminism. They expect them to write about breakups, hopefully in complete sentences. If one of them were to use her personal life as a lens through which to examine sociopolitical movements, I hazard a guess that critics would deem it quite extraordinary.

But the expectation for Pollitt, who is not twentysomething and not lithe, is that she care about Marxism and communism and feminism and not about breakups. It's surely not a coincidence that the review of her book in the New York Times runs next to a larger than normal photograph of her looking more than a little austere. Ew! Old lady writing about sex!

We frankly don't want to picture the emotional or romantic or sexual lives of non-dewy, non-leonine women. Even Pollitt herself finds it slightly distasteful, writing in the book that "People who despair after a certain age are just depressing. We don't have the looks for it, and besides, we make others uncomfortable: what if we're on to something?"

Perhaps the discomfort it causes is all the more reason "Sex and the Seasoned Woman" author Gail Sheehy and Toni Bentley reflexively crow about the pleasures of aging sexily. It's never been better! Try it up the butt!

Pollitt also faces something of a gender double standard. Where her bold confessional purportedly leaves her looking foolish, few people got bunched up over the excruciating memoir "American Sucker" by New Yorker film critic David Denby, about losing tons of money and all perspective in the wake of his wife's leaving their 18-year marriage. A couple of critics griped that he revealed too much personal stuff, but mostly, his self-exposure was welcomed. Publisher's Weekly printed a review of the book that asserted, "the work is more appealing when Denby focuses on himself ... Denby brutally details his decline, from a night of impotence to an affair with a married woman, then a six-month obsession with Internet porn -- harrowing stuff for a New Yorker staff writer ... More of Denby, and less of the Nasdaq, would have made this good book even better." Nor did Michael Lewis' column about being an inconsistent dad on Slate damage the world's view of him as a journalist who chronicles sports and business. And what about Seth Mnookin, who has written books about the New York Times and the Boston Red Sox, and who wrote extensively (for Salon, in fact) about the depths of his heroin addiction while he was a student at Harvard?

None of these revelations of personal weakness seem to undercut the esteem in which these male critics are held. Nor has there been expressed an air of disappointment that they failed to live up to some bloodless, bileless ideal of who they are. Because stoicism is expected of men, their personal revelations -- the more embarrassing the better -- register as brave and honest. When women do it, they are merely confirming the worst suspicions about their gender. How, then, is a woman to write honestly of her experiences that do conform to gender expectations? If she is to maintain respect in public realms, must her public evocation of her private life be a lifelong performance? A series of lies, or at least omissions, constructed to leave an impression of unyielding strength and impenetrability?

I understand the impulse to censure a writer like Pollitt for fueling her critics, for revealing so much of herself that she imperils her well-earned reputation. What if the next time I read her on single-issue voting or the death penalty or the Supreme Court, I'm actually thinking about how she never liked to give her ex blow jobs in the morning? What if, even worse, the next time I read her on equality in the workplace, I wonder if she's so angry about gender injustice because she always resented the fact that her boyfriend asked her for blow jobs in the morning? When people read Daphne Merkin in the New York Times Magazine, do they flicker back momentarily to an image of her being spanked? When Maureen Dowd butterflies Dick Cheney, do her readers recall the Broadway producer she alleges told her she was too smart to date?

Hoary habits die hard, and I suspect it will be a long time before we stop squirming at the meeting of respectability and femininity, the personal and the political. But it's time we grew up and realized that it is possible to exhibit both intellectual strength and personal weakness simultaneously. And that when a woman chooses to lift her cerebral robes and expose herself in surprising or disconcerting ways, she should be judged on the artfulness and grace with which she does so, not on the body that she reveals.

I wonder how many women have been stopped from literary self-exposure by the fear of incurring a lasting bruise on their previously thick and unblemished skin. Maybe they were right to preserve the illusion of invulnerability, or perhaps in their effort to remain publicly invincible, they have deprived us of what might have been gripping and incisive narrative about their personal travails.

There's no question that vulnerability makes a tough woman more palatable to the American public. America likes its women with an extra helping of emotional powerlessness -- just look at how it worked out for Hillary Clinton, a figure long reviled for her tough exterior. As soon as she got cheated on, she became a less threatening and thus more plausible female politician.

But Pollitt is not running for president. She's not playing to the masses, but to an audience of women who want her to be what they cannot be, to remain steely while they turn to rubber, to steer with unflinching conviction while they stop to ask for directions.

Iguana in a Hell's Kitchen Apartment

2007-09-26T11:04:00.000-04:00

Not sure if I ever shared this story before but it's quite amusing and every once in a while, a remnant of that story comes back and interjects itself in my life. For instance, a friend of mine from New York wrote me yesterday and asked me what the name of the iguana was, in that practical joke I'd played on our friend G.

Herman. The iguana's name was Herman.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

A friend of mine, G, was looking for an apartment in the city and his preference was Hell's Kitchen. For the uninitiated, Hell's Kitchen is a hood on the west side of midtown Manhattan. In the 70s, you couldn't walk through that place without someone cutting you with a rusty blade or, worse, ejaculating over you. But like most things New York, it became gentrified during the late-Giuliani era and now it's as hip as can be (with a ton of street credibility, which is rare).

Hell's Kitchen is expensive. You can expect to drop eighteen Benjamins a month for a one bedroom that makes my cubicle seem like a mansion. And my friend, while of capable means, was in the process of saving up for the broker's fee, the first and last month and all the other financial penalties one seems to incur upon establishing domicile in Gotham. So G was a couple of months away from actually being in a position to call leeches...sorry, brokers up, flash his cash and get them to find a pad pronto. In the meantime, he would scour Craig's List every day, looking at vacant apartments in HK and torture himself whenever he found something he liked.

"Why are you doing this to yourself?" I'd ask. "Why not wait til you're ready and then start looking"

"I just want to get a feel for what's out there" He'd respond. "Besides, it doesn't bother me" he'd assert, less convincingly.

So of course, evil Basil hatches an evil practical joke. The next day, the following ad appeared in the New York real estate section of Craig's List.

2BR in Hell's Kitchen - $1200

I'm moving to Milan on a grant for a couple of years, to study law which means I'd like to sublet my very cosy Hell's Kitchen apartment to the right person (or persons). Lawyer from the Boston area, fortyish, fully own this property. This apartment is partially furnished and is in remarkably good condition.

So why's the rent so low? Because it comes with a two year commitment and during those two years, I'm looking for someone who can look after my two pets: my English sheepdog, Patsy, and my pet Iguana, Herman. I can't take them with me and I absolutely cannot give them up, so this is the only solution I could come up with. I'd totally reimburse you for their food and any veterinary expenses (they're both in good health, so this would be a checkup every six months or so) but you'd be their primary caregiver while I'm away.

I care more about their welfare than making any money out of this place, so applicants will be asked to demonstrate their responsibility, not their bank accounts.

And I posted it, reasoning that someone who followed CL as diligently as G did would have no problems "stumbling" onto this ad. I then shut down my computer and went home.

The next day, I came into the office and opened my email account:

346 new emails. Four were from friends and 342 were applicants for the apartment. Incredulously, I opened one and read it. The most ingratiating piece of brown-nosing I'd ever read. I opened another one: "I had an iguana growing up, so I think I'd be great at taking care of your iguana". Another one had a picture of an English sheepdog that the sender had apparently grown up with. Yet another told me it would be a "privilege" to look after "Patsy and Herman". My head was spinning at this point.

I skimmed through them and eventually found G's offering to this ignoble affair. His was ingratiating but not as bad as some of the others; he managed to maintain a semblance of dignity, at least. Chuckling, I wrote a reply back to him.

Dear G,

I don't know why but I have a good feeling about you. The fact that you come from my hometown of Boston is, as you pointed out, also a plus (Go Red Sox!). Let's set up a meet-and-greet and see if we can agree on the details.

All the best,

Theophilus S. Hawthorne III

I didn't have to wait long for a reply. My friend wanted to know when we could meet.

Dear G,

Right away! Please get in touch with my representative and he'll set it up. His name is [Basil Fawlty] and his number is [gave him my office phone number].

Too-de-loo,

Theophilus P. Beaushitar IV

Twenty minutes later, G storms into my office. I look at him, wide-eyed but barely capable of containing a wave of laughter that doesn't look likely to subside this century.

"What's the matter?" I asked. "You look like hell!"

"ASSHOLE" he snarled at me. "ASSHOLE!!!"

"What?"

"Why didn't you tell me you knew him?"

"Who?" I asked, genuinely puzzled by his query. It dawned on me. But it couldn't be...could it?

"The guy with the iguana...he said you represent him!"

I started losing it, of course, but that didn't deter the poor boy.

"You had access to a great apartment and you never told me!" he fumed.

Eventually, I calmed down enough to tell him the scale of my duplicity. He listened and (I swear) his breathing became heavier. He was so pissed off, things weren't right between us for a week.

I'm pretty sure I told this story on this blog before (though I can't find it). But the reasons I'm telling it again is because I just got reminded of it and......I thought it would be fun to reprint, on a daily basis, a new email from the list of responses I got for that apartment. I'm going to start tomorrow. They're all still in a file named 'Iguana' on my Yahoo account and I'd been meaning to print them out and store them somewhere; it seems like a shame to throw away or delete the earnest efforts of so many apartment-hunting New Yorkers willing to suspend their disbelief and parlay their dignity in return for a cheap apartment in a trendy part of town. Not that I would be any different! In fact, I'm grateful that, in this case, the evil genius who concocted this sordid plan and succeeded in dashing the hopes and humiliating so many people, was me.

For a change.

Not that my designs at world humiliation would have ended there, given the right opportunity popping up: my original plan was to do a coffee table book about New York apartments, with images of English Sheep Dogs and Iguanas in a sort of Pink Floyd/ Purple Haze/ Acid-trip design, interspersed with the funniest, saddest, most desperate portions of the email I got. I even purchased the rights to the website http://iguanainahellskitchenapartment.com in case this thing took off, and even spoke to someone in the New York Times about it.

Needless to say, it never went anywhere.

John P. Halo

2007-09-26T05:37:00.000-04:00

As you may already know, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a long history of pranking (or hacks, as they call them) both on their own campus and at other schools. Though there have been some real winners over the years, this new one, captured today by MIT newspaper The Tech, really takes the cake.

To mark the Halo 3 release, MIT students gifted the John P. Harvard statue in Harvard Yard with a Spartan helmet (with "Master Chief in Training" written on the back) and an assault rifle. Love the nerds!

The World's Weirdest/Stupidest Conspiracy Theories

2007-09-26T04:59:00.000-04:00

The World's Weirdest/Stupidest Conspiracy Theories

(in no particular order, with each theory's author or main proponent in parentheses)

The driver shot JFK. (the late William Cooper)
The Beatles were designed and sent to the U.S. by the British Psychological Warfare Division, to undermine the morals of American teenagers. (Lyndon LaRouche)
Christ's Crucifixion was staged. (Hugh Schonfield) Christ eloped with Mary Magdalene, and one or both of them fled to France to raise their family. (Baigent/Leigh/Lincoln)
Christ and his disciples were a magic-mushroom cult. (Dead Sea Scrolls scholar John Allegro)
HIV/AIDS was created in a lab.
HIV does not cause AIDS.
Man never landed on the moon. It's not even possible. But there is an alien base there. (see Wikipedia; for an artful and very funny parody of how these theories can be patched together from unrelated material, watch the mockumentary Dark Side of the Moon)
The Zapruder film is entirely fake, even though it contradicts the findings of the Warren Commission. (Jim Fetzer)
Stephen King killed John Lennon. (Steve Lightfoot)
WWII was staged. It never really happened. The Illuminati employed elaborate special effects, stage magic, and phony journalism to scare the world into pacifism. (Donald Holmes)
Queen Elizabeth I was a man. The real Elizabeth died as a child.
George H.W. Bush was really George Scherff Sr., a Nazi sent to destroy America as a teenager and adopted by Prescott Bush (Scherff was also an assistant to Nikola Tesla, and stole all Tesla's inventions after he was murdered by Otto Skorzeny and Reinhard Gehlen). Hitler was still alive in Montana in 1997, and Josef Mengele is keeping himself alive and youthful with a regimen of hormones and cannibalism. Oh, and Curious George was inspired by a young George Scherff Jr.; that's probably why Alan J. Shalleck was murdered by two men he met through a gay sex network one day before the movie premiered. (this information comes from a man named Eric Berman, who claims he heard it straight from his girlfriend's dad, Otto Skorzeny, in Florida during the late '90s. Skorzeny died in Madrid in 1975.)
One promoter of the Scherff-Bush story adds that Josef Mengele was the real Zodiac, the Boston Strangler(s), and the anthrax letter mailer. (http://www.thebushconnection.com/)
The 1939 War of the Worlds radio broadcoast was a psychological warfare study funded by C.D. Jackson on behalf of the Rockefeller Foundation, designed to find out how Americans would react to an enemy invasion. Funny... in a trailer for his mockumentary F is for Fake, Orson Welles did say the WoW broadcast had "secret sponsors". (Daniel Hopsicker)
A really old one that just won't die: Jews drink the blood and eat the flesh of Gentile children during Passover. Some Catholics still revere the relics of Medieval child saints supposedly slaughtered and devoured by Jews.
The doomed Franklin Expedition was sent to the Arctic not only to find the Northwest Passage, but to secretly investigate UFO sightings that had been reported since the 1700s. The men were captured, experimented upon, and eaten by giant aliens. (Jeffrey Blair Latta)
Hitler and some associates escaped to the Arctic in a submarine, to live with super-advanced aliens who reside within the hollow earth. (This story originated with Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel The Coming Race, was treated as fact by the pre-Nazi Vril Society, was bolstered by the forged "secret diary" of Admiral Byrd, and was adopted by the likes of Ernst Zundel)
Denver International Airport was built expressly to conceal a vast underground complex, headquarters of the New World Order elite. Clues are hidden in the airport's peace-themed mural.
Scientology: Billions of years ago the intergalactic overlord Xenu used a film to brainwash our souls ("Thetans") into believing in the world's major religions, which he invented.
Gnosticism: The entire material world is an evil trap created by the imposter God of the Bible.
Nation of Islam: White people were created in a lab.
Jesuits sank the Titanic to kill some of the world's richest, most powerful Jews.
The early Middle Ages (614-911 A.D.) never occurred. Everything that supposedly happened during those years was either a misunderstanding, an event from a different era, or an outright lie - Charlemagne, for instance, is a fictional figure. And we are actually living in the 1700s. (Herbert Illig's phantom time hypothesis)
Shortly before he left office, Bill Clinton secretly signed into law the National Economic Security and Reformation Act (NESARA). This act would have completely restructured the U.S. government by - among other things - forgiving all personal credit card debt and mortgages, abolishing the IRS, restoring constitutional law, and somehow ensuring world peace - but the Supreme Court placed a gag order on it, and threatened death to any government official who breathed word of its existence. NESARA activists around the world are agitating to get the act announced and instituted.
Aspartame, flouride, genetically modified foods, and vaccines are used specifically to keep us sick and open to suggestion, and/or as part of a secret depopulation plan designed by the world's elite.
Atlanta child murder theories: Victims were used for CDC research into Interferon; KKK Klansmen posed as cops to wipe out young black men (Dick Gregory); white scientists needed the boys' foreskins to produce a cure for cancer and/or a youth serum. (Dick Gregory again)
Jeffrey Dahmer was an actor hired by the Ambrosia Chocolate company to pose as a cannibal killer so no one would object to the factory being torn down and another one built with illegal tax breaks (posted by "manoftruth" on online forums devoted to Rush and Bon Jovi, along with rants on Wicca and Jews; his name might be Mark Zahn, but who knows?).
And here's a fun one: By combining two separate conspiracy theories, you can turn Hitler into Jack the Ripper!

Theory #1: Prince Eddy, Duke of Clarence, faked his death to move to Germany and become Adolph Hitler.
Theory #2: Prince Eddy, Duke of Clarence (and/or Freemasons acting on his behalf) was Jack the Ripper.
Hence, Prince Eddy might have killed several prostitues, faked his own death, then resurfaced in Austria as Hitler.

Finish the Fight!

2007-09-25T12:36:00.000-04:00

Ramadon't

2007-09-25T10:49:00.000-04:00

So I have to say, this Ramadan has been an unmitigated spiritual disaster for your humble neighbourhood Fawlty. I only fasted the first three days and even those were laced with such a poisonous and negative vibe, I fail to see how they could be viewed as something positive I took part in. I lash out at the drop of a hat, I feel panicky and exhausted all the time, I can't sleep at night (despite being on some very good, unfiltered local drugs) and when I do, I toss and turn and feel as if the room is filled with a thousand whispers, all baying at me with fragments of memories, regrets and hopeless resentment.

Not the way a holy month is supposed to play out.

At first, I thought that my ever-declining faith in anything bigger than myself had been eroded down to nothing, but that's not quite it. True, I have problems reconciling my state and the state of the world with any kind of omnipotent force (good or bad) but the crux of my problems are essentially man-made. And the man in question is me.

Moving here's been challenging. New country, new customs, new frame of reference etc. None of that is a big deal, I've done it all before with fewer resources and acquitted myself well. What's new is that I've realized that I'm alone, poor and doing something I hate.

Now lord knows Fawlty is not a greedy man. The proof is I would be perfectly content with any one of those three, and I have been, at any one time. But to find myself back at a stage where I lack companionship, cash and contentment (the professional kind) is...well, it's so 2003 and I thought I was beyond that.

Boo-hoo, Basil, count your blessings, be thankful, stop worrying/ whining and so on. Fine, I can accept that criticism as your opinion of how much harder I make things for myself. But you don't know me; you know my blog, but you don't know me. I'm not a moper and I'm not a lazy person or someone who becomes paralyzed by circumstances. All the misery and self-lacerating reflection is very personal and not something I exude when I'm with people. I can't stop talking about it here because I'm not really talking. I'm blogging. And what's more, I do it to clear my head.

I'm broke, I'm in debt, I'm alone, I despise my job, I'm 36, I sold out and have nothing to show for it, I'm out of shape, I'm miserable and I'm scared. I'm very, very scared.

I had an epiphany while having fitar (ok, dinner) with a friend of mine I hadn't seen in a few years, an Egyptologist who lives in London now. We were talking about our relative professional and personal lack of development, and I mentioned, rather casually, that from a young age, to combat the poisonous influence of the parents and the rest of Egyptian society's ills, I'd hardened myself and refused to let them or anyone else close to me. Now that most of these parental and societal problems have faded into the footnotes of personal history, my continued inability to open up and let the world in is still costing me many moments of happiness and even simple things like the ability to relax and connect with people.

And I'm not interested in dealing with my problems: forgiving anyone, forgiving myself, loving myself, dealing with feelings...all that stuff is simply not for me. Because it doesn't work. Everyone has problems and as a man, my solution is to be successful and let some of that success drive my failures into irrelevancy. It's the only way I can feel good about things.

I guess I can see some of you recoiling in horror at such an antiquated view of achieving a healthy psychological life. The fact is psychiatry/ psychology doesn't work and everyone knows it. Everyone is damaged in a multitude of unmentionable ways and just because you see the outside of someone who's been through therapy and is 'doing better', doesn't mean you'll ever know what goes inside. Psychoanalysis is something that makes everyone else feel better, except the person in therapy. And when that person is a man...well, psychoanalysis has its work cut out for it.

Ok, so maybe this blog is a form of therapy. But since I'm leading the session and not paying $200/ hour, I don't mind it as much.

Things are slow to happen. And I'm frustrated by this slowness and lonely and bitter and rudderless. The status quo isn't the answer anymore, so I'm making changes. If I go down, I'm going down on my own terms. And if you don't like my choices, good thing you don't have to make them. And if you're bored of this blog, don't come round here no more.

Life is simple in terms of knowing what to do. It's the execution I always have a problem with.

2007-09-25T09:37:00.000-04:00

1975 JC Penny Catalogue Scans

2007-09-25T09:25:00.000-04:00

Why? Just because.

Bleeeech Redux

2007-09-25T08:42:00.000-04:00

Jesus! The umpteenth bad Thai I've had since I got here...what is it with this place? Can't they attract any good Thai cooks at all? I can't live like this..I'm going to have to learn how to cook. In self-defense!

Shut up Hooker.

2007-09-25T07:43:00.001-04:00

Always makes me laugh.

Punishing Columbia for hosting Ahmadinejad?

2007-09-25T05:30:00.000-04:00

All of the hysteria over Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speaking at Columbia University is so tiresome for so many reasons, beginning with the fact that it is all rather transparently motivated by exactly what Juan Cole says: "The real reason his visit is controversial is that the American right has decided the United States needs to go to war against Iran. Ahmadinejad is therefore being configured as an enemy head of state."

In their minds, we are at war with Iran -- even though, in reality, i.e., according to our Constitution, we are not -- and all of the ensuing hysteria is rooted in the fantasy world they occupy in which Iran is our Enemy at War. By their nature, such fantasies cannot be reasoned with.

This desire to prevent people from speaking when they express views that one finds offensive is just always baffling. That is true in general, and includes even pettier though still inane suppression efforts such as this one, which recently resulted in the recission of an invitation to Larry Summers to speak at an event for the University of California regents. Other than converting the individual into a martyr and dramatically elevating their importance, what do people think is accomplished when a person with a certain viewpoint is denied a forum?

In any event, there is not much new worth saying about the "debate" over whether Columbia should have invited Ahmadinejad to speak. People either believe in the value of having academic institutions be a venue for airing all viewpoints or they do not.

Exactly as is true for the First Amendment, it is so often the case that those who claim to believe in this principle when it comes to ideas they like suddenly find all sorts of reasons why the "principle" does not apply when it comes to ideas they hate most. And -- as is true for Osama bin Laden -- nobody has done more to inflate the importance and power of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (who, just by the way, is not even the leader of Iran, let alone the WorldWide Evil Axis of Hitlerian Dictators) than those who have focused on him obsessively.

But what is new, and what most certainly is worth commenting upon, is this extremely disturbing report from The New York Sun regarding the threats made by Democratic State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to use state power to punish Columbia for inviting a speaker whom Silver dislikes. Silver -- who, among other things, has long been a leader in efforts to free convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard from prison -- did not even bother to disguise the threats he was making:

As the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, prepares to address Columbia University today amid a storm of student protest, state and city lawmakers say they are considering withholding public funds from the school to protest its decision to invite the leader to campus.

In an interview with The New York Sun, the speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver, said lawmakers, outraged over Columbia's insistence on allowing the Iranian president to speak at its World Leaders Forum, would consider reducing capital aid and other financial assistance to the school.

Lawmakers warned about other consequences for Columbia and its president, Lee Bollinger, who has resisted campus and public pressure to cancel Mr. Ahmadinejad's appearance today, arguing that Columbia's commitment to scholarship requires the school to directly confront offensive ideas.

"There are issues that Columbia may have before us that obviously this cavalier attitude would be something that people would recall," Mr. Silver said. "Obviously, there's some degree of capital support that has been provided to Columbia in the past. These are things people might take a different view of . . . knowing that this is that kind of an institution" . . .

"It's not going to go away just because this episode ends. Columbia University has to know . . . that they will be penalized," an assemblyman of Brooklyn, Dov Hikind, who also attended the rally, said. The lawmaker said Mr. Ahmadinejad should be arrested when he sets foot on campus.

Silver sounds like two-bit hooligan making not-so-veiled threats to Columbia ("Obviously, there's some degree of capital support that has been provided to Columbia in the past. These are things people might take a different view of") for committing the crime of inviting a speaker whom Silver finds offensive. Is there anyone who fails to see how dangerous and improper this is -- not to mention unconstitutional -- that government officials threaten and punish universities for hosting speakers whom the officials dislike? Do we want our universities to be able to provide speaking venues only to individuals who are approved by the likes of Sheldon Silver and Dov Hikind?

What this really illustrates more than anything else is the true danger to our national character and basic liberties from being in a permanent state of war fighting. When we become a society that just leaps from one New Ultimate Hitler Enemy Who Must Be Destroyed to the next, we ensure that all of our political values and institutions become infected by this bloodthirsty mentality. When we have one Enemy after the next to annihilate, who really cares about dreary luxuries like due process or restraints on government power or the First Amendment? Saddam/binLaden/Ahemdinijad/Assad is Evil, a Hitler, and all power must be vested without limits in our Leaders so they can destroy him/them.

Along those same lines, this "interview" of Ahmadinejad by Scott Pelley of "60 Minutes" has to be read to be believed. As Ezra Klein says: "Pelley declined to interview Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and instead popped off aggressive statements as if he were a White House press release with a cardiovascular system."

It would be perfectly appropriate for Pelley to pose aggressive and challenging questions to Ahmadinejad. That is actually what reporters in general are supposed to do when questioning any government officials, not merely the Foreign Muslim Enemy du Jour. Fathom how elevated our political discourse would be if "reporters" like Pelley were even a fraction as adversarial and challenging when interviewing Bush officials as Pelley was when yelling at Ahmadinejad.

But Pelley did not question him so much as make a series of highly dubious war-fueling statements as fact. And far more revealing than Pelley's tone were the premises of his "questions" -- ones which blindly assumed every accusation of the Bush administration towards Iran to be true -- such as these:

PELLEY: Sir, what were you thinking? The World Trade Center site is the most sensitive place in the American heart, and you must have known that visiting there would be insulting to many, many Americans.

AHMADINEJAD: Why should it be insulting?

PELLEY: Well, sir, you're the head of government of an Islamist state that the United States government says is a major exporter of terrorism around the world. . . .

PELLEY: But the American people, sir, believe that your country is a terrorist nation, exporting terrorism in the world. You must have known that visiting the World Trade Center site would infuriate many Americans, as if to be mocking the American people.

AHMADINEJAD: Well, I'm amazed. How can you speak for the whole of the American nation?

PELLEY: Well, the American nation . . .

PELLEY: Mr. President, you say that the two nations are very close to one another, but it is an established fact now that Iranian bombs and Iranian know-how are killing Americans in Iraq. You have American blood on your hands. Why?

AHMADINEJAD: Well, this is what the American officials are saying. . . .

PELLEY: Mr. President, American men and women are being killed by your weapons in Iraq. You know this.

AHMADINEJAD: No, no, no.

PELLEY: Why are those weapons there?

AHMADINEJAD: Who's saying that?

PELLEY: The American Army has captured Iranian missiles in Iraq. The critical elements of the explosively formed penetrator bombs that are killing so many people are coming from Iran. There's no doubt about that anymore. The denials are no longer credible, sir. . . .

AHMADINEJAD: Very good. If I may. Are you an American politician? Am I to look at you as an American politician or a reporter? . . . .

PELLEY: Mr. President, you must have rejoiced more than anyone when Saddam Hussein fell. You owe President Bush. This is one of the best things that's ever happened to your country.

Scott Pelley wants Ahmadinejad to know that -- like all of us -- he "owes President Bush." Almost every word out of Pelley's mouth was a faithful recitation of the accusations made by the Bush White House. Ahmadinejad obviously does not watch much American news because he seemed genuinely surprised that someone he thought was a reporter was doing nothing other than reciting the script of the government.

Apparently, among the American press now, it is unchallengably true that the Iranian Government has the Blood of American Soliders on its hands and is a "terrorist state." I guess our "journalists" have decided that "only a fool -- or possibly a Frenchman -- could conclude otherwise." After all, even the left-wing Michael Gordon and the NYT admit this, and they couldn't be wrong about such matters.

And besides, our Top Military Commanders in Iraq are making these accusations, and we all just learned last week from Our Senate that we must never question "the honor and integrity . . . of members of the United States Armed Forces." Our media, of course, has been diligently following that Rule for many, many years.

Skepticism of government officials? Media objectivity? First Amendment freedoms? Due Process and Habeas Corpus and diplomacy? Ahmadinejad is Hitler, Our Enemy, and We are at War -- with him and forever. That's all we really need to know.

Modded Steampunk PC Case

2007-09-24T11:28:00.000-04:00

A thing of beauty..this thing is actually water-cooled! I love Steampunk. That's why I enjoyed the almost universally panned League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Congestion

2007-09-23T07:26:00.000-04:00

Who am I kidding? The problem is that I've sold out and I'm doing things for the money. And now that the money isn't enough to cover my ever-expanding neuroses, I'm forced to face myself and wonder why it is I've done so little.

Fact: I hate advertising pharmaceuticals. I'm only moderately annoyed by consumer advertising but, because I have a real talent for it and a wealth of experience doing it, it doesn't bother me as much.

Fact: I wouldn't mind being poor if I was doing something I truly loved. Because I'm doing something that annoys me, the need for money is magnified and takes on the signifance of being the only measure of progress I have: more money means even though my life sucks, at least I'm raking it in.

Fact: when you sell out, you use money to cover your anxieties, rather than dealing with them. I hate myself. And that's not your typical Basil moment of self-flagellation. I hate myself because I'm a slave and I made myself that way.

Fact: if change is going to happen, it has to happen now. I don't have any more time (or excuses) to give things a few months. I fucking hate this job, I fucking hate selling myself short and I fucking hate that I allowed myself to get this far.

'Turncoat' Terry

2007-09-23T06:37:00.000-04:00

Absolutely amazing turn of events at Chelsea. It's a classic lesson in management missteps and micro-management.

Jose Mourinho's relationship with John Terry has broken down completely over the Chelsea and England captain's central role in his departure from Stamford Bridge last week.

The Champions League-winning coach was replaced on Thursday by Avram Grant, a former Israel national team coach with no experience of club management outside his own country. According to many Chelsea sources, Grant will defer on football matters to owner Roman Abramovich, who has already started to take a hands-on role with the first team.

Mourinho holds Terry responsible for charges levelled by Chelsea's board of directors that he had lost the support of his playing staff after Tuesday's Champions League draw with Rosenborg - a match that was followed by club owner Roman Abramovich lecturing a senior professional on his on-field tactics behind Mourinho's back.
Half an hour before the Group B fixture, claims a dressing-room source, Terry told one of Mourinho's assistant coaches that he had 'things on my mind'. Only the intervention of a team-mate put him in the right state of mind to take part in the pre-match warm-up, for which Terry arrived late.

Midway through the first half Rosenborg scored, after Miika Koppinen beat Terry at a set piece. When Mourinho then directly criticised the centre back's defending at half time, Terry refused to accept responsibility for the goal or even to respond to his manager.

Earlier on Tuesday, Terry had been informed that Mourinho had gone to the club's medical department to ask whether there was any physical reason for the player's sub-standard performances in matches this season. Mourinho hoped to find an explanation for a significant decline in Terry's play following an operation to remove a disc from the defender's spine in December.

Chelsea chief executive Peter Kenyon was made aware of the dispute and, according to the dressing-room source, presented the information to an emergency board meeting on Wednesday as evidence that the manager had lost the trust of key players. The club subsequently asked Mourinho for his resignation, which he refused to tender, but ultimately settled on dismissal by 'mutual consent'. Later on Wednesday, Mourinho sent Terry a text message sarcastically thanking him for talking to the club's hierarchy.

On Friday, several first-team regulars apparently took their captain to task during a 50-minute team meeting called by Terry in the aftermath of Mourinho's dismissal. Ashley Cole, Didier Drogba and Florent Malouda are believed to have accused him of not doing enough to keep Mourinho at the club.

Terry is England's best-paid footballer after agreeing a five-year, £131,000-a-week contract this summer. In initial negotiations he had requested a 'limitless parity' clause to ensure he was the club's biggest earner for the duration of a proposed nine-year term. According to a Chelsea insider Terry also wanted - and was refused - a contractual option for him to manage the club at the end of his playing career.

As far-fetched as that request might be, Abramovich's actions in the aftermath of the Rosenborg draw were equally bizarre. In front of the entire Chelsea team, but while Mourinho was occupied with press conference duties, the Russian billionaire decided to hand out an impromptu tactics lesson to Michael Essien.

Employing striker Andriy Shevchenko as translator, he instructed midfielder Essien, player of the year last season, to hit passes wide rather than through central areas where the Norwegians had compressed play. Abramovich is expected to take an increasingly hands-on role in the team following the appointment of Grant to replace Mourinho and, according to several sources, will effectively select the side. In a press conference on Friday, Grant insisted he would not tolerate interference but declined to respond when asked who was the most important individual at Chelsea. 'Look, the owner gives the financial support,' Grant said. 'I'm not going to make remarks.'

The 52-year-old is already the subject of significant discontent among a first-team squad predominantly still loyal to Mourinho. Grant, though, is confident he will bring not only more silverware to Chelsea but a more attractive brand of football and said on Friday that he had no problems with the playing staff. 'There's a very good relationship with the players,' he said. 'I like their attitude, how they want to win all the time, even if the last result wasn't like that, but the relationship is good.'

Grant's first match comes at Old Trafford this afternoon, but he did not work yesterday for religious reasons. He must also wait for his Israeli coaching qualifications to be cleared by Uefa before he can be formally approved as a top-flight manager. Chelsea insist the process will be trouble-free.

Though Grant claimed that he had no 'plan to be the manager' until the appointment came about, he had begun requesting clearance from Uefa a fortnight ago.

According to Kenyon, the 'first-team coach' will be involved in all key areas of transfers and team building. He said: 'We are not embarking on the arbitrary buying of players and telling the coach to play them. Avram will be absolutely involved, responsible for picking the team and responsible for the results.'

Kenyon denied that Terry - who declined to comment last night - played any part in Mourinho's departure: 'There is absolutely nothing in stories that the dressing room has been lost. In particular there is no truth in any rumours that a bust-up with one or several of our players led to him leaving the club.'

'Tears, hugs and two icy handshakes'

Jose Mourinho's reign at Chelsea ended emotionally, with warm dressing-room embraces for 23 of his players - and a cold handshake for Andriy Shevchenko and skipper John Terry. His departure, though, was a long time coming. Duncan Castles reports

Tuesday, 10pm, home dressing room, Stamford Bridge. Andriy Shevchenko is taking Michael Essien to task on his performance in the night's embarrassing 1-1 draw with Rosenborg. The former European footballer of the year tells Africa's finest midfielder that he tried to make too many passes through the centre of the Norwegians' formation where '70 percent of their players were'. Essien learns he should have been passing to the wings 'where they only had 30 percent of their men'.

Not the most insightful of tactical advice, but then these are not the thoughts of a Ukraine international, they are those of a Russian billionaire. Standing beside Shevchenko, tactics board in hand, Roman Abramovich is the man telling Essien how to play football. Shevchenko is merely there to translate. In another room, attending to the press, Mourinho is utterly unaware of his employer's actions.
Tuesday, 7:11pm, the home dressing room. Chelsea's squad of 18 are called out for their pre-match warm up. All the players step out for the carefully prepared drill - except one. John Terry remains sitting where he is. One of Jose Mourinho's assistants urges Terry out. Chelsea's captain refuses, swears, and, according to an eye witness, says he is upset and has 'things on my mind'. Terry is said to be furious after finding out that Mourinho had been asking in Chelsea's treatment room whether there was a medical reason for his perceived loss of form over recent weeks. The stand-off continues until a team-mate cajoles his friend out on to the pitch.

The game starts, Chelsea quickly lose a goal at a free kick as Miika Koppinen stretches ahead of Terry to turn in a near-post cross. Chelsea go in at half time 1-0 down and Jose Mourinho takes his captain to task, blaming the defender for the deficit. Terry says nothing but all his team-mates can see the anger on his face.

The pair had once been the closest of footballing allies, but within 24 hours Mourinho is no longer Terry's manager as Chelsea agree to a £10.5million pay-off to rid themselves of a man they describe as 'the most successful manager the club has known'.

'The relationship broke down not because of one detail or because of something that happened at a certain moment. It broke down over a period of time.' - Jose Mourinho, 21 September 2007.

To understand how the winner of two Premier League titles, two League Cups and one FA Cup, a man who averaged an unprecedented 2.33 points from his 120 Premiership games in just over three seasons, steadily became persona non grata at the club he made great, it is necessary to return to the summer of 2005.

'In Jose's first season everything was fine,' said a Chelsea employee who suffered the Abramovich guillotine long before the Portuguese. 'He came in, he won the title by miles, almost made the Champions League final, everyone was happy. But then it all began to go wrong. Peter Kenyon started thinking it was his genius as a chief executive that was important. Abramovich's mates were telling him his money had done it and any half-decent coach would win the league with those resources. They forgot that the most important man at any club is the manager.'

That summer, Chelsea poached Tottenham Hotspur's sporting director Frank Arnesen at a cost of £5m. Ostensibly recruited to revolutionise the club's sub-standard youth ranks, the Dane was actually brought in on the recommendation of Piet de Visser, a well-known Dutch talent scout who had advised Abramovich on football matters from his first months as Chelsea owner.

Arnesen and De Visser, friends and allies from their time together at Dutch club PSV Eindhoven, steadily worked to influence Abramovich's thinking on the first team, and, most importantly, player recruitment. Along with the agents Soren Lerby, Vlado Lemeic and Pini Zahavi they sought to steer Abramovich towards the purchase of certain footballers. Their objective, according to one source, was 'to get to Abramovich's money. To do that they needed power at the club, needed a manager who would do what they wanted. Mourinho was not that manager.'

Thus emerged a power struggle in which Arnesen and others seemed to undermine Mourinho by questioning him at every opportunity. When Mourinho went to war with Uefa over the actions of referees they told Abramovich his coach was embarrassing the club. When Mourinho's team dourly won key matches by a goal to nil, they told the owner a better coach would win by more goals and bring him far more flamboyant football. When a Mourinho signing failed to perform on the pitch, they told Abramovich that better players could be found elsewhere.

Within a year, and despite Mourinho's success in claiming a second successive Premiership, the manager had lost control of transfers. In the 2006 summer window, Mourinho asked the board to buy Samuel Eto'o; they spent a UK record £30m on Shevchenko. Chelsea sold William Gallas to Arsenal against Mourinho's wishes, and forced the £7m Khalid Boulahrouz upon him, while Arnesen compounded the error of allowing Chelsea's most effective defender to leave the club by pulling the plug on the £5m purchase of Micah Richards. Inside a season Richards was a full England international, while Boulahrouz was stinking out the reserves until Chelsea paid Sevilla to take him off their hands.

At least Mourinho could easily leave the Dutch defender out of the first team. A personal friend of Abramovich's, Shevchenko played regardless of his performances, and those were usually awful. In his first 26 appearances for Chelsea, the Ukrainian striker scored five goals. His coaches and team-mates often felt as though Chelsea were playing with 10 men and Mourinho was faced with a problem - should he leave out the owner's pal or lose the faith of the rest of the team?

As January approached, Mourinho asked to be allowed to sign a new striker. The board refused. Mourinho asked for a centre-back to cover for Terry, then sidelined with a serious back problem. The board offered him a choice between Alex, a Brazilian bought via De Visser and 'parked' at PSV for two seasons, and Tal Ben Haim, a Zahavi client. Mourinho wanted neither.

Worse still, Chelsea's manager was instructed to sack one of his assistants and add the Israeli Avram Grant to his coaching staff. When he refused, the club descended into open warfare.

Mourinho dropped Shevchenko from his first team, leaking the story to a national newspaper in an open challenge to Abramovich to sack him. On an emotional afternoon at Stamford Bridge the manager first rallied his team around him, then sent them out to overrun Wigan 4-0. Long before kick-off the Chelsea supporters were chanting 'Stand up for the Special One' through standing ovation after standing ovation.

An infuriated Abramovich ceased attending games and instructed his advisors to find a replacement coach. Mourinho let it be known that he would leave, but only on payment of the outstanding value of his contract - about £28m comprising £5.2m per annum for three-and-a-half years and up to £10m in bonuses. In the meantime he kept winning matches, pushing his injury-hit squad to within a few games of a remarkable quadruple.

Ultimately Chelsea won the League Cup and the FA Cup, forcing Abramovich to reconcile with his manager. A consciously 'mellow' Mourinho promised to avoid conflict with opposing managers and football authorities, accepted restrictions on his transfer budget, and reshaped his team in a more flamboyant 4-4-2 formation. Fatefully, he also acceded to the appointment of Grant as Chelsea's director of football.

Though some in Mourinho's camp had Grant pinned as a 'Mossad Spy' from the off, the manager attempted to work with him, holding long meetings with him during the club's staggeringly positive pre-season US tour and letting it be known that he welcomed his arrival as a buffer against Arnesen and route to Abramovich. The early-season optimism, however, swiftly evaporated.

Grant began calling individual players aside to ask them questions.

'You look sad, why?' 'How do you feel in this position?' 'Is this the best place for you to play?' 'Are we using your abilities well?' Because many of them complained about this to Mourinho, the manager decided to cut back radically on team meetings, the only one this season having been arranged for the Jewish New Year when Grant had returned to Israel.

While Grant looked on at training, Shevchenko treated it with disdain. A morose, lonely figure around the camp, he seemed to show more interest in improving his golf swing than his shooting. As the first team prepared for their final pre-season friendly against Danish side Brondby, Shevchenko declared himself unfit with a back problem. A 2-0 victory ensured the £121,000-a-week striker was not missed, but Mourinho was bemused to discover that Shevchenko's bad back had not prevented him from enjoying a round of golf at Sunningdale that day.

The board, though, were not interested and the club's descent continued. Other players began to realise what was happening, that the summer's peace was a false one, that their manager had no support from the top. 'The mentality became weaker and weaker,' said one insider. 'You could feel the team's strength sapping away.'

Mourinho knew his time at Chelsea was coming to an end. At Uefa's forum for elite coaches in Geneva a fortnight ago he allowed Premier League rivals an insight into his thinking. 'Mourinho said he loved Chelsea and he loved English football, but thought he would not stay for long,' said one coach. 'One of us asked him why. He wouldn't answer, but it was obvious something was seriously wrong.'

His next Champions League match brought the end. On Wednesday afternoon the board asked Mourinho to resign, citing his handling of Shevchenko, his attitude to authority and, crucially, his relationship with Terry as reasons why he should go. Mourinho refused to walk, and fought only to maximise his pay-off as Chelsea apparently threatened to call club employees to testify against him at any employment tribunal.

A £10.5m pay-off was agreed and the following morning Mourinho made a final trip to the training centre at Cobham to pick up his possessions and say goodbye to his squad. There was a message in each farewell. For most there was a Latin embrace and warm words of thanks. For Didier Drogba and Frank Lampard the emotions were so strong that both men were reduced to tears, Lampard retreating to the shower room in an attempt to hide his. For Shevchenko and Terry there was nothing but a handshake that, in the words of one observer, could have 'frozen a mug of tea'. No one was in any doubt about who he considered the true captains of his team.

Out with the old, in with the new. Furious at Mourinho's dismissal, senior players describe Grant's appointment as 'a disgrace'. Some at Cobham call him 'an idiot' and describe his coaching techniques as '25 years behind the times'. Abramovich pushes the Israeli around 'without a hint of respect'.

Former academy coach Brendan Rogers has been drafted in to help out with the first team, a promotion that may not be unconnected to the one-on-one training sessions he gave Abramovich's son. Only in Steve Clarke is there the level of football knowledge to deal with a squad full of international superstars. As the sole survivor of Mourinho's cadre of four assistant managers, the Scotsman has an unenviable task.

But then neither he nor Grant will be picking the team. As Michael Essien discovered on Tuesday night, the new manager of Chelsea is also the owner.

Disaster Capitalism

2007-09-21T12:39:00.000-04:00

Books are really expensive here in the UK. This book by Naomi Klein sells for $16 in the US; the UK edition sells for £13 ($26). Also, notice the alarmist design of the US edition to the left, versus the more measured and scholarly UK edition to the right. Typifies the alarmist culture of the US, though I tell you what, for a $10 savings, you can alarm the fuck out of me all you want..

Naomi Klein talks about how governments and corporations take advantage of floods, wars and other crises to implement "shock and awe" economics.

By Lenora Todaro

Sept. 21, 2007 | Naomi Klein is one of North America's most lucid translators of globalization and its defects. Her book "No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies" (2000) landed just after demonstrators in Seattle put demands for international economic justice on the front page. In "No Logo," Klein critiqued multinational corporations for creating poor labor conditions in the developing world, all to further "the brand."

Klein, a Canadian whose physician father and filmmaker mother left the United States during the Vietnam War, followed her concerns for workers' conditions to Argentina after its economic collapse in 2001. There, with her husband, Canadian journalist Avi Lewis, Klein created "The Take," a documentary about a group of autoworkers who occupy their dormant factory. After finishing her new book, "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism," she partnered with Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón ("Children of Men") to make a short film. (See it on today's Video Dog.) The movie, which caused a stir at the Venice Film Festival, dramatizes the arguments of the book: that disasters -- unnatural ones like military coups (Pinochet's Chile) and war (Iraq) as well as natural ones (the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina) -- allow governments and multinationals to take advantage of citizen shock and swiftly impose corporate-friendly policies. The result: a wealthier elite and more-beleaguered middle and lower classes. Sri Lankan fishing villages become luxury resorts; public schools along the Gulf Coast become corporate-run "charter" schools.

Unafraid of controversy, Klein goes one step further in her new book than most progressive economists. She contends that in the aftermath of these various disasters, not only democracy but also human rights fall by the wayside -- all in the name of freedom and the free market. Klein compares economic shock therapy to the horrific experiments conducted on psychiatric patients in the mid-'50s by a CIA-sponsored Canadian doctor, in which patients were subjected to drugs, electroconvulsive therapy and sensory deprivation in an effort to replace their problem behaviors with a more compliant personality. If a personality can be remade, so, too, a nation. The film, with its stark images of ECT, excerpts from CIA torture manuals, footage of Nobel economist and shock-doctrine promoter Milton Friedman glad-handing Pinochet, Thatcher and Reagan, and images of natural disasters (the Asian tsunami, 9/11) makes her message visceral: Be informed, be shock-resistant.

Klein spoke with Salon from London, one stop on a 10-country book tour, about Bush's privatized war on terror, how free the free market is, and whether the anti-globalization movement survived 9/11.

"No Logo" and "The Shock Doctrine" each look at issues surrounding economic justice from different angles: marketing, direct action, public policy. Why are you so interested in economics?

I'm not really interested in economics; I'm interested in politics and culture. I studied philosophy and literature but forced myself to learn the language of economics later in life because I need it to understand the issues that I do care about. "No Logo" is about understanding the loss of cultural space to marketing; "The Shock Doctrine" is really about the loss of democracy at the hands of this economic program. My brother is an economist and directs a policy institute, so he hooked me up with academics and specialists.

For your research you traveled to Iraq, Sri Lanka after the tsunami, and New Orleans after the levees broke. What surprised you most?

I went on assignment for Harper's to Iraq to write about Paul Bremmer imposing shock therapy in the aftermath of "shock and awe." After Sri Lanka and New Orleans I realized the story was bigger. In Iraq I was shocked by level of resistance on the part of Iraqis to the privatization of factories. I quote one worker in my book who worked in a vegetable factory: "We will either burn it down or blow ourselves up inside it. We will not be privatized." It's a measure of just how wrong the occupation forces were that the Iraqis would be so shocked that they'd be easy to marshal from point A to point B.

In Sri Lanka I was shocked by the sight of shantytowns emerging for victims of the tsunami. I knew how much money had been raised, and there was no reconstruction going on. It was clear that these sprawling shantytowns would become permanent. They were the richest poor people in the world. The largest charitable drive in history, and the money just didn't reach them. In New Orleans the disaster was being used to finish the project of transforming the Gulf Coast into a "tax-free enterprise zone," as the Heritage Foundation called it.

In this book you talk about how certain businesses thrive after disasters like 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina. What are the most lucrative businesses?

One of the things that really struck me is how the stock market responds to hurricanes and terrorist attacks. The most significant change in recent years is that the stock market now responds favorably to terrorist attacks or narrowly averted attacks. A whole class of stocks jump -- disaster stocks, like surveillance companies. Homeland security is now a $200 billion industry.

There is a new level of integration between homeland security companies and media companies. General Electric, which owns NBC, has been in the weapons industry for some time but has become very active in the homeland security business. They recently purchased InVision, which provides bomb detection for airports. Since 9/11 InVision has received $15 billion in contracts from the Department of Homeland Security -- more such contracts than any other company. A company like that gains from the atmosphere of crisis and fear that is spread through media outlets. It's war against evil everywhere with no end. That's a war that can't be won, and you couldn't ask for a more profitable business plan. The only thing that threatens it is peace.

The recent subprime mortgage meltdown sent Wall Street to the government for a bailout. Is the free market really free?

This is yet another example of corporatism. It isn't a free market. The contractor economy in Iraq is not a free market: It is a political alliance of corporate elite through tax cuts, contracts and bailouts. The irony of this ideological campaign is that everywhere that extreme free marketeers who like freedom go, what emerges is not a free market but an alliance of the small government elite and a corporate elite marked by these transfers and the accumulation of huge debt.

Has shock therapy run its course, or will it happen again?

We're still seeing it, and the shocks that enable it are getting bigger. There was a strange period in the late 1990s when there was a shamelessness and openness about imposing these policies that date from the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and Frances Fukuyama's book "The End of History" to 1999, with the Seattle protests against the WTO [World Trade Organization]. So it was really a decade when there was an openness to this agenda, including the Washington Consensus, that all governments must privatize whatever assets they have, that all governments must adopt free-trade policies, and that the World Bank and IMF [International Monetary Fund] can impose [those actions] as conditions on their loans. It began under the guise of fighting communism, but from 1989 to 1999 the ideology didn't have a crusade. It was just naked before the world.

Now the policies are still advancing. The Bush administration has taken on the ideology of privatization and shock therapy -- remember Bush wanted to privatize Social Security -- but it's also about creating new infrastructure (homeland security, reconstruction, the war on terror), fighting wars of preemption abroad, and simultaneously outsourcing the entire enterprise.

The 1990s was a time of pride for free marketeers, and that's what was so important about the so-called anti-globalization movement. Now the war on terror acts as a shield and the ideology advances a far more ambitious scheme -- it has entered the core of what we think of as essential state functions.

What is the current state of the anti-globalization movement?

The institutions that were advancing this ideology of shock therapy are in crisis because the anti-capitalist critique of markets is so mainstream now. The WTO talks have been derailed for four years. In Quebec in 2001, every leader in the Americas, except for Fidel, signed to pledge a free-trade zone from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego; no politician in his right mind would suggest such a thing now. The IMF and World Bank are both in state of profound crisis.

There is more of a mood than a movement. Unless the progressive movement harnesses the growing rage, it will be taken over by the right.

Many critics of your work say, look at India or China or Chile to see how the middle classes are thriving with a free-market system. Do you see any long-term benefits to shock therapy?

It's interesting that these are the cases that are consistently held up as success stories, because there are clear and dramatic examples of state repression used to impose free-market policies in all three countries: the terror of the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, Pinochet's torture regime in Chile, violent crackdowns on resistance movements in India. Not one of these three countries is actually an example of the kind of unfettered capitalism advocated by Chicago School economists.

In terms of the long-term benefits of shock therapy, I never argue that no one benefits. The mark of the neoliberal state is a society of clear winners and losers, and an increasingly wide gap between the two. According to the United Nations, which tracks inequality in 116 countries, Chile is the eighth-most-unequal society on the list. In China and India the chasm between the country and the city, the slum and the call center, is so vast that it threatens national stability. We hear little about it in the Western press, but in China, India and Chile, fierce battles are fought every day over the legacy of shock therapy. For instance, there were 87,000 protests and labor disruptions in China in 2005, according to the government, and the number has gone up every year since. The Communist Party of China has identified income inequality as the most pressing issue facing the country. Chile, meanwhile, has seen a wave of strikes, unprecedented in recent decades, against the policies that were imposed in the shock therapy period, led by students and mineworkers.

You make a connection between torture and economic shock therapy. Can you explain the link?

I look at torture in two ways in the book. The first is as an enforcement tool used by states that are trying to push through an economic transformation of a country that is so wildly unpopular that terror -- including torture -- must be used to control the population. Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay in the 1970s are classic examples of places where very real shocks to bodies were used to spread terror, making it possible to impose economic shocks. China is another example. And I argue that the use of torture by U.S. forces in Iraq was related to the huge social unrest sparked by Paul Bremer's attempt at an extreme country makeover. Many analysts agree that his decision to dissolve the army, to fire huge numbers of public sector workers, to push through investment rules that decimated Iraqi industry, and to cancel local elections all contributed to the rise of the armed resistance. And it was at that point that the war moved into the jails and torture spread.

The other way that I look at torture is as a metaphor for disaster capitalism. Disaster capitalism is an attempt to push through policies in the chaos and disorientation that follow a disaster -- policies that wouldn't stand a chance during normal, non-disastrous circumstances. The move to turn New Orleans public housing into condos after Katrina is a classic example. So is the current campaign to push through a highly contested oil law in Iraq, even as the country spirals into civil war.

What I argue is that this attempt to take advantage of the window of opportunity opened up by crisis has some uncomfortable similarities to the techniques for psychological torture laid out in declassified CIA interrogation manuals, which I quote in the book. For instance, the infamous 1963 Kubark manual talks about how to put a prisoner in a state of shock, using various regression techniques like sensory deprivation and sensory overload. Then it states that "there is an interval -- which may be extremely brief -- of suspended animation, a kind of psychological shock or paralysis. It is caused by a traumatic or sub-traumatic experience which explodes, as it were, the world that is familiar to the subject as well as his image of himself within that world. Experienced interrogators recognize this effect when it appears and know that at this moment the source is far more open to suggestion, far likelier to comply, than he was just before he experienced the shock."

The first time I read that, it reminded me of the shock of Sept. 11, which, for millions of people, exploded "the world that is familiar" and opened up a period of deep disorientation and regression that the Bush administration expertly exploited. I want to stress that I am not in any way suggesting that a crisis like that was deliberately created in order to induce the state of shock, but I do argue that once the shock occurred it was deliberately deepened. And more to the point, the impulse to exploit a moment of disorientation opened up by mass trauma is, I believe, deeply immoral, in the same way that torture is immoral, because it is about exploiting an extreme power imbalance.

Basil Britain

2007-09-21T11:29:00.001-04:00

Fawlty Towers

Stage 1 in Fawlty Food # 321145: Omelette with Salisbury steak

My current favorite ad

My new vase. And no, the heat in my flat isn't turned up too high...

Fawlty appreciates minimalist modernity. In clocks, at least..

New duvet to keep Fawlty's toes warm. I know the picture doesn't communicate the warmth of this room but trust me: you snuggle in a bed with Fawlty, you'll get warmed up in a hurry.

The man is a love furnace!

Morbo

2007-09-19T11:49:00.000-04:00

Spanish football never ceases to amaze me. This answer was in response to a question sent to the Guardian football team, about the earliest kick-off in a top-flight football game.

During the 2003-04 season, Barca were scheduled to play a midweek game against Sevilla prior to an international weekend. Since Fifa rules stipulate players summoned for international duty must be released by their clubs 4 days before the match, Barca hoped to host Sevilla on the Tuesday, September 3, rather than the next day when their internationals would have been missing. However, sensing a chance to take on a below-strength opponent, Sevilla refused, pointing out a club cannot play 2 matches within 48 hours (after the Sunday fixture programme), unless both teams were agreed.

Quick-thinking suits at the Catalan giants then hit upon a novel idea: play the game as early on Wednesday morning as possible and hope their international stars would still be allowed to play. Thus, the game kicked off at 12.05am - alas, the only national association to accept Barca's ploy was the Portuguese one, who allowed winger Ricardo Quaresma to take part.

Incredibly, 80,000 fans turned up ... though it's not actually incredible at all when you consider that the club laid on free gazpacho and 100,000 complimentary Kit Kats. Also, stand-up comics entertained the crowd before live telephone link-ups with Ronald Koeman and Hristo Stoichkov worked them into a frenzy. The players ran out to the Village People's YMCA [no, we're not sure either], but it clearly worked, as the supporters only hushed once during the match, when Jose Antonio Reyes's penalty gave the visitors the lead. Ronaldinho's first - spectacular, naturally - goal for the club salvaged a 1-1 draw, the roar greeting his strike reportedly registering on the city's earthquake monitors.

Pre-emptive Strike against Iran Imminent?

2007-09-19T09:06:00.000-04:00

You have to wonder, would a US/ Israel pre-emptive strike on Iran be out of genuine concern for national security or a refusal to consider dealing with them on equal bargaining terms? Like it or loathe it, the bomb equals instant respect, and a lot of the political, economic and environmental deals around the world, strongly favour the US because of the power that it wields.

Smacks of modern colonialism to me..

Familjen - Det snurrar i min skalle

2007-09-19T06:36:00.000-04:00

Love it. They used images from old religious revivials to create this bewitching video.

Windows users more interested in God than Mac users

2007-09-19T06:33:00.002-04:00

... because Mac users *know* they're God, no doubt. Ian Clarke says,

Thoof has done some analysis of the data collected by their recommendation algorithm, and discovered some interesting differences between Mac users and Windows users. For example, it seems Windows users are 20% more interested in religion, but 6% less interested in intellectual property law.

Bonkers Britain (Plus more Fawlty Towers)

2007-09-18T11:34:00.000-04:00

It's true, you know...

A more modestly-sized HDTV..

Hate the two-faucet system! It's 2007 people!

Ummm...no comment.

Ok, Amnesiac is right. Majestic is more me than sweet!

De Salignac's early 20th century NYC photos

2007-09-18T06:38:00.000-04:00

In the early 1900s, municipal worker Eugene de Salignac took a slew of incredible photos of Manhattan as the city was reborn as a modern metropolis. Yet de Salignac's name (although not his photos) had been forgotten by history until New York City Municipal Archives senior photographer Michael Lorenzini put on a detective's hat to identify the mystery man behind the images. Now, an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York and a book, New York Rises: Photographs by Eugene de Salignac, is celebrating these marvelous photos of urban construction and infrastructure.

Seen here, De Salignac's 1914 photo of Brooklyn Bridge painters.

From Smithsonian:

It just kind of hit me: this is one guy; this is a great photographer," Lorenzini says. But who was he?

It took many months and uncounted hours of trolling through archives storerooms, the Social Security index, Census reports and city records on births, deaths and employment to find the answer: the photographer was Eugene de Salignac, a municipal worker who took 20,000 photographs of modern Manhattan in the making. "It felt like a real discovery," Lorenzini says...

De Salignac's time as a city worker coincided with New York's transformation from a horse-and-buggy town into a modern-day metropolis, and his photographs of towering bridges, soaring buildings, trains, buses and boats chart the progress. "In this remarkable repository of his work, we really see the city becoming itself," says Thomas Mellins, curator of special exhibitions at the Museum of the City of New York. "During this period, New York became a paradigm for 20th-century urbanism, and that has to do with monumentality, transportation systems, working out glitches, skyscrapers, with technology—all of the things that emerge in these photos." Check out the rest of them here.

NYT to Stop Charging for Web Site

2007-09-18T06:30:00.000-04:00

Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight Tuesday night.

The move comes two years to the day after The Times began the subscription program, TimesSelect, which has charged $49.95 a year, or $7.95 a month, for online access to the work of its columnists and to the newspaper’s archives. TimesSelect has been free to print subscribers to The Times and to some students and educators.

In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.

The Times said the project had met expectations, drawing 227,000 paying subscribers — out of 787,000 over all — and generating about $10 million a year in revenue.

“But our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising,” said Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of the site, NYTimes.com.

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” Ms. Schiller said.

The Times’s site has about 13 million unique visitors each month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, far more than any other newspaper site. Ms. Schiller would not say how much increased Web traffic the paper expects by eliminating the charges, or how much additional ad revenue the move was expected to generate.

Those who have paid in advance for access to TimesSelect will be reimbursed on a prorated basis.

Colby Atwood, president of Borrell Associates, a media research firm, said that there have always been reasons to question the pay model for news sites, and that doubts have grown along with Web traffic and online ad revenue.

“The business model for advertising revenue, versus subscriber revenue, is so much more attractive,” he said. “The hybrid model has some potential, but in the long run, the advertising side will dominate.”

In addition, he said, The Times has been especially effective at using information it collects about its online readers to aim ads specifically to them, increasing their value to advertisers.

Many readers lamented their loss of access to the work of the 23 news and opinion columnists of The Times — as did some of the columnists themselves. Some of those writers have such ardent followings that even with access restricted, their work often appeared on the lists of the most e-mailed articles.

Experts say that opinion columns are unlikely to generate much ad revenue, but that they can drive a lot of reader traffic to other, more lucrative parts of The Times site, like topic pages devoted to health and technology.

The Wall Street Journal, published by Dow Jones & Company, is the only major newspaper in the country to charge for access to most of its Web site, which it began doing in 1996. The Journal has nearly one million paying online readers, generating about $65 million in revenue.

Dow Jones and the company that is about to take it over, the News Corporation, are discussing whether to continue that practice, according to people briefed on those talks. Rupert Murdoch, the News Corporation chairman, has talked of the possibility of making access to The Journal free online.

The Financial Times charges for access to selected material online, much as The New York Times has.

The Los Angeles Times tried that model in 2005, charging for access to its arts section, but quickly dropped it after experiencing a sharp decline in Web traffic.

Typical Basil Post

2007-09-18T06:12:00.000-04:00

WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! MOAN! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE! WHINE!

2007-09-17T12:50:00.000-04:00

Why is Tottenham Hotspur Football Club like a fingerless dog-walker? Neither one can hold on to a lead.

The best TV show of all time?

2007-09-17T12:18:00.000-04:00

I concur with this article, from Salon.com. The Wire is brilliant and the unbelievably brilliant fourth season is about to be released on Amazon.com. If you don't watch TV, buy one for this show.

For a while, people -- not just critics, but the show's creators, too -- were going around claiming that "The Wire" is like a novel. What can this mean, except that the series is not like what most of us think of as TV? Specifically, it's not like the cop show you're picturing as I tell you that "The Wire" is about the Major Case Squad in the Baltimore Police Department and the black drug dealers it tries to bring down. The series is complex, with a lot of characters, and it's never going to hold your hand through the intricate curlicues of each season's story line. You have to pay attention, even when you're not sure what's going on.

But since a novel may or may not share these qualities, since a novel can be just about any kind of story these days, it might help to know that "The Wire" is also not like, say, a Dickens novel. It indulges in neither sentimentality nor moral goading. Each season has a social theme -- the failure of the war on drugs, the collapse of labor unions, the hash of local politics and, last time around, the crippled public school system -- but "The Wire" lacks the Victorian naiveté to believe that any of us will be sufficiently riled up by these tragedies to do anything about them, or that we'd succeed if we tried.

"The Wire" is also not like the crime novels produced by some of its most celebrated contributing writers (George Pellecanos, Dennis Lehane, Richard Price) because, as is only proper, those books deal in questions answered and narratives resolved. Novels end, but the vast, fascinating, unspooling mess that is the Baltimore of "The Wire" can have no conclusion. The storytellers may stop telling it, but the story itself will go on. If every last character we've loved and hated in the series over the past five years were to roll over and die, it would still go on, with us or without us.

What "The Wire" is about is the game. The "game" is what the show's black characters call the drug business, but the smarter players know that the game's boundaries are not so finite. Although the series is scrupulously realistic (its creator, David Simon, is a former Baltimore Sun crime reporter and his writing partner, Ed Burns, is an ex-homicide detective), there is one improbably romantic character: the maverick stick-up artist Omar Little -- beholden to no one, afraid of nothing, resolute in his abstention from curse words and the injury of "taxpayers," and, last but not least, gay. Leave it to Omar, the show's only true outsider, to state the series' premise while pulling off a bit of prime courtroom rhetoric in a scene from Season 2. Testifying against a soldier of the dreaded Barksdale gang, accused by the gang's sanctimonious lawyer of leeching off the drug trade, Omar coolly tells the shyster: "Just like you ... I got the shotgun; you got the briefcase. It's all in the game."

But, like I said, Omar is the exception. The rest of the characters in "The Wire" are trapped, and depending upon their intelligence and insight, they are more or less at peace with that fact. When thinking about the mood, the ethos of "The Wire," what comes to mind (rather than "War and Peace" or "For Whom the Bell Tolls") is a moment in the last book of "The Iliad" when old Priam, the king of Troy, sneaks into the camp of the Greeks to plead with the Greek warrior Achilles to return the body of his son, Hektor. Priam implores Achilles to remember his own father, who hopes to see his son again someday, and who (both men realize) never will.

"A single, all-untimely child he had," Achilles replies, relenting, "and I give him no care as he grows old, since far from the land of my fathers I sit here in Troy and bring nothing but sorrow to you and your children." From the hotheaded Achilles, this comes as a weary sigh. He is far from the father he loves, embroiled in a pointless war, mourning the death of his best friend and facing a grieving man whose son's corpse he has desecrated in a fit of misdirected rage. Someday he, too, will be similarly bereft. Yet how could it be otherwise? These men are warriors, born to fight; this is what the gods who control their destinies decree.

"The Iliad" is only one poem from a series known as the Epic Cycle ("The Odyssey" is another; the rest are lost), full of dead heroes and the fathers (and mothers and wives and children) who mourn them. This story, too, goes on and on. Death, loss, enslavement, the ruination of all their hopes and dreams, and yet in the midst of the world's stony realities, as inevitable as the wine darkness of the sea and the rosy fingers of dawn, there can be heroism, courage, honor. Just don't expect things to change; all of this is part of the game, and in "The Iliad" the game is war.

The characters in "The Wire" inhabit such a world. The gods may have different names; instead of Apollo and Juno pulling the strings, it's the bureaucracy, party politics, the free market: all equally capricious and implacable. Anyone who tries to alter the system -- be it Stringer Bell aiming to turn legit businessman, Bunny Colvin experimenting with decriminalizing drugs in "Hamsterdam" or Frank Sobotka struggling to save his beloved stevedores union from its inevitable demise -- will be crushed. The best they can hope for is to clean up one little corner of their world; Bunny may not be able to save the neighborhood, but at the end of Season 4, he managed to save one kid. To thrive, you have to learn to fly low and kiss up, and if you're unfortunate enough to be afflicted with a sense of vocation, you play it like that smooth operator, Bunk Moreland, not like that perennial troublemaker, Jimmy McNulty.

In a way, it doesn't make sense to talk of "The Wire" as the best American television show because it's not very American. The characters in American popular culture are rarely shown to be subject to forces completely beyond their control. American culture is fundamentally Romantic, individualistic and Christian; when it's not exhorting you to "follow your dream" it's reassuring us that in the eleventh hour, we will be saved. American culture is a perpetual pep talk, trafficking in tales of personal redemption and the ultimate triumph of good over evil. We don't do doom. "The Wire" is not Romantic but classical; what matters most in its universe is fulfilling your duty and facing the inexorable with dignity.

I can't argue that the classical view is superior to the Romantic one; to even introduce the idea that art is meant to nudge us toward moral improvement and social awareness is to concede to Romantic hope. But for some people, in some places, the classical view is more true, and in such cases, the artist's duty is to show us that these lives are no smaller for that. And it is -- as we always, always seem to forget -- not depressing but strangely exhilarating to see this truth about humanity acknowledged for once. It may not be the only truth, but it's a truth all the same.

Capgras Syndrome

2007-09-15T12:12:00.000-04:00

My patient, a 37-year-old homemaker, gazed at the man in the red plaid shirt as he sat on the couch in her living room.

by Fernanda Cohen

“Who are you?” she asked.

There was something familiar about him. He wore her husband’s boots, but the shirt made him look like a truck driver.

“Yeah, and who are you?” the man replied with a laugh. “Come here and give me a kiss.”

She gave the man a peck on the cheek, but she felt guilty, fearing that her husband would arrive at any moment and admonish her. Not only did the man want a kiss — he also wanted sex!

Discouraging him, she sat down to talk. The man spoke just like her husband and knew personal facts about her. It occurred to her that her husband had been mysteriously replaced by this fellow. How it happened she had no idea; she knew only that it had.

My patient had a history of schizoaffective disorder, similar to schizophrenia, but with more emotional range. And when she told me of this incident at her weekly visit the next day, I worried that her psychosis was recurring. “Have you been taking your medicine?” I asked.

She admitted that she had not taken her antipsychotic, Clozaril, for a few days because of a side effect, excessive salivation.

“With your condition, it’s important to take your medicine every day,” I said gently.

She liked and respected me, but she could not stand it when I gave her orders. “If you knew how embarrassing it is to drool all over yourself, you wouldn’t make me take that medicine,” she told me.

As I tried to extract a promise that she would restart her medicine, she suddenly sat back and stared at me.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

There was a pause. I saw her composing herself before she spoke. “You have the same voice, but your nose is bigger and your face longer.”

She excused herself 10 minutes early. I allowed her to go, because I knew she could not stand being with me any longer.

Days later, her husband called to say she was going “crazy” again, believing that I and, now, her parents had been replaced by duplicates. I had to hospitalize her and restart her medication.

My patient suffered from a variation of Capgras syndrome, in which people are replaced by inexact duplicates. It has been considered rare, but the more I work with geriatric patients, the more I am diagnosing it.

The disorder was first described in 1923 by the French psychiatrists Joseph Capgras and Jean Reboul-Lachaux. They treated a 53-year-old who believed that her husband, her children, her neighbors and even she had been replaced by exact “doubles” in a plot to steal her property.

In Capgras, there is an uncoupling of perception and recognition that leads many investigators to theorize that there may be a neurological, organic cause that remains unknown. Psychoanalysts have seen Capgras as an unusual form of displacement in which the patient rejects the loved one whenever negative features have to be attributed.

Yet guilt and ambivalence prevent the patient from becoming conscious of the rejection. The bad feelings are displaced to a double, who is an impostor and may safely be rejected. Anna Freud thought this delusion allowed patients to defend themselves against loss and distress about changes in close relationships.

After resuming her medicine, my patient quickly lost her belief that her husband, parents and psychiatrist were doubles. When she was healthy enough to return to outpatient treatment, I asked whether she had ever seen the movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” She said no.

I thought I’d better not explain the plot to her.

Ode to a Home

2007-09-14T11:52:00.000-04:00

A nice surprise left by my landlord: this case of Carlsberg was in the fridge when I moved in. In fact, the flat was remarkably well stocked: tea, coffee, sugar, detergent, all kinds of cutlery, crockery, pots and pans, a vacuum cleaner, an ironing board and an iron. But the beer was the gesture that touched me the most..

"Plasma remorse". I really must be maturing if I'm set on returning a plasma TV to the store. There are many reasons why I don't need it: it's too expensive for me, it draws enough power to light up Times Square, it radiates enough heat to enrage Al Gore and it's big enough to double as the projection screen on the Starship Enterprise. Back to Curry's with you!

Bonkers Britain

2007-09-14T11:46:00.000-04:00

With apologies for Amnesiac for pilfering her favorite word.

Missed Opportunity

2007-09-14T11:43:00.001-04:00

There goes my chance to make IP-brokered millions. I tried to register this domain name today, figuring some internet porn company would pay mucho dineros to get their hands on it...unfortunately, someone has already beaten me (and off) to it. Clearly, another soul with nothing better to do.

2007-09-14T05:22:00.001-04:00

German 'Rolling Eyes' Clocks

2007-09-14T05:17:00.000-04:00

The Watchismo Times has a great feature on the J Oswald Company's "Rolling Eye Clocks," novelty timepieces in which the eyes of a sculptural head rotated around to display the time.

Rolling eye clocks - first patented in 1926 by the J. Oswald Company of Germany with early models carved of wood and cast from metal after World War II.

The dials are represented as the eyes separating the hours on the left and minutes to the right. This collection of cross-eyed genies, skulls, monkeys, gnomes, owls, and dogs (LOTS of dogs) are an interesting cast of antique novelty clocks.

Click on the image above to view the page.

Ice-cream Portion Size by Level of Stress

2007-09-12T09:50:00.000-04:00

Demitrios Kargotis unveiled his Mr Whippy machine at the Ars Technica festival in Linz. It's a self-serve frozen custard machine that doles out portion sizes based on the amount of misery it detects in a voice-stress analysis.

Employing voice stress analysis of the user's answers to specific questions, varying degrees of unhappiness are measured and the counteractive quantity of ice cream is dispensed: The sadder you are, the more ice-cream you get.

Wrong

2007-09-12T06:20:00.001-04:00

Which means, of course, that I want one, immediately.

The Uncle Abdul suicide bomber character from the Seamour Sheep comic strip series will be available as a collector's vinyl figure from Crazy Label.

From the creator:

We hope that the release of the Uncle Abdul figure will help ironize the act of suicide bombing and acts of violence in general. In our opinion no subject should be an absolute taboo that is free from any satire, because satire is not only meant to make people laugh, but sometimes also to wake them up and make them think and discuss.

Train Wreckers

2007-09-12T06:05:00.000-04:00

There's a shop in Akiba, Japan which is devoted to almost any kind of fetish under the sun (and more than a few behind closed doors, as well. Among the more interesting DVDs they have is one named, appropriately enough, "Crush" by Venus, produced by Gagon. It's a DVD series dedicated to model train crush fetishists.

Seems that the "crush fetish" started in the USA where women would pose as they crushed insects or worms with their bare feet, or high heeled shoes. But the Japanese took it in a different direction when they switched to Otaku products like model trains or die cast cars.

It's an interesting testament to the kind of attachements (call them fetishes if you will, but even beds are fetishistic) we're developing with the mechanical and electronic devices we rely on in our daily lives. As an example, I'm frequently aware of getting intrigued (ahem) when I see a woman checking her blackberry, on the train.

My London, so far

2007-09-09T18:47:00.000-04:00

Our Lord, The Internet

2007-09-09T17:50:00.000-04:00

So this post was inspired by last night's drunken post. And the drunken post before that. And the one before that. And so on and so on. My aim was to put together the antithesis of those kinds of posts, just to underline that I can. And that when I have my head together, I make sense and don't have to woe-is-me everyone into a coma.

I guess by doing this, I prove the original point? Perhaps, but I like to write and besides, most of this stuff is for me anyway.

A few years ago, it must have been around the millenium, I saw a crazy on 82nd street in New York, with a sign that read: 'If God is the Internet, when's the last time you downloaded some happiness?'

My first thought was, that's a pretty articulate, almost wittily-reasonable line, coming from a barefoot nutjob with forks hanging on his vest and one testicle protruding from his pants. My second thought was, 'Wow, the Internet really is like God':

1. Thousands, nee millions, of people congregate daily at its virtual altar and engage in prayer.
2. A lot of people believe any answer can be found on the Internets (which would make Google, the prophet?)
3. Even more people have given up their offline lives out of disillusionment and disenchantment, and flocking to the web, in search for salvation and euphoria (or at least a chance at a bigger penis and millions from a Nigerian business man).

Back in 2000, that kind of thinking made a lot of sense to me. I mean, I first experienced 'Surfing the Net' (again, sounds like a religious tenet, albeit one that comes from some Californian cult) in 1997, and it took over my life. And there was no reason to think anything would ever be the same again.

Of course, it did. You began to realize that the net was just like anywhere else: people were pricks, chicks were scarce and you were still the same asshole trying to get laid, except this time, you didn't have to lose weight, put pants on and go out to do it (the irony is that in those days, I was fit as butcher's dog). In effect, the net became just like TV...another tool losers to brainwash the masses and keep them sedated, while important shit went down.

Why am I bringing all this stuff up? I guess, partly because of my utter reliance on it (well, the blogging part of it) as a cathartic way of expressing my discontent and disillusionment. Which is kind of like therapy, I suppose, only cheaper. And like therapy, it encourages you to keep talking about yourself, to strangers, boring everyone silly and avoiding dealing with your problems. It's gotten to the point where I long to blog, just to get some comfort. And when I'm out, I experience a low-level anxiety about who might have gotten in touch or responded to a post or written me an email, while I've been wasting time in the bright sunshine (ok, muted sunshine) of outdoor London. The comfort I draw from it is almost...

...religious. Fucked up how we're back to that, huh?

I think what a lot of people perceive as avoiding your problems is me delaying them, because there's not much I can do about them right now. Such is the speed of life, now, that I can whine, talk about it, lament how long it'll be before it gets fixed, all in the same afternoon. In a sense, that's what I miss about Egypt: so many problems, you spent every waking moment dealing with them. Sure it was exhausting, but it also made you feel...

...alive.

And as a footnote, I deal with my problems. A part-time drunk I may be, but when shit needs to get done, it gets done. The impression I give online, is very different from the real Basil Fawlty.

Online Basil Fawlty is..an indulgence.

Fawlty Reasoning

2007-09-08T18:52:00.000-04:00

So do you like my new avatar? It's supposed to represent the ushering of a new and improved Basil Fawlty. A more sophisticated version and I don't mean that in a 'I shall only wear blazers and drink champagne' sense. A more focused Fawlty, now with 20% less whining.

Who am I fooling? It's you. The Fawlty formula is world famous and practically patented: drink, drink some more, remember shit about yourself you hate which, under the normal rules of sobriety would be buried deep beneath layers of denial and hubris, and proceed to then flog yourself with it-in full view of the blogging community, mind you-until you pass out. Wake up the next day, read the shit you've written (I always remember writing it, hardly ever what it is I wrote) and wonder how you walk around with so much self-loathing and diffidence.

Did I ask if you liked my new avatar?

Things don't change; as much as they do, they don't. Let me be crystal clear: things change, but their speed of change is never enough to keep up with the falling of my spirit.

Couple that with the fact that I have ZERO confidence in myself, spells out one tortured little Fawlty. The irony-so-delicious-you-could-fry-it-with-butter is that my absence of confidence is what gives me my confidence: I'm certain I suck, ergo I have not much more to lose. Moreover, I'm certain I suck, but I'm more positive most people suck just as much as me, if not more. Finally, I suck but what sucks even more, is that I'm usually wrong about everything, even that.

Bleak stuff. And quite pathological.

So by my count, I lost half a dozen friends this year. I'm talking people I straight-up drove away because I'm difficult and inconsistent and complicated to deal with. I guess some of them were relationships, but most weren't. Friends are hard to deal with, because I can't figure out what they want.

What do you want, friends? What MORE do you want? I don't judge, I like to laugh, I don't hit on my friends (certainly not the guys but the girls are safe with me, as well) and I am never jealous or envious.

If all this sounds too good to be true, it might be. I've been accused of not giving a shit because of it. If you're not jealous or resentful or a little bit in love with your friends, then you must have some kind of agenda. You know, something really fucked up. Well, fuck it. Friends are too complicated; all I want from my friends is to be friendly without getting too close. Because deep down, I have nothing to offer. I'm emotionally bankrupt and I say this without a hint of self-pity.

Imagine that! A statement utterly devoid of self-pity in the midst of one gigantic blog dedicated to the indulgence of wallowing in self-pity.

This is just a fact that I can't seem to get away from. I'm too closed up for my feelings to leap all the way over to another person. I want someone, true, but I don't want even them to get too close.

Funny how the new Basil Fawlty isn't that different from the old. I think I may have a disease: I'm happy, during the day, but I have no joy.

Where do you people find your joy? And think about what you write before you post it; remember, I do this for a living, so if I see a cliche, a shred of disingenuousness, a quote from a book or a sentiment from whatever self-help manual you secretly have under your mattress...I'll assume that my own lack of originality has inspired yours.

Do you like my avatar? Stole it from a show called Mad Men, on AMC.

The Heinrich Maneuver

2007-09-08T09:09:00.000-04:00

How are things on the West Coast?!
I hear you movin' real fine
You wear those shoes like a dove
Now strut those shoes
We'll go roaming in the night

Well how are things on the West Coast?!
You keep it movin' to your soul's delight
Now I've tried the brakes
I've tried but you know it's a lonely ride
How are things on the West Coast?
Oh and move heaven behind those eyes...

Today my heart swings
Yeah, today my heart swings

But I don't want to take your heart
And I don't want a piece of history
No I don't want to read your thoughts anymore
My God...

'Cause today my heart swings
Yeah, today my heart swings

How are things on the West Coast?!
Hear you movin' real fine tonight
You wear those shoes, I decide
Oh strut those shoes,
We'll go roaming in the night
Well how are things on the West Coast?!
Yeah, but you're an actress and I don't identify...

Today my heart swings
Yeah, today my heart swings

Say it...
But I don't want to play the part
And I don't want a taste of victory
No I don't want to read your thoughts anymore
My God...

'Cause today my heart swings
Yeah today my heart swings

Say it...
'Cause today my heart swings
Yeah, today my heart swings

Let it come...
'Cause I've got a chance for a sweet saint life
I said I've got a dance and you'll do just fine
Well I've got a plan, look forward in my eyes

Let it come...
Well I've got a chance for a sweet saint life
I said I've got a dance, it moves into the night
Well I've got a plan, look forward in my eyes

But today my heart swings...

Monty Python - International Philosophy

2007-09-07T11:25:00.001-04:00

Aside from being hysterical, I've always loved how well-shot this is.

Ugly Betty photoshopped to a size zero for Mag

2007-09-07T07:18:00.000-04:00

North England/ South Paris

2007-09-07T07:13:00.001-04:00

I work with this freelance chick from France named Julie (pronounced the French way: Jew-Lee). Anyways, she has the most disconcerting accent ever devised: a hybrid of french pronunciation of English mixed with a geordie brogue that would do a Sunderland supporter proud. The result is something that sounds like Arsene Wenger swallowed Mick McCarthy ie not very attractive. One second, she'll say 'you know' in a French accent ("Yoo Knaw") followed by a blood-curdling "Dja knaw whauamean?".

2007-09-07T07:12:00.000-04:00

Animal Britain

2007-09-06T05:25:00.000-04:00

I left work kind of late yesterday, around 9pm or so. I work in Hammersmith, which is zone 1 in London and pretty central. So imagine my surprise when walking towards Fulham Palace Road and running into...a fox, just like in the picture. I stared at him, he stared at me, I stared at him and he turned around and scrambled into the undergrowth. Good thing they trained me for this sort of thing at my company orientation..

Where the fuck am I?

Chilling Orwellian-type arrest

2007-09-06T05:15:00.000-04:00

[Translation]
IBRAHIM ISSA CHARGED FOR MAKING DELIBERATE FALSE ALLEGATIONS REGARDING THE HEALTH OF PRESIDENT [MUBARAK]

The Supreme National Security Prosecutor's office today levelled charges towards journalist Ibrahim Issa, accusing him of spreading malicious, deliberate and untrue rumours regarding the health of President Mubarak, with the express aim of creating panic and fear among the public. The office of the supreme prosecutor has, however, decided to release him, pending the completion of its investigations and until a judgement can be made in this case.

Homeless World Cup

2007-09-06T04:39:00.000-04:00

Am I the only one who thinks the Homeless World Cup is kind of a bizarre idea? I mean, how about taking the money to organize it, sponsor it, give it the exposure it's getting...and using it to give the players a home?

Of course, once they get a home, they will cease to be homeless and the tournament will die..but isn't the point of this tournament to raise awareness about the plight of the homeless?

Also, from a football point of view, not sure how focused I would be if I had a late game. I mean, my mind would be on whether I could get to a bridge in time to find a cushy spot underneath.

Word Porn

2007-09-04T11:58:00.000-04:00

There's an interesting British spelling of a word that doesn't immediately come to mind when one mentions the differences between American and English spelling. Everyone knows about color/ colour, harbor/ harbour, center/ centre and so on. But how many know about 'dispatch' (American) and 'despatch' (English)? Not me.

I found this out upon receiving an email from Virgin Megastore informing me that a DVD I'd ordered had been 'despatched'.

On a side note, when it comes to women, I could give up nose-bleed-inducing altitudes of sexual bliss, intellect so sharp you could circumcise an armadillo with it, but I cannot (read: will not) sacrifice a like-minded fascination with how interesting language can be.

Hmmm. Crickets. I kind of expected a mad rush of high heels on their way out to buy a dictionary. Oh well. Another year of chickens suffering a grisly death by choking...

2007-09-04T09:55:00.001-04:00

Power Struggle

2007-09-03T10:59:00.000-04:00

One of the bosses at my office in London is very comfortable in his position as the office clown. Which, as faithful readers will confirm, is MY job. Anyways, I did a good job being funny over a group lunch we had today (I loathe eating with people and cracking wise helps me relieve the intense boredom and disdain one feels in the company of morons) and now his resentment is becoming less and less veiled.

Bring it on, ass clown: I can entertain the troops, get shot at by insurgents, do my job AND kick your butt before lunch.

He doesn't stand a chance; everyone knows funny comes from being desperate, and he's nowhere near my level of desperation: he's Jewish, makes £70,000 a year, owns a Harley and has a girlfriend with legs that could traverse the M1 in two steps.

Manga Charlie Brown

2007-09-03T09:31:00.000-04:00

Sheer Genius. Did I post this before?

Cadbury Gorilla

2007-09-03T09:28:00.000-04:00

The idea is that this will make you smile the way Cadbury Milk does. Click here or on the picture.

2007-09-02T21:00:00.000-04:00

When you question yourself, you're indulging in a form of masochism that is not only debilitating, but also quite dull. I've spent a good portion of my life debilitating myself with relentless questions...and boring myself along the way. I've made some good decisions in my life, but mostly they've been bad and in some cases, odd and bad. My point is, no matter how odd they were or how you should have seen this coming, I couldn't help making those decisions, because they seemed right to me at the time. not right-right...just right for me. How can someone punish themselves (or be punished) for something that seemed right?

One of the reasons I don't believe in religion (even though I believe in God) is because it makes you subscribe to a certain belief system, even if deep down inside, you don't believe it. I mean, in order to be a pious Muslim or Christian or Jew, you don't have to change the way you feel, just the way you behave. So, if I get this right, how you feel or what you think (and feelings and thinking are the two things that all religions cite as features that distinguish us from the savage beasts) is actually irrelevant compared to how you act and what you project.

Maybe there is some value in denying your baser impulses. Deny yourself what you feel and think, so you have more. Kind of like how fasting clears your head (or lowers your blood sugar, depending on your viewpoint) and brings you closer to God. But why the circular logic of creating us, so we can be proof of his or her existence.

I digress, in a big way. My original point is that I've made some terrible choices. Alienated a lot of people, stayed in many scenarios I should have avoided and run away from too many situations I should have stayed and fought against (or for). And the more I live, as I lie on the cusp of my 36th birthday, the more my regrets weigh me down and the whispery what-ifs become ever more vocal, until they begin to sound like a thousand haunting voices in some echo-filled cavern. They are driving me insane. And the more I drink, the more of the day I lose and the less able I am to piece together a coherent defence for why I am where I am with what little I have to show for it.

And yet to not drink and try and forget, would be to invite the pain of gnawing self-doubt, an ever-present companion these days I'm afraid, into my chambers and to have it do bloody murder unto me on a daily basis, in what can only be classified as a crime of no-passion.

I'm lonely. And I know I'm in a new country, so I'm supposed to be lonely..but I was lonely before I left as well. And by lonely, I don't mean having people around me, because I've had those wherever I've gone. And I've scared most of them away and those that didn't get scared...well, I love them for staying. Even if they did stay for their own hopes and fears.

If I drink some more, I lose more of my mind each time I sober up and realize how much I've missed. If I don't drink, the terrible stillness of the never-ending day mixed with the uncertainty about my choices don't stop pounding on the little door in my brain, marked 'Let-yourself-in-take-whatever-you-want'.

I wish I'd done things differently. But to do that, you'd need a different person. I would have made the same calls today as I did back then, because I love/ loathe/ believe/ accept the same things today as I did back then. Which means my unhappiness today is as it is supposed to be. And its all in how I deal with it.

Great. More choices.

The double life of Catherine M

2007-09-02T17:57:00.001-04:00

I bought this book when it first came out in the US, in 2002. I think I need to come to terms with me probably being some kind of sex addict. I mean, I'm fine with it but the problem becomes my constant striving to lead a monogamous life and then being disappointed and frustrated because of what one woman cannot do.

By day she was a sought-after curator and well-respected member of the French intelligentsia; by night she was an insatiable hedonist whose passion was indiscriminate sex with anonymous men. And now she's written a shockingly candid and provocative memoir of her experiences. Jessica Berens meets Catherine Millet

Sunday May 19, 2002
The Observer

Catherine Millet does not look like a person who has slept with the whole world. Promiscuity tends to be linked with pneumatic aspects, after all: big tits, prozzie lips, all that. Catherine Millet has bosoms that, as she has said herself, are not 'resplendent'. And she had very bad teeth until she slept with a dentist who made her a present of some new ones.

She is quite a small Frenchwoman, 54, chic in black cardie and Mary-Jane shoes, living in an apartment crowded with modern art near the Bastille in Paris. There are a lot of books, untidy clutter, a lady doing the ironing, a husband upstairs, and copies of Millet's book which show her naked from the back. She is the editor of Art Press, a high-minded arts magazine with a circulation of 30,000 that she launched 30 years ago. She looks like what she is - an intelligent art critic - though she does not have that stern intolerance that sometimes arrives in a mature female intellectual. There is no set mouth or frightening jawline. She is amenable. She laughs. And she has a lot to laugh about nowadays.

Her book, The Sexual Life of Catherine Millet, published in France last year, has sold 400,000 copies and is still inciting worldwide debate. 'This has been one of the happiest times of my life,' she says. 'Not just because the book is a success, but because a lot of people understand it.'

Employing provocative precision and embarrassing honesty, Catherine Millet has exposed herself in print with all the conscientious rigor of a Hustler model posing for a photographer. Her memoir details her sex life, from masturbation as a child to an adulthood where she was propelled by a predilection for group sex. She is a visual person and her facility is to convey images successfully. The prose - never silly, never flowery - is as relentless as that of Henry Miller.

'Today I can account for 49 men whose sexual organs have penetrated me,' she writes. 'But I cannot put a number on those that blur into anonymity.'

Catherine Millet felt most at home lying on a table at a club named Chez Aimé, being penetrated by lines of unknown men. Page 18: 'I was sometimes set upon so violently that I had to hold on to the ends of the table with both my hands and for a long time I bore the scar of a little gash above my coccyx, where my spine had rubbed against the rough wood.'

She liked sex and she particularly liked an orgy. Why? She liked the anonymity, the abandonment, the 'delicious giddiness'. As a young woman she was shy - 'awkward', she says, at making relationships. Strangely, she felt more embarrassed with her clothes on than off; not so strangely, she disliked her body. To achieve transcendence through climax was to leave her self behind.

'I was carried by the conviction that I rejoiced in extraordinary freedom. To fuck above and beyond any sense of disgust was not just a way of lowering oneself, it was to raise yourself above all prejudice. There are those who break taboos as powerful as incest. I settled for not having to choose my partners.'

Cemeteries. Saunas. Train platforms. Store-rooms. Art galleries. Fields. Vans. Oral sex. Anal sex. Abortions. Fat men. Thin men. Filthy, naked men that she never saw again. Ringo who was 'wiry', Claude with a 'beautiful dick', Eric who took her to clubs where 'I could make myself available to an incalculable number of hands and penises.'

There is no youth, or lingerie, or televisual pouting. Catherine Millet does not conform to the mould that contemporary culture has created to define (and incarcerate) a woman's sexuality. She is a middle-aged woman who holds a respected position in the circles of Parisian intelligentsia. Now she is saying things like: 'I could gather together a good many anecdotes concerning the use to which for many years I put my anus.' In British terms, it is as if Joan Bakewell had decided to reveal herself as an insatiable swinger.

The book took her a year-and-a-half to write and was published in France by Denis Roche, who happened to be a friend and live next door to her. His Editions du Seuil publishing house has an established catalogue of avant-garde work. 'He didn't think I would go through with it,' Millet says now. Asked whether she kept a diary, she says no, but for certain things, she has ' une mémoire diabolique!'

Seuil started with a small print run which quickly went into reprint as the book attracted, variously, shocked disapproval and loud applause. There were, as Millet puts it, ' beaucoup des attaques'. She was particularly stung by one 'ex-friend' who accused her of a cynical book motivated by money.

Detractors, ever welcome aids to promotion, included the renowned publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert, who published the Story of O in 1954 and declared that Millet's book was a victim of the fact that eroticism had been killed by its own ubiquity. Perhaps the bottom has fallen out of the bottom market. The critic Michel Schneider commented that writing about sex was neither politically or socially revolutionary. He resented the idea that the author should labour under the delusion that anyone should care about the nature of her sex life.

Jean Baudrillard weighed in with a characteristically opaque point about nudity and truth. 'If one lifts one's skirt, it is to show one's self, not to show oneself naked like the truth,' he sniped in Libération .

Millet says that the book's detached tone arises from the fact that she did not want to write a pornographic book that established an empathy between author and reader. Yet she does not object to the word pornographic. 'There were people who reproached me for not writing a pornographic book which they could find sexually arousing, while others found certain passages very exciting.'

In other words, she could not win as the debate wavered between the stagnant 'what is pornography?' question (American Vogue said it was, Edmund White said it was not) and the issue of whether acts of sexual transgression still have the power to subvert. This last question holds more relevance in France, where the profane writings of libertinage (and underground anti-monarchy libelles ) were political and seen as having a part in the French Revolution. More recently, pornography and erotic fiction have increasingly come under the scrutiny of post-feminist writers and other academics. The late Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault were instrumental in the reassessment of de Sade and the establishment of Georges Bataille as a dissident hero.

'We had found a ready-made philosophy reading Bataille,' Millet notes in her book. She was also affected by Catherine Deneuve's appearance in Belle du Jour, and though she enjoyed daydreams about being a high-class prostitute, she knew that her 'excessive reserve' would prohibit the negotiations of 'mercenary relationships'.

Catherine Millet did not want to speak, she did not want to be seduced, she did not want to be paid, she did not want to become involved in any S&M power game, she did not even want to flirt; she simply wanted to enjoy a lot of penetrative sex and, on the way, 'satisfy my intellectual and professional curiosity'.

The Sexual Life of Catherine M will be published in England next month by Serpent's Tail, an independent and independent-minded publishing house under the aegis of the quietly anarchic Peter Ayrton. He was tipped off about it by a friend in France and 'made a modest offer'. To his enormous surprise, it was accepted.

'Some London editors have made it quite clear that they did not rate the book,' he says. 'Some have told me it is disgusting. But it has been published throughout Europe - the reaction here is merely a reflection of the conservatism of London publishers.'

Ayrton argues that this is an important book - unique as a sexual memoir written by a woman and important against a backdrop that is fast scorning the effects of the sexually liberated 60s. This repudiation is highlighted in the novels of Michel Houellebecq and was best summed up by Joni Mitchell, who recently said, 'There is no such thing as free love.'

'Catherine Millet is not well known in British intellectual life,' says Ayrton. 'So the book will not have the same impact it had in France. It will probably confirm the British stereotypes of the French as a nation of rabbits. But it will be read by voyeurs curious to know what all the fuss is about, it will be read by the art world who know Millet in her role as a leading curator, and it will be given a sympathetic reading by a Sex and the City generation of women whose sexual encounters are numerous and guilt-free.'

Millet wears her new-found fame with a little discomfort. 'I am always embarrassed when people approach me in the street,' she says. She is set to appear at the Hay-on-Wye festival, where the straight brigade will doubtless be disappointed to learn that she no longer practises the sex that she writes about. She is married to Jacques Henric, an avant-garde poet and novelist, and has been monogamous for eight years. 'I would have liked to have had children,' she says. 'But when the moment came nothing happened, and that didn't matter much.'

Henric has written his own memoir of their life together, Légendes de Catherine M, complete with Readers' Wives-style photographs. Henric, a voyeur, enjoys an open-minded liberality that includes sex in parks and in cupboards. His opus did not sell as many copies - 40,000 or so. Did he mind? 'Oh no,' she says. 'He was pleased. He is a novelist, he is used to selling 4,000.'

The emergence of a voracious woman unsentimentally pursuing her own sensual pleasure without recourse to protocol or pleasantry is particularly potent when accompanied by a high IQ and a talent for articulate communication. Page 165: 'I needed affection, and I found it, but without feeling any need to go and build love stories out of sexual relationships.'

Millet could easily be viewed as a post-fem player, much needed on a field cluttered with Bridget Jones clones, narcissistic una-woman celebrities and idiotic chick-lit types who have created a repressive atmosphere where women never see romance for the lust that it is, where questions are no longer asked and progressive political thought is nonexistent.

For a man, one might imagine, Millet would represent a schizoid Eve - welcome since she is always available, terrifying because her appetite can never be satisfied by his performance.

She does not view her sexuality as 'unusual'. 'Many women have fantasies about this kind of sex,' she points out. 'I happened to play them out.'

The essentially promiscuous nature of the female species has been reflected in recent research into semen conducted by the English scientists R Robin Baker and Mark A Bellis, who wondered why a human penis must ejaculate 350m sperm when a man has no (conscious) desire to fertilise 350m women. The theory of sperm competition says that sperm must be prepared to do battle with the sperm of another man inside a woman because of the possibility that she has 'double mated'. Evolution seems to tell a truth denied by civilisation.

Millet had not launched herself from a feminist or political springboard, and her book may well fit into Barthes's 'author is dead' notion where the reader is the creator of meanings. She was not a bra-burner, partly because she did not wear a bra, or any underwear, for that matter. Her feelings about equality were assimilated into Art Press, which seriously addressed female artists before it was fashionable to do so.

She wrote the book, she says, in order to reintroduce the idea of complexity into an area where theories about the nature of sexual liberty, largely manufactured by men, had become increasingly simplistic. Her achievement, she thinks, is to participate in a movement where sexuality is spoken about honestly. The memoir has helped to trigger openness.

'Sexual mores have evolved recently, nevertheless some sexual practices are only tolerated if they are kept hidden. During publication, people came to me wishing to describe their own experiences, which had been secret. Now they feel they can talk about them without being ashamed. I look forward to a democratisation of sexuality where anyone can reveal their true nature without suffering socially.'

So what made Mademoiselle Millet? She was born in Bois Colombe, a petit-bourgeois suburb of Paris. There was no money. Her father, Louis, was a driving instructor; her mother, Simone, suffered from a mental illness which erupted into wild 'episodes' of insanity and ended in suicide. Her mother's condition meant that, in general, Millet became the adult and the carer.

The apartment was cramped.Her parents did not like each other much and were seeing lovers. Millet shared a bed with her mother until she left home as a teenager. At the age of 23, after the death of her brother, she was subsumed by a feeling of ' mal de peau' ('feeling bad within her skin') and went into psychoanalysis.

There is a natural inclination to view misery as the psychic fuel of her promiscuity and thus condemn her enjoyment as an illness - even to see her as a sex addict in need of a programme, but this would be to agree with all those arrogant old medics who spent years causing untold damage to the normal sensate women they incorrectly treated as 'hysterics'. Millet sees herself as a normal person afflicted with an average ration of angst.

'It is evident that sexuality is formed as a child,' she says, 'but what can happen to one person in childhood can have a different effect on another. It is dangerous to think that the taking of pleasure can be traced to neurosis, for this leads to the religious attitudes that demanded the taking of pleasure demanded atonement.'

Despite the clear honesty with which she presents her sexuality, the Millet of the memoir remains an enigma because she is created by a collection of conflicting paradoxes that serve to brook no definition. There is the dislike of her body, but the comfort with nudity; there is the excessive reserve and the wild exhibitionism; there is the woman who enjoyed hard-core casual encounters from the age of 18, but it was not until the age of 35 that she realised, 'My own pleasure could be the aim of a sexual encounter.' And there is the Catholic girl with the clap.

Is her book an honest representation of herself, I wonder. 'Within the limits I prescribed myself,' she says, 'I believe this is a true account of my personality. But as one learns in psychoanalysis, one is not necessarily accurate about who one is.'

Denver Airport: The Lair?

2007-08-31T18:18:00.002-04:00

Denver International Airport is in the middle of nowhere. It's been dubbed "America's Most Inconvenient Airport." It's also the airport of choice for conspiracies theorists, who say that deep beneath the airport exists a massive complex of buildings six stories underground designed to house a cultish shadow government and the super-rich elite in case of natural or man-made disaster. The airport's colorful and undeniably creepy diptych murals depicting things such as a gas-mask wearing Gestapo officer impaling a dove with his saber, and three dead women in coffins, don't help quell the rumors that DIA is some kind of grand mystic lodge for the reptilian overlords who secretly run everything.

And not all these theorists are Unabomber-like crackpots uploading their hallucinations from basement lairs. Former BBC media personality David Icke, for example, has written twenty books in his quest to prove that the world is controlled by an elite group of reptilian aliens known as the Babylonian Brotherhood, whose ranks include George W. Bush, Queen Elizabeth II, the Jews and Kris Kristofferson. In various writings, lectures and interviews, he has long argued that DIA is one of many home bases for these creatures, a fact revealed in the lizard/alien-faced military figure shown in Tanguma's murals.

"Denver is scheduled to be the headquarters of the US New World Order during martial law take over," Icke wrote in his 1999 book, The Biggest Secret. "Other contacts who have been underground at Denver Airport claim that there are large numbers of human slaves, many of them children, working under the control of the reptilians."

The latest issue of Westword has a long article about DIA and the many conspiracies surrounding it. God, I love crazy shit like this..

Artist Leo Tanguma doesn't understand how conspiracy theorists find hidden messages in his mural on environmentalism.

Denver International Airport has long been subject to a litany of conspiracy theories. At least one nationally syndicated radio show is taking them seriously.

By Jared Jacang Maher

Published: August 30, 2007

Conspiracy theorists have always hovered around Denver International Airport. Especially on June 11, when George Noory devotes all four hours of Coast to Coast, his nationally syndicated talk-radio program dedicated to the "paranormal, extraterrestrial and other topics typically overlooked by more mainstream media outlets," to a discussion of Denver International Airport. Broadcast on more than 500 affiliate stations, including KHOW, the popular overnight show is the 60 Minutes of conspiracy theories, often with self-educated experts expounding on such subjects as the occult, psychic visions, crop circles, Skull and Bones and apocalyptic predictions. And almost all of these conspiracies intersect at DIA.

For the show this night, a special line is set up for listeners in Colorado. Susan from Denver finds it strange that so many contractors were dismissed during the airport's construction, and speculates that this was a tactic to prevent workers from understanding the true scope of the project, allowing planners to build a facility six stories underground "without anyone questioning it." Chris from Indianapolis has heard that the tunnels below DIA were constructed as a kind of Noah's Ark so that five million people could escape the coming earth change; shaken and earnest, he asks how someone might go about getting on the list.

"Well, you first need a lot of money," replies guest expert Jay Weidner. "And then you need a lot of influence."

Weidner, a filmmaker and freelance journalist, is on Noory's show to promote 2012: The Odyssey, a new documentary that connects Weidner's previous work uncovering the secrets of ancient alchemy with a growing interest in the year 2012 as a historical "end date" for the world as we know it, a kind of new-age Armageddon. Some conspiracy buffs predict this end/beginning nexus will generate a telepathic wave of harmony throughout humanity; others see signs that 2012 will be fraught with fire and warfare. The date comes from the ancient Mayan calendar, which marks a day in December five years from now as the conclusion of the 5th Sun. Weidner has found evidence in monuments built by alchemists and Freemasons that they were not only aware of this Mayan prophecy but have been secretly preparing for 2012 for generations. His film examines a 150-year-old cross in France, a Stonehenge-like structure in Georgia and Masonic connections in Washington, D.C. It concludes at DIA, where Weidner shows the capstone located in the terminal's Great Hall — a name that's no accident, since Masonic temples call their main meeting rooms by the same name. Engraved in the marble facade is a coffee-cup-sized icon of a square and compass, symbols of the Masonic order, with the words "New World Airport Commission." Weidner associates this with the New World Order, an autonomous behind-the-scenes government that manipulates global events and communications.

"And my feeling is that the Denver airport is some kind of cathedral to these guys, a cathedral to the world that they're making," Weidner tells the listening audience.

The airport holds more clues. "These murals, which are shown in the film, are a story," Weidner continues.

"Like a message?" Noory asks. "Are they trying to tell us something? Or are they trying to [rub] it in our face?"

Weidner explains that some high-level factions in Masonic society may be using the murals to alert the general population to the earth-shattering political and environmental changes in store for 2012. Either that, or those factions are amazingly arrogant. Because for Weidner and other conspiracy experts, the symbolism is as explicit as a manifesto.

One mural features three women in coffins surrounded by endangered animals, including a Quetzal bird, named after the Mayan god Quetzalcoatl, in a glass cage — an "extinction message," Weidner says. The next panel shows children of the world gathered around a "gigantic psychedelic plant of some kind. And they're all extolling that all the races are going to live together in a world of peace."

"It's like the one-world government bylaws," says Noory.

But the peace doesn't last. Another mural depicts a Gestapo-like figure "knifing the dove of peace with his bayonet," surrounded by crushed cities and starving citizens. Considered in the context of other curiosities captured in his documentary, Weidner concludes that these DIA murals reveal that 2012 will be a time of intense military oppression.

"To put it bluntly," he says, putting it bluntly, "It's going to be a real nail-biter."

Back in 1994, Leo Tanguma was working in his studio in the Lakeside Mall when a van full of people pulled up.

"And they weren't hostile," he recalls. "They asked a lot of questions." They wanted to know about all the different symbols in the murals that he'd been commissioned to make for the still-unopened DIA. "And I explained it like I explain it to everybody," the artist says. The first part of the environmental mural is about the ways that humans destroy nature and themselves through destruction and genocide. The second part is about humanity coming together to rehabilitate nature and revive their own compassion.

Tanguma likes to keep things simple. He may be left-wing, but he says he's not a liberal intellectual. He's a Christian who thinks of his murals as painted sermons, depicting the virtues of the poor and hardworking, and warning against the evils of greed and violence. Like many painters trained in the Mexican style of mural art, Tanguma gears his work to the street and all of its elements, everyone from businessmen and college professors to people like his parents, who were all but illiterate. The last thing Tanguma wants is for viewers to mistake his meaning.

The visitors stayed for more than an hour, looking around his studio, talking. One of the women asked Tanguma if the airport had told him what to paint. He remembers that, because he remembers how she said it. He told her no, that he was given no instructions on content. And then the visitors began to talk about how the United Nations was another conspiracy to take over the United States.

"How do you figure that?" he asked.

Before they left, they went to the back of their van and pulled out a thick, photocopied book detailing the U.N. conspiracy. They gave Tanguma the book. He knew where it was until about ten years ago, when he moved his studio from the strip mall to a modest house in Arvada where he lives with his wife.

Now that his art has become so central to a growing group of conspiracies, he wishes he could find it.

Even before the U.N. came into being, the United States had a rich history of conspiracy movements. It stretches back to seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts, where Puritans began executing witches in hopes of saving their crops and livestock from God's wrath. In a 1964 article for Harper's magazine, Richard Hofstadter labeled groups prone to such "exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy" as having "paranoid style," and he compared the anti-Masonic movements of the previous century with the McCarthyism trials of the 1950s. Hofstadter wrote this piece before the Jimmy Hoffa disappearance and the Apollo moon-landing hoax became mainstays of conspiracy subculture, but the assassination of John F. Kennedy was already providing plenty of fodder.

In the '90s, Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing massacre both prompted bumps in theorizing, but the events of September 11, 2001, really kicked government coverup conspiracies into high gear. The 9-11 Truth Movement points to purported incongruities in the official explanation of the attacks as proof that the events were actually conducted by elements within the U.S. government. And other large-scale disasters, such as the 2004 tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, have also fallen under the microscope of conspiracy theorists.

It's not difficult to see why national disasters and global catastrophes would inspire suspicion, but a set of paintings at an airport in middle America? How the Tanguma murals became the focus of such a diverse spectrum of conspiracists is a mystery in itself. Still, whispers of shadowy plots, nefarious schemes and activities ranging from paranormal to extraterrestrial have been tied to DIA since even before it opened in 1995, and the growth of the Internet and the increased interest in conspiracies since 9/11 have combined to pull even the most cryptic oddities from the back of the web to the forefront of the conspiracy networks.

Today, dozens of websites are devoted to the "Denver Airport Conspiracy," and theorists have even nicknamed the place "Area 52." Wikipedia presents DIA as a primary example of New World Order symbolism, above the entry about the eyeball/pyramid insignia on the one-dollar bill. And over the past two years, DIA has been the subject of books, articles, documentaries, radio interviews and countless YouTube and forum board postings, all attempting to unlock its mysteries. While the most extreme claim maintains that a massive underground facility exists below the airport where an alien race of reptilian humanoids feeds on missing children while awaiting the date of government-sponsored rapture, all of the assorted theories share a common thread: The key to decoding the truth about DIA and the sinister forces that control our reality is contained within the two Tanguma murals, "In Peace and Harmony With Nature" and "The Children of the World Dream of Peace."

The murals each stretch about 28 feet along wide hallways near the baggage claims on the east and west sides of the rectangular Great Hall. Each is split into two parts by access-area doorways. Painted in the Mexican "muralista" style typified by such artists as Diego Rivera and Jose Orozco, with simplified figures cast in bright, solid colors, the characters in the murals — mostly children of various ethnicities — are portrayed with almost cartoonish qualities and laden with symbolism, such as a boy weeping as he holds a soon-to-be-extinct chipmunk in front of a burning forest. According to the DIA website, the murals function metaphorically as diptychs (hinged tablets of theological artwork and writing often placed on Catholic altars) designed with two simple themes: environmental destruction vs. environmental healing and war vs. peace.

But conspiracy theorists from as far away as Australia, Romania and Japan offer their own analyses of the paintings on message boards and blogs. Some think the murals depicting peace and environmental harmony are meant to be read first, which makes the second parts of the visual narratives — genocide and the devastation of the natural world — the conclusion; the murals can then be read as prophetic warnings from all-knowing groups or celestial beings that humans must clean up their act. Others view the murals not as an oracle, but as a propaganda tool of power-hungry interests who hope to distract people with false concerns over global warming, lulling citizens into complacency with dreams of peace. Once all the swords have been beaten into plowshares — as Tanguma's "Dream of Peace" mural illustrates — then the evil forces, represented by the military figure in the adjacent panel, will enact their brutal overthrow of the world.

When Syracuse University professor Michael Barkun was researching his 2006 book A Culture of Conspiracy, he found DIA in the stream of conspiracy theory that considers the Freemasons, a fraternal organization that grew out of the stone-mason guilds of medieval Europe, as a group secretly in control of world politics. "We think of anti-Masonic material as essentially a nineteenth-century genre," Barkun says. "But there is an enormous amount of anti-Masonic stuff being recycled." Barkun wasn't really surprised by DIA's Freemason-to-Illuminati-to-New World Order conspiracy connection, but he was intrigued by how DIA conspiracies intersected not only with UFO and 2012 "millennialist" contingents, but also the conspiracy branches concerned with underground military bases and reptilian aliens. Left-wing radicals, fundamentalist Christians, UFO hunters, white nationalists, hippie mystics, Vietnam veterans and anti-U.N. Libertarians are all able to pick out evidence within the main body of DIA infatuation to support their competing perspectives.

And not all these theorists are Unabomber-like crackpots uploading their hallucinations from basement lairs. Former BBC media personality David Icke, for example, has written twenty books in his quest to prove that the world is controlled by an elite group of reptilian aliens known as the Babylonian Brotherhood, whose ranks include George W. Bush, Queen Elizabeth II, the Jews and Kris Kristofferson. In various writings, lectures and interviews, he has long argued that DIA is one of many home bases for the otherworldly creatures, a fact revealed in the lizard/alien-faced military figure shown in Tanguma's murals.

"Denver is scheduled to be the Western headquarters of the US New World Order during martial law take over," Icke wrote in his 1999 book, The Biggest Secret. "Other contacts who have been underground at the Denver Airport claim that there are large numbers of human slaves, many of them children, working there under the control of the reptilians."

On the other end of the conspiracy spectrum is anti-vaccination activist Dr. Len Horowitz, who believes that global viruses such as AIDS, Ebola, West Nile, tuberculosis and SARS are actually population-control plots engineered by the government. The former dentist from Florida does not speak about 2012 or reptiles — in fact, he sees Icke's Jewish alien lizards as a Masonic plot to divert observers from the true earthly enemies: remnants of the Third Reich. He even used the mural's sword-wielding military figure as the front cover of his 2001 book, Death in the Air.

"The Nazi alien symbolizes the Nazi-fascist links between contemporary population controllers and the military-medical-petrochemical-pharmaceutical cartel largely accountable for Hitler's rise to power," Horowitz explained in a 2003 interview with BookWire. A YouTube video dated last fall shows him standing before a podium as he deconstructs photos of the murals projected onto a large screen. He points to Tanguma's work as an "expression of the devil-doers' confidence" in their plan to generate mass genocide of undesirable populations through air-based chemical warfare. The wispy rainbow that extends between the two adjacent murals is a stand-in for lethal toxins sprayed into the atmosphere, he tells the audience, "and as a result, you have dying people, mostly ethnic populations."

Evangelical Christians have also found messages in the murals. In a 2003 newsletter, biblical research group Cephas Ministry included photos of the murals, along with the caution that they referred to bio-warfare, 9/11 and paganism. "They are frightening to Christians as well as American citizenry since one speaks of death to Christianity as we know it," the newsletter noted. Another grainy YouTube video shows a speaker alleging that the murals indicate that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has built a concentration camp below the airport to systematically murder the "people that Lucifer hates."

Many of these Internet speculators believe that DIA is linked via underground tunnels to nearby conspiratorial hotbeds such as NORAD and the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. But some also believe that the conspiracy stretches from the airport to controversial Colorado tragedies such as Columbine. (A few even posit that those students may have been consumed by aliens.) One 1998 article posted on www.konformist.com managed to connect the DIA conspiracy to JonBenét and the Denver Broncos. Reached by phone at his home in Las Vegas, the site's creator, Robert Sterling, admits that the best conspiracy theories often necessitate dizzying leaps of logic, demonstrated by a kind of free-association exercise he calls "the conspiracy game."

Even though Sterling realizes that these connections are more than a little tenuous, he is willing to err on the side of speculation, given the sheer weirdness of the murals and evidence of DIA's capstone. "The idea that [DIA] is a temple or monument to the New World Order, it almost in some bizarre way makes sense," he says.

In his sociological observations of conspiracy culture, Barkun has noticed a rise in the number of individuals suspicious of Freemasonry, a trend he thinks may be the cause (or effect) of conspiracy-thriller novelist Dan Brown's popularity. As with The Da Vinci Code, there's a belief that the future can be accessed if you can only decipher the code. "It's often something that's in plain sight as it is [at DIA]. But their claim is that there's a hidden meaning," Barkun says. "Most often it is thought to exist in text; people have long done this with the Bible. But it can often be visual, as in the case of DIA."

Although conspiracy theories vary widely, they all share three commonalities. "One is the belief that nothing happens by accident," Barkun points out. "Another is that everything is connected. And a third is that nothing is as it seems."

Jay Weidner would agree with that. From his office in Seattle, the former National Public Radio talk-show host says that world events like the war in Iraq, the oil crisis and the erosion of global economies signal that a fundamental alteration in human history is on the horizon.

"There's some profound shift that's about to happen," he says. "And for those of us who are prescient and aware and conscious, we can feel there's something going on here." And they can see it in the Tanguma murals.

Although the DIA conspiracies have branched off into wild ideological directions, they're all rooted in a 1996 radio interview with Alex Christopher, an interview whose transcription has been republished on hundreds of websites. Many theorists surmise that the man quoted in this transcription is dead.

Actually, Christopher is a 65-year-old grandmother living in Alabama.

Christopher first became interested in the New World Order in the mid-'80s, and she started writing a book on the subject. In the mid-'90s, she came to Denver for the Global Sciences Congress conference, where she gave a lecture on her theories about aliens and the globalist agenda. People there were talking about how odd the long-delayed airport was, "and I started looking at all the murals and floors and weirdness," she remembers. "I got really intrigued."

At the conference, she met people who she claims took her into DIA's underground tunnels. The first time, she went with a man who worked there. "It was really spooky," she remembers. Then she returned with fellow conspiracy theorist Phil Schneider, and they went down four levels.

That was enough to convince Christopher that something funny was going on at DIA. "As far as I know, I'm the one who started all that," she acknowledges.

She went with a few family members to visit Tanguma at his studio, where he was working on the second mural. "And I asked him, 'Where on earth are you coming up with this material from?' And he said, 'Well, it's just a collection, a collage.' And he had a lot of books in his studio that had strange pictures," she remembers.

"I understand that he didn't have free rein on those things," Christopher continues. "He was given an outline of what was supposed to be in the murals. And I tried to talk to him about what I thought, and he wasn't buying it at all. Evidently he was bought and paid for, because there was no talking to him. And his mind was totally shut down to what he was depicting."

Christopher, on the other hand, was open to hearing anything. A man called her and said he had found an elevator at DIA that led to a corridor that led all the way down into a military base that also contained alien-operated concentration camps. She detailed this theory in her next book, Pandora's Box II, and in 1996 was a guest on an esoteric California radio show hosted by Dave Alan. There she outlined her theory that the British secretly control the United States, as shown in the "secret society" symbolism of the Tanguma murals.

But then Phil Schneider turned up dead — officials determined it was a suicide, but conspiracy theorists recognized it as an assassination, and he has since become a martyr for underground-base believers. Christopher became fearful for her life and her children's safety. "And so for them, I shut up and disappeared and decided to see if somebody would take the material and let it take on a life of its own so that their focus would be somewhere else," she says.

And Christopher has tried to stay hidden, which has led to even more conspiracies. "Everybody thinks I'm dead or they think I'm a man," she says. "My daughter and I have a real good chuckle over it." But she's grown tired of how "notorious" her KSCO interview has become, as others pick apart and misquote her work to serve their own conspiracy-theory agendas.

She's now working on an updated version of her books, which she says may even include a DVD containing photographic proof of DIA's underground labyrinth.

While the Tanguma murals appear in all DIA conspiracies, the pieces themselves are not the root of the airport obsession. Every good conspiracy theory needs a foundation of fact or a pre-existing controversy as its framework. And in this case, the theories all build off the origins of DIA, which seem bizarre enough on their own: an airport built absurdly far off into the prairie, on a massive piece of land, billions of dollars over budget, years late, with a high-tech baggage system that never worked. An airport that critics say was never needed in the first place.

Since it first opened in 1929 as Denver Municipal Airport in the northeast corner of the city, Stapleton Airport had steadily grown in both size and capacity. But commercial and residential development around the airport made new construction so cramped that jets were forced to taxi through underpasses built below I-70 to access certain runways. Talk of building a new airport at a different location started as early as the 1960s and continued through the mayoral administration of Bill McNichols, who commissioned a study of new sites. When Federico Peña took over as mayor in 1983, he thought that expanding Stapleton onto the adjacent Rocky Mountain Arsenal might be a better alternative. But the costs of cleaning up the contaminated site and opposition from Adams County sunk that idea. Meanwhile, Park Hill residents were growing increasingly angry over airport noise and pollution and even filed a lawsuit in hopes of prompting a relocation.

Peña knew that building a new airport would not be easy. But with the support of then-governor Roy Romer and other high-profile boosters from the civic and business world, Peña was able to work out a complicated deal that would allow the annexation of a large swath of farmland northeast of Denver. Despite a strong opposition campaign, the arrangement was approved by both Adams County and Denver voters in the late '80s.

From the beginning, plans for DIA were ambitious. Peña, who now works in the local office of an international investment company, says he wanted the airport to make a "bold statement across the world" that would put Colorado on the global map. And the scale of DIA reflected this desire: It was to be the largest, most modern airport in the world. But almost as soon as ground was broken in 1989, problems cropped up. The massive public-works project was encumbered by design changes, difficult airline negotiations, allegations of cronyism in the contracting process, rumors of mismanagement and real troubles with the $700 million (and eventually abandoned) automated baggage system. Peña's successor, Wellington Webb, was forced to push back the 1993 opening date three times. By the time DIA finally opened in February 1995, the original $1.5 billion cost had grown to $5.2 billion. Three months after that opening, the Congressional Subcommittee on Aviation held a special hearing on DIA in which one member said the Denver airport represented the "worst in government inefficiency, political behind-the-scenes deal-making, and financial mismanagement." But Peña, who by then was serving as the Secretary of Transportation for President Bill Clinton, testified that despite the project's shortcomings, more cities would need to construct world-class airports in the future.

And what looked like a gamble in 1995 seems to have paid off for Denver. Today, DIA is considered one of the world's most efficient, spacious and technologically advanced airports. It is the fifth-busiest in the nation and tenth-busiest in the world, serving some 50 million passengers in 2006.

Peña knows all about the statistics — but he hadn't heard about any of the DIA conspiracies. They "have no basis in fact," he asserts, but still manages to put them in a positive light, suggesting that it's a compliment that Denver International Airport has attracted so much interest. "If it were a boring architectural structure, if it were a minor cog in the complex system of aviation traffic around the world, it probably wouldn't get very much attention from anybody," he says. "So in a way, I would think of this as a somewhat interesting observation that people make of DIA, which means that people give it a lot of importance, which it deserves. So I think it's good in that sense."

DIA spokesman Chuck Cannon has heard all about the DIA conspiracies. He's been getting questions about the underground bases and the airport's connection to the New World Order since before DIA opened, at a rate of about one a month. And his response hasn't changed over the years. With all of the intense public and media scrutiny of the airport project, he asks, how could these supposed underground facilities have been built without somebody seeing them or reporting them?

"Sometimes these conspiracies are fun to read about, but they're hokum; they just don't hold water," Cannon says. "And the people who say they've been out here and worked on the project and saw all of this stuff being built are smoking something stronger than what they can buy at their local supermarket."

The strangest theories he's heard are that the capstone in the main hall is a beacon for the mothership, and that underneath the basement is a camp for political prisoners. "When I tell them it's bunk, they say, 'Well, of course you'd say that. You work there. You're part of the conspiracy, too!'" he says. "Well, if they think that's true, why did they bother calling me?"

No one has bothered to call Charles Ansbacher, now the conductor of the Boston Landmarks Orchestra, which gives free classical concerts at public landmarks around the Boston area. But as the co-chair of the now-defunct New World Airport Commission, which orchestrated DIA's opening festivities, Ansbacher would be a prime candidate for the conspiracists' Illuminati puppet master. Back in 1990, the longtime arts advocate was living in Denver and working as an aesthetic design-policy advisor for DIA when he decided to start a not-for-profit organization that would help promote the new airport to the people of Denver, and enlisted big-name corporate and civic names to serve on the board.

Ansbacher can't quite remember how he came up with the name for the organization, but he guesses it might have come from Dvorák's New World Symphony. The New World Airport Commission name emphasized that DIA was the newest airport in the world, and the first new airport built in this country since Dallas/Fort Worth in 1973, he says; it did not symbolize that DIA was a monument to the New World Order. "The idea that there is anything secretive about this is totally preposterous," Ansbacher says.

The group's main function was to plan both an air show and a public gala in 1993, which went on despite the fact that the airport was delayed. He was there the day the capstone, which is also a time capsule, was dedicated. The Masonic symbol was placed on the stone because it was provided by a local Masonic lodge. "One of the remaining things they do is provide time capsules," he points out.

Ansbacher was also a force behind the plan to make art a pervasive part of the new airport. With a budget of more than $7 million, DIA's art program grew into the largest single-facility public-art program in the nation. "We are definitely not a Greyhound bus depot," says Colleen Fanning, DIA art program manager. "We're not just a bland environment. We have a transitory public that oftentimes has a little bit of time to spend as they make their way through security. We definitely want to enhance and humanize our spaces here at the airport and just beautify the experience."

From the beginning of the design process, an effort was made to infuse art into the architecture, with 39 artists chosen to create original work for the project. These artists were selected by a committee of public officials, community members and working artists. There was a major cultural component to pieces chosen, and the committee was careful to include work by black, Native American and Hispanic artists. Still, there was no specific slot for a Mayan artist — which Jay Weidner insists Tanguma is.

Fanning has gotten calls about Tanguma's art, including one last year from a person who accused the airport of changing portions of his murals to cover up secret meanings. "They basically scream at me and ask me why we have taken those murals down, but they've never been changed or been taken down," she says. "Those murals will be there for a while. They're not coming down."

In fact, DIA will soon be getting more art. The airport will undergo $1.2 billion in infrastructure improvements over the next ten years, and under the city's one-percent-for-art program that requires all capital improvement projects to allocate that percentage of the budget to art, Fanning's program should get a significant boost.

And so the conspiracy calls will keep coming. "And really, there is nothing controversial here at all," Fanning insists. "I really don't give credence to any of the thinking that goes behind these theories."

Weidner does. He visited DIA while working on his documentary and checked out the Tanguma murals. "I don't know where he is," Weidner says of the artist. "Last I heard, he was in Chicago; that's all I could find out. I know he was commissioned to do the murals, and I know he was told pretty much what to paint. And that's all I know. He's pretty much just gone away."

Leo Tanguma, a quiet man with a gray goatee, hasn't moved from Colorado since DIA opened. Right now he's standing in front of "The Children of the World Dream of Peace," describing his work while travelers scurry past.

"This is my daughter's friend," he says, pointing to the children's faces. "That's my niece. Here's my other niece. This is my granddaughter, Sandiana. This is my other granddaughter." Other faces belong to friends of the family, neighbors, relatives. Some were victims of gang violence. "This little boy was at the zoo with his parents. At the zoo! And somebody was having a war in the neighborhood, and one of those bullets came in the air and paralyzed him," Tanguma says. "It took him one year to die. So when I met the parents, I went to their home, and they gave me his photographs."

The children represent a wide assortment of nationalities: "Panama. Brazil. Greece. Arabia. Sweden. Czech Republic." The mural is about kids dreaming of a world without violence, he explains, with the dream turning into a rainbow that leads to children of all nations putting down their weapons by beating swords into plowshares.

The soldier in the mural could be any soldier. "That's why I put a mask on him," Tanguma explains. "I didn't want to make him white or black. I wanted to make him villainous to give that aspect of something vile, something real, something mean."

Tanguma grew up in a small town in Texas, where Latinos were in the minority. He created his first mural when he was in the fifth grade and the local sheriff shot and killed three of his cousins in a questionable incident. He got up and went to the blackboard to draw what he liked to draw: horses, lions and tigers. "But this kid, somebody, said, 'Draw me killing the sheriff.' We were totally helpless in those days." So he drew the kid stabbing the sheriff. And then the teacher walked in. He got a few licks for his depiction.

"But somebody asked me to do that art," he remembers. "And in my life, I always felt that the community needed somebody to express its feelings."

He only finished school through the sixth grade. Later, he joined the military. While overseas, he got his GED and took a cartooning correspondence course. Once out of the service, Tanguma went to Texas Southern University in 1972, where he'd paint community-center walls or street murals for small commissions. His murals can now be found on the walls of elementary schools, college campuses, housing projects, churches and art museums across the western U.S.

Tanguma moved to Colorado in 1983 because he thought there would be more opportunity here. The first piece he did in town was a mural in response to gang violence, paid for with small donations from churches and neighbors.

In 1993, Tanguma got a $100,000 commission for DIA. Initially, it was for one mural — but as he started painting, he decided to do more. "I wanted it to live up to how I felt about Denver, for the opportunity," he says. He insists that he was given no guidelines for what to paint, and it took him three years to finish the work. "I tried to paint according to my conscience. Because I told the committee I tried not to paint just for decoration. It has to have a meaning."

But meaning is created by the viewer as much as the artist. And it's not just conspiracy theorists who find unintended meaning in the murals. Tanguma remembers how passersby would question his work even while he was finishing it on the walls at DIA. One man complained that the Scottish boy's shawl had the crest of an enemy of his clan, so Tanguma included the man's family crest on the shawl. Others wondered why the multi-racial murals didn't have more black people, or white people, or why one country's flag seemed to be covering another's.

No matter how big the murals, no matter how inclusive the content, viewers always seem able to find a subtext, a code that explains the chaos now common in the new world.

Tanguma's murals have even traveled from the world of fictional fact into outright fiction. In Forever Conceal, Never Reveal, a novel published online in 2005, Washington-based author Dawn Meier wrote about a character who got sucked into the Masonic underworld and traveled to DIA in one scene:

"How on earth did the city of Denver approve of such horrific murals in their airport?" Aaron asked.

"They really didn't have anything to say about it. Freedom of speech; freedom of expression in art; all the freedom arguments allowed the Masons to influence all the murals you see. Here is another one." They moved on to the next one.

"Oh, Gordon. How horrible. I can't believe my eyes; a dark green giant monster wearing what looks like a gas mask, destroying a city. And what are these? It looks like women carrying dead babies. What sick person drew all these?"

"It doesn't matter who drew them, Aaron. This is the future."

Tanguma says he would like to "have a chance to meet with those folks and explain to them what I meant by this. I'm not part of any conspiracy whatsoever. I mean, it's weird to be saying that. In general, this is about humanity. What could they find bad about this?"

A Woman who went to Alaska

2007-08-31T06:17:00.000-04:00

A Woman who went to Alaska, by May Kellogg Sullivan (1902) is available for free in a bunch of different formats from Manybooks. I love shit like this, probably because it combines my love of esoteric experiences and strong, unconventional women. Here's the blurb:

This unpretentious little book is the outcome of my own experiences and adventures in Alaska. Two trips, covering a period of eighteen months and a distance of over twelve thousand miles were made practically alone. In answer to the oft-repeated question of why I went to Alaska I can only give the same reply that so many others give: I wanted to go in search of my fortune which had been successfully eluding my grasp for a good many years.

Art, Truth & Politics

2007-08-31T05:07:00.000-04:00

In his controversial Nobel Lecture "Art, Truth & Politics", speaking with obvious difficulty while seated in a wheelchair, Harold Pinter distinguishes between the search for truth in art and the avoidance of truth in politics.

He describes his own artistic process of creating The Homecoming and Old Times, following an initial line or word or image, calling "the author's position" an "odd one" as, experiencing the "strange moment . . . of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence," he must "play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man's buff, hide and seek" during which "the search for the truth . . . has to be faced, right there, on the spot." Distinguishing among his plays The Birthday Party, Mountain Language, and Ashes to Ashes, he segues into his transitions from "the search for truth" in art and "the entirely different set of problems" facing the artist in "Political theatre" to the avoidance of seeking "truth" in "power politics" (Art, Truth & Politics: The Nobel Lecture.

He asserts:

Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory [of the artist] since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.

As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al-Qaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.

The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.

Charging the United States with having "supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War," leading to "hundreds of thousands of deaths," Pinter asks: "Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy?" Then he answers his own question: "The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it".

Revisiting arguments from his political essays and speeches of the past decade, Pinter reiterates:

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.'

In imagery recalling his description of "speech" as "a constant stratagem to cover nakedness,"

Further information: #Pinter's "two silences": a "continual evasion" of "communication"

Pinter adds:

It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

Toward the end of the lecture, after reading two poems referring to "blood in the streets", "deaths", "dead bodies", and "death" by fellow Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda and himself, in a whimsically-humble gesture, Pinter offers to "volunteer" for the "job" of "speech writer" for President George W. Bush, penning a ruthless message of fierce aggression masquerading as moral struggle of good versus evil yet finally proferring the "authority" of his (Bush's) "fist".

Pinter demands prosecution of Tony Blair in the International Criminal Court, while pointing out, with irony, that he would do the same for George W. Bush if Bush had not so shrewedly refused to "ratify" that Court. Pinter concludes his Nobel Lecture with a call for "unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies" as "a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all," one which he regards as "in fact mandatory," for, he warns, "If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us — the dignity of man

The Espressor-Maker

2007-08-29T20:40:00.000-04:00

Lokesh Dhakar's "Coffee Drinks Illustrated" is a lucid infographic showing the composition of a variety of espresso beverages. Espresso is prepared by forcing hot water through finely ground dark-roast coffee beans. Think of it as strong, concentrated coffee.

Cappuccino

Espresso Con Pann

Espresso

Flat White

Americano

Cafe Breve

Caffe Latte

Caffe Macchiato

Caffe Mocha

Belittle Britain

2007-08-27T19:24:00.000-04:00

If the US is a sexy, blonde cheerleader with perfect smile, golden brown tan and more than a hint of availability, then Britain must surely be her brunette geekette of a younger sister, the one with the odd mannerisms and bad teeth. I've always had a soft spot for good old Blighty and had visited here many times; so imagine my surprise when I found myself wondering why the hell the Brits did certain things in certain ways. I mean, is there such a thing as delayed culture shock?

They're not big things and goodness knowns I applaud individuality wherever I can find it..but some of these are worth a mention, for their stubborn insistence on standing their ground in the face of my plodding casually through the day. For the sake of brevity and because I don't want to come across as (even more of) a whiner, I've picked out just five of those things that have stood out:

1. Coins: the Brits love them. You have your smaller denominations (much as you do in the US)..but then it carries on from there. Any change you get from shops or newstands or coffee places will invariably be a collection of 50 pence coins, pound coins and 2 pound coins. And they're heavy too. Were I to trip and fall into the Thames, I'd expect whomever's in charge of my estate to sue the treasury, because I'm sinking right to the bottom.

2. Trashcans: in the US, and even in Egypt, every desk at work has a trashcan. Not so in the UK. You have to get up, walk to the kitchen and dispose of your litter there. I see a certain logic there: it can't be too healthy to spend eight hours a day at a desk that houses a mini-waste basket filled with all kinds of aromatic refuse, from this morning's bagel to that overripe banana you decided you didn't want. But still, what that's done is it snookered me into hoarding my garbage until I happened to be getting up to go. So now the trash is above my desk, as opposed to under..

Incidentally, there are no trashcans in the street or in tube stations.

3. Four seasons in one day. The joke about England is that it never stops raining, but even that I could understand. The problem is that rain is no guarantee of sustained wetness and bright sunshine is no promise of enduring dryness. In the space of five minutes, you could go from nibbly cold (less intense than biting cold) to face-warming heat and back again. In the words of Bobcat Goldthwaite, who made this world?

4. When I call my bank in the US and I'm prompted to key in my pin number, each entry is accompanied by a certain beeping note to let me know that the system is receiving my keystrokes. Guess what? Here, you're greeted with the sound of silence, and I don't mean the Simon and Garfunkel song. From the time they tell you to key your pin in, to the time you're done, you have no way of knowing if you doubled-pressed a key, skipped a digit, if the system was even turned on or if you'd lost your connection even. I know this is a small thing, but I'm a small man..

5. I knew this was coming but there's no way you can brace yourself for this kind of drop-off: The standard of Thai food here should be debated in the Commons and people should be sent to the tower for allowing it to be. It is abysmal. Limp as a Viagra focus group. Tasteless as a leopard skin top on a fifty-five year old Russian countess. As plain and bland as a teenage Basil. It's simply a gastronomical crime against nature, a cry for help, a call to arms for all the foodies out there. I can't bear it anymore because it enrages me to think that I may very well never taste another well-made pad thai with cashew salad. And such a simple thing to fix: bring some Thai people over and give them license to kill anyone who has besmirched their good culinary names!

That said, the step up in Indian has been remarkable, but why should I settle for substitutes when I am so used to having it all?

1000 Words

2007-08-27T18:01:00.000-04:00

The Double Act

2007-08-27T15:21:00.000-04:00

Without Karl Rove around to give him his orders, and with the investigations closing in, "Fredo" had nowhere to turn.

By Sidney Blumenthal

Alberto Gonzales, right, and Karl Rove, left, at the swearing-in ceremony for Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings in Washington, Jan. 31, 2005.

Aug. 27, 2007 | When Alberto Gonzales swiftly turned heel on the stage at the Department of Justice without answering questions about his resignation as attorney general he left behind yet another lingering cloud of mystery. What is he not telling about his resignation?

The true story may be something like the denouement of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter," which was in plain sight all along, a solution that can, as Poe wrote, "escape observation by dint of being excessively obvious; and here the physical oversight is precisely analogous with the moral inapprehension by which the intellect suffers to pass unnoticed those considerations which are too obtrusively and too palpably self-evident." To be excessively obvious, Gonzales' resignation, following Karl Rove's exactly by two weeks, is the shadow of the first act.

Under investigation by the House and Senate Judiciary committees for his part in the political purge of U.S. attorneys and warrantless domestic surveillance, Gonzales wandered through his appearances down winding paths of dissembling. On the U.S. attorneys, his former deputies -- his former chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, and former deputy attorney general, Paul McNulty -- contradicted him. On domestic spying, the former acting attorney general, James Comey, described then White House counsel Gonzales' attempted coup on behalf of a program Comey considered illegal through Gonzales' securing the signature of the ailing Attorney General John Ashcroft, barely able to lift his head in his hospital bed after surgery. After Gonzales offered a different account, FBI Director Robert Mueller appeared before the Senate on July 27 to corroborate Comey's version, staking his position against Gonzales' credibility. Senators called for the appointment of a special prosecutor.

In the weeks leading up to his resignation, Gonzales was undoubtedly aware of the various investigations into his activities, the avenues being pursued and the witnesses questioned, not all of them in public. As a practiced attorney, he knew that once he left government service he would become less interesting to investigators and that whatever revelations were unearthed would have less political impact. The logic of his resignation became indisputable from his own narrow interest and the larger interest of the administration. But the resignation of Rove severed his lifeline to his political control agent. Without Rove, Gonzales was adrift.

From the beginning of his rise with George W. Bush until the day of his abrupt resignation, Alberto Gonzales was anointed, directed and protected by Karl Rove. At the Department of Justice, Gonzales served as Rove's figurehead. In the real line of authority, the attorney general, a constitutional officer, reported to the White House political aide. Bush did not nickname Gonzales "Fredo," after the weak brother in "The Godfather," without reason.

As White House counsel and attorney general, Gonzales operated as the rubber stamp of the two great goals of the Bush presidency -- the concentration of unaccountable power in the executive and the subordination of executive departments and agencies to partisan political imperatives. Vice President Cheney directed the project for the imperial presidency, while Rove took charge of the top-down politicization of the federal government. Gonzales dutifully signed memos abrogating the Geneva Conventions against torture, calling them "quaint," and approved the dismissal of U.S. attorneys for insufficient partisan zeal.

Rove ran the Department of Justice like a personal fiefdom as Gonzales reigned there as his vassal lord. The civil rights division was gutted, more than 60 percent of its professional staff forced out; and since 2001, not a single discrimination case was filed. The antitrust division became a favor bank. Rove granted dispensations to companies, including those seeking to override laws involving foreign purchases of U.S. assets with national security implications, a former government official involved in such a case told me.

Typical of the political interference was the 2005 federal racketeering case against big tobacco companies in which government witnesses were suddenly withdrawn, suggested penalties lessened and lawyers ordered to read a weak closing statement prepared for them. Sharon Y. Eubanks, the 22-year veteran federal prosecutor in the case, revealed to the Washington Post in March 2007 that the chain of command ran directly through the attorney general's office. "The political people were pushing the buttons and ordering us to say what we said," Eubanks said. "And because of that, we failed to zealously represent the interests of the American public ... Political interference is happening at Justice across the department. When decisions are made now in the Bush attorney general's office, politics is the primary consideration ... The rule of law goes out the window."

Rove's interest in tobacco cases was hardly new. From 1991 through 1996, while guiding the ascent of Bush to the Texas governorship and during his early years in that office, Rove worked as a $3,000-a-month consultant to Philip Morris. In 1996, when Texas Attorney General Dan Morales filed a suit against tobacco companies seeking compensation for state Medicaid funds spent on workers who fell ill because of smoking, Rove conducted a dirty trick against him -- a push poll spreading smears about him.

Rove vetted and approved every important appointment made by Gov. Bush. Like Bush, Rove saw the political possibilities in having a prominent Hispanic as part of the entourage. The son of immigrants, from the town of Humble, Texas, no less, was perfect casting.

From 1982 to 1994, Gonzales worked as a partner at the Houston-based Vinson and Elkins law firm, which handled the legal affairs of Enron and Halliburton. Enron was the single biggest financial supporter of Bush's political career in Texas; and Cheney, of course, was the CEO of Halliburton, for which Gonzales performed legal services.

In 1994, for Bush's run for governor, Rove got tobacco firms, Enron and Halliburton, among other interests, to siphon funds into various front groups on the issue of "tort reform." Through these funding sources, Rove also managed a flow of donations to candidates for the Texas Supreme Court, whom he handled as a consultant. (Rove was among the biggest owners of Enron stock among White House staffers, holding between $100,000 and $250,000. His influence with Enron extended to arranging a lucrative Enron consulting contract for Republican operative Ralph Reed, an old associate from College Republicans days, while Reed simultaneously worked on Bush's 2000 campaign.)

Upon Bush's election, Gonzales was named his legal counsel. In 1996, he successfully argued that Bush should not serve on a Travis County jury because of a potential conflict of interest given his powers of pardon and clemency. The real reason was that Bush did not want to disclose his past drunken-driving arrest, which would have threatened his political viability as he began planning his presidential campaign.

Having proved his loyalty, Gonzales was made Texas secretary of state and then appointed to the Texas Supreme Court. Rove guided him every step of the way. In 2000, Gonzales had to win election to his appointed judgeship. Even as he was running Bush's presidential effort, Rove handled Gonzales' campaign, just as he managed the campaigns of all Republican candidates for the state high court. Once again, Rove drew upon his deep sources of campaign funding. Enron and its law firm, Vinson and Elkins, were the principal financiers of Gonzales' race, kicking in $35,450.

Once elected president, Bush immediately named Gonzales his White House counsel. To the extent that Gonzales was pliable he was useful. But his "remarkable journey," as he called it today in his resignation statement, was remarkable only for his unwavering subservience.

From the start, Rove and Gonzales were secret sharers. But one was "the Architect" and the other was "Fredo." With Rove's resignation, Gonzales lost the political and policy hand that had guided him all along. When the puppet master departed, the puppet collapsed in a heap.

Tattoo Band-Aids

2007-08-27T15:13:00.000-04:00

These tattoo bandaids are a fantastic idea. Get them for $3.99 at Perpetual Kid.

2007-08-26T02:44:00.000-04:00

Reading books not big in US

2007-08-22T05:52:00.000-04:00

The winner of the obvious article of the day..

WASHINGTON (AP) -- There it sits on your nightstand, that book you've meant to read for who knows how long but haven't yet cracked open. Tonight, as you feel its stare from beneath that teetering pile of magazines, know one thing -- you are not alone.

Women are more avid readers than men, according to a new poll.

One in four adults say they read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and seniors were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices.

The survey reveals a nation whose book readers, on the whole, can hardly be called ravenous. The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year -- half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who hadn't read any, the usual number read was seven.

"I just get sleepy when I read," said Richard Bustos of Dallas, Texas, a habit with which millions of Americans can doubtless identify. Bustos, a 34-year-old project manager for a telecommunications company, said he had not read any books in the last year and would rather spend time in his backyard pool.

That choice by Bustos and others is reflected in book sales, which have been flat in recent years and are expected to stay that way indefinitely. Analysts attribute the listlessness to competition from the Internet and other media, the unsteady economy and a well-established industry with limited opportunities for expansion.

When the Gallup poll asked in 2005 how many books people had at least started -- a similar but not directly comparable question -- the typical answer was five. That was down from 10 in 1999, but close to the 1990 response of six.

In 2004, a National Endowment for the Arts report titled "Reading at Risk" found only 57 percent of American adults had read a book in 2002, a four percentage point drop in a decade. The study faulted television, movies and the Internet.

Who are the 27 percent of people the AP-Ipsos poll found hadn't read a single book this year? Nearly a third of men and a quarter of women fit that category. They tend to be older, less educated, lower income, minorities, from rural areas and less religious.

At the same time, book enthusiasts abound. Many in the survey reported reading dozens of books and said they couldn't do without them.

"I go into another world when I read," said Charlotte Fuller, 64, a retired nurse from Seminole, Florida, who said she read 70 books in the last year. "I read so many sometimes I get the stories mixed up."

Among those who said they had read books, the median figure -- with half reading more, half fewer -- was nine books for women and five for men. The figures also indicated that those with college degrees read the most, and people aged 50 and up read more than those who are younger.

Pollyann Baird, 84, a retired school librarian in Loveland, Colorado, says J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter fantasy series is her favorite. But she has forced herself to not read the latest and final installment, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," because she has yet to file her income taxes this year due to an illness and worries that once she started the book, "I know I'd have to finish it."

People from the South read a bit more than those from other regions, mostly religious books and romance novels. Whites read more than blacks and Hispanics, and those who said they never attend religious services read nearly twice as many as those who attend frequently.

There was even some political variety evident, with Democrats and liberals typically reading slightly more books than Republicans and conservatives.

The Bible and religious works were read by two-thirds in the survey, more than all other categories. Popular fiction, histories, biographies and mysteries were all cited by about half, while one in five read romance novels. Every other genre -- including politics, poetry and classical literature -- were named by fewer than five percent of readers.

More women than men read every major category of books except for history and biography. Industry experts said that confirms their observation that men tend to prefer nonfiction.

"Fiction just doesn't interest me," said Bob Ryan, 41, who works for a construction company in Guntersville, Alabama. "If I'm going to get a story, I'll get a movie."

Those likeliest to read religious books included older and married women, lower earners, minorities, lesser educated people, Southerners, rural residents, Republicans and conservatives.

The publishing business totaled $35.7 billion in global sales last year, 3 percent more than the previous year, according to the Book Industry Study Group, a trade association. About 3.1 billion books were sold, an increase of less than 1 percent.

Tom Stoppard Said

2007-08-21T06:06:00.000-04:00

"Age is too big a price to pay for maturity"

Odd Commemorative Russian Stamps

2007-08-21T05:09:00.003-04:00

Cupid's Sigh-ence

2007-08-20T12:09:00.001-04:00

Anthropologist Helen Fisher explains what online dating sites can learn from the biology of love -- and what the length of your ring finger says about your sex life.

By Rebecca Traister

Aug. 20, 2007 | You've probably seen Chemistry.com's magazine and television ads, the ones about people who have been rejected by online matchmaking sites like eHarmony for being gay, depressed, or generally unmarriageable for murkier reasons. In one ad, a young man stares hopefully at heterosexual porn, only to conclude, "Nope, still gay." At Chemistry, spokespeople like to crow, you can "come as you are" (as long as you come as someone who is over 18).

But the aggressive ad campaign isn't the only thing that sets Chemistry apart in the flourishing business of finding love online. The company is an offshoot of Internet meet-market Match.com, which has been around since 1994. In 2004, Match approached Rutgers anthropologist Helen Fisher, whose work on sex, love and the brain had made her a preeminent authority on human mating, about designing a site where, like at the successful but restricted eHarmony, members would not shop blindly for dates, but would be matched with each other based on personality profiles and compatibility.

Fisher developed a theory that human beings fall into four categories: negotiators, directors, explorers and builders, and that your type helps determine who you fall for. According to Fisher's formulation, negotiators are powered by estrogen, intuitive, socially skilled, imaginative and sympathetic; testosterone-fueled directors are focused, ambitious, daring and independent; explorers are dopamine-driven risk-takers who are spontaneous, curious and adaptable; and solid builders have a lot of serotonin that makes them calm, sociable, conscientious and domestically oriented.

Fisher designed, and continues to tweak, the site's lengthy personality questionnaire, on which customers discover what their driving chemical and personality type is by answering wacky questions about the length of their fingers, how they react to public displays of affection, and what kind of doodles they do in work meetings. (While reporting this story, I took Chemistry's personality test, and received a stream of matching profiles. My matches did not seem to differ significantly from those with whom I was set up several years ago while reporting a story on eHarmony, except that my Chemistry matches tended to be geographically closer to New York City. But overall, the profiles I browsed were of guys I was not moved to meet in person. Then again, I am not the world's most enthusiastic dater.)

Fisher, a lifelong academic, seems the unlikeliest online dating entrepreneur, and in the 18 months since Chemistry's launch, has lent the enterprise a kind of punk-wonky sensibility. On Chemistry's Great Mate Debate blog, she trades messages with Match spokesman and sex therapist Ian Kerner, columnist Dan Savage and modesty enthusiast Wendy Shalit. Her entries are sprinkled with references to everything from Chaucer to an East African chimp named Flo, who gets a lot of play despite her bulbous nose and bald pate because she's so confident and happy.

Fisher and Kerner recently stopped by the Salon offices to chat about estrogen, testosterone, the impact of antidepressants on our love lives, the mating habits of elephants, trading sex for food, and what on earth the length of our fingers tells us about our personalities.

Helen, how did you come to be involved with a dating site?

Helen Fisher: When Match invited me in December 2004 to create a new dating site for them, I said, "Are you sure you've got the right person? Because I'm an anthropologist. I've spent my life studying why we're all alike, not why we're different." But I came up with a theory, supplementing what we already knew, for why you fall in love with one person and not another. I wanted to add the Darwinian, biological, evolutionary, chemical component. So I came up with a theory [that there are four personality types] and I designed the core questions on the site. I've studied the first 28,128 people and who they chose to go out with. Did you do the questionnaire?

I did.

HF: What did you end up being?

Oh, I already knew what I'd be. I'm a Negotiator/Explorer.

HF: Oh! I'm the Explorer/Negotiator. But frankly I think I cheat, so I could be a Negotiator/Explorer. Those two could be very interchangeable. Plato came up with these four types, and then Aristotle, and Galen in the second century A.D., and then Carl Jung. We've known about these types for hundreds of years. What I've done is add that biological component.

Did Plato divide them into four categories as well?

HF: Yes. What I call the Explorer he calls the Artisan, what I call the Builder he calls the Guardian, what I call the Negotiator he calls the Idealist, and what I call the Director he calls the Rational. Frankly, I would not have made up new names if I had known the originals. You can't beat Plato.

Ian Kerner: I have a question for Helen, because I was recently at the AASECT [American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists] conference and people were saying that women's sexual response has a lot more to do with emotional attunement at the outset, as opposed to desire, and that initial desire is going to have a broader emotional context for a woman than for men.

HF: Generally women take a broader view of everything, for good Darwinian reasons: Women were the ones that were going to spend nine months having the baby, and most of the time for the first four years raising the baby! So women think of the contingency: "Well, he doesn't have a job. What about 10 years from now?" Women do more long-term thinking.

Does that play into initial attraction, not just a later decision about whether to stay in a relationship?

HF: I don't think we understand much about female sexuality yet. We way underplay men's desire for love and women's desire for just plain sex. Women can have quite a high sex drive. But there's a lot of data that they're a lot less interested in the one-night stand, for good Darwinian reasons.

IK: I was looking at studies of male and female college students who were having a lot of casual sex; the women ended up being much more ambivalent, much more regretful, much more depressed.

HF: I just don't think that casual sex is very casual. Any kind of sexual activity drives up dopamine in the brain, and that can bring you closer to a threshold of romantic love. I also think both sexes often use casual sex trying to trigger these other brain systems. They may tell you it's casual sex, but they're hoping that he likes me or she likes me.

You're talking about all this hormonal response, but how does that relate to someone you meet over an Internet connection?

HF: A lot of people think that Internet dating is unnatural, but I think it is extremely natural, because for millions of years, you might not know that cute boy over at the water hole, but your mother knows his aunt, and you know a lot about him: what he's going to grow up to become, who his relatives are, what his religion is; you know things about him. It's really much more artificial to walk into a bar where you know nothing about the person.

IK: One trend I've noticed lately online is people being much more interested in people's educational backgrounds.

HF: Yeah, particularly men. Men didn't care about women's educational backgrounds in the past. Now they care.

Do they want women to have more or less education than they have?

IK: Equal or superior. It's not the traditional: "Oh my God, she's making more money than me, my ego has been shattered." It's more like, "This is a two-income world we live in, it's going to take both of us to make it."

HF: They also want women closer to their age, and want them to have the same earning power. But you know what? It's not different from the way we always were. We're moving forward toward the kind of people we were a million years ago. For millions of years women commuted to work to gather vegetables, they came home with 60 to 80 percent of the evening meal, the double-income family was the rule. In shedding what we regard as traditional family values, we're actually going back to the real traditional configurations.

What screwed up that balance originally?

HF: Somebody invented the plow. Prior to the plow, women in horticultural societies did the farming with a digging stick and were very powerful. But somebody invented the plow about 5,000 years ago, and it required the strength of men; men began to need to move the rocks, fell the trees, draft big heavy animals. Then the property that got produced was more theirs, and they would bring it to local markets and come back with the equivalent of money. Women got relegated to secondary jobs and having lots of babies, because in farming societies, you needed children as the workforce.

IK: Changing subjects for a minute, I wanted to ask Helen about the fact that my wife says to me, "The only reason I'm still with you is that I like the way you smell." For all the mate-matching systems, aren't there always going to be these intangibles?

HF: Always. I finish my talks by saying "there will always be magic to love." All I'm trying to do is add another component to the mystery. But you never can predict. There could be some tiny aspect of your childhood that will turn you one way or another in love.

IK: Even the smell thing is a genetic index, so if I'm attracted to your smell we're most likely to create the most genetically broad, healthy children. People should be submitting T-shirts to Chemistry.

HF: Somebody actually came to me with a proposal! What I'm discovering on the site is how much you can read someone's face. We know you can read testosterone signs: the heavy jaw, heavy brow ridge, and little round face for estrogen. What we will do eventually is figure out how serotonin and dopamine express themselves physically. I'm interested in the smell thing, but they call it love at first sight because 80 percent of the brain is devoted to the visual.

IK: What do you think about a generation of single people who are on SSRIs? Are they spiking their dopamine and messing with their brain chemistry?

HF: Yes. At the university I'm working with, 40 percent of incoming freshmen are on something. Ritalin for fun, androgens to build the body, SSRIs.

And you say that antidepressants not only have sexual side effects but that they dull the brain's ability to feel love?

HF: Yes, I wrote about it [with psychiatrist J. Anderson Thomson] in a chapter in the book "Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience."

IK: I think you're on to something, because anecdotally I meet a lot of single people on antidepressants and I would say their mating systems are very impaired. That's 40 percent of my clientele -- when one person is on an antidepressant. And I hear from lots of people whose psychiatrists or G.P.s never even mentioned the sexual side effects before prescribing.

HF: I give speeches to grand rounds at hospitals, and at an uptown hospital a guy took me to the cleaners for [talking about the way that SSRIs alter the way the brain responds to love]. People don't hear what I'm saying. For some people these are necessary drugs. There are people who can't get out of bed to go on a date; they need antidepressants! I'm just saying that we could at least tell people it's a possibility that they're altering how they feel love.

Can you talk at all about anthropological and biological models for matchmaking? Are there yentas in the animal kingdom, matchmakers in nature?

HF: I've looked at 100 species and I think we've evolved three different brain systems -- sex drive, romantic love, and attachment, the deep sense of calm and security you can feel over the long term. Animals have all three systems. Now, 97 percent of animals do not pair up to rear their young; only 3 percent do. So they probably have a stronger attraction system and maybe romantic love, but not as strong attachment systems.

But an elephant will, at the beginning of her estrus, avoid a lot of males and then she'll suddenly see one who's the right guy and make a beeline for him. Then she'll show many of the characteristics that, if you listed them in a human being, you would say she's in love: doggedly following him; focused attention on the fact that this particular male is special -- if he had three heads she wouldn't notice -- all kinds of affiliative gestures, like putting her trunk on his back; not eating; not sleeping; she'll be just overcome by infatuation for this fella. So no, I don't think other female elephants are lumbering through as matchmakers, saying, "He's not good for you!" But don't forget that many females raise their babies on their own. So what they really need is insemination by the best-looking, strongest, smartest, least scruffy guy.

Given the number of single mothers, could humans be heading toward a model in which women raise their babies on their own and just need insemination from the smartest, least scruffy male?

HF: I don't think so. Our brain system for attachment is so strong.

IK: On the other hand, I send my son to a school where a percentage of moms chose to be artificially inseminated or have a sperm donor. They are very successful in their careers, money is not really an issue, and they're raising their children on their own.

HF: But I would guess that if the right guy came along ... Look: One-third of all children in America are born out of wedlock; teen births are going down, but older women are choosing to have the babies on their own and then marrying the guy or marrying a different guy. But 90 percent of Americans do marry by middle age. We're just marrying later and doing more serial pair bonding.

I know that eHarmony's goal is to lower the divorce rate, and PerfectMatch's is to make practical long-term partnerships. Are you interested in creating marriages?

HF: Chemistry.com was designed for people interested in a long-term relationship. But we feel that a lot of these other sites are behind the times in looking only for marriage, that there are many, many ways to have a beautiful long-term relationship that does not include marriage.

Was it a major decision to provide matching services for gay couples?

HF: No. They asked me right off the bat whether I thought that the brain chemistry for gay was any different from the brain chemistry for straight, and I'm absolutely convinced that it isn't.

It's the same model for matching?

HF: Absolutely. We don't have quite as many gays to study as straights, but that's changing thanks to the new ad campaign, and I've been asked whether they'll have the same patterns as the straights, and everything makes me think yes. Explorers are going to go for Explorers whether they're gay, straight, black, white, pink, green, old, young, cats, dogs, male or female. If you're a person who loves risk and novelty, you're going to want somebody to do that with you. Period. Homosexuality is about which sex you're attracted to. It's nothing about how you feel when you're in love.

IK: I can tell you that gay couples are having the same issues as straight couples: boredom in relationships, emotional infidelity, sexual infidelity. If the post-matching process is exactly the same, I would think the pre-matching systems are probably the same.

What else is shifting in the world of dating and couples?

IK: So many gender stereotypes are being turned on their heads right now, between stay-at-home dads and the guy who makes less money than his wife. It's tremendously exciting, though I sometimes worry that the residue of the third-wave feminist cultural product creates almost a new set of expectations.

Like that all women want casual sex?

IK: Yeah, or that women should always be asking guys out, stuff like that.

HF: A good example of that is who pays. From an anthropological perspective, the guy always pays.

Why?

HF: Because throughout the animal kingdom, it's food for sex. A male chimpanzee will get the sugar cane and the female will go up and stare at him. You know, if somebody's staring at your food, you've got to deal with this. So the male gives her the sugar cane and she'll turn around and copulate with him and then march off with the food. Women biologically know there's no such thing as a free lunch.

I'm not in Ian's business, but I'm single. I find that I want to split the bill until I'm ready to make a relationship. At the very moment he pays, we've already begun down a new route in my head.

IK: I meet a lot of men who are confused. Who are somewhat wired to be a pursuer in something and confused about paying the check, or calling someone again, or courtship around sex. Everything is upended.

HF: That's what's so interesting! Because we're seeing the shedding of thousands of years of traditions where men knew what they were doing and women knew what they were doing and now we're here in this amazing time in human evolution.

IK: When I met my wife we had a great first date and we were very attracted to each other. And she still gives me shit about this because I kissed her on the cheek, and she still says, "I can't believe you didn't kiss me on the lips." And I say, "But I knew that I liked you!" Guys get it internally even if they never stop to think about it: If I postpone sex, it will lengthen the courtship period and increase the dopamine activity and enhance the whole reward system. So in an age of casual sex you have a bunch of guys who are slowing the process down.

HF: We have these innate sexual practices that we don't even realize. That's the difference between short-term and long-term reproductive strategies.

When we meet someone do we decide short-term or long-term pretty quickly?

HF: Different people would do different things, but what they call "beer goggles" is a short-term reproductive strategy. But then you might take her to bed and wake up and she says something about Nietzsche or Tolstoy that makes you think you could have a good intellectual conversation with her and then you take her to breakfast and over breakfast she laughs at your jokes and you start falling in love with her. So short-term can turn into long-term.

What is the thing about your fingers? It's a question on the Chemistry questionnaire -- about how long your pointer finger is versus your ring finger.

HF: It's called digit ratio. In the womb, the brain is washed over by estrogen and testosterone. If you have a lot more testosterone than estrogen in the womb, it is going to build a longer fourth finger than second finger. If you've got a lot more estrogen in the womb, the pointer finger will be longer.

What does it say about your personality?

HF: Well, there are three testosterone bursts. There's one in the womb, and there's one in infancy and a giant spurt in puberty. But if you have more testosterone in the womb and you have a longer fourth finger, you're more likely to have musical ability, mathematical abilities, to be an engineer or architect or good at computer programming. You tend to have poorer social skills but be direct, decisive, ambitious, competitive. What they call extreme male brain is when you're overly flooded with testosterone and are pushed into the autistic spectrum. And football players are very high on testosterone and estrogen. So you can be high in both.

What does it mean to have more estrogen?

HF: Usually that you have good verbal skills, can find the right word rapidly, are good at remembering, better at compassion, nurturing, patience, have good people skills, and are better at reading posture, gesture, tone of voice and facial features.

Do you believe lifelong monogamy is possible and natural?

The word "monogamy" means a pair bond, which doesn't necessarily mean sexual fidelity. What you're asking about is a long-term pair bond including sexual fidelity. So ... sure! Forty-three percent of people are serial monogamists, but that leaves the balance of people who form a pair bond and sustain it long term.

Builders go for Builders, Negotiators for Directors and Directors for Negotiators, and Explorers are going to keep going for a lot of different kinds of people! I get asked all the time can people settle down. And I think a good Explorer can find another good Explorer who keeps them running home for the novelty.

IK: I think that the beginning of a relationship, especially falling in love, is such a heightened state that people often don't know each other for a few years. Romantic love will mask more fundamental truths about our personalities, and I meet a lot of people who don't understand that they're really sexually incompatible until they're well into the relationship.

HF: Yes! In fact I say to people, "Don't marry him till that's worn off and you know what you've got."

Genuine old New Yorker ad

2007-08-10T22:26:00.001-04:00

Wind-up MP3/ Video Player

2007-08-10T22:24:00.000-04:00

The Eco-Media Player is a wind-up MP3/video player created by Trevor Baylis, inventor of the Freeplay wind-up radio. One minute of winding gives you 40 minutes of playback, and the device can also charge mobile phones and has a built-in flashlight. It plays mp3, wma, asf, wav, mp4, and has an FM radio, an analog recorder, and a photo-viewer. You can wind it for 20 hours' worth of playback.

Iranians Get Thirsty, Too

2007-08-09T17:50:00.001-04:00

Fantastic WW2 Propaganda Posters

2007-08-09T16:06:00.000-04:00

Fans of this blog know me as someone who's a big believer in the power of the word and its ability to move and motivate. But I have to admit that back in the day, before we all fell prey to carefully manufactured, heavily focus-grouped mass messaging, art on posters (especially propaganda posters) had the power to evoke strong emotions and exploit the passions and prejudices of the common man to a scarcely imaginable degree.

A superb example of this is the wildly effective Lusitania Enlistment ad, which encouraged men to enlist in the army and avenge the sinking of the RMS Lusitania, during WW1, and was a big factor in the US decision to enter the war.

I'm just a huge lover (or so the ladies tell me) of this style of art and I'm starting to learn more about it. I mean, mass manipulation and ethnic sterotyping aside aside, the quality of drawings and inkwork simply transcends all the machinations of its questionable message. Here are a few examples of just such propaganda posters from the Second World War, courtesy of BoingBoing.

Taking the Piss

2007-08-09T13:26:00.000-04:00

Piss-Screen is a urine-stream-controlled video game. Bad news for the swollen-prostate crowd.

The Piss-Screen is a pressure-sensitive inlay for urinals, to play a game with your pee. The game is displayed on a screen above the urinal. We teamed up with bars across Frankfurt, and installed the Piss-Screen in the men's restrooms. We designed a driving game in the style of Need for Speed with the clue that people would have a terrible crash into the oncoming-traffic if their reaction was too slow. After the crash we placed the message: "Too pissed to drive? Take a Taxi instead! Call: 069-733030"

Move Any Mountain

2007-08-05T00:47:00.000-04:00

I learnt a lot about myself in the past few days.

1. I am cheap about hiring movers. Whereas I am extravagant and act like your asshole Italian/ Egyptian uncle who insists on buying everyone drinks (or meals, in Egypt's case) in other corners of my life. When it comes to movers, I feel competitive about hiring muscle because I (falsely) believe myself to possess muscle.
2. I have acquired a lot of crap in six years.
3. The kind of crap I have acquired lends some real insight into my character (or lack thereof): a yarmulke, a commodore 64, two Degas' 'The Thinker' book ends, a John Kerry for President 2004 sticker that reads 'Lick Bush and Dick in 2004', a very heavy electrical current converter, a shisha which, as far as I can tell, has never tasted coal or tobacco, an S&M gimp mask with a red ball to gag the mouth (don't bother to write and ask for it; the Salvation Army will be scratching their heads over that one...presumably once they take the mask off), a baseball bat, a 1983 Penthouse Letters edition, flag pins from every country at the 1998 World Cup, a bottle of hot sauce from New Orleans with a skeleton on it and a patient's gown and medical gloves, which I stole from my GP's office in 2002.
4. I have 852 books which I'm keeping (throwing out 76--mostly old almanacs, bad biographies and Time Magazine rip-off special edition IMPRESSIVE BUILDINGS OF THE WORLD and 2004: THE YEAR IN REVIEW) and 968 DVDs (and counting--since I moved out, I've bought another twelve).
5. I have shitload of clothes, including an Elvis outfit (I wear that for Halloween), countless bowling shirts, more puma sneakers than it is humanly possible to wear in a week, a frightening number of turtle necks for someone who considers himself to be on the cutting edge of what-the-kids-are-wearing, and a velcro-sided tracksuit bottom which, immediately upon stumbling on, my phone rang and a mysterious voice proclaimed itself to be 1993, asking for its sports fashion back.
6. I am covered in bruises. Apparently, my muscles (or whatever the hell they are) are structured in such a way that if one part were to engage in any kind of strenuous activity, another part breaks down from the strain and immediately becomes black and blue.
7. This is unrelated to moving, but it also came up during my move: according to a friend of mine who, rumour has it, is completely in love with me, I don't feel as well as other people. She claims the reason I'm so jovial is because I don't think anything is serious enough to be upset about (and if that isn't an abject lesson in not judging a book by its cover, I don't know abject lessons). I didn't argue with her, however, because she was helping me move and wrapping up my CDs in bubble wrap, and I was afraid of what she might do to them if I argued. Them shits are expensive..
8. Storage units are very sinister. Who are these people who need to store things away from their homes? I saw possible mob-types with clearly fake mustaches, single mothers with multiple kids, who had clearly been thrown out of their trailers...and me.
9. I am now homeless. Carmen has taken over my apartment and is presently re-painting it. I am staying with a friend of mine who has a very strange cat..

10. I am exhausted and kind of lonely; I have given away my dog, Mimi, for the next ten days, until I fly out of here: homelessness is no place for a dog. At least, not a cocker spaniel with a twitching eye and expensive tastes. As I was moving, I had the BBC 'Planet Earth' documentary on, and Mimi was absolutely fascinated by all the animals in it:

Bibliomula!

2007-08-04T18:20:00.000-04:00

Is it wrong that I want to make sweet love to these mules?

Bibliomulas are mules toting mini-libraries to remote communities in Venezuela in an effort to encourage reading. Sometimes, the mules also carry projectors and laptop computers. A BBC News reporter recently took a trip with the Bibliomulas through the foothills of the Andes. From the BBC News:

Anyone who was not out working the fields - tending the celery that is the main crop here - was waiting for our arrival. The 23 children at the little school were very excited.

"Bibilomu-u-u-u-las," they shouted as the bags of books were unstrapped. They dived in eagerly, keen to grab the best titles and within minutes were being read to by Christina and Juana, two of the project leaders.

You can read the rest of the BBC article here.

Hossam 'Ghastly' Behaviour

2007-08-04T13:12:00.000-04:00

Ghaly attended training with his new teammates on yesterday morning. The Egyptian was involved in some harsh tackling which triggered a fight between him and other players. Amongst these players were Tunisians Nafti and Jaidi.

Coach Steve Bruce spoke with Ghaly about the training ground incident and the Egyptian was clearly unimpressed by his new teammates behavior against him.

According to Bruce, the player's agent sent a voice mail message to the Blues coach to express Ghaly's anger:

"His agent left a message and said that he [Ghaly] wasn't happy with the standard of players here," revealed Bruce to the Birmingham Mail. "I couldn't believe what I was hearing - and I've kept the message on my voicemail.

Following the training, Ghaly was supposed to join his teammates for lunch and then continue the 2nd part of training but the Egyptian headed directly to the dressing room.

When told that he should have lunch and asked to do extra running and a one-on-one session with fitness coach Dan Harris, the Egyptian expressed his dismay from the intensity of training:

"When he had his one-to-one session with Dan, he was moaning we 'don't do this, don't do that' at Tottenham.

Bruce then replied in harsh words to Ghaly and asked if he meant Spurs' reserves? The Egyptian continued to show dissatisfaction and did little work during training.

Bruce then asked the Egyptian if he wants to stop training and Hossam said "Yes" and this was the last straw.

Bruce had some comments today on the situation as he spoke to Birmingham mail:

"There's no way I'm going to have someone criticising the squad, especially when they are supposed to be their new team-mates. And I'm not having anyone upsetting the togetherness and spirit we have worked so hard to build up here.

"I've had this before with a former captain [Kenny Cunningham] complaining about all sorts and I'm not going to keep fighting things like that. Yes, we train our players hard and we expect them to put the work in.

"What we do here was good enough for a World Cup winner [Christophe Dugarry] and so was our club and players. Hossam Ghaly came from Tottenham's reserves and we were quite prepared to give him an opportunity to play regularly and establish himself.

"He had had the summer off and after reporting back hadn't trained properly for a couple of weeks or so as the transfer negotiations got going. For the previous four or five days he'd done nothing. He was way, way behind in his fitness."