ABOUT

Steak, lobster, apple pie, vanilla ice cream, 7UP

executionChamber_1660852c
That was what Ronnie Lee Gardner ate for his last meal. He was executed by firing squad in Utah a few minutes after midnight on June 18th. A victim of a terrible childhood, Gardner went on to kill two people, one a lawyer in 1985. Most likely he will be the last to be executed by this barbaric method. His surviving family apparently played Lynrd Synyrd’s “Free Bird” as the 4 real bullets from 5 shooters (one was a blank) pierced his heart. Timothy Egan has a good piece on capital punishment in general and this method in particular. Regardless of the victim’s heinous offenses, to me, capital punishment is nothing more than state-sanctioned murder. It does not deter. It should be abolished.
|

Goldstein Is Bought Out

22yards_CA0-popup
Money wins. Daniel Goldstein, the founder of Develop Don’t Destroy, has agreed to settle with Forest City Ratner, the developer of Atlantic Yards, for $3 million. He lives a few blocks from my studio on Pacific Street and was the last man standing in the footprint who hadn’t been bought out. The $3M apparently buys Goldstein’s condo, bought for $590K in 2003, and his silence--Goldstein agrees to “not actively oppose the project,” which primarily means to abandon the only coalition actively opposed to the project, DDD. Read more about this sad news here. Good news: Freddy’s, the great bar (and Ratner hate HQ) around the corner from my home, closes on April 30th, but will reopen on 4th and Union.
|

Portrait of Insurgents

Dzhennet Abdurakhmanova is identified posing with her husband Umalat Magomedov
The above photo was released by Russian news agencies. It is said to be a portrait of one of the Moscow suicide bombers (Dzhennet Abdurakhmanova, likely not yet 17) and her husband, Umalat Magomedov, a “militant Islamist,” who was killed in 2009. A big novel could be written about this photograph. The youth, the cocky pride, the Bonnie and Clyde coolness--and all the blood of innocent victims on their hands in the name of vengeance and political oppression. While it seems the condemnation is universal, the West still refuses to face the difficult question: why would a young woman barely on the brink of adulthood willingly destroy herself and dozens of innocent strangers?
|

The Death of Professional Photography

Tournachon-1
The New York Times has an article about how amateurs have been flooding the professional photography market. This isn’t news for somebody like me. This is what I’ve been calling the Craigslist phenomenon. The shitty economy has forced everybody to get more creative about how they earn money. And many photo hobbyists are discovering that they’d happily take photos for next to nothing, thus the undercutting of prices and the devaluing of pro quality. Wedding photography for $3-500 is now commonplace. Headshots for $75. When you’re an amateur, time is not money. The complication of course is that there’s often little that distinguishes amateur from pro work. This is often the case in the arts. But technology-based jobs have been getting outsourced to cheaper competition—India, China, etc.—for years. Professional photographers now either have to pursue the high-end or compete against the lowest-common denominator. Of course journalism and photojournalism are dying professions anyway. Twitter and blogs now deliver the news and flickr allows anyone to enter the stock photo business. Competition is healthy of course and as Cocteau said, a medium only really becomes an art form when it is affordable by the masses. So, while I love the increasingly visually saturated world, I’m preparing for my full retreat into another non-lucrative passion, fiction writing.
|

Atlantic Yards Begins in Earnest

Barclay's Center
In two years, we will have this glorious building down the street from us. This afternoon, Bruce Ratner’s ratpack of politicians, Paterson, Bloomberg, Schumer, Markowitz, etc. pushed their ceremonial shovels into some ceremonial dirt.
AY-Groundbreaking
Thanks to taxpayer subsidies, Ratner’s pockets are very deep, deep enough to buy almost everyone out. Most likely there will be a few eminent domain fights before Forest City Ratner can claim the last few pockets of privately owned land, but the Supreme Court has already spoken about that. Like the Republican Convention held in NYC in 2004, protestors were forced a block away from the ceremony. The Times reported this, but the story was mostly buried, strange given the scale of the Atlantic Yards project. (Could it have something to do with the NYT’s cozy relationship with Forest City Ratner?).
Atlantic Yards
While I’m all for jobs and the expansion of affordable housing, this plan will do little good for the borough except help the construction industry and possibly build some borough pride with the Nets. Aside from real estate speculators, I do not know a single person who is in favor of this enormous project. It is totally out of character with the neighborhood, in scale and design. The traffic will be a nightmare. There aren’t enough schools, the subway and LIRR will be overburdened. And then there will be the loss of neighborhood businesses as anonymous mall life invades the borough. We live in Brooklyn because we like the brownstone scale of life. We like trees and parks and peace and quiet. We like owner-occupied small structures. There’s a reason we didn’t want to live in Manhattan. This is a very sad day for Brooklyn.
|

Barry Hannah, R.I.P.

Barry Hannah, by Robert Jordan
I had the privilege of spending a week with Barry Hannah in 2007, at a summer workshop at Amherst College. Though his love of storytelling was still richly evident, it was clear his failing health was most on his mind. Drink and cancer had ravaged him, and the financial fallout was terrible. Like Orson Welles, who needed to pontificate about cheap domestic wines to pay the rent, Hannah joked that he only did these workshops for the money. Still, I was charmed by his raucous sense of humor and his reverence for his literary forbears. After enjoying brief monologues on the craft of fiction, I got to lunch with him and talk about Faulkner and John Grisham and Larry Brown, and Donna Tartt, his hatred of the label southern writing. He had an amazing, playful way with words. His sentences and characters were wild and fun and irreverent. I have never encountered voices like those in Airships or Geronimo Rex. The horror and grotesque humor of Yonder Stands Your Orphan still haunts me. On Monday, America lost a truly original voice. Read the NYT obit here and an appreciation at Vanity Fair.
|

Gowanus Canal Designated Superfund Site

FTrain-Panorama
The EPA did the right thing, naming the polluted Gowanus a SuperFund site. According to this NYT article, the cleanup could take 10-12 years and cost $300-500 million. Bloomberg and company were very disappointed, no doubt upset about the prospects for crony real estate development. Next up should be the Superfund labeling of the terrible oil spill under Greenpoint, one of the worst domestic oil spills (even bigger than the Exxon Valdez).
|

Pew News Quiz

PEW Quiz
I’m happy to say I got 11 out of 12 questions right on this test of current events ignorance. Try it yourself here.
|

J.D. Salinger, R.I.P.

JD_Salinger
JDS in 1950, photo by Lotte Jacobi

One of the most influential American writers of the 20th Century died on the 27th. The Catcher in the Rye remains one of my favorite books. I wonder if his children will reveal if there was a manuscript their father was working on all these years.
|

Newspaper (Summerland)

20091228_Summerland-2
|

Irving Kriesberg, 1919-2009

20091008_IrvingKriesbergatStudio,WashSqWest-03
We had nearly completed documenting over 60 years of his work, when he died on November 11th. An obit is on the NYT here.
|

Composition vs. Meaning

NYT_Angel Fraco Bronx_1991
The above photo was taken in 1991 in the Bronx by New York Times staff reporter Angel Franco. Composed with the urban blight in the background, this Halloween picture of Guisette Muniz, then 6, elicited an outpouring of Times' readers emotions (and gifts). Readers interpreted Muniz's expression to be sad, vulnerable, and worthy of pity, when in reality she was scared--not of the desolate neighborhood--but of her uncle who was inside the apartment in a frightening Chuckie costume. Read more about this photo in the Times here. This also fits nicely with Errol Morris' series in the Op-Ed webpages on propaganda and photography, a fascinating read here. The subject of how photographers compose, put frames around what they see, is worthy of many books of essays. Context is everything.
|

Mein Baaden Meinhof

20091017_MeinBaaderMeinhof
Coincidentally, I was looking through a catalog raisonée of Gerhard Richter's work on the 32nd anniversary of the biggest events of the German Autumn on October 18, 1977. I am returning to a novel which takes some of its inspiration from the tragic, misplaced angst of the RAF.
|

Michael Jackson Birthday Party (Prospect Park)

Summary only available when permalinks are enabled. Read More...
|

Studio Finally Ready to Rock and Roll

Summary only available when permalinks are enabled. Read More...
|

Another Digital Manipulation Controversy

Summary only available when permalinks are enabled. Read More...
|

RIP: Michael Jackson 1958-2009

Summary only available when permalinks are enabled. Read More...
|

RIP: Farah Fawcett 1947-2009

Summary only available when permalinks are enabled. Read More...
|

Atlantic Yards Site (Prospect Heights)

Summary only available when permalinks are enabled. Read More...
|

Knox's Day in Court

Summary only available when permalinks are enabled. Read More...
|

Waiting for the Next Disaster

Summary only available when permalinks are enabled. Read More...
|

Finally the Nightmare Can End!

Summary only available when permalinks are enabled. Read More...
|

Powell Finally Does the Right Thing

Summary only available when permalinks are enabled. Read More...
|

The Manipulator Manipulates McCain

Summary only available when permalinks are enabled. Read More...
|

WTC 7th Anniversary

Summary only available when permalinks are enabled. Read More...
|

A Nose Is a Nose Is a Nose?

080617_HWL_cruise2
In a kind of Borgesian rewriting of history, United Artists has apparently doctored old photographs of Claus von Stauffenberg, the attempted assassin of Hitler, so they resemble better Tom Cruise who is playing the German hero in a film called Valkyrie slated to open in February of 2009. Read about the controversy and how it ties in to Scientology here.
|

The Empires Strike Back: Big Oil Is Back in Iraq

Summary only available when permalinks are enabled. Read More...
|

Bees, Like Humans, Are Overworked

Summary only available when permalinks are enabled. Read More...
|

The Verdict Is In: Saddam Had No WMDs!

Summary only available when permalinks are enabled. Read More...
|

Client 9 Gear Already Available

InStock239409046v1_240x240_FrontOB at Zoo-7OB at Zoo-8
|

Invented Memoirs—A Million Little Pieces Redux X 2

First a holocaust memoir turns out to be a total fabrication (Misha Defonseca's Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years), now an L.A. gang orphan story turns out to be fiction as well. Margaret B. Jones' Love and Consequences fooled a lot of reviewers for the best reasons: it was well written and compelling. In Defonseca's case, she was not found out until the book was already a bestseller and a movie. For Jones, we'll see how her career fares, especially since the publisher has cancelled her book tour and is recalling the book. (I wonder if you can sue for the mental anguish caused by memoir deception--WRITERS: a possible short story idea?). It's amazing how well a book can sell when it's labeled as a memoir, but when it's fiction, it's assumed to bear little resemblance to reality and is given much less attention. Reality sells. Though I haven't read her book, Defonseca's supposed raised-by-wolves childhood was probably no less vivid than a great book of powerful fiction thought to be based on some version of the author's youth: Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird.
|

Michael Moore Is Very Brave

Summary only available when permalinks are enabled. Read More...
|

China Proves Its Ready for War in the Final Frontier

China made a strategic test last Thursday evening local time. Now it's not just superior firepower that counts, "smart" bombs, but the ability to protect the satellites that guide them. GPS is very vulnerable if its satellite network is destroyed. Read more here.
|

Sony Walkman Monkey Dies

Summary only available when permalinks are enabled. Read More...
|