06.24.2010 | 03:02 PM •
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.
04.21.2010 | 10:11 PM •
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.
04.02.2010 | 11:08 AM •
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?
03.30.2010 | 01:23 PM •
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.
03.11.2010 | 10:12 PM •
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.
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?).
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.
03.04.2010 | 09:15 AM •
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.
03.02.2010 | 03:10 PM •
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).
02.18.2010 | 10:53 PM •
I’m happy to say I got 11 out of 12 questions right
on this test of current events ignorance. Try it
yourself
here.
01.30.2010 | 04:30 PM •
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.
11.17.2009 | 11:06 AM •
We had nearly completed documenting over 60 years of
his work, when he died on November 11th. An obit is
on the NYT
here.
11.10.2009 | 10:03 PM •
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.
10.18.2009 | 11:52 PM •
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.
06.24.2008 | 03:22 PM •
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.
03.05.2008 | 01:39 PM •
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.
01.18.2007 | 08:56 PM •
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.
