The city seems made up of them. Which is why I clung to the subway map designed by this guy for so long. It came with me to Binghamton, to college.
Now less sure about his update of that map. It’s fun to look at, but seems maybe too cool, like it belongs on Curbed with all the condos. (Maybe I’m just hopelessly retro.)
Yesterday, I went to a benefit performance of the Off- Broadway show “The Castle,” in which four former inmates tell their stories and praise The Fortune Society. For 40 years, the society has worked on such folks’ behalf, and ten years ago bought the castle where this movie was filmed and turned it into a halfway house. The group’s director, Jo Ann Page, told me last week that the play felt like a return to the origins of the group, born of founder David Rothenberg’s play “Fortune and Men’s Eyes.” “David was saying, ‘look—we started on Broadway, now we’re back almost on Broadway!’ And meanwhile, one of the players was saying, ‘Last year I was in lockup. Now I’m Off-Broadway!’”
The play itself is a touch didactic – while Variety called it “immensely eloquent,” the Times said drily, “This is theatre verging on a public service announcement” – but it made me think about something I’d noticed since I first started covering prison stuff: the extent to which these ex-offenders reminded me of so many of the GI’s I used to counsel. Serious people, who’ve been through something I can’t claim to share (and likely wouldn’t want to).
That impression was redoubled last night by a conversation I had with the wife of one of the leads in the play, herself a graduate of the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. After we bonded talking about a friend of hers I’d written about, she spoke of some programs at the prison that had been restored with the help of “some civilians.” I’d not known that former prisoners also talked about “civilians.”
“Are you a veteran?” hotline callers used to ask me, back in the day. “You just seem like you understand.” Not a soldier, I would reply softly, but maybe not quite a civilian either. Maybe my task as a writer is to hover in that not-quite-civilian zone. Because, as my brilliant friend Jine pointed out a few weeks ago, the most important thing journalists can do is not the stories we tell, but that we listen.
My friend Lily was one of the first on the net with this story you might have seen on CNN — the first, that is, after the dad whose desperation threw on Youtube the substandard housing contractors had built at Fort Bragg:
The screen capture to the left is a soldier plunging a clogged bathroom drain, on a bathroom floored filled with inches of standing water and raw sewage. Ft. Bragg’s living conditions, at least as shown in this video by a suitably outraged father, bring to mind those at Walter Reed, profiled by the reporting team at the Washington Post last year. The Fayetteville Observer has weighed in with an article on the conditions at Fort Bragg, prompted by the release of this video, and they’re asking for answers, too. Do yourself a favor and watch what one citizen journalist did to document the conditions facing some returning military. We are not remotely giving them the care that they deserve. And it’s shameful that public pressure has to be brought to bear, by videos like this, before conditions are improved for returning servicemembers.
Others drew connections to last week’s GAO report on the outsourcing of Iraq reconstruction, also know to some as why we went to war in the first place:
In addition, the audit said many reconstruction projects were being described as complete or otherwise successful when they were not. In one case, the U.S. Agency for International Development contracted with Bechtel Corp. in 2004 to construct a $50 million children’s hospital in Basra, only to “essentially terminate” the project in 2006 because of monthslong delays.
But rather than terminate the project, U.S. officials modified the contract to change the scope of the work. As a result, a U.S. database of Iraq reconstruction contracts shows the project as complete “when in fact the hospital was only 35 percent complete when work was stopped,” said investigators in describing the practice of “descoping” as frequent.
But how do we get this stuff done without hiring someone to do it? I hear you cry in agony. But here’s where the history slut comes in: we seem to have forgotten what was learned from costly wars in earlier centuries, that outsourcing war doesn’t work. Those underfed, mutinying troops I talked about from the Revolution were supplied by private companies, who couldn’t keep up with the demand.
That’s why when we had to get serious, during World War II, whole companies of the U.S. Army were only about building stuff — not the defense plants, but literally putting supplies together right in theatre. I learned about this when reading about the great wartime journalist Ernie Pyle. As his biographer notes, Pyle spent weeks with the Army 75th Ordnance Company, which made
…trucks and tanks and supplied the ammunition, for though “the layman doesn’t hear much about [it] … the war couldn’t keep going without it,” [Pyle wrote.]….It was a grievous distortion to imply, as all newspapers did, that the only parts of the war that mattered were the high commands and the line of battle. All the tankers and riflemen and bombardiers put together made up only the sharp point of a long, long spear constructed of signalmen, cooks, quartermasters, engineers, drivers and clerks.
Now, that long spear’s been subcontracted to KBR and its spinoff subs, who are too busy counting their money to evaluate whether the job they were hired to do is well done. Or even done.
I better stop writing before I start talking about this film, which is about the thousands of Asian employees those companies are busy retaining, and endangering, in Iraq. These are the days of miracle and wonder only in the Paul Simon sense – I have to take myself to the last line of that song.
It’s a Monday morning, and I’m trying to simultaneously finish my crazy oversized book chapter and get my week at the newspaper firmly started. So I’m going to punt one more time, and offer up a couple of links:
Does Obama’s appearance on Fox News signify a move to the right? An interesting take.
A portrait of the overall primary drama from my favorite cartoonist, who is also one of our most fearless thinkers.
If you’re tired of political chat, some Chelsea stuff: for those of you curious whatever happened to the folks I described at the Hotel Breslin, here’s the latest update:
Last week, the Hotel Breslin on Broadway bustled with the sounds of construction. Eight DOB notices were plastered to the front door, between 28th and 29th Sts.—some clear (“Install New HVAC System”) and others mysterious (“Conversion To Prior Use”). Just below the doorman’s cubicle, workers wearing protective masks tramped down to the basement, while the sound of power drills and other heavy equipment blasted from beyond the inner door. Just beside that door, a yellowed notice pleaded politely: “Please Remember That This is a Residential Building. Avoid Excess Noise.”
And if you just want to grimace wondering why you didn’t come up with it yourself, the inevitable Yes We Can Has.
Two quick bits, since I’m otherwise mostly in the 19th century today:
First, Anthony Lane gave me a new catchphrase this week, in his New Yorker review of 88 Minutes:
Avnet is setting a noble example here: if all movies were named after their running times, Hollywood would instantly become a brisker place. Would Peter Jackson have dared to put us through a Tolkien trilogy called “Nine and a Quarter Hours of Elves”? I don’t think so.
I now never have to use the phrase “Lord of the Rings” again. In Lane’s honor, I will only use his alternate title. Including for the books.
But that’s not the ironic part. That happens in July, when this happiest? place on earth opens.
I’ve loved my neighborhood since before the realtors renamed it “Hudson Heights”; my best friend has lived in various corners thereof for 20-some years, and I soon knew both the assets and the liabilities of this small town at the top of the island.
But by the time we moved up here five years ago, the renaming had happened, taking with it any hope we had of buying. The rent stayed reasonable, but barely. And every time we hope that things will soften, our neighbors who write for the Times ensure that an article like this one appears to perk things up:
Over the years, Hudson Heights — a quaint enclave that stretches roughly from 181st Street on the south to Fort Tryon Park on the north, and from Broadway on the east to Riverside Drive on the west — has attracted more affluent residents than the rest of Washington Heights, where the overall average household income in 2006 was less than $45,000, according to the United States Census Bureau. In Hudson Heights, one-bedroom apartments can fetch as much as $1,800 a month in rent and two bedrooms for nearly $3,000. Two-bedroom co-ops and condos can cost as much as $800,000. Much of the construction is prewar, and there are even some Tudor-style facades. A fortresslike wall stands along the community’s western edge.
Ostensibly, the piece is about the recession-era travails of small businesses on the block, focusing on the spa (!) that opened up on our block three years ago. I wondered why the reporter didn’t check in with Mr. Anh, the tall chainsmoking Korean man who sells produce on the corner. I bet he’s actually seen an uptick in business, as more folk realized that Fresh Direct is really no bargain. (Besides, they miss Anh’s surreally good cilantro.)
Time was, I never forgot when it was April, National Poetry Month. Now it’s almost over. I thought I should honor it with some Berryman, in honor of the site’s title: but instead of merely pasting his hilarious Dream Song 14, “Life is boring,” I found some sound.
If you’d rather just read, go peek at my sweetheart’s ghazals:
My eyes entombed with sleep, I need some coffee.
I can’t yet see the bathroom. Where’s the coffee?
She takes the can out of the freezer and the water from the tap.
And when I smell the air has changed I know I’m loved, for she made coffee.
A bag of beans, organic but uncertain.
How much of what I paid was paid to those who picked the coffee?
The line’s too long; I take the train. No cup in hand, I read.
I’m late for class. Be later. Be contrite. Just get some coffee.
This runs in my family. From a Chinese banquet hall on his daughter’s first
birthday, my brother rushes out to find a cup of take-out coffee.
Summer’s coming. When it ends, I will have ridden in its heat
obsessed with shedding winter pounds and gaining coffee
shaded skin (albeit three parts milk to two with some red syrup).
As the summer sweat pours down my arms, I will seep coffee,
eggs, bananas, meat. Along the hills of Brooklyn, dodging dogs
and children, dodging cars, smiling at everyone, I’m seeking coffee.
The Germans say “Not addict. Morphine-seeky.”
When I stop to rest my muscles in Park Slope or Coney Island I’ll get coffee.
On the boardwalk, watch the waves. They sound like steam
and final, gurgling drips; to Rachel’s ear no longer H2O, a pot of coffee.
— Rachel Rawlings, 2005
Miraculously, I’ve somehow managed to spend much of my weekend on the book, thinking less about current controversies —including super-burning issues like this week’s Rand study documenting this country’s ongoing betrayal of new veterans — than about those of 1830: how long slavery should last, and what to do about the pesky presence of the original inhabitants of this continent. And I found a surprising new veteran character for the book: Davy Crockett, emblazoned in popular culture with a rifle and a coonskin cap, who killed many Indians in Andrew Jackson’s first wars.
To my surprised delight, I found that Crockett, then a Congressman from Tennessee, stood up to Jackson years later, when the then-president asked for formal endorsement of his policy of moving all Indians across the MIssissippi:
Soon after the commencement of [my] second term, [Jackson’s] famous, or rather I should say his in-famous, Indian bill was brought forward, and I opposed it from the purest motives in the world. Several of my colleagues got around me, and told me how well they loved me, and that I was ruining myself. They said this was a favorite measure of the president,and I ought to go for it. I told them I believed it was a wicked, unjust measure, and that I should go against it, let the cost to myself be what it might; that I was willing to go with General Jackson in every thing that I believed was honest and right; but, further than this, I wouldn’t go for him, or any other man in the whole creation I had been elected by a majority of three thousand five hundred and eighty-five votes, and I believed they were honest men, and wouldn’t want me to vote for any unjust motion, to please Jackson or any one else; at any rate, I was of age, and was determined to trust them. I voted against this Indian bill, and my conscience yet tells me that I gave a good honest vote, and one that I believe will not make me ashamed in the day of judgment.
Crockett’s faith in his voters may have been misplaced; he was soon returned to civilian life, a fate he’d foreseen from the beginning: “ I know’d well enough,though, that if I didn’t ” hurra ” for [the President’s] name, the hue and cry was to be raised against me, and I was to be sacrificed, if possible.”
While Crockett didn’t then join fellow veterans Noah Worcester and Wiliam Ladd in their American Peace Society, instead taking the opposite stance and dying fighting for slavery at the Alamo, his vote against removal still counts for something. I’m still working to tease out how much, in this alchemists’ brew of dissent that I’m tracking. But I wonder how many deserters from subsequent wars traded stories about the frontiersman who stood up to a president.
By the way, before some random historian finds this and slams me: I know Andrew Jackson didn’t come up with the idea of removal. Sweet old Tom Jefferson had conceived of such tactics fifteen years earlier, should his chosen strategy of creating a red/maroon Generation Debt fail:
To promote this disposition to exchange lands, which they have to spare and we want, for necessaries, which we have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading houses, and be glad to see the good and the influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands. . . . They will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States, or remove beyond the Mississippi.
In other words, Jefferson provided the ideology, Jackson the means, and reckless Western governments an incomplete Final Solution.
Thinking about all this, the poetry of white people pouring away their life savings at Indian-owned casinos comes clearer; I should probably mind less my parents going to Foxwoods in formerly Pequot Connecticut, or Mohegan Sun farther east. Though I understand the reluctance of William Penn’s city to want to allow a similar payback on their soil.
Last night, a meeting of a local transportation committee kind of made the past 15 months slip away. The topic was the same as my very first story for Chelsea Now: the ARC Tunnel project, a plan by New Jersey Transit and the Port Authority to double the number of passengers crossing the river. Then as now, there was a New Jersey Transit rep with Power Point slides, ready to explain how the trains would only benefit New York and Chelsea. Then as now, there sat the opposition, renegade transit planners and passenger organizations with their own quixotic-seeming quest to remake the project.
In the interim, NJT had revised its plans significantly, but not to respond to the critics. Instead, the plan had diverged even further from its original concepts. There went those critics’ hopes to integrate the tunnel station with a regional rail system, as in Paris or Philadelphia.
My full article about the (bloody long and contentious) meeting will be in the paper, but I wanted to note some language I might never have noticed last February. The fellow from NJT rattled off a series of “impacts” now avoided by the new plan, which envisions a tunnel and station 155 feet underground that doesn’t try to link with Penn Station. “We would have had to get too close to the bottom of the buildings near the station. Both existing buildings and for future development,” he said. “The city, City Planning, asked us not to do that. So we found a better way.”
Anyone who follows New York’s development dance might have had their ears prick at that last sentence, and wondered when those conversations took place. And who it was that really asked. Given subsequent changes, that may make a difference in whether the Quixotes can slay their dragon.
Meanwhile, this movie is still in play. And thus,my current earworm is this song
I’ve been a huge fan of Jeannette Winterson for more then ten years, ever since her novel Passion knocked me out of any literary or emotional comfort zone I’d ever had. I can’t say I emulate her: her brand of poetry, vision and audacity just can’t be mimicked, though I did tell students they could learn bravery from her fearless descriptions:
One woman who kept a fleet of boats and a string of cats and dealt in spices is here now, in the silent city. I cannot tell how old she may be, her hair is green with slime from the walls of the nook she lives in. She feeds on vegetable matter that snags against the stones when the tide is sluggish. She has no teeth. She has no need of teeth. She still wears the curtains that she dragged from her drawing-room window as she left.
The city in question is the same as Calvino’s, the period early enough that the narrator ends up traveling with Napoleon’s cook.
Admittedly, I’d sort of lost the thread of her work in more recent years, as it focused more on myth than I felt I could. But The Stone Gods, her newest, feels simultanously like yesterday’s news, tomorrow’s headlines, and the kind of poetry that rattles the brain. At first her dystopia, in which humans all choose to genetically stop aging whenever they wish, is hysterically funny as it horrifies:
Making everyone young and beautiful has made us all bored to death with sex. All men are hung like whales. All women are tight as clams below and inflated like lifebuoys above. Jaws are square, skin is tanned, muscles are toned, and no one gets turned on. It’s a global crisis. At least it’s a crisis in the countries of the Central Power. The Eastern Caliphate has banned Genetic Fixing, and the SinoMosco Pact does not make it available to all its citizens, only to members of the ruling party and their favorites. This way the leaders look like gods and the rest look like shit-shovellers. They never claimed to be a democracy.
The Central Power is a democracy. We all look alike, except for rich people and celebrities, who look better. That’s what you’d expect in a democracy.
I was going to quote a much later section, wherein she explains and describes the apocalypse that put her society into being, “the ugliness of how we had destroyed it, the brutal, stupid, money-soaked, drunken binge of a 21st-century world.” But I’d rather you read it in her book — which I first read in an addictive rush, pulled by her well-constructed love story/space opera/reverse-Jonathan-Swift commentary. Then I read it again, to savor the poetry, and the crystal palace Winterson has constructed.
Meanwhile, I do have one question for her. When is the film coming out, inevitably directed by the guy who dreamt up Torchwood?
Incredible Panic Rules 
