MANY THANKS
Thanks to all the nice folks who have linked to my page this week. Among them are many good friends: furious warblogger Matt Welch, his talented wife Emmanuelle Richard, the poet and spiritual advisor with a penchant for porn Tony Pierce, newlywed Ken Layne and artist and Buck Owens fan Greg McIlvaine. And there are some kind folks I don't know so well: MetaFilter, InstaPundit.com and Michael Kelley. Groovy, thanks.
- posted by Amy @ 10/27/2001 11:51:00 AM

 

RECENT HISTORY
Earlier this month I spent some time at the Gotham History Festival, which ended up focusing a lot on recent history in the city since it was still less than a month after the WTC attacks. I've gone through my notebook and plucked out a few of the most interesting comments. My apologies that they aren't coherently woven, but there are a few good morsels to chew on. These remarks came during a sessions called New York City: 1945 to 9/11/2001 And Beyond and New York City Journalism Since 1960.

Leo Bogart, who writes about communications issues, noted that when the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was sentenced, it wasn't reported in a big way that his initial goal was to make the two Trade Center towers crash into each other. Plus, they planned to blow up the Holland Tunnel.

The Daily News' Pete Hamill responded with a mea culpa for the media with the very logical resources argument that the newsrooms can only focus on a few big stories at once. And he pointed out that sometimes the wrong ones get picked. Hamill said the media didn't pay much attention to the Swissair crash in Nova Scotia in September 1998 because the media was preoccupied with Monicagate. (A story that originally shorted the Pope's historic trip to Cuba, he noted.) When Clinton bombed bin Laden in August 1998, the media thought it was a "Wag the Dog" story. However, the Swissair flight crashed right after bin Laden's camps were bombed. "We don't know if it's connected, but we didn't spend a lot of time with it either," Hamill said.

New York Times reporter Somini Sengupta sounded as if she was setting up a joke: "How many American flags does a Yemeni shopkeeper have to put on his window?" But the rhetorical question was actually in context to hyphenated-Americans feeling they need to adamantly prove their patriotism to fend off attacks from those who never understood the "melting pot" ideal.

Hamill, in discussing journalists' duty to keep all sides honest, rather than turn into flag-wavers, made reference to Bush's excellent Sept. 20 speech to Congress: "We liked your speech Mr. President. However, it's not our job to salute. Our job is to make sure it's accurate." And he quoted the late Daily News columnist Lars-Erik Nelson: "The enemy isn't liberalism, the enemy isn't conservatism, the enemy is bullshit."

Joshua Freeman, a history professor at the City University of New York's College and Graduate Center, noted that in the days following Sept. 11, New York changed its image of who is a hero. No longer is it a useless celebrity, but rather the firefighters and cops. "Until Sept. 11 … blue-collar workers disappeared from the conscience of New York." He said that until the end of WWII, New York was a working-class city with loads of manufacturing jobs, even in what is now the financial district. He said that it was during the city's financial crisis in the 1970's that the power shifted away from the working classes.

Bob Fitch, metropolitan studies at NYU, talked about the evolution of downtown. After Grand Central Station and Penn Station opened in midtown, there was no major construction downtown for 50 years, he said. It was later, when Nelson Rockefeller was governor and his brother was running the downtown business association, when subsidies finally headed that way.

Fitch said the city reached its peak employment in 1969, with 3.9 million jobs. Rosemary Scanlon, the former deputy comptroller of NYC, said that as a result of the 1975 fiscal crisis, the city lost jobs, real estate prices dropped and 1 million people moved away.

Marshall Berman, a CUNY political science professor, noted that the rebuilding of the fire and police departments "will bring about the long-awaited racial integration of those departments." This remark, by the way, didn't come across as callous, since he was also noting the rush of support for the departments now, and said that those guys will need help "when the crowds go away."

» YOU GONNA DRINK THAT?
- posted by Amy @ 10/27/2001 11:31:00 AM

 

WHY NOT FLY?
I'm not flying as long as AP has to have sentences like this in its copy: "It was not clear why a security agent did not spot the pistol when it went through the X-ray machine." And it was loaded.
- posted by Amy @ 10/25/2001 10:07:00 AM

 

WAR FOR SALE
National Geographic says they are rushing to complete a new map of Afghanistan in just a smidgen of the time it normally takes to update an entire country. Particularly challenging is the fact that the war- and drought-ravaged country hasn't had an official government map in decades. The mapmakers said that in the past month, they've been gathering info from a number of places, including the CIA, State Department, and the Northern Alliance. But don't plan on using it as a stocking stuffer for your Soldier of Fortune buddies: "For strategic reasons airbases, refugee camps, trails and unpaved roads, obscure mountain passes and watering holes known only to the locals are being left off." The new map will be included in the December issue of National Geographic, which hits newsstands in mid-November.

If your jonesing for other items to follow the war from the comfort of your home, National Geographic is already selling a nice big map of the entire Middle East and Amazon.com has put together a special Sept. 11 store with books about terrorism, Islam, and the Taliban.
- posted by Amy @ 10/23/2001 09:45:00 AM

 

MEXICAN WEDDING
With great regret, I note that we missed the wedding over the weekend of the absurdly talented Ken Layne and the extremely lovely and sometimes trouble-enciting Laura Crane. We planned to attend, but it would have involved getting on a plane and crossing the border in a tight timeframe that was just no longer practical. But if you don't know Ken - who I first met when we worked at Prognosis in what was still Czechoslovakia - let me point you to a few of my favorite writings. The dark joke that launched Tabloid.net is worth a visit. Shortly after the mass suicide in Ken's old San Diego stomping grounds, he had reason to create a page devoted to fictional (which was a shame considering all the people who tried to order) Heaven's Gate Action Figures. There is the brilliant novella-in-installment type thing Vodka City. As you read Vodka City, you might think one of the recurring characters seems familiar. And you'd be right. That sarcastic talking-ham-sandwich sounds a lot like the one in the orange juice commercials. Funny thing was, those commercials weren't around until after the folks at an ad firm paid a bunch of visits to the Vodka City pages, then out of the blue came up with the same idea for an ad campaign. There was a lawsuit, which was written about by Salon, among others. Also in the Tabloid archives, you can find the mysterious tale of the Baphomet Matrix. (Though credit for that one, I think, may go entirely to a Hermosa Beach detective with clown shoes.) More recently, he has written a hilarious and smart novel called Dot.con which for some odd reason is so far available only in Australia. However, you can buy it for $20 US here. And in case your love for Ken is overflowing you can send him a couple bucks as a thank you, wedding gift, or merely to improve your own karma, by donating via Amazon.com.
- posted by Amy @ 10/22/2001 07:07:00 PM

 

THE NEWS CHANNEL CRAWL
When I was in college, there was something called the "State Street Crawl," which is what many students did on the bar-laden street in downtown Santa Barbara for their 21st birthday. But as it turns out, the "crawl" also refers to that news ticker that so many TV stations are running at the bottom of their screens lately. There is a story in the Washington Post that basically says crawls are a bad idea, but likely here to stay anyway. So let me make a plea - make them relevant. I can handle the tickers just fine on CNBC, but they drive me batty when CNN uses them. The difference, I think, is that CNBC rarely uses the ticker to compete with what their talking heads are saying. And the info comes in extremely small bites, unlike the annoying ellipses that CNN cheats with, trying to use three screens to complete one thought. CNBC uses stock symbols, the price, arrows pointing up or down, and colors indicating positive or negative. You only pay attention to the stock symbols you know and you easily screen out the rest. CNN bombards you with crap - like celebrity birthdays under their top story, text that dumbs down and repeats what their anchor is saying at the same moment, and pithy headlines that eat up precious character counts. And oh man, those ads for in-house crap must stop. My advice, TV people, is to cut way back on what you're putting up there and make it specifically complementary to what is happening on your main screen. The exception would be when your main screen is in feature mode - I think our brains go on "low" when you switch to fashion and fuzzy animals, so go ahead and give us a hard news ticker for those few minutes. But you need to remember that part of your job as an information provider is to sort through the news, not just spew it out in unreadable blobs.
- posted by Amy @ 10/22/2001 11:44:00 AM

 

SUPER-EMPOWERED ANGRY MEN
There is a portion of Thomas Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree that keeps coming to mind as I try to make sense of the terrorism situation. I've been telling friends to go out and buy this book, because he makes loads of interesting observations while making his case that Globalization is Good. These passages below are all from the book, and mind you, were published in 1999:

In the Marx Brothers' classic movie Duck Soup, there is a scene in which Chico and Harpo are talking to the evil, calculating European statesman Trentino, Groucho's political rival, who has hired Chico and Harpo as spies. When Chico and Harpo come to Trentino's office to report on the progress of their spying, his secretary walks in with a telegram. Harpo grabs it out of her hands, examines it closely and then rips it to shreds, tosses it to the floor and shakes his head. Stunned and surprised, Trentino turns to Chico with a quizzical look, as if to ask: "Why did he do that?" And Chico answers: "He gets mad because he can't read."

That scene reminds me of yet another trend in reaction to Americanization-globalization - the one that is actually dangerous. It is the reaction of those who are either not up to Americanization-globalization or don't want to be up for it in cultural, economic or political reasons, and want to rip it up every time it is shoved in their face. These are the Harpos - angry men and women who, unlike their leaders, don't want to have it both ways. They don't want to bow to Americans and then criticize it behind its back. They want to have it one way, the old way, their way.
…

Finally, there are the really angry and really violent Super-Empowered Angry Men who don't use just E-mail. These are Harpos with real guns. They sense that there is a world-ruling system that they are not, and never will be, part of. In their view, the United States, IBM, The New York Times, Wall Street and the global economy are all part of one power edifice that needs to be brought down. These violent Super-Empowered Angry Men include the Aum Shinrikyo (Supreme Truth) sect in Japan, the Osama bin Laden gang in Afghanistan, the Unabomber and the Ramzi Yousef group in New York. …

Ramzi Yousef is really the quintessential Super-Empowered Angry man. Think about him for a minute. What was his program? What was his ideology? After all, he tried to blow up two of the tallest buildings in America. Did he want a Palestinian state in Brooklyn? Did he want an Islamic Republic in New Jersey? No. He just wanted to blow up two of the tallest buildings in America. He told the federal district court in Manhattan that his goal was to set off an explosion that would cause one World Trade Center tower to fall onto the other and kill 250,000 civilians. Ramzi Yousef's message was that he had no message, other than to rip up the message coming from the all-powerful America to his society. The Economist once noted that "it used to be said of terrorists that 'they wanted a lot of people watching and not a lot of people dead." But not the Super-Empowered Angry Men. They want a lot of people dead. They are not trying to change the world. They know they can't, so they just want to destroy as much as they can.

- posted by Amy @ 10/22/2001 11:07:00 AM