Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

The out-of-towners

Kind of jumpy today in the New York Public Library at 42nd Street. In the midafternoon, the fire alarm sounded. And sounded and sounded. The siren is accompanied by strobe lights, which make it hard to ignore. No one got on the intercom to say it was a test, so I unplugged my laptop. A ten-year-old with hunched shoulders tried to enter the room that a group of us were leaving, did a 180 when he realized it wasn't an exit, then raced down the stairs ahead of us.

In fact, it was a test, but the guard at the door had to make a few hurried phone calls before we were reassured. "It's for next week," the guard explained.

It was very next week on 42nd street today: lots of cautious-looking middle-aged couples, blandly dressed. Their clothes didn't have the flashiness or shoddiness of real tourists, and their gait lacked the intensity of native New Yorkers, who glared at them. I was glared at once, too, probably because I had made the mistake of putting on a blue permanent press Brooks Brothers shirt this morning. It wasn't until I got on the subway to go home that I saw a scruffy college-age person, bearing a backpack a foot and a half taller than he was and struggling with a Metrocard vending machine.

Shallow background

A few weeks ago, I bought a T-shirt from American Apparel, a company that disavows sweatshops. In the vitrine of their store in Nolita, they were then featuring a Florida voting booth from the 2000 presidential election, complete with the confusing "Do you know whether you're voting for Buchanan or Gore?" booklet. It may still be there, for all I know.

So a detail in a photo of Benjamin L. Ginsberg on page A24 of this morning's New York Times caught my eye. Yesterday Ginsberg resigned from Bush's reelection campaign, where he had been the chief legal counsel, because it turns out that he's also the legal adviser for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, so-called. In the photo, to his left and the viewer's right, is something that looks like an oversize TV dinner, opened on a tray table. I could be wrong--I can't find an online photo to confirm my hunch--but I'm pretty sure it's a Florida voting booth from the 2000 presidential election. Cute, huh?

[Note: I didn't want to see the gentleman's face anymore, so I've turned the photo into a link.]

Phony beetlemania

This appeared on our kitchen counter as I was cleaning up tonight. In real life it was much smaller, only about a third of the width of my thumbnail. It was somehow too interesting-looking for me to squash it, so I took a picture and contrived to sweep it out the window. Then I panicked and wondered whether I might have wrongfully spared the life of an Asian longhorned beetle. They've been spotted recently in Brooklyn (there's a fantastically alarming Bug Wanted poster here). I don't think it is, upon reflection--wrong color--but it doesn't really look like any of its beetle rivals, either. But that's probably because the people over at the forestry department are relying on the public's ability to disciminate between a black beetle and a green one on their own.

Playlistology

In their affect, rock songs are composed of loss, fight, and sugar. I am leaving musicianship out of the question here, which is to leave everything out, I realize, but I'm playing incantatory intellectual right now, and incantatory intellectuals do this sort of thing.

I do not assert that every rock song must have all three elements. But I do assert that if it lacks one, the absence will be felt. By inspection, since rock songs contain both loss and fight, to the extent that they mourn, it is incomplete mourning. They are not reconciled. If the singer is sad because a lover has left, one must have at least the suspicion that the singer would sleep with him again anyway, if it could be arranged, loss of face be damned. Or would take another hit. Or play with your heart.

The sugar is vital. The problem with Britney Spears's "Oops, I Did It Again," insofar as there is any problem at all, is not the sugar. Rock can never be too saccharine. Is there anything sweeter than, say, the chorus of Bowie's "Ashes to Ashes"?

Ashes to ashes, funk to funky
We know Major Tom's a junky
Strung out on heaven's high
Hitting an all-time low

The problem with "Oops" is that it is not clear that the loss is real, or that if it is real, that she feels it. In fact, we're pretty sure she doesn't. But the song works because we appreciate the loss even if she doesn't. And you know, on second thought, perhaps she does.

Now, in composing a mix tape, the trick is to monitor the fluctuations of loss, fight, and sugar from song to song. At its best, one should proceed like an artful diabetic dosing himself with insulin, such that the variances are not too abrupt, but not wholly without interest, either. On a five-point scale, for example, one might rate the loss in Hem's "When I Was Drinking" at 5, the fight at 2, and the sugar at 5. To abbreviate, its profile is 5-2-5. You want to follow it with a song that varies from all of these elements, but not suddenly. For example, you could move to a song with a profile of 4-3-4, such as Ben Kweller's "Different But the Same," still fairly wistful but with noticeably more pep. Stepping up a degree in two out of three categories, you might next choose a 5-4-4 song, such as "Lost in the Supermarket," by the Clash. Melancholy critique of late capitalism, with an accelerating drumbeat: high loss, high fight. You're nearly peaking, so you should next back down to the Lucksmiths' "I Prefer the Twentieth Century," which, because it mourns a century, a rather abstract loss but nonetheless an irrevocable one, clocks in at a milder 4-2-5.

If we graph these progressions, we arrive at the following:

Fight is shown in red, loss in blue, and sugar in green. One might imagine constructing a mix in which the curve of fight mounted steadily, while that of loss oscillated on a sine curve and that of sugar trilled steadily in the upper registers of 4 and 5 consistently. Or a mix in which loss had a sudden onset but tapered off, while fight rose and subsided, and at last only sugar remained.

I trust that I have given a sufficient sketch here of the science behind playlists. The boyfriend asks, "Does it work, though?" Sheesh. For the record, I don't personally believe anything I've written here, except the first line. And also for the record, the complete playlist under discussion is as follows:

1. Brendan Benson, "Me Just Purely"
2. Ed Harcourt, "Birds Fly Backwards"
3. Britney Spears, "Oops I Did It Again"
4. Fountains of Wayne, "Barbara H."
5. David Bowie, "Ashes to Ashes"
6. Hem, "When I Was Drinking"
7. Ben Kweller, "Different but the Same"
8. The Clash, "Lost in the Supermarket"
9. The Lucksmiths, "I Prefer the Twentieth Century"
10. Evan Dando, "My Drug Buddy (feat. Juliana Hatfield)"
11. Weezer, "Say It Ain't So"
12. Liz Phair, "Polyester Bride"
13. Sloan, "The Lines You Amend"

S.v. "Issa al Britani," for example

I have the honor of playing fairy godmother to the n+1 index to the 9/11 Commission Report, which has four parts and a conclusion. Kudos to Christian Lorentzen, Keith Gessen, Ben Austen, Chad Harbach, Nic Kovac, T.J. Kelleher, Allison Lorentzen, Caroline McCloskey, Ben Phelan, Emily Votruba, and Wesley Yang.

Taking the stairs

On Thursday, the elevators in the Surrogate's Court building, which sits across the street from City Hall and was once the Hall of Records, were spotty. I've been doing some research there, in the New York County Clerk Office's Division of Old Records on the seventh floor, where two centuries of paper-filing technologies succeed one another in a maze of rooms, on floor-to-ceiling shelves, interrupted only by the occasional gray metal locker from which spill oversize portfolios of maps of property that was condemned to build, say, the West Side Highway or FDR drive. It's one of the city's great and unacclaimed archival treasures. Last week I shone a flashlight through the back of an 1850 divorce case complaint, so that I could read the name of an adulteress, which had been pasted over a century and a half ago, perhaps to forestall a libel suit. (If you want to know the lady's name, you'll have to buy my book, whenever I get around to writing it.)

But I was talking about the elevators. In the morning only one of the four was working. When I left in the afternoon, I waited about five minutes with a fidgety stranger and then thought I'd try a set of stairs I'd seen on the other side of the building. I wasn't sure if they went all the way down.

They did. They more than did. I wouldn't call the building beautiful, but it's in the idiom of those late 19th century, early 20th century monumental public spaces, like the 42nd Street New York Public Library or the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Marble, wherever the eye falls. Vaulted ceilings. And, I realized as I descended, staircases that were meant to provide not a backup means of getting from one floor to another but the chief means of doing so. And not only that. The stairs in the Surrogate's Court building are grand. They're disproportionately wide and for the most part not very steep, and even though at least one flight is no longer lit, they seem to have been intended as a place where people in the building would see one another, stop, and confer, familiarly and formally. The architects probably never suspected that one day healthy adults would use elevators as the primary means of ascending to higher floors. Did skyscrapers normalize the use of elevators? Maybe it was automobiles that accustomed us to being carried by machines.

A loss related to the disuse of grand staircases: the absence of stoops from any building in Park Slope less than fifty years old.

The mother of all indices

My meager index to the 9/11 Commmission Report has been superseded by a younger, broader, deeper, and bright red one, published by the collective over at n+1. Apparently it's so big it comes in installments.

(The only thing is, if you're going to index Clarke down to his expletives, don't you have to put in the story of him calling an official in the United Arab Emirates and advising him not to go hunting with Bin Ladin in the Afghan desert, as our satellite imagery revealed that he recently had, thus kiboshing a site where Bin Ladin might have been targeted? Page 138. (No, but seriously: Nicely done.))

Footnote judo and its aftermath

Last night I finally finished reading the 9/11 Commission Report. The award for the most unlikely government-agency acronym goes to the Defense Department's tactical intelligence and related activities program, also known as TIARA (p. 412). To the end, the report practices footnote judo at the level of art. An inventory of dismaying statistics about the social, political, and economic conditions in the Arab world, for example, is sourced to a memo that was prepared by "sherpas" for the high poobahs of the G-8 but leaked to the newspapser Al-Hayat (563 n 26). A stern warning that "the enemy is not just 'terrorism,' some generic evil" cites a White House press release as an example of how not to think (562 n 2).

It's tempting to add to my ongoing index, to wit:

secrecy impedes alerts 258, 359; impedes military planning 351; impedes management 410; impedes budgeting 416

Or to fill out my list of Iraq-UBL links, real and imagined:

Bush think Iraq responsible for 9/11 attacks 334
Rumsfeld wants, on afternoon of 9/11, to hit Iraq 335
Clarke finds no link 559 n 60
Wolfowitz thinks that Ramzi Yousef was Iraqi and that Iraq was behind 1993 attack on WTC, and can't understand why the CIA hasn't investigated his theories 336
All bets are off if Iraq becomes a failed state 367

I was anticipating that the last few chapters would be a little slow; policy recommendations aren't usually considered to be as compelling as disaster narratives. And I admit that chapter 11, "Foresight−And Hindsight," is a bit, well, abstract. But in fact the chapters on what to do and how to do it were nearly as riveting as the rest. It's concerning that we need a commission to recommend to us that we look into this thing called the Geneva Convention (380). And it's fascinating that the commission feels obliged to recommend that "the U.S. government must decide what the message is, what it stands for" (376). It makes me wonder whether propaganda has gotten a bad name it does not deserve. Maybe having a message, and worrying about compromising it, imposes a kind of discipline−a kind of operational morality−that is otherwise difficult for an entity as diffuse as the American empire to achieve.

The big questions about the recommendations are, I suppose, Will they work? And: Are we creating a monster? On the first, I wonder whether, before we restructure another sector of the government, we ought first to understand clearly why and how the Homeland Security department has failed. Presumably the fact that it reports to 88 different Congressional committees and subcommittees has something to do with it (421). On the second question, as the Democrats rush to outflank Bush on the issues of strength and security, it would be worthwhile to deliberate. But my sense, from the sheer messiness with which information about terror leaks out of the intelligence services as now configured, is that we should err on the side of competence.

More highly evolved

BROOKLYN---Peanut, the chewtoy monkey, took steps this morning to reassure friends of his liberal credentials, after a photograph appeared in the New York Times of a similar monkey involved in a protest action against gay marriage in Missouri.

Peanut denies any contact with the Missouri monkey, who is thought to be a hand puppet.

A chihuahua close to Peanut said she accepted Peanut's explanation. The chihuahua asked not to be named. A mixed-breed dog seemed at first to welcome Peanut's statement, but then threatened to rend and disembowel the plushy monkey, removing his squeaky and stuffing. Analysts suggest, however, that this threat may not be related to the mixed-breed's sociopolitical beliefs.

Like a violin

Yesterday, before leaving home to come to this office (which is near Citicorp, one of the five targeted buildings), I cried. My jag was brief, but the news had confused and frightened me, and I needed to have it. Then my mother called. When I got to work, I discovered that most of the people in my bank of cubicles had been called by their out-of-town mothers.

On Sunday Lieberman jumped down Dean's throat for suggesting that this terror alert might have a political motivation. Will he apologize today? Don't hold your breath, but it turns out that much of the information about the targeted buildings is as old as the similar information in the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Brief, which Bush ignored. I am happy that the new discovery was relayed to the media promptly and wouldn't have it any other way. But why were government officials "circumspect" about the dating of the material when they broke the news? Why wait twenty-four hours to release that component? There was a political convention rather recently. It's hard to resist the conclusion that once again, we've been played.