Losing the Battle for European Hearts and Minds

REUTERS
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice points the way for German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Letter from Berlin

Losing the Battle for European Hearts and Minds

By Marc Young

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had hoped her visit to Berlin would mark a new start to German-American ties, but her trip has been completely overshadowed by concerns about secret CIA flights. Has America just lost the battle for the hearts and minds of Europe?

Condoleezza Rice’s first visit to Berlin after German Chancellor Angela Merkel took office was originally intended to be a rather harmless and straightforward affair. Following the trans-Atlantic discord of the Gerhard Schröder era, Merkel has repeatedly said she wishes to make improving relations with Washington a priority of her new government.

But Tuesday’s joint press conference by Rice and Merkel was never going to be the pleasant affair both women had probably hoped it would be. Growing German concerns — more from the press and the public than the government — about the actions of US intelligence agencies across Europe made the possibility of simple consultations and a happy photo op afterwards impossible.

Following weeks of increasing evidence that the CIA has been using several European airports as transit stations for flights with terror suspects aboard, pressure has been building for Berlin to clarify the scope Washington’s so-called “extraordinary renditions” program. But in recent days it’s become increasingly clear that both the current and previous German governments have been privy to what the spooks from Langley have been up to for years.

Specifically, former German interior minister Otto Schily was informed by the US ambassador to Berlin about the wrongful abduction by US intelligence services of a Lebanese-born German citizen, Khaled al-Masri. Detained in Macedonia, he was taken to a jail in Afghanistan and held for five months without evidence of any wrongdoing before being released.

Though Rice on Tuesday studiously avoided admitting that the United States was wrong to kidnap Masri, Washington was unwittingly outed by a seemingly careless Merkel. “We spoke about that one case and the US government accepted that it has made a mistake,” Merkel said plainly, as Rice listened stony-faced to the English translation of her comments.

But that slip aside, US officials can generally be pleased with what Merkel said to the press corps in an extremely packed corner of Berlin’s massive chancellery. As masses of journalists, photographers and TV crews all jockeyed for position, Germany’s new chancellor made clear she was backing the way Washington is prosecuting its global war on terror. She spoke of “new threats” and “finding balance” between combating unconventional enemies and the laws and standards of free societies — all very similar to the official Bush administration line.

“My foreign policy will have a very clear compass,” Merkel said, explaining her intention to align Berlin closer with Washington.

If that appears like an abrupt shift compared to the sometimes seemingly anti-American course of her predecessor Schröder, it shouldn’t. The revelations that Berlin kept quiet about the Masri case make clear that there has long been tacit approval of the methods used by the US intelligence communities.

On Tuesday, Rice justified using controversial measures to protect the citizens of both America and Europe from terrorism. “We will use any means to do so,” Rice said, reiterating, however, that the United States would not condone torture or anything that contravened US or international law.

Losing hearts and minds

That the secretary of state is even forced repeatedly to assure the United State’s friends and allies that the country does not violate the most basic human rights is the surest sign that Washington has long since lost the battle for hearts and minds of many Europeans. In Germany and elsewhere, America is simply no longer given the benefit of the doubt.

Khaled al-Masri was held for five months.
Of course, it would be naïve to think that intelligence agencies were not operating on the borders of western laws and norms. But the question worrying many on both sides of the Atlantic right now is just how far governments are willing covert operations go?

Merkel is hoping to deflect unwanted scrutiny about Berlin’s silence on the Masri abduction by having her foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, testify to a closed parliamentary committee about why Germany simply accepted the kidnapping of one of its own citizens. Steinmeier, who was chief of staff in Schröder’s chancellery, was almost certainly informed about the rendition gone wrong.

Will it be enough? Many Germans are sure to be upset that there was less distance between Schröder’s government and the Bush Administration than they had thought. And they may now begin to ask whether Merkel’s compass is pointed in the right direction.

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2005
All Rights Reserved
Reproduction only allowed with the permission of SPIEGELnet GmbH

Interview with Ex-Powell Aid Wilkerson

DPA
The Bush Administration has lost its ethical compass, says Wilkerson

US President Bush and Vice President Cheney. “Saddam Hussein was not as dumb as we thought.”

LAWRENCE WILKERSON
Lawrence Wilkerson, 60, was for 16 years one of former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s closest aides and was Powell’s chief of staff from 2002 to 2005. The retired US Army colonel served in the Vietnam War and later was the head of the Marine War College in Quantico, Virginia. He retired with Colin Powell in January 2005.

Interview with Ex-Powell Aid Wilkerson

“A Leaderless, Directionless Superpower”

Lawrence Wilkerson, 60, was instrumental in helping then Secretary of State Colin Powell assemble the dossier against Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Now, however, he is one of the Bush Administration’s sharpest critics. He spoke with SPIEGEL about America’s disdain for international law, Vice President Dick Cheney’s oversized influence, and the loss of US moral authority.


SPIEGEL: Colonel Wilkerson, hardly an insider of the Bush Administration has ever criticized it as sharply as you are now. Why?

Wilkerson: The straw that broke the camel’s back, what made me finally decide to go public, was the issue of departure from the Geneva Conventions. It was the departure from international law and treaty with regard to what I perceive to be a policy that permeated the leadership from the Vice President through the Defense Department and out to the military forces in the field. In my view, it was not only damaging to the armed forces — and I was a member of the Army for 31 years — but also damaging ultimately to America’s image and credibility in the world and damaging to our capability to win this conflict against Osama Bin Laden and Abu Musab al Zarqawi and others like them. You can’t win what essentially is a war of ideas by departing from your own ideas.

SPIEGEL: How has it come to this?

Wilkerson: What I saw from my perspective at the State Department was essentially involvement in what I prefer to refer to as the statutory process. The President gets advice from every side and ultimately goes away and makes his decision. What I saw was the President making a decision that appeared to be a compromise. He said it was indeed a new enemy and perhaps Geneva did not pertain. But at the same time he said very clearly in the same memorandum, which I saw, that all detainees should be treated in accordance with American values and the spirit of Geneva.

SPIEGEL: So what went wrong?


Wilkerson: In execution of that decision the other side won, the side who thought that terrorists are the new beast, and they had to be dealt with differently. That happened because this is the most powerful vice president in the history of the United States, and he wanted it to happen. It was a secretive little known cabal, led by Cheney and Defense Secretary (Donald) Rumsfeld who short-cut the statutory process. In the case of Geneva they thought there were no holds barred, that the demand for intelligence was so great that there was enormous flexibility in how you interrogated prisoners. And I saw that go all the way down to the lowest level of the armed forces. And when you put those two pressures together, the demand for intelligence and the implicit fact that this isn’t the old ball game, then you have opened Pandora’s Box. You contaminate the armed forces and you can expect to have things like Abu Ghraib and deaths.

SPIEGEL: How many people have died in American detention?

Wilkerson: When I left the State Department, there were over 70 deaths of people in detention, some of them being investigated, some of them covered up.

SPIEGEL: Is the CIA torturing people?

Wilkerson: I don’t know. If the President signed a presidential finding and authorized a certain select group of the CIA, highly trained, to do other than Geneva-type interrogation-techniques, only a very few people will know. I’m not even sure the Secretary of State would know about it.

SPIEGEL: You prepared Colin Powell’s now famous speech for the Security Council in which he blamed Iraq for having weapons of mass destruction and connections to al-Qaida. Was this claim a lie to generate support for the war, as some democrats now allege?

Wilkerson: I don’t know. I wish I did. I was the task force leader at the CIA, putting together Powell’s presentation. I was housed there for five or six days and nights. Today, I know that the Germans warned about the credibility of their agent “Curveball”, who stated that Iraq has mobile production units for biological weapons. Why wasn’t I told? Why wasn’t the secretary of state told? We used the information from the al-Qaida member Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libbi who claimed that Iraq was training the jihadis in chemical and biological weaponry. Now he has recanted. We are hearing that his confessions were obtained under less than Geneva methods — waterboarding for example.

SPIEGEL: The administration was also choosing the facts that best illustrated the supposed dangers presented by Iraq and overselling the case for war, isn’t that right?

Wilkerson: That is true, at least with regard to Douglas Feith, then the number three in the Pentagon. And there is no question that the vice president overstated the case. I mean, all you have to do is run his tapes. By the way, they tried to get the alleged Prague meeting between Mohammed Atta and Iraq Intelligence officials — which was discounted by almost everyone — into the presentation. But we refused.

SPIEGEL: Colin Powell recently said this is a blow to his reputation …

Wilkerson: … I call it the low point in my professional career. I mean, I look back on it, and I rack my brain again. I wasn’t a novice. I had been an intelligence user for years. How did we get so fooled?

SPIEGEL: Have you been able to find an answer?

Wilkerson: Saddam Hussein was not as dumb as we thought. He actually was a very smart man. He knew his principal enemy was Iran; his second most threatening enemy was his own people. And somewhere in there was the US, but way down at the bottom. And the only way he could maintain the brusque ‘I’ll knock you out if you try to hit me’ attitude that he did was to maintain the myth that he had WMDs. And so he managed to conduct a disinformation campaign.

SPIEGEL: Shouldn’t then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice have ensured that President Bush was better advised than he proved to be?

Wilkerson: There was a single word used by countless people in the government to describe the National Security Council under Dr. Rice and that is “dysfunctional.” And if you think about it for a moment, this dysfunctionality of the statutory process was a nice camouflage for the alternative decision-making process that revolved around the vice president.

SPIEGEL: Rice had the president’s trust and seemed focused on becoming ever closer to him.


Wilkerson: It worked. She had her eye on the prize. And finally she became secretary of state.

SPIEGEL: The Pentagon always claimed that a stable government could be installed in Iraq within a matter of months. Was there a climate of arrogance?

Wilkerson: Yes there was. Incredible arrogance. I call it the administration of hubris. How could anyone look at that region and believe it? As opposed to the Pentagon, we in the state department never signed up to that idea that our troops would be greeted with flowers. There were so many mistakes from the very outset of the administration — beginning with sticking our finger in the world’s eyes with our rejection of Kyoto without offering an explanation. The gracelessness, the ineptitude of how we confronted the world made foreign policy and international relations in general very difficult in the first Bush term.

SPIEGEL: Now, though, the mood has changed dramatically and the American public is no longer supportive of Bush’s Iraq policies. Should the US troops be pulled out of Iraq?

Wilkerson: There are two dimensions to that. First, because Secretary Rumsfeld made the decision not to enlarge the army two years ago, it’s inevitable that they’ll be pulled out. Otherwise we will break our Army and Marine Corps, sometime in 2006, or 2007. That’s the reality. The second and far more important dimension is the situation in Iraq. We now have to finish the job, otherwise we will, at a minimum, have a civil war and the whole Middle East would be in danger; I could see a tragedy of monumental proportions developing. So I agree 100 percent with the President that we have to stay until we get it right — and I hope that can be done in the one to two years we have before we destroy the Army and the Marine Corps.

SPIEGEL: There is a proposal from the Democrats whereby the President should acknowledge the mistakes that have been made and then ask the country and the world for renewed support.

Wilkerson: I think many Americans, including myself, would be encouraged by some admission of fault and some change. But I don’t think it’s in this president’s disposition and character to do that.

SPIEGEL: Isn’t the loss of America’s moral authority the biggest problem?

Wilkerson: Yes. Recently I had occasion to be on a panel with a former prime minister of Canada who said, ‘It’s not so much that we Canadians are anti-American, it’s that we are very, very worried about a headless giant.’ And that stuck with me because that is an apt metaphor in some cases for this superpower right now. It seems leaderless. It seems directionless.

SPIEGEL: Are there not indications of a more measured foreign policy now emerging?

Wilkerson: I hope so. There have been some changes, and I’m encouraged by them. Dr. Rice is doing some things that would indicate to me that she has learned and that she is working now off a sheet of music that sounds pretty sweet to our allies and friends. That’s wonderful. But I still detect, especially from the vice president, a note of unbridled unilateralism that concerns me: the willingness to go it alone, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, we’re the big guy on the block, to hell with you. I mean that sort of attitude is out of place in the 21st century.

SPIEGEL: Haven’t the neo-conservatives and their policies failed?

Wilkerson: They are not neo-cons. They are not new conservatives. They’re Jacobins. Their predecessor is French Revolution leader Maximilien Robespierre. And to say that these people are dead, dormant or lying quiescent is not encouraging because there are enough of them left. And it’s going to be incumbent on the rest of us, in this country at least, to watch these trends and make sure that their ugly head doesn’t rise up and cause more problems in the future.

Interview conducted by Georg Mascolo

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2005
All Rights Reserved
Reproduction only allowed with the permission of SPIEGELnet GmbH

Whitney Biennial 2006

Regen Projects, Los Angeles
Liz Larner’s sculpture “RWBs.”

Whitney Museum of American Art
Lucas deGiulio’s “Can Barnacles” (2005)

Whitney Museum of American Art
A still from “A Journey That Wasn’t,” a musical in Central Park, (2005) by Pierre Huyghe.

Whitney Museum of American Art
A still from “Jump” (2004) by T. Kelly Mason and Diana Thater

Whitney Museum of American Art
A still from Kenneth Anger’s film “Mouse Heaven” (2005).

Galleria Massimo de Carlo, Milan
Rudolf Stingel’s “Untitled (After Sam),” a 2005 oil painting. More Photos >

Jochen Littkemann/Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin
Peter Doig’s painting “Day for Night” (2005). That is also the biennial’s title.

Whitney Museum of American Art

Coming soon to the Whitney Biennial: Marilyn Minter’s “Stepping Up,” a 2005 painting on metal that explores the seedy side of glamour.

November 30, 2005
This WhitneyBiennial Will Take In the World
By CAROL VOGEL

For 70 years, the sprawlingWhitney Biennialexhibition of contemporary art has prided itself on its insistence on an American point of view. But as times and tastes change and art world boundaries dissolve, the 2006 biennial’s two foreign-born curators have ventured across the Atlantic.

Not content with just recording what’s happening in contemporary art around the United States, the curators have scoured artists’ studios in art capitals like Milan, London, Paris and Berlin, a first for Whitney Biennial curators. European artists have been in recent biennials at the Whitney Museum of American Art, but the majority have had American addresses or studios. This year, Europeans who live and work abroad will be represented, as well as American artists who reside in Europe.

Another first claimed by the museum is that this year’s biennial, which is to open on March 2, has a title: “Day for Night.”

It is inspired by the English title of François Truffaut’s 1973 film, “La Nuit Américaine,” which became famous for using a cinematic technique of shooting night scenes during the day by using a special filter. The title was chosen to reflect the kind of restless, in-between moment that the curators believe defines art now – somewhere between day and night, when work may be irrational, religious, dark, erotic or violent.

“We wanted the biennial to feel more like an exhibition than simply a checklist, to provide a context, which art fairs and Chelsea gallery shows cannot,” said Chrissie Iles, the Whitney’s curator of contemporary art.

This is Ms. Iles’s second biennial; she was one of three Whitney curators who organized the 2004 event. This year Ms. Iles, who is British, has teamed up with Philippe Vergne, the French-born deputy director and chief curator of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Each has worked in the United States for eight years.

“Historically Europe and America have been in bed together for so long that to separate them would be very artificial,” Mr. Vergne said. “You can’t have one without the other.”

Given the proliferation of large art fairs all over the world and the speed by which images travel across the Internet, the curators said they wanted to make this biennial something more than a rambling show of new art.

“There are now over 200 biennials in the world,” Mr. Vergne said. “It’s one thing to take the pulse of the art world, but the situation has become so complex we felt serious editing was required.”

Occupying all of the Whitney except its top floor, the 2006 version of what is always a highly anticipated but also often heavily criticized event will include some 100 artists, about the same number as in 2004. There will be a fairly equal representation among mediums: painting and sculpture, photography, film, video and performance.

For the last biennial the three curators split up, traveling in different directions and seeing artists on their own. They then put together an exhibition that melded three different points of view. Ms. Iles and Mr. Vergne purposely did everything together, they said, to form a single vision.

The 2006 biennial will explore various aspects of the newest art. One is its ambiguous nature, reflected in the fact that there are artists who show anonymously and others – Reena Spaulings and Otabenga Jones & Associates, for example – whose names are fictitious. (Reena Spaulings is also the name of a Lower East Side gallery.)

There are works that blur definitions, like a painting that is also part of an installation project or a film that records a performance piece. Or a work may be left for the viewer to translate, like Troy Brauntuch’s black-and-white canvases of softly drawn images that seem to emerge from the darkness or Mark Grotjahn’s creamy white paintings that camouflage a masklike face.

The biennial’s roster also underscores the growing number of artist collaboratives, an increasingly important part of the contemporary landscape. One is the Bernadette Corporation, an international group of young artists formed in 1994 that has created films, albums, magazines and books. (One of its permanent members is John Kelsey, who, not coincidentally, is a co-director, with Emily Sundblad, of the Reena Spaulings gallery.)

While the 2006 biennial will have its share of young talent whose works have never been in a museum show, it will also feature some veterans, including mature artists who, Ms. Iles and Mr. Vergne say, have been underrecognized. Among them are the 81-year-old Warhol Factorystar Taylor Mead and the painters Dorothy Ianonne, 72; Marilyn Minter, 57; and Ed Paschke, who died last year at 65.

As always, there will be political messages. Outside, in the Whitney’s sculpture court, Mark di Suvero and Rirkrit Tiravanija are recreating Mr. di Suvero’s “Peace Tower,” first constructed in Los Angeles in 1966 as a protest against the Vietnam War. There will also be a drawing by Richard Serra for his poster “Stop Bush,” a version of which was plastered around Manhattan to protest the war in Iraq during the 2004 Republican convention.

Not everything is meant to be serious. There will be a good deal of tongue-in-cheek in this year’s biennial. The Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli’s “Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s ‘Caligula,’ ” which had its premiere this summer at the Venice Biennale, will be shown. The four-minute film depicts the decadent government of a Roman emperor and stars Courtney Love, Benicio Del Toro, Milla Jovovich and Helen Mirren, with Mr. Vidal narrating.

In a gallery on the museum’s fifth floor, outside the main exhibition, there will be a show-within-a show. It is being organized by Wrong Gallery, the Chelsea space that was the brainchild of the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan and the art critics Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick. When it opened three years ago, the gallery consisted of a glass door that looked like all the other Chelsea gallery entrances but was always locked. The one-square-foot exhibition space behind the door has been the scene of an array of performance and art projects.

The gallery does not represent any artists, nor does it sell work; it simply serves as a laboratory for art experimentation. What it plans to do at the Whitney is still unclear, Ms. Iles said. But playing off the gallery’s eccentric nature, the dates of its show will not match those of the biennial. It will open on Jan. 21 and run through May 21.

“They’re planning to do a show about the dark side of American culture and outlaws,” Ms. Iles said. “In some ways the Wrong Gallery’s unconventional approach echoes what we have tried to do throughout the entire biennial.”


Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top

A Strategy to Restore Western Grasslands Meets With Local Resistance

Kevin Moloney for The New York Times

The edge of Escalante Canyon in Utah is shown in a composite of images. Standing at the right is Bill Hedden, the leader of an effort to retire grazing rights in the hope of preserving the area’s delicate ecosystem.

Kevin Moloney for The New York Times

Brent Robinson, with his sons Tyler and Quincy, recently relinquished his grazing rights on public lands.

December 1, 2005
A Strategy to Restore Western Grasslands Meets With Local Resistance
By FELICITY BARRINGER

BOULDER, Utah – No cows remain on the federal lands set aside for grazing here above the Escalante River.

At first glance, this would seem a boon to land and cow alike. The layered rockscape just west of this small town is immense, rolling from the river toward the sky. The grass is thin and dry. The soil, the same. How fat could a cow get?

So, seven years ago an environmental group based in Arizona, the Grand Canyon Trust, began paying ranchers to give up their grazing rights when their herds, or bank accounts, had failed to thrive. By this fall, the trust had spent more than $1 million to end grazing on more than 400,000 acres.

The deals seemed to suit all concerned, until a group of local officials decided that they were bad for the local economy and a threat to the ancestral tradition of living off the land. The group set out to end this latest, uncharacteristically civil chapter in the fraught history of cattlemen, environmentalists and dueling visions of the West’s future.

Michael E. Noel, a former Bureau of Land Management employee who now is a Republican state representative from southern Utah, led the charge to roll back agreements the trust had forged. Mr. Noel said the loss of the grazing allotments would hurt ranching, which would in turn deprive the area’s young people of the character-building chance to work on the land.

“Yes, it’s a free market to buy and sell,” Mr. Noel said recently. “But if you buy it, you use it.”

By retiring the lands, he said, the trust is reneging on an implicit agreement, and “if we allow that to occur, we go down the path of eliminating all grazing on public lands.”

The Grand Canyon Trust’s strategy had been to look amid Utah’s ancient russet cathedrals for lands that needed a long rest from grazing. If the rancher with the grazing rights wanted to relinquish them to the Interior Department, the trust would pay him to do so.

One deal involved simply paying a rancher to relinquish his grazing rights and find new pastures or reduce his herd. The trust also started a round of musical chairs, paying three ranchers to yield their allotments, then consolidating cattle on one grazing area while leaving the riverbanks free of livestock.

In tandem with the trust’s efforts, the federal land bureau was conducting environmental reviews that tended to find that grazing should end on the acreage at issue.

Bill Hedden, the executive director of the Grand Canyon Trust, said he could not understand why his efforts, involving transactions between a willing buyer and willing sellers, seemed a threat to Mr. Noel.

Mr. Hedden said he had hoped to create a situation with no losers. Ranchers could consolidate their herds in more congenial settings. Federal officials could bar grazing during a drought without bankrupting ranchers. The trust, dedicated to preserving the Colorado plateau, could show its financial supporters results.

Besides, he said, the land in question is marginal economically and at risk environmentally.

Pointing to the soil’s crust, a mat splotched with bacterial growths that replenish soil nitrogen, Mr. Hedden said grazing left both grass and crust in tatters.

“We don’t know how long this land takes to heal,” he said.

But given the resistance of local officials, Mr. Hedden is shelving the strategies he used here.

The arc of his efforts to preserve the plateau says much about the evolution of the environmental movement in the West, where the fight over grazing goes back years. Anger over the government’s stewardship of public lands helped feed the Sagebrush Rebellion, which in turn fed the Republican revolution of the 1980′s.

In the years since, the canyons that lace the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument near here drew cows and hikers. The cows sought forage on the banks of the Escalante River; the hikers sought spiritual forage in the same places. They did not mix well.

Throughout the 80′s era of state rebellion against the Bureau of Land Management and the 90′s period of criticism of grazing policies by environmentalists, the Interior Department was buffeted with lawsuits.

Grazing, in the view of local ranchers and officials like Mr. Noel, “can be one of the best tools to use to improve watersheds, to improve forage, to improve soil structure on public lands.” Grass grows better when cut back, Mr. Noel said. Manure can improve the soil.

Dave Hunsaker, the manager of the national monument, an area of 1.7 million acres, relies on the land bureau’s experts to settle that issue.

“The idea of grazing decisions is to achieve rangeland health objectives, No. 1,” Mr. Hunsaker said. “No. 2, it is to provide stability to those ranching operations on the monument right now.

“The Grand Canyon Trust,” he said, “can provide us flexibility for the future.”

Brent Robinson sold the 25,000-acre Clark Bench grazing allotment to a trust subsidiary in 2000, though he retains a basic distrust of environmentalists. Mr. Robinson said his intention was “to scale down a little bit” his herd of 300 head, a sizable herd in these parts.

But Mr. Noel and members of the Kane County commission were concerned enough about the potential retirement of the Clark Bench acreage that they sought out ranchers to appeal the bureau’s decision to let Mr. Hedden’s group buy it and to seek the allotment for themselves.

“Most of the herds here are very small,” Mr. Noel said. “But because the income in this area is very low, those 25 to 30 cows are what make the difference between being able to really provide for family that extra little thing. They can buy a pickup truck or send a kid to college or on a Mormon mission.”

Ranching is a small and declining part of the economy of Kane and its northern neighbor, Garfield County. In several recent years, the total ranching income was in negative numbers in one county or the other. But Kane officials, after some effort, found people to seek the retired grazing permits for themselves.

Trevor Stewart, one of the ranchers seeking the Clark Bench allotment, is Mr. Noel’s son-in-law. Mr. Noel said he was able to get $50,000 from the state to support Kane County when it joined Mr. Stewart’s suit.

The county’s challenge before an administrative law judge in the Interior Department is pending. But even the remote prospect that the complex choreography of ending the grazing might have gone for naught has been enough to dissuade the Grand Canyon Trust from doing more in Utah, Mr. Hedden said.

The eight-year process, however, did result in some cross-pollination. As ranchers like Mr. Robinson have warily shed suspicions and made common cause with an environmental group, the trust itself is gingerly adopting ranching to achieve conservation goals.

The purchase of the Kane and Two-Mile Ranches north of Grand Canyon National Park – 1,000 acres of land and grazing allotments on an additional 830,000 acres – was recently completed by the Grand Canyon Trust and the Conservation Fund, based in Arlington, Va. Instead of retiring the allotments, they will use them, though for fewer head of cattle.

By running cattle on some of the land, the groups may inoculate themselves against new lawsuits, even as they restore acreage damaged by grazing.

Mr. Hedden, however, remains quietly angry at the circumstances that led him to abandon his campaign to use free-market tools to curb grazing.

“We’ve been out there dealing with this,” he said. “We solved the problems of the B.L.M., and we’re hurting the Kane County economy by buying out guys who are going bankrupt? I don’t get it.”


Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top

My Space We Are The World

DECEMBER 12, 2005

COVER STORY

The MySpace Generation
They live online. They buy online. They play online. Their power is growing

COVER STORY PODCAST

The Toadies broke up. It was four years ago, when Amanda Adams was 16. She drove into Dallas from suburban Plano, Tex., on a school night to hear the final two-hour set of the local rock band, which had gone national with a hit 1995 album. “Tears were streaming down my face,” she recalls, a slight Texas lilt to her voice. During the long summer that followed, Adams turned to the Web in search of solace, plugging the lead singer’s name into Google repeatedly until finally his new band popped up. She found it on Buzz-Oven.com, a social networking Web site for Dallas teens.

Adams jumped onto the Buzz-Oven network, posting an online self-portrait (dark hair tied back, tongue out, goofy eyes for the cam) and listing her favorite music so she could connect with other Toadies fans. Soon she was heading off to biweekly meetings at Buzz-Oven’s airy loft in downtown Dallas and helping other “Buzzers” judge their favorite groups in marathon battle-of-the-bands sessions. (Buzz-0ven.com promotes the winners.) At her school, Frisco High — and at malls and concerts — she passed out free Buzz-Oven sampler CDs plastered with a large logo from Coca-Cola Inc., () which backs the site in the hope of reaching more teens on their home turf. Adams also brought dozens of friends to the concerts Buzz-Oven sponsored every few months. “It was cool, something I could brag about,” says Adams, now 20 and still an active Buzzer.

Now that Adams is a junior at the University of North Texas at Denton, she’s online more than ever. It’s 7 p.m. on a recent Saturday, and she has just sweated her way through an online quiz for her advertising management class. (The quiz was “totally out of control,” write classmates on a school message board minutes later.) She checks a friend’s blog entry on MySpace.com to find out where a party will be that night. Then she starts an Instant Messenger (IM) conversation about the evening’s plans with a few pals.

KIDS, BANDS, COCA-COLA
At the same time, her boyfriend IMs her a retail store link to see a new PC he just bought, and she starts chatting with him. She’s also postering for the next Buzz-Oven concert by tacking the flier on various friends’ MySpace profiles, and she’s updating her own blog on Xanga.com, another social network she uses mostly to post photos. The TV is set to TBS, which plays a steady stream of reruns like Friends and Seinfeld — Adams has a TV in her bedroom as well as in the living room — but she keeps the volume turned down so she can listen to iTunes over her computer speakers. Simultaneously, she’s chatting with dorm mate Carrie Clark, 20, who’s doing pretty much the same thing from a laptop on her bed.

You have just entered the world of what you might call Generation @. Being online, being a Buzzer, is a way of life for Adams and 3,000-odd Dallas-area youth, just as it is for millions of young Americans across the country. And increasingly, social networks are their medium. As the first cohort to grow up fully wired and technologically fluent, today’s teens and twentysomethings are flocking to Web sites like Buzz-Oven as a way to establish their social identities. Here you can get a fast pass to the hip music scene, which carries a hefty amount of social currency offline. It’s where you go when you need a friend to nurse you through a breakup, a mentor to tutor you on your calculus homework, an address for the party everyone is going to. For a giant brand like Coke, these networks also offer a direct pipeline to the thirsty but fickle youth market.

Preeminent among these virtual hangouts is MySpace.com, whose membership has nearly quadrupled since January alone, to 40 million members. Youngsters log on so obsessively that MySpace ranked No. 15 on the entire U.S. Internet in terms of page hits in October, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. Millions also hang out at other up-and-coming networks such as Facebook.com, which connects college students, and Xanga.com, an agglomeration of shared blogs. A second tier of some 300 smaller sites, such as Buzz-Oven, Classface.com, and Photobucket.com, operate under — and often inside or next to — the larger ones.

Although networks are still in their infancy, experts think they’re already creating new forms of social behavior that blur the distinctions between online and real-world interactions. In fact, today’s young generation largely ignores the difference. Most adults see the Web as a supplement to their daily lives. They tap into information, buy books or send flowers, exchange apartments, or link up with others who share passions for dogs, say, or opera. But for the most part, their social lives remain rooted in the traditional phone call and face-to-face interaction.

The MySpace generation, by contrast, lives comfortably in both worlds at once. Increasingly, America’s middle- and upper-class youth use social networks as virtual community centers, a place to go and sit for a while (sometimes hours). While older folks come and go for a task, Adams and her social circle are just as likely to socialize online as off. This is partly a function of how much more comfortable young people are on the Web: Fully 87% of 12- to 17-year-olds use the Internet, vs. two-thirds of adults, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Teens also use many forms of media simultaneously. Fifteen- to eighteen-year-olds average nearly 6 1/2 hours a day watching TV, playing video games, and surfing the Net, according to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey. A quarter of that time, they’re multitasking. The biggest increase: computer use for activities such as social networking, which has soared nearly threefold since 2000, to 1 hour and 22 minutes a day on average.

Aside from annoying side effects like hyperdistractibility, there are some real perils with underage teens and their open-book online lives. In a few recent cases, online predators have led kids into dangerous, real-life situations, and parents’ eyes are being opened to their kids’ new world.

ONE-HIT WONDERS
Meanwhile, the phenomenon of these exploding networks has companies clamoring to be a part of the new social landscape. News Corp. () Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch has spent $1.3 billion on Web acquisitions so far to better reach this coveted demographic — $580 million alone for the July purchase of MySpace parent Intermix Media. And Silicon Valley venture capitalists such as Accel Partners and Redpoint Ventures are pouring millions into Facebook and other social networks. What’s not yet clear is whether this is a dot-com era replay, with established companies and investors sinking huge sums into fast-growth startups with no viable business models. Facebook, barely a year old and run by a 21-year-old student on leave from Harvard, has a staff of 50 and venture capital — but no profits.

Still, consumer companies such as Coke, Apple Computer (), and Procter & Gamble () are making a relatively low-cost bet by experimenting with networks to launch products and to embed their brands in the minds of hard-to-reach teens. So far, no solid format has emerged, partly because youth networks are difficult for companies to tap into. They’re also easy to fall out of favor with: While Coke, Sony () Pictures Digital, and Apple have succeeded with MySpace, Buzz-Oven, and other sites, P&G’s attempt to create an independent network around a body spray, for one, has faltered so far.

Many youth networks are evanescent, in any case. Like one-hit wonder the Baha Men (Who Let the Dogs Out) and last year’s peasant skirts, they can evaporate as quickly as they appear. But young consumers may follow brands offline — if companies can figure out how to talk to youths in their online vernacular. Major companies should be exploring this new medium, since networks transmit marketing messages “person-to-person, which is more credible,” says David Rich Bell, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

So far, though, marketers have had little luck creating these networks from scratch. Instead, the connections have to bubble up from those who use them. To understand how such networks get started, share a blue-cheese burger at the Meridian Room, a dive bar in downtown Dallas, with Buzz-Oven founder Aden Holt. At 6 feet 9 inches, with one blue eye, one brown one, and a shock of shaggy red hair, Holt is a sort of public figure in the local music scene. He started a record label his senior year at college and soon turned his avocation into a career as a music promoter, putting out 27 CDs in the decade that followed.

In 2000, as Internet access spread, Holt cooked up Buzz-Oven as a new way to market concerts. His business plan was simple. First, he would produce sample CDs of local bands. Dedicated Buzzers like Adams would do the volunteer marketing, giving out the CDs for free, chatting up the concerts online, and slapping up posters and stickers in school bathrooms, local music stores, and on telephone poles. Then Holt would get the bands to put on a live concert, charging them $10 for every fan he turned out. But to make the idea work, Holt needed capital to produce the free CDs. One of his bands had recently done a show sponsored by Coke, and after asking around, he found the marketer’s company’s Dallas sales office. He called for an appointment. And then he called again. And again.

Coke’s people didn’t get back to him for weeks, and then he was offered only a brief appointment. With plenty of time to practice his sales pitch, Holt spit out his idea in one breath: Marketing through social networks was still an experiment, but it was worth a small investment to try reaching teens through virtual word of mouth. Coke rep Julie Bowyer thought the idea had promise. Besides, Holt’s request was tiny compared with the millions Coke regularly sinks into campaigns. So she wrote him a check on the spot.

DEEP CONNECTIONS
By the time Ben Lawson became head of Coke’s Dallas sales office in 2001, Buzz-Oven had mushroomed into a nexus that allowed hundreds of Dallas-area teens to talk to one another and socialize, online and off. A middle-aged father of two teens himself, Lawson spent a good deal of time poring over data about how best to reach youth like Adams. He knew what buzzer Mike Ziemer, 20, so clearly articulates: “Kids don’t buy stuff because they see a magazine ad. They buy stuff because other kids tell them to.”

What Lawson really likes about Buzz-Oven is how deeply it weaves into teens’ lives. Sure, the network reaches only a small niche. But Buzzers have created an authentic community, and Coke has been welcomed as part of the group. At a recent dinner, founder Holt asked a few Buzzers their opinions about the company. “I don’t know if they care about the music or they just want their name on it, but knowing they’re involved helps,” says Michael Henry, 19. “I know they care; they think what we’re doing is cool,” says Michele Barr, 21. Adds Adams: “They let us do our thing. They don’t censor what we do.”

Words to live by for a marketer, figures Lawson, particularly since Coke pays Buzz-Oven less than $70,000 a year. In late October, Holt signed a new contract with Coke to help him launch Buzz-Oven Austin in February. The amount is confidential, but he says it’s enough for 10,000 CDs, three to four months of street promotions, and 50,000 fliers, plus some radio and print ads and a Web site promotion. Meanwhile, Buzz-Oven is building relations with other brands such as the Dallas Observer newspaper and McDonald’s () Chipotle restaurants, which kicks in free food for Buzzer volunteers who promote the shows. Profits from ticket sales are small but growing, says Holt.

Not so long ago, behemoth MySpace was this tiny. Tom Anderson, a Santa Monica (Calif.) musician with a film degree, partnered with former Xdrive Inc. marketer Chris DeWolfe to create a Web site where musicians could post their music and fans could chat about it. Anderson knew music and film; De Wolfe knew the Internet business. Anderson cajoled Hollywood friends — musicians, models, actors — to join his online community, and soon the news spread. A year later, everyone from Hollywood teen queen Hilary Duff to Plano (Tex.) teen queen Adams has an account.

It’s becoming a phenomenon unto itself. With 20 million of its members logging on in October, MySpace now draws so much traffic that it accounted for 10% of all advertisements viewed online in the month. This is all the more amazing because MySpace doesn’t allow those ubiquitous pop-up ads that block your view, much less spyware, which monitors what you watch and infuses it with pop-ups. In fact, the advertising can be so subtle that kids don’t distinguish it from content. “It’s what our users want,” says Anderson.

As MySpace has exploded, Anderson has struggled to maintain the intimate atmosphere that lends social networks their authenticity. When new users join, Tom becomes their first friend and invites them to send him a message. When they do, they hear right back, from him or from the one-quarter of MySpace’s 165 staffers who handle customer service. Ask Adams what she thinks of MySpace’s recent acquisition by News Corp., and she replies that she doesn’t blame “Tom” for selling, she would have done the same thing. She’s talking about Anderson, but it’s hard to tell at first because she refers to him so casually, as if he were someone she has known for years.

That’s why Murdoch has vowed not to wrest creative control from Anderson and DeWolfe. Instead News Corp.’s resources will help them nourish new MySpace dreams. Earlier this month they launched a record label. In the next few months, the duo says, they will launch a movie production unit and a satellite radio station. By March they hope to venture into wireless technology, perhaps even starting a wireless company to compete with Virgin Mobile or Sprint Nextel’s Boost. Says DeWolfe: “We want to be a lifestyle brand.”

It’s proof that a network — and its advertising — can take off if it gives kids something they badly want. Last spring, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg noticed that the college students who make up most of his 9.5 million members were starting groups with names like Apple Students, where they swapped information about how to use their Macs. So he asked Apple if it wanted to form an official group. Now — for a fee neither company will disclose — Apple sponsors the group, giving away iPod Shuffles in weekly contests, making product announcements, and providing links to its student discount program.

The idea worked so well that Facebook began helping anyone who wanted to start a group. Today there are more than a dozen, including several sponsored by advertisers such as Victoria’s Secret and Electronic Arts. Zuckerberg soon realized that undergrads are more likely to respond to a peer group of Apple users than to the traditional banner ads, which he hopes to eventually phase out. Another of his innovations: ads targeted at students of a specific college. They’re a way for a local restaurant or travel agency to advertise. Called Facebook Announcements, it’s all automated, so anyone can go onto Facebook, pay $14 a day, and fill out an ad.

SPARKLE AND FIZZLE
Still, social networks’ relations with companies remain uneasy. Last year, for example, Buzz-Oven was nearly thrown off track when a band called Flickerstick wanted to post a song called Teenage Dope Fiend on the network. Holt told Buzzers: “Well, you can’t use that song. I’d be encouraging teenagers to try drugs.” They saw his point, and several Buzzers persuaded the band to offer up a different song. But such potential conflicts are one way, Holt concedes, that Buzz-Oven’s corporate sponsorships could come to a halt.

Like Holt, other network founders have dealt with such conflicts by turning to their users for advice. Xanga co-founder John Hiler has resisted intrusive forms of advertising like spyware or pop-ups, selling only the conventional banner ads. When advertisers recently demanded more space for larger ads, Hiler turned the question over to Xanga bloggers, posting links to three examples of new ads. More than 3,000 users commented pro and con, and Hiler went with the model users liked best. By involving them, Hiler kept the personal connection that many say they feel with network founders — even though Xanga’s membership has expanded to 21 million.

So far, corporate advertisers have had little luck creating such relationships on their own. In May, P&G set up what it hoped would become a social network around Sparkle Body Spray, aimed at tweens. The site features chatty messages from fake characters named for scents like Rose and Vanilla (“Friends call me Van”). Virtually no one joined, and no entries have comments from real users. “There wasn’t a lot of interesting content to engage people,” says Anastasia Goodstein, who documents the intersection between companies and the MySpace Generation at Ypulse.com. P&G concedes that the site is an experiment, and the company has found more success with a body-spray network embedded in MySpace.com.

The most basic threat to networks may be the whims of their users, who after all are mostly still kids. Take Friendster, the first networking Web site to gain national attention. It erupted in 2003, going from a few thousand users to nearly 20 million. But the company couldn’t keep up, causing frustration among users when the site grew sluggish and prone to crash. It also started with no music, no message boards or classifieds, no blogging. Many jumped ship when MySpace came along, offering the ability to post song tracks and more elaborate profiles. Friendster has been hustling to get back into the game, adding in new options. But only 942,000 people clicked on the site in October, vs. 20.6 million who clicked on MySpace in the same time.

That’s the elusive nature of trends and fads, and it poses a challenge for networks large and small. MySpace became a threat to tiny Buzz-Oven last year when Buzzers found they could do more cool things there, from blogs to more music and better profile options. Buzzer message board traffic slowed to a crawl. To stop the hemorrhaging, Holt joined MySpace himself and set up a profile for Buzz-Oven. His network now operates both independently and as a subsite on MySpace, but it still works. Most of Holt’s Dallas crowd came back, and Buzz-Oven is up to 3,604 MySpace members now, slightly more than when it was a stand-alone network.

Even if the new approach works, Holt faces a succession issue that’s likely to hit other networks at some point. At 35, he’s well past the age of his users. Even the friends who helped him launch Buzz-Oven.com are in their late 20s — ancient to members of his target demographic. So either he raises the age of the group — or replaces himself with someone younger. He’s trying the latter, betting on Mike Ziemer, the 20-year-old recent member, even giving him a small amount of cash.

Ziemer, it turns out, is an influencer. That means record labels and clothing brands pay him to talk up their products, for which he pulls down several hundred dollars a month. Ziemer has spiky brown hair and a round, expressive face. In his MySpace profile he lists his interests in this order: Girls. Music. Friends. Movies. He has 4,973 “friends” on MySpace. At all times, he carries a T-Mobile Sidekick, which he uses to text message, e-mail, and send photos to his friends. Sometimes he also talks on it, but not often. “I hate the phone,” he says.

Think of Ziemer as Aden Holt 2.0. Like Amanda Adams, he’s also a student at UT-Denton. When he moved to the area from Southern California last year, he started Third String PR, a miniature version of Buzz-Oven that brings bands to the ‘burbs. He uses MySpace.com to promote bands and chats online with potential concertgoers. Ziemer can pack a church basement with tweens for a concert, even though they aren’t old enough to drive. On the one hand, Ziemer idolizes Holt, who has a larger version of Ziemer’s company and a ton of connections in the music industry. On the other hand, Ziemer thinks Holt is old. “Have you ever tried to talk with him over IM?” he says. “He’s just not plugged in enough.”

Exactly why Holt wants Ziemer on Buzz-Oven. He knows the younger entrepreneur can tap a new wave of kids — and keep the site’s corporate sponsor on board. But he worries that Ziemer doesn’t have the people skills. What’s more, should Ziemer lose patience with Buzz-Oven, he could blacklist Holt by telling his 9,217 virtual friends that Buzz-Oven is no longer cool. In the online world, one powerfully networked person can have a devastatingly large impact on a small society like Buzz-Oven.

For now, the gamble is paying off. Attendance is up at Buzz-Oven events, and if the Austin launch goes smoothly, Holt will be one step closer to his dream of going national. But given the fluid world of networks, he’s taking nothing for granted.


By Jessi Hempel, with Paula Lehman in New York
Copyright 2000-2004, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
Terms of Use Privacy Notice

Dr. Ecstasy

Reuters Photo:

Alexander Shulgin, pharmacologist and chemist known for his creation of new psychoactive chemicals, is interviewed…

Back to Story – Help
“Dr. Ecstasy” laments the rave drug’s notoriety By Jason Szep
Fri Dec 2, 7:02 PM ET

The scientist who introduced Ecstasy to the world in the 1970s fears the drug’s notoriety and popularity at nightclubs is destroying any chance that it might be used to treat the mentally ill.

“It’s very excellent potential for being used as medicine has been badly jeopardized,” Alexander Shulgin, told Reuters after defending the merits of mind-altering drugs at a symposium on the human brain at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this week.

“It’s gone out of control,” lamented Shulgin, a tall Californian with a mane of white hair and a Santa Claus-like beard, who is widely known as “Dr. Ecstasy.”

A psychopharmacological researcher who once had a license from the U.S. government to develop any illegal drug, Shulgin believes so strongly in the power of psychedelic drugs in unlocking the human mind that he plans to publish a 1,500-page encyclopedia next year of all his creations.

The 80-year-old former lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley, who self-tested many of his experiments and admits to more than 4,000 psychedelic experiences, finds little comfort in Ecstasy’s image as the drug of choice at all-night nightclub dance parties or raves.

“These rave scenes have added kindling to the fire of governmental disapproval,” he said.

Use of the drug, known for inducing euphoria and energy while reducing inhibitions, surged 70 percent from 1995 to 2000, according to United Nations data.

Ecstasy-related deaths, while relatively rare, make enough headlines to force authorities to regularly issue health warnings. Australia’s National Drug and Alcohol Research Center in April said users risked harmful psychological effects.

Tracing that rise of the drug leads straight to Shulgin. A gifted biochemist and former National Institutes of Health consultant, he unearthed a formula for MDMA — a synthetic drug with psychedelic and stimulant effects — in a 1912 chemistry text and synthesized it into Ecstasy in 1976.

After testing it on himself, he became convinced of its power to treat mental illness. He gave the drug to psychotherapist and close friend, Leo Zeff, who sampled it, agreed, and passed it to hundreds of other therapists.

Shulgin, who had already quit a senior job at Dell Chemical after sampling mescaline in 1960 in a life-changing introduction to psychedelic drugs, enjoyed a period of celebrity as a cutting-edge chemist.

He described his first experiment with psychedelic drugs as a “very delightful experience” in which he could “see clearly what he could not appreciate before.”

Ecstasy was used in its early days as a treatment for depression and other illnesses, but that ended abruptly in 1986 when it was banned by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.

Recently, however, Ecstasy has had a modest comeback in clinical therapy. U.S authorities gave researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina permission last year to use MDMA in a small study of patients suffering post-traumatic stress.

In August, researchers at Duke University in North Carolina found that amphetamines, including Ecstasy, reversed the effects of Parkinson’s disease in mice, raising the possibility of exploring related treatments for humans.

Meanwhile, Shulgin, whose involvement in psychedelic drug research spans 40 years, is at work compiling his encyclopedia on 1,000 psychedelic compounds. It is modeled on the Merck Index of chemical properties.

“It will be everything that is known to be, has been tried but not found yet to be, or should be tried because they are apt to be psychedelic,” he said of the work, which he expects to self-publish by the middle of next year.

Face Transplant in France

Amiens University Hospital, via Reuters

A woman who received a partial face transplant was taken from the operation in Amiens, as shown in this image released Friday in Lyon.

Dire Wounds, a New Face, a Glimpse in a Mirror

Cool Clothes for Cool People

December 1, 2005
Dress Like Your Dad? He Rocks
By RUTH LA FERLA

DEBORAH DEJAH, a New Yorker and the mother of two, has long shared her daughter’s tastes in music. Now she shares her dress size too. So it was probably inevitable that Mrs. Dejah, 48, and Olivia, 14, would find themselves at Marsha D. D., a Third Avenue store specializing in children’s fashion, squeezing their diminutive frames into identical Doors T-shirts, the image of Jim Morrison emblazoned on the front.

The Dejahs’ infatuation with the accouterment of classic rock ‘n’ roll does not stop there. Olivia makes regular forays into her mother’s closet, ferreting out the old T-shirts, frayed jeans and weathered cowboy boots that were once the emblems of her mother’s renegade look, hoping they will lend a subversive edge to her own.

Mrs. Dejah is thrilled. “These clothes resonate from your childhood,” she said. “That you could share them with your kid is really wonderful.”

It is also fashionable, perfectly in tune with the current revival of an old-school aesthetic founded on the relics of classic rock’s glory days, an era roughly from the mid-1960′s through the early 70′s. In the last year or two, the trappings of that raucous era have acquired a mass appeal, recycled or reinvented for a candidly nostalgic age.

Rock’s funky, flamboyant aesthetic has been part of the cultural landscape for so long that to some it may not register as new. But the look is now being revisited simultaneously by a young generation enchanted with rock’s golden age and by their parents, many of them seeking to reconnect with their past lives.

A high-low roster of retailers – including Fred Segal, Bergdorf Goodman and Barneys New York; vintage shops like Cherry and Resurrection; and youth-driven chains like Urban Outfitters and Hot Topic – have added components of classic rock style to their inventories. That stock encompasses original and contemporary variations of Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin T-shirts; biker and cowboy boots and winkle-pickers; low-rise drainpipes and patched and shredded denim flares; Sergeant Pepper-style marching band coats; glitter tops; and faux folkloric tunics worthy of Janis Joplin or Stevie Nicks.

“Rock ‘n’ roll is part of everybody’s uniform right now,” said Jaye Hersh, the owner of Intuition, a popular Los Angeles boutique and Web site selling rock-inflected items like studded belts and newly minted concert T-shirts, even baby onesies imprinted with an AC/DC logo.

Aspiring hipsters of any age can buy their rock paraphernalia from mass marketers like H&M, which is selling skinny black velvet jackets reminiscent of Mick Jagger’s; companies like Trunk, a maker of reissued concert T-shirts; or catalog merchants like Worn Free, which publishes a promotional gazette styled like an alternative newspaper, advertising a “heritage line” of clothing bearing images of Frank Zappa and John Lennon. “This is rebellion made ready-to-wear,” the catalog copy boasts.

Those who like their look raw and authentic flock to shops like Resurrection in the East Village, a purveyor of used concert shirts, leather jackets and accessories priced from $200 to several thousand dollars. For older shoppers, high prices are no hurdle. “They are buying all those things that they wanted as a kid, that they didn’t get to have,” said Katy Rodriguez, an owner of the shop.

Others turn to eBay, which reports a recent run on vintage pieces like hardware-embellished hipster belts, motorcycle jackets, leather wristbands, old concert T-shirts and Nike sneakers customized with a portrait of Bob Marley.

Last month Cherry, a boutique in Greenwich Village and Los Angeles that sells vintage rock clothing to the fashion set, opened an outlet at the Virgin Megastores in Times Square and in Los Angeles, an indication that the music emporium, which sells new band T-shirts and accessories to teenagers and young adults, has made a commitment to the old-time style.

Ed Baker, a student from England, strolled inside Virgin’s Cherry shop in Times Square on Tuesday and gazed longingly at an olive drab field jacket, an artifact from his father’s time. “My dad was a Mod back in the day,” Mr. Baker, 23, said. “He rode scooters and stuff, and he was fond of the Beatles, the Stones and the Who.”

That his father might have worn one of the styles on display “is definitely part of the appeal for me,” he said.

Shoppers partial to more lacquered rock interpretations can wait until early next year, when spring fashions from houses like Comme des Garçons, Undercover, Balenciaga and Dior Homme begin trickling into stores. In her men’s show in February, Rei Kawakubo, the Comme des Garçons designer, introduced a procession of suits and shirts gaudily done up with the Stones’ famous lips-and-tongue logo. Undercover, an influential women’s line by Jun Takahashi, includes playful riffs on the concert T-shirt, sliced up and reassembled as A-line dresses, tunics and hip-wrapped skirts.

Rock’s stylistic revival comes at a time when the signature music of the 60′s and 70′s reverberates in the popular consciousness by way of made-for-TV movies and books, the latest including “The Autobiography of Donovan: The Hurdy Gurdy Man,” out this week from St. Martin’s Press. Boomers with families in tow have packed a recent run of concerts, including the Stones, who performed in New York City in September, and Cream, who reunited for a three-night blockbuster at Madison Square Garden in October. A Times Square billboard trumpets the 1971 “Concert for Bangladesh,” now on DVD.

It was only a matter of time before the wholesale commercialization of classic rock would find a new outlet in fashion. That old-school style is “valid today,” said David Wolfe, the creative director of the Doneger Group, which forecasts retail trends. “It is very much a part of our time, being adopted by a younger generation looking for a way to rebel within the boundaries being set by mainstream society.”

Lisa Koenigsberg, an adjunct professor of arts at New York University and the founder of Arts Initiatives, which organizes conferences on the arts, observed that rock’s raw style is just as potent a magnet to the middle-aged. “It conjures an Arcadia, a time when the boomers felt they could change the world,” she said.

Ms. Koenigsberg, who will preside at “Dressing the Part,” a New York University conference that runs today through Saturday and addresses the allure of rock style, added that for parents and children alike, that style “represents a narrowing of the bridge between the generations, a visual argument that both are on the same page.”

The appeal of rock fashion lies primarily in its authenticity. “It’s not about taste,” argued the aptly named Mick Rock, who has been photographing rock bands since 1969. “It’s more about energy. These are people very involved in their own style. Quite often they are self-styled. They are pulling together unlikely elements, and it’s their attitude that makes them work.” An exhibition of Mr. Rock’s photographs opens today at the gallery in the Soho Grand Hotel in Manhattan.

Paradoxically, a denatured, stylized version of the look prevails on the runways and in fashion glossies. This month Harper’s Bazaar features a homage to the likes of Patti Smith, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin using designs from Yves Saint Laurent, a look that is anything but gritty.

“Rock is not destroyed anymore,” said Julie Gilhart, the fashion director of Barneys, where best sellers include glamorized versions of the classic biker’s boot. “It’s cleaned up. Everything is done with such precision that you’re going to look as if you thought about it long and hard.”

At Bergdorf, which does a robust business with Chrome Hearts rock-inspired accessories, shoppers have embraced the tough-as-rivets look as a complement, or sometimes an antidote, to the prim runway fashions of the last several seasons. It appeals to “luxury customers who do not necessarily want to look as if they are conforming,” said Robert Burke, the store’s fashion director.

Mrs. Dejah, the mom who shops at Marsha D. D., is among those likely to incorporate the look into a more refined ensemble, pulling on a Stones T-shirt, for instance, to punch up a fastidiously tailored blazer and black pants. “Rock is not my whole look,” she said. “If I have to do something grown-up, I’ll make some adjustments.”

And Bergdorf’s interpretation of classic rock will not be literal, Mr. Burke said, but will highlight hard-edged elements from the collections of Alexander McQueen and Dsquared, a mix intended for customers who want to roughen up and lend ballast to the season’s wispy doll-like looks.

Today rock style is increasingly pitched to an audience grown comfortable with its casual if somewhat mannered appearance. “Formality doesn’t really exist in everyday fashion like it did in the times of our parents and grandparents,” said Cesar Padilla, an owner of Cherry. “That’s why the things we take for granted – denim and leather and boots – which were embraced by the rock movement, have become part of modern street chic.”

Nor will the sight of a baby boomer tricked out in leather and flares raise many eyebrows, Mr. Padilla added. “In the 60′s, if you had a record executive walking around in a Sonic Youth T-shirt, you would have thought he was out of his mind.

“But today it’s O.K. for a 50-year-old to wear a Sonic shirt, because everybody in Sonic Youth is 50 years old.”

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top

The rehabilitation of “Stepin Fetchit.”

Back in Blackface
The rehabilitation of “Stepin Fetchit.”
By Armond White
Updated Monday, Dec. 5, 2005, at 7:08 AM ET

Few pop consumers remember who Stepin Fetchit was. That must mean we’ve come a long way from the period when mass media trafficked in racist black stereotypes, because Stepin Fetchit was one of the primary purveyors of that iconography. The minstrel-show tradition that lampooned African-Americans (sometimes by white performers in blackface) was kept going by Stepin Fetchit himself, who was black by birth and a race clown by chosen profession. This complicated identity is the subject of Mel Watkins’ recent biography Stepin Fetchit: The Life and Times of Lincoln Perry, an account of the history of the notorious film- and stage performer who shuck-and-jived his way into mid-20th-century American pop consciousness.

Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry—the actor who created Stepin Fetchit—was born in 1902 and named to honor presidents. An emblematic figure in 1930s Hollywood, Perry played the quintessential lazy, foolish American Negro—first on the black vaudeville “chitlin’ circuit,” where he got the tag “The Laziest Man on Earth,” and later in dozens of movies. But with the advent of the civil rights era, Fetchit became a target of radical political sentiments. He was famously excoriated on a 1968 primetime CBS documentary Of Black America narrated by Bill Cosby. In the decades since, he has been virtually forgotten. Some biographers might see this as rough justice, but not Mel Watkins, who takes his cue from the contemporary range of black pop performers—from Samuel L. Jackson’s raging violence to Snoop Dogg’s indolent pandering to Chris Rock’s black-on-black ridicule. In this new spirit of relaxed embarrassment, Watkins attempts to rehabilitate Stepin Fetchit’s reputation.

Watkins starts by dedicating the book to “all of the early twentieth-century black comedians who, under the most repressive conditions, satirized and labored to humanize the nation’s distorted image of African Americans.” That’s Watkins’ sly means of shifting your interest past Fetchit and onto the larger conundrum of African-American humor. It’s a strategy tailored to hip-hop materialism and the vogue for academic validation of black pop. Moving readers within the politically correct confusion about pride, self-defense, self-deprecation, and self-denigration, Watkins uses tactics almost as slippery as Jackson’s, Dogg’s, and Rock’s.

One of the book’s strangest historical lapses is the way Watkins relegates certain of Stepin Fetchit’s politically conscious contemporaries to the margins. It is alarming to read Watkins’ infatuated descriptions of Stepin Fetchit’s antics, then realize that his regressive shtick, wooing Depression- and World War II-era audiences back to the strains of Old Dixie, was also the period when Paul Robeson, Eugene O’Neill, Langston Hughes, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, and Paul Laurence Dunbar created works that struck blows against white supremacy and advanced the intellectual and artistic standing of black Americans. Watkins instead puts specious emphasis on Stepin Fetchit’s “talent” as a comedian:

Every movement was meticulously controlled … Perry skillfully contrasted his absentminded coon lethargy with the silken finesse of his dancing. Onstage, he would come meandering out, scratching his head, looking utterly confused and lost. Mouth agape, eyes half closed, shoulders slouched, arms dangling, he would slip into a practically incoherent monologue; delivering in a whining monotone to no one in particular most often it had little meaning beyond the visual impression of confusion.

That’s a pretty accurate police sketch of Stepin Fetchit’s crime. Yet Watkins seems oblivious to the meaning, the dismal, belittling impact of such public representations as “coon lethargy,” “meandering,” “slouch,” “incoherent,” “whining monotone,” “confusion.” Watkins quotes a newspaper interview where Perry analyzes his own big-screen act: “I decided to go ahead pantomiming just as I had always done. I picked out the important words in the lines I had, the ones important for laughs, or that gave a cue to other actors; I consciously stress them, the rest of the speech doesn’t matter. I mumble through the rest, gestures helping to point the situation.” Watkins is so impressed that Perry’s technique is deliberate and self-conscious that he disregards that it was also reckless and damaging.

Part of Watkins’ rehabilitation effort includes the dubious boast that Perry was initially cast in silent dramas at a time when Hollywood more readily used white actors in blackface rather than actual black actors. He makes the questionable assumption that a demeaning screen representation was better than none at all. This misses the point that Perry’s coon-show routine was only sanctioned as out-of-context comic relief, never a fully humane characterization. While “breaking down barriers,” Perry’s black male figure remained marginalized all the same. Watkins’ erroneous sense of black actors’ professional progress causes him to ignore a smoking gun, a letter Perry wrote to the Pittsburgh Courier to answer negative criticism: “I much prefer to work as comedy relief in a company of white people rather than an all-colored picture because in the former company I have no competition as to dialect and character, and therefore, have a much better chance for recognition.” This is a key point displaying how a black actor’s vanity and self-regard can override his sense of community and social effect.

Stepin Fetchit established the model of the unscrupulous black performer, pursuing money, work, and fame by any means necessary. One can imagine these same rationales animating Samuel L. Jackson when he lit up his face like a jack-o-lantern in The Caveman’s Valentine (2001), or Denzel Washington when he played the most wicked cop in Hollywood history in Training Day (2001). Watkins’ book justifies such self-justification; he argues against any criticism that might seem to impede Stepin Fetchit’s ruthless exhibitionism. His most complicated contention suggests that Stepin Fetchit was perhaps even more beloved by black audiences than by white ones. The venerable Hollywood slapstick producer Hal Roach (The Little Rascals) is quoted as saying:

Stepin Fetchit was a very funny guy. That’s why we tried to use him, because he was a skilled comic. … [T]he colored people in those days got as big a kick out of Stepin Fetchit as anybody. They used to come to the studio every single day, you know, dozens of them, wanted to see him.

What Watkins is suggesting here is that Stepin Fetchit’s act continued the “trickster” tradition of slaves: outwitting their oppressors by pretending to be slow-witted and lazy, and thereby exploiting whites’ sense of superiority. This ironical defense of black stereotypes misses the basic fact that while even black folks may recognize and laugh at the buffoons in their community, it doesn’t mean that this disdainful reflex is subversive.

Given the contemporary success of black performers and innumerable hip-hop artists who flirt with shameless, disreputable images, Stepin Fetchit’s legacy—from popular figure to pariah—takes on new importance. Should African-American performers be accountable to political correctness? To what degree should they worry that their antics shape the self-image of young African-Americans? Should they follow any standard other than their own conscience? Should they have a conscience? Watkins ends his tale with complaints about Lincoln Perry’s late-in-life ostracism by Hollywood and the black community. He notes that Perry was haunted by his own out-of-date image as the “laziest man on earth” whose brand of comedy was no longer tolerable in the 1970s. Watkins laments that Perry’s identity became confused with the figure of Stepin Fetchit, and that in this ignominy a misunderstood artist was sent to oblivion.

But Watkins disregards the effect Stepin Fetchit’s odious comedy had on the moviegoing public. The psychological rationale for racism cuts two ways—flattering whites and defaming blacks—and it rebounded upon Stepin Fetchit and stained his soul. Watkins revives the ghost without heeding the opportunistic performers who follow Stepin Fetchit’s path, a scary thing.

Armond White is a film critic for the New York Press

Today’s Blogs

The CIA’s New Black Eye
By David Wallace-Wells
Posted Monday, Dec. 5, 2005, at 6:09 PM ET

Bloggers are generally dismayed by a case of CIA mistaken identity. They also discuss yesterday’s pro-democracy rally in Hong Kong and a new book that questions the authority of so-called “experts.”

The CIA’s new black eye: German citizen Khaled Masri was wrongfully imprisoned by the CIA in 2004, the victim of mistaken identity in the agency’s vigorous pursuit of terrorist suspects. “The CIA inspector general is investigating a growing number of what it calls ‘erroneous renditions,’ ” the Washington Post reports.

“It is becoming obvious that 911 did change everything, for the worse,” writes retired engineer Ron Beasley at Middle Earth Journal. “The United States was once the beacon for freedom and justice but no more.” At OneGoodMove, Norm Jenson suggests the imprisonment amounts to a mark on the American permanent record. “You can’t take back torture,” he says.

“It’s really scarey when you have an organization as powerful as the C.I.A is running amok playing ‘Spy vs. Spy,’ ” remarks Houston Conservative Will Malven, nevertheless optimistic. “Hopefully the ongoing shake-up within the C.I.A. will remedy such abuses,” he writes. Conservative Tom Maguire of JustOneMinute, pointing to an excerpt in which a covert agent is described but not named, thinks the story itself demonstrates agency dysfunction, a personal turf war cannibalizing the front pages. “Quick, subpoena Dana Priest of the WaPo – someone with a political axe to grind has leaked to her the name of a covert CIA officer!” he cries in mock outrage.

Others say such treatment of suspected terrorists impedes the war on terror. “Listen, in the long run, it’s about winning the hearts and minds of the world,” writes contributor Justin Gardner at Joe Gandelman’s The Moderate Voice. “And do any of you think that’s going to happen when we’re kidnapping innocent people because of so-called ‘actionable intelligence’ we got from torturing other detainees?”

At Obsidian Wings, Hilzoy, a professor of ethical philosophy, believes the lesson is equally clear. “This is why we have a legal system: because even with the best intentions, government officials make mistakes. People who are kidnapped and sent off … to some secret CIA prison … have no recourse at all.”

Read more about the report.

Chinese democracy?: Thousands of pro-democracy protesters rallied in Hong Kong Sunday, calling for the first general elections in the region since its return to Chinese rule in 1997. The march was widely considered to hold significance beyond Hong Kong in mainland China.

“The march today was somber, determined, and serious,” reports Yan Sham-Shackleton, a Hong Kong artist and activist, at Glutter. “It did not have the joyous atmosphere of some of the protests past, I kept feeling that everyone there had the same kind of feeling which is that we are in this for the long haul.” Of particular concern, she believes, was the underestimation of the crowd by police, who reported the turnout as 63,000. “I had my doubts that the march was going to be that large,” admits protester and American expatriot Tom Legg at The Eleven. “But if that march was only 63,000, then I’m a monkey’s uncle.”

“I am less interested in numbers, and more interested in meaning,” confides Sam Crane, an American professor of Asian studies, at Useless Tree. “We often hear that democracy is fragile in Chinese cultural contexts because of the lack of deep historical experience with electoral rotation of political leadership. Apologists for authoritarianism in Beijing and Hong Kong and Singapore will argue that not only is democracy culturally alien, but it is simply not necessary or wanted by Chinese people. … Hong Kong is at a point in its history where, I would bet, a majority of people would vote for direct elections. “

Plenty of others agree the city is, presently, uniquely able to popularly demand popular government. “Hong Kong is like no other place on earth,” writes Publius Pundit Robert Mayer, a longstanding supporter of democratic movements worldwide. “It is an outpost of Western ideas on the flank of communism. … This march, and others like it, will serve as an example for activists in Beijing and elsewhere who are preparing — even now — to challenge the government and take their rights back.”

Read more about the rally.

The meaning of expert: In his new book, Expert Political Judgment, Berkeley psychologist Philip Tetlock examines the reliability of analyses and predictions made by specialists and experts. His finding? “The accuracy of an expert’s predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge,” summarizes critic Louis Menand in a New Yorker review. “People who follow current events by reading the papers and newsmagazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote.”

“The problem as I see it is that the market for punditry has skewed incentives,” opines Jane Galt at Asymmetrical Information. “There is no reward for being boring and right, nor any punishment for being novel and wrong. But there are big rewards, in the form of book contracts and lecture fees, for being novel and right. Pundits are thus tempted to act like executives with fat option packages.”

“This is one of the (few) must-read social science books of 2005,” declares economist Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, adding this caveat: “Each new forecast or new theory is an example of individual hubris and in expected value terms it is stupid. But the body of experts as a whole, over time, absorbs what is correct. A large number of predictions creates a Hayekian discovery process with increasing returns to scale. Social knowledge still comes out ahead, and in part because of the self-deceiving vanities put forward every day. You can find that point in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.”

Read more about the book, and more about the New Yorker review.

Got a question, comment, or suggestion? E-mail todaysblogs@slate.com.

Howard Stern

Photo credit: Dan Winters; hair by Toni Coburn; makeup by Eva Scrivo; styling by Ralph Cirella and Marie Blomquist)

Ahhhh, the shower. All day, Howard Stern has felt so goddamned pressured. He’s in one of his obsessive funks, so frequent lately, and can’t wait to get under the hot water. And freaking relax. So Howard sneaks off, pads across the whitish bathroom tiles, a towel secured around his waist. Howard’s not one to run around the apartment naked. Not with his very small penis—no need for Beth to see him unaroused.

Howard steps into the shower, a palace of curved, floor-to-ceiling glass, determined to escape the stress that is freaking brutal. Every morning, Howard does four-plus hours of America’s most popular morning-radio show. In a few weeks, he will join Sirius, a satellite-radio company, where he vows to reinvent the medium. Sirius is betting $500 million (and, probably, its future) on Howard; it’s given him two entire channels. That’s 48 hours of dead air to fill every single day. Plus, Beth seems to feel a little ignored right now. No wonder he’s barely sleeping.

In the shower, Howard powers up the hot water. There are nozzles everywhere, like eight of them. His hair, that dense wheel of curls, which, thank God, he still has, flattens against his head. Just stand there, Howard tells himself. Zone out. He’s a Transcendental Meditation guy. Every morning and night, he empties his head, which is what he’d like to do right now. Except the vibe’s not right. Is it the freaking bathroom mirror? From the shower, Howard can catch a glimpse of himself, enough to disturb anyone. “Fat!” is Howard’s reaction to a mirror. “Ugly!”

Just freaking breathe. In TM, you let distracting thoughts float right out of your mind. Some thoughts, though, are like fish bones. Like how about that ad Howard’s boss took out? Good riddance to twenty years of stale fart jokes, as if he couldn’t wait to usher Howard out the door. Infuriating! Reduce Howard to fart jokes! What about his penis and vagina material? He practically invented saying penis and vagina on the radio! And his stripper bits and lesbian gags and his legion of deformed and defective characters? Howard’s boss ought to drop to his knees and thank him. Those fart jokes built an empire! That genius should get testicular cancer!

Which might be about the time that Howard hears the voice. Where the fuck is this coming from? Howard thinks. He hears a series of sharp, percussive notes, like an old Teletype machine. It’s the way WINS, the all-news radio station, introduces its newscast. Then Howard hears a news anchor’s sonorous voice. Except that instead of introducing the WINS newscast, Howard hears the voice intone, It’s “he Howard 100 News.”

It’s like the radio gods are sending Howard a radio show. All the news you want about the universe that is Howard Stern. Everything about the characters in Howard’s world, their fascinating lives, including, yes, the gases they pass. And not just the gases! Howard hears that rich newscaster’s voice say, The Howard Stern Sports Department. But our sports, thinks Howard. Like how about High Pitch Eric, one of his characters, who’s fat and disgusting and speaks like a girl, eats for a whole day. People could bet on his, uh, output. It’ll be the . . . Craptacular! Howard can imagine the hushed, reverent tones of the sportscaster, as if he’s describing Tiger Woods. There in the steamy shower, Howard puts his fist to his mouth, like it’s a microphone: High Pitch approaches the Porta Potti. He appears ready. Concentration is on his face . . . That’s funny! That’s genius!

Howard’s boss no longer permits fart noises on the air. But on satellite, anything goes. Yes, Howard thinks, I want to host the Craptacular.

Howard’s so excited about “The Howard 100 News” he’s got to tell Beth. He rushes out of the shower, almost forgetting the towel. Six foot five and hung like an acorn! Where’s the goddamned towel? “Honey?!”

In recent years, Howard Stern claims to have harbored a deep secret. It’s a notion that seems, on the face of it, preposterous. After all, Howard has a confessional urge like no one’s ever heard. Before Howard, radio was mostly comforting, discreet, tasteful. Emotion, if it surfaced at all, was happy (later on, and even worse, it was mellow). “[Radio] was a lot of people who didn’t say shit,” grumbles Howard. To Howard, that was all phony, and Howard despises phonies. “The show is about honesty,” he says earnestly. But Howard’s honesty is not the honesty of, say, Oprah. Howard hates Oprah. Howard’s earliest professional instinct was to erase the line between private and public, which often mirrors the one separating discomfort and comfort. Howard says, “Discomfort is something interesting to explore.” Starting, of course, with his own. His anal fissures? His ex-wife’s miscarriage? Howard wants you to know.


Howard, in his telling, is a person who seldom feels at ease. “He wasn’t the most popular kid, and he didn’t feel like he belonged,” says Robin Quivers, Howard’s radio sidekick and friend of a couple of decades. It was an unhappiness for which Howard took a specific kind of revenge: He recruited others just like himself. That includes his studio crew. (“We’re all damaged,” says Robin.) Then, Howard added a whole other layer of losers, such as Crackhead Bob, Eric the Midget, Wendy the Retard, Howard’s “Wack Pack.” Stir into the mix strippers and porn stars, similarly undesirable in good company, and you’ve got what Robin calls Howard’s “own little club.” Howard, needless to say, anointed himself its king, “king of the dipshits,” as he puts it.

The club’s key rule: Anything is fair game; the more private and embarrassing and hurtful, the better. Howard’s real interest is emotion and not the packaged Hollywood variety. “He doesn’t want you to act mad; he wants you to be mad,” says his producer, Gary Dell’Abate, whose mother once called Howard’s mother to get Howard to stop belittling her son on the air. Racial hatred, sexual offensiveness: Those are real.

Howard tolerates celebrities as long as they enter his world. Recently, for instance, he explained to Robert Downey Jr. that, no, he hadn’t watched his movie that Warner Bros. had sent over especially for that purpose. “How ridiculous that he thinks the most interesting thing he has to talk about is his new movie,” said Howard. Howard wanted to know about Downey’s stretch in prison. “Did you fight?” he asked. Downey, annoyed, nonetheless produced. “I initiated,” he said.


Howard may be arrogant and insecure, a combustible combination; he may be a “miserable prick,” as he sometimes says. “You suck the joy out of everything” is one of his girlfriend Beth’s endearments. His savior has always been the microphone, behind which he feels unusually, some would say unreasonably, free. “I can tell my audience anything,” he says.

Except for a time there was one thing that was too private, too damaging, for even Howard to blurt out: He felt dead inside.

In 2001, Howard signed a five-year deal with Infinity, owner of 178 radio stations, including WXRK, K-Rock, Howard’s home base. Howard earned upwards of $25 million a year. Still, a few years into his deal, Howard was going limp. Says Robin, “I started to see him wither.”

Howard’s agent, Don Buchwald, is a gentlemanly presence who keeps a larger-than-life cardboard cutout of Howard in his office. “Howard couldn’t really function with the current FCC,” Buchwald explains. The Federal Communications Commission, among other duties, polices the airwaves for “indecency.” “I don’t think there’s a fucking thing I ever did that was indecent,” says Howard, whose on-air remarks have led to at least $2.5 million in fines, more than any other radio broadcaster.

The FCC doesn’t initiate complaints, listeners do. Howard has 12 million listeners. In 2004, the FCC sided with one offended listener. Howard had committed indecency by discussing “swamp ass,” a smelly personal-hygiene issue right up Howard’s alley. The FCC specifically didn’t like that the bit included “repeated flatulence sound effects.” The government fined Clear Channel, which carried Howard’s show on six of its stations. (Howard was on in 46 markets.) The fine (which included penalties for other performers) was a whopping $1.75 million. Later, Viacom, Infinity’s parent, would pay the government $3.5 million for a variety of infractions, including at least one by Howard. For Howard, the devastating effect was that Clear Channel tossed him off its stations.

Howard blamed the FCC and Clear Channel, the country’s largest radio company. But later, the grudge spread. He griped about his boss, Infinity, and its corporate parent, Viacom. He would have liked to take “swamp ass” all the way to the Supreme Court. Infinity was sympathetic to Howard’s cause, and in fact added him to nine of its stations a few months later. Still, Infinity instituted a companywide “compliance plan” to appease the FCC. “They”—Infinity and Viacom—“are allowing this to happen,” moaned Howard. He saw an unhappy trend. “I’m losing stations,” he said. “I’m not going to be making more money; I’m going to be making less money. And fuck the money, I’m going to be making shit radio. How am I the outrageous Howard Stern if I can’t talk?”

Howard, naturally, personalized his grievance—one of his gifts. (“Oh, absolutely,” he says jauntily, “I have a chip on my shoulder.”) “You guys have not stood up to the FCC,” Howard told Joel Hollander, COO and then CEO of Infinity. “House Negro,” he later called Hollander.

But the issue was bigger than a supposedly wimpy boss. Howard had lost his mojo. “I’ve been doing subpar material for the last ten years. I didn’t even realize it. I got sucked in,” Howard told his agent. Then he told Buchwald his secret. “I think I’m done.”


“Okay,” Buchwald responded. Though just in case, Buchwald said, he’d listen to offers.

For years, the morning host to strippers and porn stars—he threw lunch meat at their bare asses—tooled home to Long Island, to a big house with a lawn and a pool. There he sometimes imagined he was living an extended episode of Leave It to Beaver. For a couple of schizy decades, the outrageous morning man did nightly duty as suburban husband and father to his college sweetheart and their three daughters. Howard and Alison had met as undergrads at Boston University. She was his first serious girlfriend. They married at age 24. “I got happily married so fucking young,” Howard says.

It wasn’t really a typical household. Howard followed his own early-to-bed, rise-in-the-dark schedule (masturbating himself to sleep every night, he told his audience). And as time went by, he passed a growing fraction of his at-home time in the basement, where he had a 100-inch TV and double locks on the door. There, he labored to turn flatulence into mainstream humor, and to write two best-selling memoirs, as well as to, uh, do research. For instance, he spent time dialing into online sex-chat rooms, including one called the Howard Stern Room. “The pathetic fact is I . . . seldom emerge, except for meals,” Howard said.

Alison wanted a social life. Howard hated to travel. “To tell the truth,” he said, “I hate every fucking place in the world.” He didn’t especially like to dine with Alison’s friends. They told him what was wrong with the show, and not to make fun of Jews. To Howard, it seemed like the garmento husbands inevitably carped about how they too ought to have radio shows since they were as funny as Howard.

Howard was exceedingly devoted to his wife, while simultaneously forlorn—a bind that would prove one of the great inventions of his career. Howard was an id on a leash, which, Howard knew from the start, made him, sexually, an Everyman. “I want new experiences,” he once explained, “where Alison can’t accuse me of cheating.” And so Howard hatched a vibrant fantasy life in which he was . . . single. “I have my whole single life worked out,” Howard once announced. “There aren’t many girls I wouldn’t fuck. I’d be with somebody every night.”

In the meantime, Howard had women—Howard, old-fashioned, called them “broads”—stop by the studio and get naked. He gave them money to do things, like kiss each other. Soon, spectating wasn’t enough. He spanked women on the air. “Butt bongo,” he called it. Then, one day with a naked woman in the studio, Howard announced he too was getting naked. Cue the superego. Alison, magically, was on the phone to the studio.

“I’m really getting offended,” Alison said.

“You’re not happy because I’m a desirable man. Well, how about giving me sex every once in a while?” Howard told her on the air.

She told him he sounded like “a dirty old man.”

“I love you,” he said sweetly.

“I love you too,” Alison said and hung up.

Then Howard plunged back in, returning to the naked girl in the studio.

Of course, both satellite-radio companies—there are only two—wanted Howard. Sirius, though, needed him more.

For satellite radio, the next mass medium, the value proposition starts with this: Terrestrial radio sucks. The technology is out-of-date; it’s not yet digital quality. Plus, because the real audience is not the fan but the advertiser, playlists tighten, less-popular genres disappear. “Radio was a business that focused initially on passion and music and then, instead, decided it was packaging listeners for advertisers,” says Hugh Panero, CEO of XM, which is the larger satellite company. It proved adept at packaging listeners; Howard’s show has as many as 22 minutes of ads per hour.

Satellite technology offers better-quality audio (though digital radio is coming). And it cut the ads on music stations and expanded the offerings. Satellite reaches the entire country with 120 channels (Sirius) or 160 channels (XM). To get it, you must pay a monthly fee.

In the competition for satellite dominance, Sirius was the category’s laggard. Among other things, XM was first to market with an iPod-size portable player; Sirius debuts its version this Christmas season. Both companies made deals with automakers to install satellite radio into new cars. Again XM led, claiming more deals with car manufacturers. Most important, it has outpaced Sirius in subscribers. By year’s end, it will have 6 million, compared with 3 million for Sirius.

Howard, who has more listeners than both satellite companies combined, could be a momentum changer for Sirius. After all, before Howard’s announcement, it had just 700,000 subscribers. Wall Street treated it like a castoff. A share of XM traded for about ten times as much as a share of Sirius.


Howard’s agent negotiated, as is his practice, without consulting Howard. XM’s Panero was prepared to pay Howard close to $30 million a year. But Sirius’s offer was, as Panero put it, “shocking.” At a time when Sirius had not quite $13 million a year in revenue, it offered Howard a hundred million dollars a year, about eighty in cash, the rest in stock, for five years. And that’s mainly for “The Howard Stern Show.” Sirius wanted Howard’s imprint to be larger. The company gave him two channels to program, for which it will pick up most of the tab.

On October 6, 2004, during his regular K-Rock show, Howard made his announcement. Instantly, he’d changed the radio game. Howard’s millions of fans went up for grabs; it was a more profitable audience share than, as Hollander put it, “at any time in my 27 years in the business.” Howard vowed “to bury” Clear Channel, “you sons of bitches.” But the immediate competition pits Howard directly against Infinity.

For Howard, the private moping was over; indeed, the stars seemed to be aligning. The following month, Sirius announced that Mel Karmazin, former COO of Viacom, was coming out of retirement to be its new CEO, its third. Karmazin is a superstar executive whose arrival added its own cachet to Sirius, and to satellite radio generally; also, he may be the only radio exec Howard has ever called a friend.

On September 30, 1985, Howard was marched out of WNBC, fired for, among other offenses, being impossible to manage. (Howard had aired a running fight with his bosses, one of whom he referred to as “Pig Virus.”) That same day, Karmazin, then CEO of Infinity, called to say he had to have Howard. At the time, Infinity was a chain of half-a-dozen stations, and Karmazin was known mainly as a terrific ad salesman. “I don’t think anybody should think in terms of my skill set being involved in creating radio programming,” he says. Yet even Karmazin sensed that Howard was on to something. “Everyone’s boss is an asshole, right?” he says. “That sort of makes for great radio.” As long, Karmazin knew, as he wasn’t the asshole boss. Howard’s contract stipulated that he couldn’t mention Karmazin on the air.

Karmazin turned Howard into Infinity’s franchise player. At Howard’s insistence, Karmazin bucked the wisdom of the time—that radio was a local medium—and put Howard on in Philadelphia, eventually in Los Angeles, and syndicated him. Not that there weren’t tensions. At one point, Howard says, he stormed into Karmazin’s office. “If you guys start inhibiting and editing me, I’m going to lose my audience,” Howard told Karmazin. “How the fuck do I stay No. 1?” Still, when the FCC came after Howard, Karmazin stood behind him, to a point. Eventually, though, Karmazin says that the FCC stopped processing his applications to buy radio stations, and he settled. (That 1995 settlement cost Infinity $1.7 million.)


“I’ve got some kind of weird rebirth going on,” Howard says. “All of a sudden, I’m like the old Howard Stern. This stuff just rushes into my head.” He makes it sound like a mental illness.



By 1996, Karmazin had built Infinity into a chain of 44 stations and sold it to Westinghouse, CBS’s then-parent, where he became the largest individual shareholder. When CBS merged with Viacom in a deal worth $37 billion, Karmazin was appointed the company’s No. 2; in the initial bear-hugging, he seemed likely to succeed Sumner Redstone, Viacom’s now 82-year-old CEO and chairman. Redstone made it clear he wouldn’t observe generational niceties and step aside. (“He’s full of shit,” Karmazin says of Redstone now.) And so, in 2004, Karmazin, then 60 years old, exited Viacom, intending to retire.

At least that’s the story Karmazin tells me in Sirius’s glass conference room at Rockefeller Center, situated dangerously close to both Eminem’s and Martha Stewart’s studios. Karmazin has white-gray hair, furry black eyebrows, and large white teeth. He’s a compact man in a good business suit who was once in line to run a vast slice of the country’s media (and, in that capacity, dismissed satellite radio as a nice niche business). Why is he at the helm of an eleven-year-old company that’s never made a profit?

After leaving Viacom, Karmazin tried golf. “I hated that,” he says. He traveled. “I really don’t want to travel anymore,” he says. Karmazin is the poor Queens boy who took an office job for the air-conditioning. He attended college at night and thrived in business, in part because he famously trimmed costs, and also arrived early. (He says, “It wasn’t like I was a visionary or anything.”) To this day, he says, he’s first in the office, at 6:30. “I turn the lights on here,” he says. Even sitting in a conference room, Karmazin constantly pushes himself away from the table, gliding on a wheeled chair, a pantomime of energy-to-burn.


“I really did miss, you know, the business stuff,” explains Karmazin, by which he means being “able to solve problems.”

Also, Howard’s arrival intrigued Karmazin. They don’t socialize. Much of Howard’s show has never been Karmazin’s thing. The Craptacular? “Not my taste,” he says. Still, Karmazin had ridden Howard to the top once before. (“His tombstone could read, MEL ROSE WITH HOWARD,” says one industry insider.) Karmazin did his due diligence in a brisk two weeks.

Among his priorities is to make Howard the company’s flagship offering. “Howard is going to be bigger than he has ever been,” Karmazin says. “And that’s going to help our company significantly.”

Of course, the relationship may not be tension-free. Howard has already gotten resistance to his “Howard 100 News” team, a group of seventeen, including “award-winning professional journalists.” Some Sirius executives have complained. They don’t like to walk out of their offices to find Howard’s news team sticking microphones in their faces. Clearly this delights Howard. “You’re going to have to deal with it,” he’s told the uncomfortable execs.

Even Karmazin?

“He’s got no choice,” says Howard. “He’s in the building. He’s going to have to.” This time, Howard’s not prohibited from mentioning Karmazin on the air.

“It ain’t in this contract,” says Howard gleefully. “He’s fair game.”

Before I met the outrageous Howard Stern, I’d been concerned. With Howard, I knew, vengefulness is sport. He finds a person’s weaknesses, zeroes in. “I can fuck you up your ass six ways till Sunday and pick your corpse clean, and you won’t know what hit you,” he delicately points out. But the first time I meet him, my impression is different. I think, Howard might be in recovery. It’s the end of another week of 5 a.m. wake-up calls. He’s bone-tired. At 51, he seems vulnerable. His systems, most of them, suggest wear and tear. He’s towering, a physically dramatic presence, but it’s kind of a sight gag. He’s imposing and thin as a post (even if he thinks he’s fat). He’s not hardy. There’s his fear of germs—“I’m a germphobe,” he announces as a kind of introduction. He’s apparently sworn off several food groups. I watched him approach a buffet of desserts; delicately, he extracted a thin bit of cantaloupe. And then there’s the insomnia. I’d seen e-mails Howard sent to his staff at 2:58 one morning, at 2:53 another morning. Howard’s rich as a god, of course, but he can’t quite subdue his inner Aerosmith. He’s dressed like an off-duty rocker: jeans, Caterpillar boots, a navy tee under an unbuttoned shirt. He has a couple of small gold hoop earrings and, scrawled on a pinkie, an ex-con’s blue tattoo.


Of course, Howard is in recovery from, he says, years of professional compromise. “They just ruined a goddamned medium,” he says. “They ruined me.” Howard mentions this in his Upper West Side penthouse, which is spacious, open, immaculate. It’s done in tasteful earth tones. Howard flops onto a gold couch. “I think I got kind of dead inside and just kind of accepted this,” he says. He leans back. The couch seems to nearly inhale him. Howard says he needs a nap.

Then the topic changes, and so does Howard. Weariness vanishes. He propels himself across the room, heads to his desk, and returns with a black spiral notebook and a folder containing his plans for satellite radio. He spreads them on the coffee table and suddenly pitches his big birdish body onto the floor, landing on one knee, as if he wants to physically get into the material.

“I’ve got some kind of weird rebirth going on,” he says. “All of a sudden, I’m like the old Howard Stern. This shit just rushes into my head.” He makes it sound like mental illness. He’s obsessed, manic. “I’m like out of my freaking mind,” he says. “I hear radio shows in my dreams. I haven’t been this turned on by radio in so long. I can think about nothing else. This is nuts.”

Howard flips through the spiral notebook. He’s pasted e-mails inside and scribbled notes. They’d tried to stop Howard being Howard. Now, with two channels all his own and no FCC, Howard plans to exact revenge: He’s going to be more Howard than ever. He’ll turn what’s inside his head into a radio world. He’s already got “The Howard 100 News,” the brainstorm delivered to him in the shower. It’ll make the whole thing cohere and, at the same time, mock the coherence of that other, you know, “real” world.

Howard will still have a morning show. “Fuck a show!” says Howard exuberantly. He’s back on the couch, but bent forward, his chest nearly touching his knees. “I’m going to give you real action. I got famous for ‘Lesbian Dating Game’? Now I can really do it. We’ll hear the date, and if they like each other, we’ll have the date right there and the sex right there, and it’ll be done beautifully.”


Howard’s radio world will be a red-light district. “Wouldn’t it be brilliant if my audience could all lie down at night together and come together?” he wonders. “Cum together?” Howard’s idea is “Tissue Time With Heidi Cortez,” a 24-year-old Playboy model and “orgasmer” who will offer phone sex to Howard’s audience. He’s also working on a show called “Confessions From the Bunny Ranch,” a Nevada whorehouse. Howard plans to tape a room 24 hours a day. “You’ve heard of Taxicab Confessions, but that’s bullshit,” he says. “You’ll be right in the prostitute’s room. You’ll hear the negotiation. You’ll hear the screwing. You’ll hear the after-sex conversation. And that fascinates me. I want to be in that room.” Howard hopes to launch a show called “I Want to Fuck a Porn Star,” a send-up of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. “It’s going to be difficult,” cautions Howard. “If you can answer the questions, you will get to fuck a porn star. So many guys from my audience would love that opportunity.”



“I do miss you lately,” says Beth, Howard’s pinup-girl girlfriend. “I am not messing up this relationship,” says Howard grimly. “I don’t want to keep repeating my life.”



It’s possible that Howard is just a garden-variety pervert (as he’s sure every guy is). Howard’s instincts, though, are usually satirical. His targets are seriousness, good taste, the other boring virtues of adulthood (including reading books). Howard is a professional adolescent, though in his hands, adolescence is also a devilish send-up of mature, uptight opinion, like that involving bodily functions. “Sometimes flatulence is the funniest thing in the world to me,” Howard says. “It just is.”

Like the Craptacular. “Listen, to me the Craptacular is what I’m all about,” he says, and then, with earnestness, adds, “I really thought this guy was going to outproduce a baby elephant.” When done as a sportscast, it’s also a joke on every pompous sportscaster.

He has other self-serious targets. “You’ve heard of The View,” Howard says. “We’re going to round up four crack whores, and every night, we’re going to take the exact topics that The View talked about. I can’t stand those women on The View, but to hear ‘The Crack-Whore View’ girls talk about those same topics? It will be ten times better.” Howard has an idea for another talk show, the genre of, say, Meet the Press, except with girls from Scores, Howard’s favorite strip club. “One of the things that I love are these Scores girls get drunk about four o’clock in the morning, wasted,” he explains. “We want to have a round table, ‘The Drunken Scores Girls Show.’ I want to throw them topics of the day and just hear them.”

In his apartment, Howard has wound himself up. “It will be like nothing else,” he says. “It will be real.” Real is a favorite Howard word. Real is a retard on the radio for 24 straight hours, which was an idea in one of Howard’s late-night e-mails. Real is a racist with his own show, which Howard threatens. “One of the sitcoms we’re working on—very exciting—‘Meet the Fuckheads,’ ” Howard says. He’s written a synopsis, which reads, “An exciting sitcom starring married couple Jeff the Drunk and Wendy the Retard and their son Elephant Boy. Jeff, a hand-stamper at a local swimming pool, is spiraling downward and his retarded wife is fed up with him when suddenly life changes on a dime. He hits the winning lottery numbers. He moves into an exclusive neighborhood next door to Donald Trump.”

Of course, Howard could fail. Howard has been best when his oppositional disorder is engaged. Without a censor, a wife, or a manager trying to rein him in, who will be his foil? The calculation seems to be that he has good taste, everyone’s internalized arbiter, to screw with. Will fans cough up $12.95 per month for this? “That’s a very risky career move,” says Howard, “but I don’t care.” Maybe it’s the mania talking—or the promotional possibilities of the moment. But Howard acts as if he can’t believe his luck. “I mean, fuck me!” he shouts. “We’ll get the real Donald Trump.”

Howard reels off ideas, which he will also put on TV—he’s got a separate subscription deal with In Demand TV. “It’s crazy! All of a sudden,” he says, “I’m like on fire creatively.” He’s got more. “You’ve heard of Desperate Housewives? We have The Really Desperate Housewives.” It’s a show starring his staff’s significant others. “Each week, these wives desperately try to change their famous husbands into something they’re not: human,” says Howard. Some of the ideas are still incubating. Howard has to tell all. “Face the Shrink”: “Every night you will hear a live psychiatric session with a very famous celebrity,” he says. “It’s going to be a real shrink, real psychotherapy. Also, the shrink is going to analyze some of my Wack Pack guys.”


Stop him, change the subject, and Howard obliges. He’s surprisingly gracious. But his energy drains. The couch reclaims him. He’s laid-back, again in need of a nap.

“What’s in the folder?” I say. It’s like pushing a button. Howard leans forward, his chest bumping those inordinately tall knees, and pours the contents on the coffee table. It’s his new logo, a black-power fist—classic Howard: arrogant, aggrieved, inappropriate (who’s whiter than Howard?), bristling with aggression.

“This is a big black fist up the ass of Clear Channel, the religious right, George Bush, those motherfuckers on the FCC,” says Howard gaily. “That fist will appear everywhere because that inspires me.”

The day Howard announced on K-Rock that he’d signed with Sirius, he still owed fifteen months to Infinity, K-Rock’s owner. “[If it were my decision] he would’ve been gone the first day,” says Karmazin. Easy for him to say. Howard pulls in $100 million in annual revenue. People looked at the numbers, the effect on the market. Infinity decided to hold Howard to his contract, which created a colossally awkward situation. Hollander, Infinity’s CEO, had initially hoped Howard would stay with Infinity—he’d been ready, say industry sources, to offer him an eye-popping $35 million a year. He didn’t even get a chance to make an offer, a professional discourtesy that still smarts. Now he hoped for some understanding from Howard, a gentlemanly accommodation. “We both have a difficult January coming,” he told Howard.


In some ways, Hollander’s looked more challenging. “Somebody in their career was going to be entrusted with replacing Howard Stern,” says Hollander. “I landed on the seat. If I don’t succeed here, that’s what people will remember.”

Howard, inevitably, turned the awkwardness into a radio reality show on K-Rock. Soon, Infinity banned Howard from using the word Sirius. Fine. Howard called it “eh-eh-eh.” I can’t wait to get to eh-eh-eh, he’d tell his listeners, all in on the joke. At Sirius, Howard had begun to preview material a couple of hours each evening. “The Howard 100 News” team interviewed his parents. One of Howard’s characters on K-Rock, a black New Jersey garbageman who calls himself “King of All Blacks,” auditioned for a show on Sirius. Wendy the Retard did 24 hours straight, no callers. The next morning, Howard would review these performances on K-Rock.

If Howard is Sirius’s biggest break, keeping a lame-duck Howard on K-Rock might be its second.

In October, Infinity announced its lineup, five D.J.’s who would replace Howard in various markets. In New York, David Lee Roth, the former Van Halen rocker, will take over Howard’s slot. Penn Jillette of Penn and Teller will do a slot on K-Rock too. Hollander hired Adam Carolla in Los Angeles; Carolla will get help from Jimmy Kimmel. Roth is the wild card. He has little radio experience. “If he doesn’t work, they’ll say that was the dumbest thing,” says Hollander. “If it works, they’ll all call me a genius.”

Clearly, Hollander wants to take Howard’s slot in a different direction—for one thing, K-Rock will now be all talk. He avoided Howard imitators. Toning down the trash talk is a theme. And a popular one. At XM, CEO Panero echoed the sentiments. Let Sirius identify itself with Howard’s young male demo. Panero lately describes XM’s appeal as mainstream, diverse, “known for a lot of different kinds of content.”

Hollander announced his new roster in Advertising Age, tweaking Howard. “We didn’t just replace Howard,” said one ad. “We’re freshening up the airwaves altogether. Twenty years of fart jokes gets old.” Howard, predictably, took offense. “What the fuck is this?” said Howard. “They called me a piece of shit.”

A few days later, Howard had 50 Cent in the studio. Howard wanted to hear about 50 Cent’s “bitches,” as Howard put it. The rapper said a couple were waiting back at the hotel—he even remembered one of the bitches’ names. Howard wanted to call the bitches. Howard clearly enjoyed saying the word bitches, which he thought was funny coming from him.

Tom Chiusano, K-Rock’s general manager, didn’t appreciate the humor.

“They call dogs bitches,” Howard said. “It’s a common word.”

Chiusano entered the studio, a small, dingy, low-ceilinged room where Howard sits behind a large U-shaped console. Chiusano, who favors black tasseled loafers and pinstripes, explained that the repetition of the word bitch made it potentially indecent. Obligingly, he spoke into a microphone. “I’m not wrong,” he said, which didn’t exactly sound bold.

Howard, who wears T-shirts and jeans to work and who constantly reminds listeners that he is reinventing radio at the moment, turned to 50 Cent. When 50 comes on Howard’s satellite show, Howard told him, he can say anything he wants. Then Howard asked Chiusano, why didn’t they just kick him off the air? “Dude, let’s end this already,” said Howard. “Prick,” he added.


50 piled on. “Bitches,” he mentioned.

After the show, Howard was suspended for a day—with pay, he says. The ostensible reason was that later in the program, Howard talked extensively about Sirius. The next day, Hollander called a closed-door meeting at the Beacon restaurant. There, management laid down the law. Again. Tempers flared. That’s when Howard called Hollander a “house Negro.” Hollander wasn’t pleased, but later, he sounded understanding. “Howard’s very nervous,” said Hollander. “It’s like he’s had a fourteen-month honeymoon, and now he’s got to go do it.”

In the living area of his apartment, Howard takes a seat next to his girlfriend, Beth Ostrosky. Outside, it’s a stunning fall day. Through the windows, and the apartment has tons, you can see all of Central Park, every single red-yellow-orange tree.

Beth is almost twenty years younger than Howard and a beauty. White-blonde hair, opalescent eyes, long legs. She’s modeled since she was 9; recently, with a lingerie specialty. Not long ago, she appeared on the cover of FHM magazine in a bikini, a career high point. Beth, though, apparently feels some pressure on her modeling prospects. It’s her ass. She says she can’t stand her ass.

The thought moves Howard. “Honey,” Howard tells her. “You’re my sex object. I want to see your ass. I want you to walk around the apartment naked.”

“Never!” gasps Beth.

Howard grabs Beth’s hand. “Beth doesn’t think she looks good, and I’m like, ‘You’re insane.’ ”


“No,” Beth says. “I can doll myself up and be fine, but, no, I have a really poor self-image—really, it’s bad. Really bad.”

“We’re two insecure people,” Howard says, shrugging.

Howard pulls Beth’s hand onto his lap. It’s an adorable scene. A goofy V-shaped smile settles on his face. It’s like he’s wearing a slice of pie. It softens his features, doubles his chin. Howard might be on his prom night, though, of course, Beth is the type of beauty Howard couldn’t ever have taken to the prom. Howard was an ungainly teen; Beth was homecoming queen. “I can’t believe I’m with the homecoming queen!” Howard sometimes says.

For Howard, his fucking happy marriage, which ended in 1999, was a different kind of relationship. “Alison wanted somebody who was involved with her and did things with her,” Howard says. “And I wasn’t fitting the bill.” He squirreled himself away in the basement. “She kind of confronted the sort of lack of marriage that we had,” says Howard. “What I think ended us . . . we both had problems with that lack of passion. I’m sure it wasn’t often enough, ’cause I was gross.”

Part of Howard hates being divorced. (Alison remarried a year later and is currently a practicing psychoanalyst. “I’m now very happy and leading the life I always wanted to,” she says.) Howard’s life works better now, too. For one thing, that schizy feeling is gone. “I used to think I was two different guys,” Howard says. “I was very sure that I was one way on the air and then when I come home, I’m Ward Cleaver and I don’t have any weird thoughts.”

Howard has come to a different conclusion. “That’s horseshit,” he explains. “That guy on the radio is me. And when I get off the radio, I behave differently, but I’ve got to own the fact that I’m fascinated by strippers. I’m really sexual. I’m curious about everything. That’s a much healthier way to look at who I am, I think.”

Howard had expected to be one of those divorced guys who goes around sleeping with everyone. “You would think,” Howard says. “But I found out that that’s not who I am. It was all fantasy. I didn’t feel right just sleeping with someone. It’s not my thing. I feel like it’s a use: a use of me and use of them,” he says. “There’s too many bad feelings afterwards.”

The evening Howard met Beth at a dinner party, he was feeling particularly lonely, missing his daughters, who range from 12 to college age. He and Beth talked till three or four in the morning. And the next day, they hung out, watching movies at Howard’s.

“We were like, ‘Wow, this is so nice,’ ” Howard explains. “We connected and we hung out and it was great, and I didn’t want to give up that feeling.”

Beth hadn’t listened to Howard’s show much—still doesn’t. But she had an impression. “He was a crazy maniac,” she says. “Like, that was my impression of him.”

They met five and a half years ago. Last year, she moved in with Howard. Howard doesn’t want to ever remarry, which Beth says is fine. “I never had that burning desire to get married,” says Beth. “If he wanted to get married and we decided, he’s the one I would want to marry. But I’m okay. I never had the burning desire to have children . . . yet.”


Howard pushes back into the couch and crosses his fingers out of Beth’s view. A pie-slice smile settles on his face.

“Most of the marriages we know are all fucked up and miserable,” says Howard helpfully. “Out of everyone we know, we’re the happiest. We think, anyway. We believe.”

“Oh, we’re for sure the happiest,” says Beth.

Howard, though, requires a lot of effort on Beth’s part. He’s high maintenance.

“I don’t think I am high maintenance,” Howard protests initially, then adds, “I think therapy’s helping a lot.” Howard goes four times a week. “Beth would be the first one to say it’s all about me . . . ”

“It’s all about him,” says Beth. She wags her head good-naturedly, “but I’m okay with it. We’re good together.”

“I am self-centered, and I don’t know how you change that, but I am really working on trying to be empathetic in my relationship with Beth and understanding where she’s coming from.”

“You’re doing a great job,” says Beth.

“I think we’re on the right path,” says Howard.

Of course, she makes clear, “he needs attention. He’s very needy.”

“I’m a needy person,” says Howard. He nods his head, and the fuzzy circle of hair bounces.

“He’s very sensitive. He needs constant adoration and—”

“I do. I need her to pay attention to me. I feel bad for this woman.”

Howard is truly worried. Howard’s relationship with his fans has often been the most potent in his life. The other evening, Howard listened to a roundtable of his superfans, a competitive category, on Sirius. They talked about their favorite moments of his K-Rock shows.

Beth walked in. Howard says that, in general, “she has taught me not to be so serious and to lighten up a little bit.” That time she couldn’t distract him.

“You sensed a vibe from me that I was upset,” says Beth.

Howard did. But he couldn’t tear himself away. “This,” he says, referring to the plans for Sirius, “is my sex now.” It’s a joke. Sort of. Listening to his superfans talk about the universe that is Howard Stern charges him up. “That connection between me and the audience gets a little too important,” Howard says.

Beth’s rarely seen Howard like this, and she’s thrilled for him. “I feel it’s just the rush of what’s ahead. All the anticipation and all the ideas are flowing,” Beth says. But she misses Howard. “I do miss you lately, but I know that there’s an end.” They’re still holding hands, working out their relationship in real time, like a radio show. Sometimes they talk to each other, sometimes to me. “I hope that it’s not going to be five years of this,” Beth says, no doubt to Howard, though she looks at me.

“No,” says Howard softly. Howard assures her he misses her, too. He’s solicitous, almost pained. This particular complaint strikes home; his work obsession was one reason his marriage dissolved. “Honey, I swear to you, I’m going to balance this out because I miss being with you,” he says. “I mean, we have a great life together and I know how important it is to sort of spend time together and be together, so it’s my selfishness that I want it all. I want the radio thing going and I want, I want this full relationship—”

“We have great chemistry,” says Beth.

“We have a great—that’s the exact word—”

“I answer his sentence—” she says.

“It’s true, we really feel this great connection. I feel it.”

Beth’s not complaining; she’s a good sport. “I think I’m going to get him back,” she says. “I hope.”

“I am not fucking up this relationship,” says Howard grimly. “I don’t want to keep repeating my life.”

For one thing there’s the sex, girlfriend sex, not wife sex, though Alison was a fine sex partner. Still, Beth’s the homecoming queen, the shiksa goddess with a closetful of lingerie.

“I’ve never felt more comfortable with somebody sexually and more excited about, I mean, it’s . . . ”

Howard pauses. He looks at Beth. “Honey, go in the other room.” Then he looks at me. “You got to try her out.”

“Could you imagine?” says Beth, good sport to the end.

Holiday Helper

November 27, 2005
The Goods
Not for Edward Scissorhands
By BRENDAN I. KOERNER

TO describe the two customary ways to cut a swath of gift wrap, Scott Pearson uses a pair of onomatopoeic names: “clip clip” and “zip zip.” The clip-clip method involves slowly snipping one’s way across the paper with a pair of scissors, opening and closing the blades every few inches. The zip-zip technique consists of keeping the scissors’ blades ajar and sliding them forward – a swifter option, but also one prone to error.

“The zipping thing will work sometimes,” said Mr. Pearson, laboratory manager for the stationery products division of 3M in St. Paul. “But sometimes it won’t, and the paper will tear.”

To help prevent such tribulations, Mr. Pearson created a replacement for the imprecise scissors of yore: the new Scotch paper cutter. The gadget, which resembles a toothbrush without bristles, is intended to slice through gift wrap rapidly and reliably, propelled by a fluid hand motion akin to sliding a pizza tray into an oven.

The cutter, the size of a pen, has a small blade at one end, tucked between a plastic arch and a thin plastic tongue. When an inch of gift wrap is placed in this alcove, the cutter’s shape forces the paper to curl slightly. Adding a small degree of curvature to the paper makes it easier to cut, Mr. Pearson said, citing the immutable laws of physics. He added, however, that too much curvature can cause unsightly creases, so 3M’s researchers were meticulous in determining the cutter’s dimensions.

They also learned the hard way that it would be wise to place the blade deep inside its plastic nook. When Mr. Pearson and his associates began designing the cutter in January, they came up with several prototypes that were more hazardous, including a two-handed tool nearly a foot long and a naked blade inspired by the X-Acto knife. The testing process with these implements did not go smoothly, to say the least. “We were showing up at work with bad cuts,” Mr. Pearson said. “We were showing up with bandages on our fingers.”

The final prototype, which took five weeks to complete, poses few safety hazards. The blade’s alcove is too narrow to accommodate a finger or toe, and the blade itself is firmly anchored in the handle, so it can’t be jostled free.

Mr. Pearson said the cutter, though intended primarily for gift wrap, could also expedite tasks like clipping coupons or recipes. Some members of focus groups convened by 3M to test the cutter’s user-friendliness suggested more outlandish applications. “They wanted to cut wires, and I think somebody was trying to do bubble wrap with it,” Mr. Pearson said. “That’s a little outside of what we want it to do.”

I found that the cutter, which costs $6.49 and has been available at Target stores since October, is stymied by both speaker wire and bubble wrap. It does a decent job of cutting cereal boxes, however, and whizzes through gift wrap, drugstore circulars and even most junk mail. An extra-thick envelope containing a credit card offer was the lone resister.

The paper cutter, of course, has one last, less tangible application: to bolster the visibility of the Scotch brand during the end-of-year high season. According to 3M, the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas accounts for roughly half of all sales of transparent tape to home consumers.

But can the new paper cutter push scissors toward extinction? Cross-bladed scissors, after all, have been around since ancient Rome, and generations have been raised as either clip-clippers or zip-zippers. And what would the holidays be without a few gift-wrapping mishaps?

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top

Nutcracker

Paul Kolnik/New York City Ballet

A scene from “The Nutcracker,” City Ballet’s seasonal offering of George Balanchine’s production, at the New York State Theater.

November 28, 2005
Dance Review | New York City Ballet
Somebody Wake Up the Sugar Plum Fairy; It’s That Time of Year Again
By JENNIFER DUNNING

George Balanchine’s production of “The Nutcracker” is the gold standard, with high-tech stage effects imbued with homespun magic and a believable portrayal of a loving family. The purity of Balanchine’s choreography adds to the production, too, from his first-act evocation of the ordered turbulence of a snowstorm to vivid character dances and the pristine classicism of the second act.

It takes a lot to dim that enduring magic. But the lead dancers in the New York City Ballet’s production nearly did on Friday night in the first “Nutcracker” of the season, at the New York State Theater, leaving the heavy lifting to the cast of children and a few adults. Sofiane Sylve danced the Sugar Plum as if she were counting the minutes until the company returned to the regular repertory in January. Hers was a shockingly formulaic performance, and her behavior in the grand pas de deux, when at one moment she seemed to be tugging her partner after her, was even worse.

Charles Askegard, Ms. Sylve’s hapless Cavalier, actually sighed deeply at one point and danced like a whipped puppy. Even the dependably exhilarating Ashley Bouder came up short in a technically exciting but brittle performance that was more icicle than Dewdrop.

It fell to Jennifer Tinsley – who made the often faded-looking dance of the Marzipan Shepherdesses come alive with her finely articulated upper body – to remind you of the ballet’s inherent eloquence.

Daniel Ulbricht made something vibrant of the Tea divertissement; Robert La Fosse was unusually gentle as the mysterious old Herr Drosselmeier; Amar Ramasar brought an amusing touch of braggadocio to the Mouse King; and Austin Laurent’s toy Soldier solo had just the right mix of crispness and ferocity.

Most of all, this year’s crop of children, rehearsed by Garielle Whittle, stood out for their liveliness and lack of affectation. Isabella DeVivo’s Marie was a natural little girl, bold and retiring in turn and never saccharine. Sebastien Peskind made her little brother, Fritz, as touching as he was naughty. Ghaleb Kayali was both regal and blessedly simple as the young prince.

Andrea Quinn, the evening’s conductor, and the City Ballet orchestra, with Kurt Nikkanen on the violin, made the sumptuous Tchaikovsky score sing.

The New York City Ballet will perform “The Nutcracker” through Dec. 30at the New York State Theater, (212) 870-5570.


Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top

Craigslist

From sfweekly.com
Originally published by SF Weekly 2005-11-30
©2005 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.

Craig$list.com
The much-loved Web site is taking millions from Bay Area newspapers and causing layoffs that adversely affect coverage. And its founder’s well-intentioned support of citizen journalism has a slim chance of fixing the problem.
By Ryan Blitstein

Gabriela Hasbun Newmark’s home office, like his citizen journalism efforts, is still a work in progress.   More than 6 million classified ads are posted to Craigslist’s 190 worldwide sites each month. Gabriela Hasbun The deck behind Newmark’s new home overlooks a forested ravine.

Who / What: Craigslist Craig Newmark citizen journalism

Stents vs Surgery

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times Dr. John J. Ricotta works with another surgeon at Stony Brook University Hospital on Long Island. Dr. Ricotta sought training in stenting, to give patients more options.

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times Dr. John J. Ricotta, right, said that in most cases he would still probably prefer surgery to stenting.

Stent vs. Scalpel

Election Fraud in 2004

Lyn Davis Lear Bio

11.30.2005

Paging Frank Rich! GAO confirms – 2004 Election Was Stolen (26 comments )

READ MORE: Iraq, Dick Cheney, 2006, New York Times, 2008, Karl Rove, Investigations, George W. Bush

I had a chance to talk to my hero, Frank Rich, a few months ago about election fraud and he claimed he didn’t know much about it. Perhaps he has his plate full unraveling the administration’s lies about Iraq, but with the midterm elections coming up someone has to take this issue on.

I was listening to NPR yesterday and they had some young computer hackers on bragging about how easy, embarrassingly easy, it is to switch votes on the Deibold machines. Bill Clinton once mentioned that India has flawless electronic voting while ours is mired in unaccountability. I hope Frank and other journalists and bloggers of his caliber read this article by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman about the GAO report on the 2004 election. Paul Krugman and the NYTimes editorial board have been good on this issue in the past, but it has been a while since anyone has raised the subject.

The Government Accountability Office is the only government office we have left that is ethical, non-partisan and incorruptible. They investigate and tell it like it is. Thank God for them. This report is very serious and must get more attention. It has taken years for the mainstream press and Congress to finally understand what we in the blogisphere have known since 2000. This administration will distort and cheat about anything and everything to get its way. If this report got the attention it deserves and broke through the static of our 500-channel universe, it could be the coup de grace of the Bush White House.

Powerful Government Accountability Office report confirms key 2004 stolen election findings by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman October 26, 2005

As a legal noose appears to be tightening around the Bush/Cheney/Rove inner circle, a shocking government report shows the floor under the legitimacy of their alleged election to the White House is crumbling.

The latest critical confirmation of key indicators that the election of 2004 was stolen comes in an extremely powerful, penetrating report from the Government Accountability Office that has gotten virtually no mainstream media coverage.

The government’s lead investigative agency is known for its general incorruptibility and its thorough, in-depth analyses. Its concurrence with assertions widely dismissed as “conspiracy theories” adds crucial new weight to the case that Team Bush has no legitimate business being in the White House.

Nearly a year ago, senior Judiciary Committee Democrat John Conyers (D-MI) asked the GAO to investigate electronic voting machines as they were used during the November 2, 2004 presidential election. The request came amidst widespread complaints in Ohio and elsewhere that often shocking irregularities defined their performance.

According to CNN, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee received “more than 57,000 complaints” following Bush’s alleged re-election. Many such concerns were memorialized under oath in a series of sworn statements and affidavits in public hearings and investigations conducted in Ohio by the Free Press and other election protection organizations.

The non-partisan GAO report has now found that, “some of [the] concerns about electronic voting machines have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes.”

The United States is the only major democracy that allows private partisan corporations to secretly count and tabulate the votes with proprietary non-transparent software. Rev. Jesse Jackson, among others, has asserted that “public elections must not be conducted on privately-owned machines.” The CEO of one of the most crucial suppliers of electronic voting machines, Warren O’Dell of Diebold, pledged before the 2004 campaign to deliver Ohio and thus the presidency to George W. Bush.

Bush’s official margin of victory in Ohio was just 118,775 votes out of more than 5.6 million cast. Election protection advocates argue that O’Dell’s statement still stands as a clear sign of an effort, apparently successful, to steal the White House.

Among other things, the GAO confirms that:

1. Some electronic voting machines “did not encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, and it was possible to alter both without being detected.” In other words, the GAO now confirms that electronic voting machines provided an open door to flip an entire vote count. More than 800,000 votes were cast in Ohio on electronic voting machines, some seven times Bush’s official margin of victory.

2. “It was possible to alter the files that define how a ballot looks and works so that the votes for one candidate could be recorded for a different candidate.” Numerous sworn statements and affidavits assert that this did happen in Ohio 2004.

3. “Vendors installed uncertified versions of voting system software at the local level.” 3. Falsifying election results without leaving any evidence of such an action by using altered memory cards can easily be done, according to the GAO.

4. The GAO also confirms that access to the voting network was easily compromised because not all digital recording electronic voting systems (DREs) had supervisory functions password-protected, so access to one machine provided access to the whole network. This critical finding confirms that rigging the 2004 vote did not require a “widespread conspiracy” but rather the cooperation of a very small number of operatives with the power to tap into the networked machines and thus change large numbers of votes at will. With 800,000 votes cast on electronic machines in Ohio, flipping the number needed to give Bush 118,775 could be easily done by just one programmer.

5. Access to the voting network was also compromised by repeated use of the same user IDs combined with easily guessed passwords. So even relatively amateur hackers could have gained access to and altered the Ohio vote tallies.

6. The locks protecting access to the system were easily picked and keys were simple to copy, meaning, again, getting into the system was an easy matter.

7. One DRE model was shown to have been networked in such a rudimentary fashion that a power failure on one machine would cause the entire network to fail, re-emphasizing the fragility of the system on which the Presidency of the United States was decided.

8. GAO identified further problems with the security protocols and background screening practices for vendor personnel, confirming still more easy access to the system.

In essence, the GAO study makes it clear that no bank, grocery store or mom & pop chop shop would dare operate its business on a computer system as flimsy, fragile and easily manipulated as the one on which the 2004 election turned.

The GAO findings are particularly damning when set in the context of an election run in Ohio by a Secretary of State simultaneously working as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign. Far from what election theft skeptics have long asserted, the GAO findings confirm that the electronic network on which 800,000 Ohio votes were cast was vulnerable enough to allow a a tiny handful of operatives — or less — to turn the whole vote count using personal computers operating on relatively simple software.

The GAO documentation flows alongside other crucial realities surrounding the 2004 vote count. For example:

The exit polls showed Kerry winning in Ohio, until an unexplained last minute shift gave the election to Bush. Similar definitive shifts also occurred in Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico, a virtual statistical impossibility.

A few weeks prior to the election, an unauthorized former ES&S voting machine company employee, was caught on the ballot-making machine in Auglaize County

Election officials in Mahoning County now concede that at least 18 machines visibly transferred votes for Kerry to Bush. Voters who pushed Kerry’s name saw Bush’s name light up, again and again, all day long. Officials claim the problems were quickly solved, but sworn statements and affidavits say otherwise. They confirm similar problems inFranklin County (Columbus). Kerry’s margins in both counties were suspiciously low.

A voting machine in Mahoning County recorded a negative 25 million votes for Kerry. The problem was allegedly fixed.

In Gahanna Ward 1B, at a fundamentalist church, a so-called “electronic transfer glitch” gave Bush nearly 4000 extra votes when only 638 people voted at that polling place. The tally was allegedly corrected, but remains infamous as the “loaves and fishes” vote count.

In Franklin County, dozens of voters swore under oath that their vote for Kerry faded away on the DRE without a paper trail.

In Miami County, at 1:43am after Election Day, with the county’s central tabulator reporting 100% of the vote – 19,000 more votes mysteriously arrived; 13,000 were for Bush at the same percentage as prior to the additional votes, a virtual statistical impossibility.

In Cleveland, large, entirely implausible vote totals turned up for obscure third party candidates in traditional Democratic African-American wards. Vote counts in neighboring wards showed virtually no votes for those candidates, with 90% going instead for Kerry.

Prior to one of Blackwell’s illegitimate “show recounts,” technicians from Triad voting machine company showed up unannounced at the Hocking County Board of Elections and removed the computer hard drive.

In response to official information requests, Shelby and other counties admit to having discarded key records and equipment before any recount could take place.

In a conference call with Rev. Jackson, Attorney Cliff Arnebeck, Attorney Bob Fitrakis and others, John Kerry confirmed that he lost every precinct in New Mexico that had a touchscreen voting machine. The losses had no correlation with ethnicity, social class or traditional party affiliation—only with the fact that touchscreen machines were used.

In a public letter, Rep. Conyers has stated that “by and large, when it comes to a voting machine, the average voter is getting a lemon – the Ford Pinto of voting technology. We must demand better.”

But the GAO report now confirms that electronic voting machines as deployed in 2004 were in fact perfectly engineered to allow a very small number of partisans with minimal computer skills and equipment to shift enough votes to put George W. Bush back in the White House.

Given the growing body of evidence, it appears increasingly clear
that’s exactly what happened.

GAO Report

Revised 10/27/05

Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA’S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, available via http://freepress.org and http://harveywasserman.com. Their What Happened in Ohio?, with Steve Rosenfeld, will be published in Spring, 2006, by New Press.

Send to a friend

Post a Comment

Read all posts by Lyn Davis Lear

Elia Kazan

Columbia Pictures

November 27, 2005
‘Elia Kazan,’ by Richard Schickel
On the Kazan Front
Review by JOHN SIMON

A BIOGRAPHER’S life is not an easy one. Aside from taxing demands of I.R.S. (insight, research, style), there is the supreme test of tact: knowing what to include, what to exclude. There are not only sins, but also virtues, of omission. A good biography is like a good marriage: biographer and biographee (if they knew each other personally) must have a mutual love, but a discriminatingly nuanced rather than blind one. And both had better be interesting. All this obtains in Richard Schickel’s “Elia Kazan: A Biography,” the life story of the distinguished stage and screen director.

No mere page turner, this is a page devourer, generating the kind of suspense that is usually the province of the playwright or novelist. But Elia Kazan’s life, as lived and written up here, is dramatic to a fault, and easily as strange as fiction.

To start with the prose, take this sentence from the discussion of the making of Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons,” during which, Schickel says, Kazan started “inhabiting that sublime zone directors sometimes achieve, a zone in which they sense that their every decision is the right one.” Promptly, there is even better: Kazan “wanted his actors to bring their discoveries to him, like children finding pretty objects on a beach.” Lest, however, this make Kazan out to be a laissez-faire director, there follows, “Impact – the more shattering the better – was everything with Kazan.” And there you have him: permissive yet manipulative, enlightened but also commercial.

Kazan is a tough subject because there is so much to deal with. Equally renowned as a stage and screen director, he also became a lacerating autobiographer and prolific novelist. He helped found the enormously influential Actors Studio, cradle of the questionable “Method.” He kept profuse, revelatory notes on virtually every project he undertook; there are numerous published articles by and interviews with him, including a book-length one with the French critic Michel Ciment. Further, he appears in autobiographies by major writers. Moreover, as a friendly witness naming names to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he became politically controversial, necessitating knowledge of the McCarthy era and its long shadow. Lastly, this complex and contradictory figure has inspired reams of important film and drama criticism.

And even that is not quite the last. There remains Kazan the great adulterous womanizer, with his passion for blondes. From the semiautobiographical novel “The Arrangement,” Schickel quotes, “Being Greek, blondness is my fetish.” (Opposites, you’ll recall, attract.) “All three of Kazan’s wives were blondes,” Schickel writes. “Almost invariably his leading ladies were, too.”

Like Kazan, Schickel names names. The major extramarital affairs are there: the extended ones with the actresses Constance Dowling (causing a serious rift with the first wife, Molly Day Thatcher) and Barbara Loden (later legalized); the more playful ones, too, as with Marilyn Monroe, whose favors he shared with Miller; and even some minor ones. Their treatment is commendably succinct, short on gossipy details.

As for research, there is enough here for a lesser biographer to leave you bleary-eyed: Kazan’s often fussily meticulous tomes could stop a portcullis, never mind a door. Schickel has clearly grappled with them all, but keeps matters relatively concise yet amply informative. No reader will leave either hungry or unduly replete. As for insight, Schickel makes good use of others’ as well as his own. Aptly he quotes a passage like the following from Ciment’s book, about a confrontation with the notorious studio head Louis B. Mayer during Kazan’s shooting of “The Sea of Grass,” concerning Katharine Hepburn’s crying scene:

MAYER. She cries too much.

KAZAN. But that is the scene, Mr. Mayer.

MAYER. But the channel of her tears is wrong.

KAZAN. What do you mean?

MAYER. The channel of her tears goes too close to her nostril, it looks like it’s coming out of her nose like snot.

KAZAN. Jesus, I can’t do anything with the channel of her tears.

MAYER. Young man: you have one thing to learn. We are in the business of making beautiful pictures of beautiful people and anybody who does not acknowledge that should not be in this business.

As Schickel points out, Mayer “was, in a sense, right.” He expatiates on how all this affected Kazan, and why he too was right not to yield to his temptation to quit, but instead “at least insist on doing things his way and get fired.” Which did not happen.

In 1913, the 4-year-old Kazan, whose family name was Kazanjioglou, arrived in the United States from Anatolia with his mother; his father and an uncle had preceded them, starting a rug business for which Elia seemed destined. His formidable father, George, was the only man Kazan ever feared, yet he defied him in choice of career. Sensibly, Schickel wastes little space on family history, or on Kazan’s studies at Williams College and the Yale Drama School, from neither of which the young man felt he had gained much.

Not so, however, from the Group Theater, into which he inveigled his way through charm and sweat, eventually reaching the top echelon. He had some respect for Harold Clurman, but scant use for Lee Strasberg, whom he resolved to supplant. Beginning as a character actor, he specialized in gangster roles; no less a critic than J. Edgar Hoover proclaimed him the most authentic hood he had seen. He befriended Clifford Odets and appeared in “Waiting for Lefty” and “Golden Boy”; in Chicago, the Mafia was so impressed as to get him better housing than he could afford. Still, Clurman had told him, “You may have talent for the theater, but it’s certainly not for acting.”

DIRECTING, he gradually decided, was a more “manly art” than acting. He also joined the Communist Party in 1935, but left it in disgust after 19 months. “I understood Communism better than they did,” he was to declare. By directing a popular downtown Jewish comedy, “Café Crown,” he gained a foothold in the commercial theater. Next he wangled the job directing Thornton Wilder’s demanding “Skin of Our Teeth” with a notable cast. He was only 34 and inexperienced, but his services came cheap.

That piece was a milestone. Everyone in it was fighting with almost everyone else: Fredric March and his wife, Florence Eldridge, with Tallulah Bankhead; Florence Reed with Bankhead; and, most ferociously, Bankhead with Kazan. Tallulah did her level best to get him fired, but he survived her tantrums and maneuvers. Later he said she had “made a director of me,” because “every fighter has one fight that makes or breaks him. That was my fight.”

Soon Kazan was working with Helen Hayes, for whom he could do nothing, and Mary Martin, whom, in “One Touch of Venus,” he was able to make “more down-to-earth, less of a soubrette.” In the delightful “Jacobowsky and the Colonel,” he learned from its beguiling star, Oscar Karlweis, that there was more to acting than the glorified grubbiness of the Group Theater. He also realized that his great successes were to be built around star turns, without which his shows would fail.

Pretty soon he branched out into movies, where his first success was “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” in 1945. Here he developed his technique, which often consisted of setting up creative antagonisms between actors, or, as in the case of the young Peggy Ann Garner, of tormenting her into evincing grief for her alcoholic father, played by the excellent James Dunn. The film allowed Kazan to address one of his perennially favorite topics, that of “the immigrant outsider, ever the imperfect American,” which no success could quite uproot from his mind, producing a neediness that “drove almost all his actions – from his marriages to his politics.”

We are taken in breathtaking, often riotous but never excessive, detail through Kazan’s many achievements. We get the making of such hits as “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Death of a Salesman,”plus several more by Williams and Miller, vividly conveying how much the plays owed to him, how different their authors’ careers might have been without him. Also works by lesser dramatists like Robert Anderson, William Inge and Archibald MacLeish, whose genesis is no less stimulating. Even a number of flops provide compelling evidence of how effectively, even if sometimes adversarially, Kazan worked with different playwrights and players. Especially gripping is the interaction with Marlon Brando, whom he loved, and James Dean, whom he didn’t.

And then all those movies! “Boomerang” and “Panic in the Streets,” with its exciting location photography; then “Streetcar” and his heroic grappling with censors and Vivien Leigh,the affair with whom Kazan was to ungallantly brag about. The fine “Viva Zapata!,” with Brando again and a screenplay by John Steinbeck, was nevertheless, as Schickel shows, a problem picture. The biography goes exuberantly to town on “On the Waterfront,” the collaboration with Budd Schulberg, an account so rich in funny and grim particulars that it could form a terse, mandatory volume for all film courses. It is Brando’s on-screen best, later prompting Martin Scorsese’s observation that Kazan “was forging a new acting style.”

Indeed, Brando and Eva Marie Saint infused the film with great tenderness. As Saint was to comment about her director, “There was such empathy felt from this man.” Kazan knew how to get to know his actors intimately, to tremendous artistic effect.

Another major success was “East of Eden,”again with assistance from Steinbeck. Here the technique of sharpening intramural antagonism was perfected, in this case between Dean and Raymond Massey as his father, eliciting rewardingly taut performances. For autobiographical reasons, the father-son conflict kept running through, and lending power to, Kazan’s oeuvre. Schickel’s pungent account of “Baby Doll” reawakens interest in that memorable but neglected comedy, Kazan’s most erotic picture. As his wife, the patrician, puritanical Molly, hitherto a useful literary adviser, became ever more “calcified” to him, Kazan started an affair with Barbara Loden. Molly’s opposite, she was passionately lower-class, free from abstract ideas, very attractive and, of course, blond.

With the satirical “Face in the Crowd,” Kazan returned to a favorite theme, “the hidden ambiguity of idealistic enterprises.” Schickel also makes a strong case for “Wild River,” about problems involving the Tennessee Valley Authority; here Kazan worked with Montgomery Clift and Lee Remick to splendid effect, but meager box-office returns.

Kazan’s last hit movie was “Splendor in the Grass” in 1961, with Warren Beatty (in his film debut) and Natalie Wood, from whom Kazan evoked superb performances, well beyond Inge’s script and powerfully caught by Boris Kaufman’s camera. Onstage, meanwhile, Kazan was stuck with Arthur Miller’s political and marital auto-whitewash, “After the Fall,” which, in spite of the shaky writing, provided Loden with her greatest success.

Kazan’s scrappiness comes across in such statements as “It’s stimulating to dislike someone, don’t you think?” But the later phases of his career were less than stimulating. The marriage to Loden soured, and though his unremarkable novels kept morale and cash flow going, the Kazan star was fading. Yet there was still a happy adventure with a recent widow on a romantic trip to Europe. And Elia faithfully nursed the by-then-estranged Barbara through her two-year-long losing battle with cancer.

His final movie, “The Last Tycoon,” flopped: “The resilience has gone out of me. And the fun.” To a film teacher he remarked, “Tell your students they’ll throw you away eventually.” But he had a good third marriage with Frances Rudge, a blond Englishwoman. His last novel, “Beyond the Aegean,” a sequel to his family-historical book and movie “America, America,” was reviewed practically nowhere. Afflicted with deafness and arteriosclerosis, he was only half there when receiving his controversial lifetime-achievement Oscar in 1999. Four years later he died, having just turned 94.

Schickel got to know Kazan by making a television documentary about him. He also put together the film clips introducing that rather stormy Oscar presentation. He is cogent about Kazan’s politics, and makes a convincing case for Kazan’s naming of names to HUAC – hardly heroic, but far from indefensible. Only a self-justifying ad Kazan took out in The New York Times, urged on him and written by Molly, earns Schickel’s just censure.

L ong ago, Schickel and I edited an obscure anthology together, but since those days we never communed or even communicated. I neglected, probably wrongly, his many books and TV documentaries. So I was stunned by the sharpness, levelheadedness and multifariousness of “Elia Kazan,” some errors notwithstanding. There are typos (“Irwin” for Erwin Piscator, “Tavianni” for the Taviani brothers, “Brodsky” for Harold Brodkey). Also problems of accidence (“whom some thought was a journalist”), subject and verb agreement, tautology (“reverted back”) and the nonword “thusly.” “The Changeling” is a 17th-century, not a 15th-century, play. “A bathetically bathed Oscar broadcast” is clumsy, and how is progress of a car “not enlightened” by knots of demonstrators?

But let’s forgive a book that, without any flab, manages to be, over and above a biography, a stirring bit of social history and a panorama of Broadway and Hollywood during what may have been their glory days. It could not be a more pertinent study of a spellbinding subject.

John Simon is the author of “John Simon on Theater,” “John Simon on Film” and “John Simon on Music.” He reviews theater for Bloomberg News.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top

Watchmen

Fighting Evil, Quoting Nietzsche
Did the comic book really need to grow up?
By Tom Shone
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2005, at 3:30 PM ET

Alan Moore’s Watchmen, originally published in 1986, was the comic-book series that supposedly revolutionized the industry, defrocked the superhero, and invented the graphic novel at a stroke. Yet reading Watchmen today is a distinctly underwhelming experience. Its fans would say that is appropriate: The world’s first anti-heroic comic book is supposed to be, well, anti-heroic. The mode is pyrrhic, deflationary, its tone deadpan, spent. Either way, like a math savant at a party, the book seems to shrink from the hullabaloo surrounding its approaching 20^th anniversary. A new edition, retitled Absolute Watchmen and published this month by DC, has drawn critical superlatives and comparisons with Pulp Fiction and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In truth, it’s more like the White Album, a fractious, blitzed masterwork. This is not a comic book that wants you to go “Wow.” It is a comic book that wants to let the air out of your tires.

Released the same year as Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns—which turned the Batman mythos on its head and emptied it into the gutter—Moore’s book does the same for an entire alternate universe of superheroes. Outlawed since 1977, they now sit around in dark basements drinking beer, contemplating their middle-aged spread, and reminiscing about the good old days—just like Mr. Incredible. One, Ozymandias, has set up a lucrative franchise selling posters, diet books, and toy soldiers based on himself. Only one still paces the city: Rorschach, a psychotic vigilante attempting to wash the vermin from the streets, a la Travis Bickle. When one of his colleagues, the Comedian, is thrown from his penthouse-suite window, Rorschach decides that “someone is gunning for masks” and tries to corral his old teammates together for one last hurrah. Such is the inverted central conceit of the book, in which superheroes are far too busy defending themselves from the world to contemplate saving it.

And what a wicked world it is! Both Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four glancingly confronted the political turmoil of the times—drugs, racism, Vietnam—but Watchmen was the first comic book to allow the disenchantment to take root, albeit a decade too late. Watchmen was set in the ’80s but evinces a distinct nostalgia for the anti-American sentiment of the ’70s, when Moore was growing up in England: He loved the United States for its comics, hated it for its politics, and out of that was born the world of Watchmen, a world where Nixon is in his sixth term as president, nuclear apocalypse is looming, and the superheroes are trying to shake off accusations about their involvement in everything from Vietnam to Iran-Contra. “Yes we were kinky, yes we were Nazis, all those things people say,” admits one, Nite Owl, in his autobiography Under the Hood, chunks of which are excerpted at length along with disquisitions on the arms race, criminal psychology, and quotations from Nietzsche and Bob Dylan. What on earth was Moore trying to get us to do? Read?

The suspicion lingers that Watchmen was more a triumph of writing than draftsmanship. The graphics were by Dave Gibbons, one of many artists who made their name on Judge Dredd, although he always felt a bit like the fill-in guy, lacking the ravaged punk impudence of Mike McMahon or the ebullient absurdity of Brian Bolland. Gibbons’ style was neat, tidy, and strong-jawed, which lent his work for Watchmen a flicker of irony, although it was unclear whether the hokey costumes he came up with for Moore’s superheroes were deliberately hokey or just the kind of stuff he came up with anyway. In which case, the joke was on him and the irony was all Moore’s. A typical comic script is 32 pages; for Watchmen, Moore’s ran to 150 pages, heavy with voice-over narration and speech balloons. Gibbons found himself cramming his graphics into a neat box-arrangement of nine frames per page, and the result was a minimalist, Philip Glass-y, metronymic tone. Watchmen also took comic-book chronology to new levels of complexity. It features an elaborate flashback structure and a fascination for slo-mo simultaneity that wouldn’t have embarrassed your average Modernist—when they coined the term “graphic novel” nobody mentioned that the novel in question was Ulysses—although how well this technique melded with the more straightforward dynamism of traditional comic-book panels is open to question.

Watchmen‘s whodunit plot was not allowed to kick into gear until late in the day and climaxes with Ozymandias spouting Postmodern art theory in his snowbound eyrie (“phosphor-dot swirls juxtapose; meanings coalesce from semiotic chaos before reverting to incoherence”). Even that old windbag the Silver Surfer might have hung his head in shame. The book’s action highlight, on the other hand, comes when Nite Owl finally shakes off his midlife crisis, dons his costume, and heads out on the town for one last night of kicking criminal butt. One gets the feeling that Moore wanted to make us feel guilty for enjoying this—to take in the episode as one would a guilty pleasure. “See apathy! Everybody escapin’ into comic books and TV! Makes me sick,” shouts a news vendor, peddling comics while the streets around him run red with blood.

Whether you take this self-reflexivity as evidence of a newfound sophistication on behalf of the comic book, or as self-hatred tricked out as superiority—that old adolescent standby—is up to you. Watchmen was unquestionably a landmark work, a masterpiece, even. Before Moore came along, comic books were not generally in the habit of quoting Nietzsche, or scrambling their time schemes, or berating their heroes for their crypto-fascist politics, or their readers for reading them. It was Moore’s slightly self-negating triumph to have allowed it to do so. But did the comic book have to “grow up”? The last time I looked, the only ones reading Ulysses and quoting Nietzsche were teenagers. No adult has time for aesthetic “difficulty” or “self-consciousness.” Life is too short. Frankly, we’d much rather be watching The Incredibles.

Tom Shone is a former critic for the (London) Sunday Times. He is author of Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer.

Huffington Blog

Arianna Huffington Bio

11.30.2005

Bush’s New Strategy for Victory: Stop Saying ‘Insurgents’ (11 comments )

READ MORE: Iraq, Dick Cheney, Saddam Hussein, George W. Bush

So “the insurgency” really is in its “last throes”.

No, not the effort to drive U.S. forces America out of Iraq — that continues unabated. I’m talking about the Bush administration’s decision to stop using the words “insurgency” and “insurgent” to describe the rebel forces.

Yesterday, Donald Rumsfeld said that “over the weekend” he’d had “an epiphany” that “this is a group of people who don’t merit the word ‘insurgency’”.

President Bush apparently had the same epiphany because in today’s big speech on Iraq he went to great pains to rebrand the enemy as “a combination of rejectionists, Saddamists, and terrorists”. Indeed, he only uttered “insurgents” one time in the entire speech — and even then it was when quoting a U.S. Lt. Colonel (who apparently has been too busy training Iraqi troops in Tikrit to have time for weekend vocabulary epiphanies).

So in the middle of a whole lot of the same tired rhetoric we’ve heard before (“September 11”, “as Iraqi security forces stand up, coalition forces can stand down”, “we will never back down, we will never give in”), here came the president’s latest “Plan for Victory in Iraq”: win the war on words.

Who says Bush’s only strategy is to “stay the course”? Not true. In previous big speeches, the administration set out to dazzle us with impressive-sounding numbers about the rapid growth of Iraqi forces. Now they’ve switched the focus to improved terminology. It’s Victory Through Vocabulary!

So “insurgents” are out and “rejectionists, Saddamists, and terrorists” are in. Here’s how the president broke down the new lexicon:

Rejectionists are “ordinary Iraqis, mostly Sunni Arabs” who “reject an Iraq in which they’re no longer the dominant group.” According to Bush, rejectionists make up “by far the largest” portion of “the enemy”.

Saddamists are former Saddam loyalists who “still harbor dreams of returning to power”. This group is “smaller” than the rejectionists “but more determined”. (Is it just me, or does “Saddamist” sound an awful lot like “Sodomite”? Hey, might as well shore up your evangelical base while charting your new victory vocabulary, right? Bush really brought this connection home when he referred to the “hard-core Saddamists… trying to foment anti-democratic sentiment amongst the larger Sunni community”. While buggering each other and pushing for gay marriage, no doubt).

And the terrorists? Well, they’re the ones who “share the same ideology as the terrorists who struck the United States on September 11”… the ones “responsible for most of the suicide bombings and the beheadings and the other atrocities we’ve seen on our television”. While calling them “the smallest” of the enemy groups, they are still clearly Bush’s favorite: he mentioned “terrorists” 42 times in his speech, compared to the five times he mentioned the “rejectionists” and the four times he brought up the “Saddamists”.

Following the president’s speech, White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett appeared on MSNBC and addressed the administration’s counter-“insurgency” strategy, saying the word had been replaced because ‘insurgents’ implies that they are on the side of the people.

Fine. But, at the end of the day, we are losing the war not because of what we call our enemies in Iraq but because of how the people of Iraq see our enemies — and the U.S. military.

And as long as American troops are seen as, what a report by an Iraqi National Assembly committee called, “occupation forces”; and as long as Shiite, Kurdish, and Sunni leaders agree, as they did at a U.S.-backed conference last week, that the insurgency is “legitimate”; and as long as Iraqi leaders like former Prime Minister Allawi and Shiite leader Abdul Aziz Hakim continue to paint a dark picture of what’s going on in George Bush’s Iraq, the president’s new victory vocabulary is just another pathetic diversion. A diversion ginned up to fight the enemy he is most concerned with: the rejectionists here at home who are finally rejecting his lies.

Send to a friend

Post a Comment

Read all posts by Arianna Huffington

Today’s Blogs

The Roberts Court Takes on Abortion
By Bidisha Banerjee
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2005, at 7:30 PM ET

Bloggers discuss the first abortion cases that the Supreme Court has heard in five years; they also respond to a Seymour Hersh piece about withdrawal from Iraq, and an FCC proposal for a la carte pricing for cable channels.

The Roberts court takes on abortion: The Supreme Court is hearing two abortion cases today. Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood is receiving the most attention. It concerns a New Hampshire law (that hasn’t yet gone into effect) that would require parental notification before a minor could have an abortion even if the minor’s health is at stake. (Listen to this morning’s arguments; read about the other case.)

As bloggers attempt to suss out whether the case is about health exceptions or parental notification, their views about abortion shine through. “While the major question in the Ayotte case is about health exceptions to abortion restrictions, the media has overwhelmingly been portraying it as a case about parental rights,” opines Laura Donnelly on Uncommon Sense, the blog of the progressive TomPaine.com. “The decisions in these cases could have sweeping practical implications about women’s abilities to actually access abortion services—potentially severely limiting reproductive choice even if Roe v. Wade remains untouched.” But Blogs for Bush‘s Matt Margolis is convinced that the case does fundamentally concern parental rights: “Planned Parenthood is trying to make this a case about women’s rights… But we’re not talking about women… We’re talking about minors… Children.” Adamantly Mike, a college student, agrees: “[A] sixteen-year-old cannot walk into a dentist’s office and have his teeth touched without parental permission. Abortion is an extremely invasive surgery. Why then, should it not be regulated under the same concern for the parents’ authority?”

Reporting from this morning’s hearing that there was “certainly no sign that Roe itself was in jeopardy,” SCOTUSblog‘s Lyle Denniston suggests that “the Court appeared to be dealing with the new cases as if abortion rights at this stage had become primarily a matter calling for technical legal precision.” Denniston notes that Chief Justice John Roberts “contributed to that impression.” However, liberal Echidne of the Snakes demurs. Quoting a news story that described Roberts as “sympathetic to the state”, she writes, “I suspect that the process of dismantling Roe will be a slow strip-tease, to keep the radical clerics at a fever pitch and their constituency voting for the Republican party.”

Read more about Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood. Read Dahlia Lithwick’s “Supreme Court Dispatch” on today’s hearing, and find out how to pronounce “Ayotte.”

Into thin air?: Seymour Hersh’s latest New Yorker article claims that current U.S. plans for withdrawing from Iraq involve increasing air strikes over the country. Hersh writes, “The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what.”

Some bloggers are comparing this strategy to previous American moves, both positive and negative. “The plan sounds very similar to the strategy used to great success in Afghanistan,” claims Benny’s World‘s Benny, a “media entrepreneur.” But on Democratic Daily Kos, Ademption makes the Vietnam analogy, discusses Hersh’s appearance to talk about the article on Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, and writes, “I think Mr. Hersh raises a HUGE concern. If we can’t rely on Iraqis to give us the proper intelligence on the ground, then how can we rely on the same intelligence sources to target the right people in airstrikes?”

“The reality is that protecting critical economic infrastructure from motivated attacks by native people is impossible without imposing a complete police state,” writes the wonkish Outlandish Josh, who discusses Hersh’s piece in context of the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq, a document that the president discussed today. Dismissing it as “an extended tautology,” Josh believes, “[I]t seems the war will grind on. Maybe more bombing; maybe more local paramilitaries; but basically the same war.” And The Lion’s Den‘s Aethern, is concerned: “I’m conflicted on this, because as a vet, I want my buddies to get their asses out of there as soon as possible, but if we replace boots on the ground with even more bombs and unaccountable mercenaries, then the very things that are enraging the Iraqis and fueling the insurgency will only be exacerbated, which will make things even more hellish on the troops that didn’t get lucky enough to be included in the PR drawdown.”

Read more about Hersh’s piece. Read Fred Kaplan’s analysis of President Bush’s speech in Slate.

Cable a la carte: The FCC’s Kevin Martin has suggested that cable and satellite channels should implement decency standards and/or a la carte pricing plans that would allow parents to select only the channels they want. (Read Martin’s oral statement to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.)

Some people think Martin might be on to something. “[I]s there any way to stop the a la carte system from eventually being implemented? It just makes too much sense and has too much positive consumer sentiment behind it to not make its way into standard practice,” insists Nicheplayer, a techie. “Indeed, why shouldn’t TV programming work exactly like the WWW, where people seek out and subscribe to what they like, and the news about good ‘shows’ is spread by word of mouth from one trusted friend or acquaintance to another?”

But libertarian bloggers think that Martin’s suggestions are a recipe for censorship. “[I]ndecency is in the eye of the beholder. For example, I think that the FCC is indecent. If I ask them, do you think they will commit group suicide or at least resign?” demands South Puget Sound Libertarian. And on Reason‘s Hit and Run blog, Nick Gillespie notes that Martin has asked, “You can always turn the television off and, of course, block the channels you don’t want [....] But why should you have to?” Gillespie’s answer: “Because It’s a Free Country, You Idiot!” He continues, “God forbid Smellivision ever happens–because you know the FCC will be in favor of blocking adult smells too.”

Read more about the FCC. Read Slate‘s Daniel Gross on Martin’s suggestion.

Got a question, comment, or suggestion? E-mail todaysblogs@slate.com.

Today’s Papers

Victory Strategery
By Andrew Rice
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2005, at 6:29 AM ET

The New York Times leads with a preview of President Bush’s speech at the U.S. Naval Academy today, where he is expected to unveil his “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq,” which critics argue is a little late in coming. The speech also tops the Wall Street Journal‘s world-wide newsbox. The Washington Post, which leads with a local story, off-leads a very different take on America’s future in Iraq, sitting in on a contentious town hall meeting held amid the falling mortar shells in Ramadi. The Los Angeles Times leads (at least online) with its second big Iraq break in two days, exposing a Pentagon-sponsored network that pays Iraqi newspapers to print dubiously favorable stories about the war. USA Today follows a scoop from yesterday’s WSJ: In a reversal, the Federal Communications Commission may now allow consumers to pick and choose which cable channels they want to subscribe to, rather than forcing them to buy expensive packages.

None of the other papers even front their pre-speech stories, and reading the NYT piece, it’s not hard to see why: The sneak-peek reporters got didn’t contain any bombshells (no pun intended)—though Bush will be asking Congress for an additional $3.9 billion to train Iraqi troops. Some analysts, like Slate‘s Fred Kaplan, think today’s speech will mark the beginning of the end of America’s occupation of Iraq. If so, Bush is being cagy about it, saying yesterday, “I want our troops to come home, but I don’t want them to come home without having achieved victory.” To that end, the administration will release a 27-page booklet outlining its “strategy for victory” today. The Times says that “much of it sounded like a list of goals for Iraq’s military, political and economic development rather than new prescriptions on how to accomplish the job.”

The WP‘s Ramadi dispatch shows just how far off victory may be. At an unusual meeting held between Iraqis in the restive Anbar province and the local American military commander, Sunni leaders railed against the “illegitimate occupation” and their country’s “terrorist government” and heckled an insufficiently demure female American official. The Marine general tried to sound conciliatory, telling the crowd, “We’re here to work through the problems,” but his message of understanding was undercut when an impatient interpreter translated his words into Arabic as, “I don’t have any time to waste.”

Facing such problems of miscommunication, the Army seems to have come to an innovative solution, the LAT reports: Buy good news. Secretly, through military contractors and Iraqi intermediaries posing as freelance journalists, the Pentagon has been paying local newspapers to run stories with headlines like “Iraqis Insist on Living Despite Terrorism.” Some of the articles are labeled as “advertorials,” while others are passed off as straight news stories. The paper writes that it’s only the latest example of “how far the Pentagon has moved to blur the traditional boundaries between … the dissemination of factual information to the media” and creating propaganda.

USAT‘s lead doesn’t add much to the cable-channel story besides a few live quotes from FCC Chairman Kevin Martin at a Senate hearing yesterday. The proposed change has less to do with lowering prices—an FCC study last year found that consumers might actually pay more under the smorgasbord approach—than with pleasing families who want Nickelodeon but not Nip/Tuck. The WSJ, which unsurprisingly has deeper coverage, stresses that cable providers and networks are vehemently opposed, saying the change will kill niche channels that survive financially only by being bundled with ESPN and MTV.

The WP has news of some slightly reassuring developments on the bird-flu front: Two manufacturers are expected to deliver several million doses of a vaccine to the government by the end of December, and researchers are experimenting to see if these could somehow be diluted to cover up to 120 million people. The bad news: Nobody really knows if the vaccine can be stretched that far, and if it can’t be, the government is only sure it can protect 4 million people. In the event of a pandemic this winter, the Pentagon would be allotted a quarter of the vaccine stock, while the rest will “probably be restricted to critically needed personnel,” the WP says. TP would like to see a follow-up explaining who defines “critically needed” and how one gets on the list. (May I humbly submit: The world needs freelance journalists.)

For those who are still fuzzy about why a bug that has killed fewer than 100 people in Asia is so scary, the WSJ has a useful flu FAQ.

The USAT and WSJ both front stories pegged to an abortion case that is to be argued before the Supreme Court today. The New Hampshire case concerns a parental-notification rule for minors that does not include an exemption for cases in which the health of the mother is threatened*. The WSJ has an interesting feature on Americans United for Life, a little-known group that had a “guiding hand” in crafting the legislation at issue. Modeling its fight on the NAACP’s battle against segregation, the group’s strategy is to “chip around the edges” of Roe v. Wade until the Supreme Court is ready to overturn it.

The LAT alone fronts news that Mexico’s Supreme Court issued a ruling yesterday allowing alleged criminals who face life imprisonment—though not the death penalty—to be extradited to the United States for trial. Previously, life without parole was considered cruel and unusual punishment in Mexico.

By far the best most enjoyable read of the day is the WSJ‘s chronicle of fallen Russian oil billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s life in a Siberian prison camp. Surviving on porridge while performing menial tasks in a climate that reaches temperatures of 40 below, he may be plotting a comeback once he’s done his time in Siberia—following in the rich tradition, the story says, of “Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.”

Only the NYT fronts the latest round of kidnappings in Iraq. Pictures of four peace activists from Canada, Britain, and the United States turned up on the Internet yesterday, while a separate group threatened to execute a prominent German archaeologist.

Back to the Pentagon propaganda story for a moment. TP can’t help wondering whether any American newspaper should cast stones at their developing-world brethren for blurring the lines of journalism for big-spending advertisers—in the LAT‘s case, a scandal over a glossy advertorial touting the new Staples Center comes to mind. But the piece is worth reading if only for the hilarious reactions of the duped Iraqi newspaper editors. They range from (possibly feigned) outrage to shoulder-shrugging. (“We publish anything.”) Then there’s the head of Iraq’s “most cerebral and professional” newspaper, who ran three Pentagon advertorials and says he wishes he knew the U.S. government was behind them—so he could have “charged much, much more.” Mark Willes couldn’t have said it better.

Correction, Nov. 30, 2005: This article originally and incorrectly claimed that a disputed New Hampshire law that restricts a minor’s access to abortion doesn’t allow for exemptions even if the mother’s life is at stake. In fact, the law doesn’t allow for exemptions if the mother’s health is an issue. Return to the corrected sentence.