In all the controversy surrounding the effectiveness and distribution of AIDS drugs, this is a story one doesn't like to hearbut there may be more like it in the near future.
The V-1 tablet is reported to be "a mixture of calcium, magnesium and traces of the AIDS virus itself," which makes no sense and screams of a scam. The free giveaway seems to be a promotional gimmick: "Thousands of desperate AIDS victims have been flocking to the distributor's clinic in the Bangkok suburb of Bang Pakong following claims that V-1 Immunitor is a 'miracle cure' for the disease."
This Bunnag sounds like a nasty piece of work. "A live television debate on the issue had to be cut short Wednesday night," UPI reports, "after a critic of the alleged AIDS cure said she overheard one of Bunnag's followers asking him, 'Should we blow her damn head off?'" It may be that a new age of AIDS profiteers is dawning.
(6/8)
A movie star, whose moral authority to attend a D-Day ceremony stems from his appearance in a Spielberg war film, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with actual members of the military?it's fine with me. But I'm reminded of the Reagan era, in which a standard bit of cant issued by NPR-style liberals was predicated on the rather inconclusive fact that a man who had once made his living as a film actor now lived in the White House. You'll remember this smug line, recited by genteel liberals: There's an actor playing the President!
As much as I dislike Reagan, that self-satisfied comment always irritated me. It betrays the liberal's basic establishmentarianism; it implies that the office of the Presidency possesses an intrinsic majesty that the presence of a Hollywood actor cheapens. In fact, there's arguably no more natural place than the Presidency of a bumptious, amoral empire for a second-rate actor; or a smirking, morally idiotic fraternity lout; or an ex-CIA heavy; or a backwoods Arkansas pimp.
At any rate, I'm not aware that liberals have attacked Hanks for trying to invest himself with the moral authority of the men who stormed the beaches at Normandy. There's a Baby Boomer actor playing a heroic anti-fascist warrior! I wonder why that is.
(6/8)
[According to British newspaper reports published earlier this week], during a 15-year period between the mid-1950s and the early1970s, the bodies of some 6000 dead babies (preferably stillborn) were sent, without the parents' knowledge or permission, to scientists in Britain and the United States, for experiments involving the effects of nuclear fallout on the human body.
[In Alexander Cockburn's column this week] he details the history of the rather gruesome "Project Sunshine" quite well. And while the general response to the revelations has been one of shock and dismay, I think some other things need to be taken into account.
Body-snatching?as distasteful a practice as it may seem to most?has been an integral component of scientific research since the time of the Greeks. Modern anatomy, remember, got its start thanks to the grave-robbing skills of Leonardo Da Vinci.
Science?especially biological and medical research?isn't always pleasant and neat. Sometimes it requires more than chemicals and test tubes and lasers and those bzzzzz things. Sometimes the cutest of animals need to be experimented upon. Sometimes you never really know how or if a vaccine, say, will work on humans until you actually try it on a few humans.
And sometimes, well, dammit, you just have to go out and steal 6000 dead babies from their unsuspecting parents.
(6/8)
In a letter to the editor in the June 11 New York, Manhattanite Lauren Brooks Ogden writes: "I cannot help but wonder how anyone could respect the views of a restaurant critic who would actually admit he ended his meal with a cappuccino ['Restaurants: Mama's Boy,' May 21]. The derisive snorts from Adam Platt's 'Italian snob' dining companions must have drowned out his senses at Beppe. On no corner of this planet is it considered sophisticated to have that breakfast beverage after dark, let alone after dinner."
"Sophistication" and "Manhattan" are no longer synonymous, as any resident of the city knows, but let's give the time-warped Mrs./Miss Ogden a refresher course. First of all, she reads New York, a prole move that's certainly the equal of wearing whites before Memorial Day or drinking cappuccino after sunset. Ogden also lives on an island that's blighted by a building called the "Trump Tower"; a government that wants to ban smoking in open-air spaces; a population that voted overwhelmingly for Al Gore and Hillary Clinton last fall; a grotesque media culture in thrall to celebrities like Puff Daddy, Jerry Seinfeld and Nicole Kidman; and draconian zoning boards that won't allow restaurants to set up tables outside.
I suggest Ogden move to Paris, along with fellow sophisticate Alec Baldwin.
(6/7)
If his goal, as he so often claimed after his conviction, was to strike a blow against the United States government, if his goal was to go down in history (at least in certain circles) as a Man Who Stood Up, then he should've learned to keep his damn fool mouth shut.
Randy Weaver earned his martyr status, as did David Koresh. McVeigh was well on his way there. As that first execution date approached, he appeared, by all accounts, stoic and unapologetic. He did what he did, and he stood by that. Didn't point fingers, and accepted the blame himself. He'd die with his eyes wide open. He could argue?I'm not saying he'd be right or justified, but he certainly could argue?that he was being shoved off for taking a stand, for believing in something so strongly that he was about to give up his life for it.
When the FBI made that 11th-hour admission, and began handing over the 4400 pages of documents they had suppressed during the trial, he should've remained silent. Moreover, he should've told his lawyers to do the same. If he had told them to take the matter up after the execution, his point, what he was dying for, would've been driven home with spikes. Yes, the government is corrupt. Yes, they will kill people who stand in their way. Yes, they will trample all over the Constitution to inflict harm on their own citizens. It'd all be out there in the open, plain as day, and McVeigh would have cemented his martyrdom.
But no.
No, there were [pleas, and scrambles, and demands] on the part of the lawyers as well as McVeigh himself that there be delays, calls for a retrial, requests that the death sentence be overturned.
Now, granted, had this happened in any other case, to any other individual, there's a good chance he'd be a free man today?or at least not facing the needle on Monday. Regardless of how guilty he was, an admission like this on the part of the prosecution would have, at the very least, demanded a retrial. It's happened before. As legal loopholes and technicalities go, this is a mighty hefty one.
But by causing such a ruckus, by suddenly trying to hide behind the Constitution, by attempting to wrap himself in the Law of the Land, McVeigh was confessing to his own fear of death?which is something no good martyr is supposed to do. And the longer things are delayed, the farther his status (again, in certain circles) is going to plummet.
I might suggest now?now that it's most likely far too late to forestall the inevitable?that he read (should he have the time) T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral.
(6/7)
Her topic is David Brock, the former American Spectator reporter who did his best to torpedo the nomination of Theodore Olson as U.S. Solicitor General.
Vincent writes: "If the world ended tomorrow and good and evil fought it out for keeps, I imagine that David Brock would be one of the devil's chief recruits. His public behavior in recent years gives you the strong impression that he's exactly the kind of unctuous weasel you'd expect hell to be full of?hell, of course, being a place like Washington, a pit made wretched not by any external force but by its own jockeying inhabitants. Nobody's there who doesn't want to be there, and nobody stays who isn't as slimy as the rest. The torture is self-imposed.
"You may remember Brock as the author of 'The Real Anita Hill,' the slam-bang 1994 bestseller that so famously characterized Justice Clarence Thomas' erstwhile nemesis as 'a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.' It was harsh and on the money. Textbook character assassination. It put Brock on the map and in the glaring spotlight.
"He followed up in 1998 with 'The Seduction of Hillary Rodham,' another incendiary bit of investigative reportage that was contracted to be a hatchet job on then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. But it didn't turn out that way. Instead, Brock virtually exonerated his subject. What's more, he turned the book's poor reception and sales into an opportunity to make a very public political about face, declaring himself a reformed conservative who was emphatically no longer a 'hit man' for the right wing."
(6/7)
I find complaining by right-wingers about puritanical thought control disingenuous, and one of Derbyshire's premises?"When you look at the state of modern morality," he writes, "it's hard to avoid the impression that it's a sort of photographic negative of the morality of the 1950s"?is a cliche of conservative writing.
Mark Steyn's piece, in the [June 3 Telegraph,] is better. Steyn writes: "I have lived in both Britain and America and I have no wish to go down the Anglo-Celtic route, where villages that no longer support a store, post office or church have four packed pubs. I don't miss the baying, mooning, urinating and pavement pizzas. But immaturity comes in different guises. In America, adulthood is so deferred that many Americans exist in a state of perpetual childhood, 300lb toddlers waddling down the street sipping super-sized sodas from plastic bottles with giant nipples.
"It's at least arguable that it is healthier for Jenna and Barbara to have a couple of glasses of wine than the sugary Pepsis and Mountain Dews that the law all but forces them to drink. Excessive late-teen soda intake may well be the reason why so many chipmunk-cheeked, perky-breasted high-school cheerleaders are bloated, lardbutts by 22."
The questions that must exercise intelligent foreign observers of the United States: That's the civilization that presumes to rule the world? In the name of what? Toward what purpose?
(6/6)
Blumenthal is not only upset by the fake critic business, but also by the age-old publicist's trick of carefully editing lukewarm reviews into raves (ahh, ellipses?the publicist's best friend!). Stating that it might be considered "deceptive and misleading advertising," Blumenthal is planning to begin a probe to see if "the complaints are valid."
Now, I have a few questions here.
First, is this all news to Mr. Blumenthal? If so, where in the hell has he been for the past 30 years?
Is he just upset because one of Mr. Manning's "reviews" tricked him into going to see A Knight's Tale?
I know several film critics?at this paper as well as others?and yes, on occasion I've heard them complain about their reviews being chopped up by publicists to look like raves they never were. But they understand the business, and are usually no more than mildly amused by the practice. Are there people out there who are seriously pissed that the movie industry is using deceptive advertising? Automobile manufacturers and drug companies I can understand, but the movies? That's just silliness.
Nevertheless, I contacted a fellow I know, a man who has worked in the movie marketing and publicity business for nearly 20 years now, to ask him for his take on the "fake critic" business. What surprised him was the fact that Columbia's p.r. people felt they needed to make someone up.
"I've never had to make up a critic," he told me. "Hell, most small paper, radio, TV, public access cable?and now website?critics will call the studio publicist with quotes. The more desperate ones will provide rave quotes for even a shitty movie, as they know they will get used."
The motivation for this, he says, is simple.
"It all comes down to, yes, getting your name in the paper. I knew critics who kept scrapbooks of film ads that contained their names. It soothes the dipshit ego of the critic and is good for name recognition for when they try to get their next job."
He also knew of some critics (some very recognizable names) who'd been bribed for blurbable reviews.
Given all that, maybe the real question should revert back to Columbia's p.r. department, and why they weren't doing their job.
In the meantime, Mr. Blumenthal should find himself some sort of hobby.
(6/6)
Nevertheless, he had [a pip of a take this week] on Howell Raines' promotion to executive editor of The New York Times. Raines' appointment is sure to further erode the Times' credibility--for example, he's an incurable Maureen Dowd cheerleader--and Grossberger, surprisingly, isn't pleased by publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.'s latest blunder.
Debunking the outdated notion that the Times is "The Newspaper of Record," Grossberger writes: "That is no longer quite the case, but on the other hand, the paper does have terrific restaurant coverage now."
He continues: "At one time, the typical Times reader was a 72-year-old man in a gray suit who had fallen asleep in his chair at the Yale Club over an editorial on monetary policy. Today, according to polls, she is a soccer mom in Chappaqua who is about to rush out to buy a jar of beta-carotene-flavored yogurt because she read in Jane Brody's column that it could delay menopause up to eight months... Though Republicans often whine that The New York Times is Ôtoo liberal' (as if that were a bad thing!), no one ever complains that the Times is too interesting. That's because a special secret cadre of editors trained to delete colorful words or thoughts from the paper is still on the job, even though reporters have managed to assassinate six of them over the past few years."
Okay, Grossberger isn't exactly Jackie Mason, but any time a New York City liberal-for-life slams the Times, it's cause for celebration.
He might have mentioned a [ludicrous June 2 Times editorial] about the bumper harvest of lobsters in Maine in the last couple of years. The writer, who praises the conservation measures that have led to the glut of this luxury item, is nonetheless concerned that this might be too much of a good thing. "In a report on lobster habitat written for the Lobster Institute three years ago, the authors noted several worrying trends," the editorial reads. "Lobsters are decreasing in size, and many of them are being caught before they reach sexual maturity... Maine's Department of Marine Resources has begun a pilot program using on-board electronic logbooks that will help plot the location, number and size of lobsters being caught. Such information will help researchers tell whether the current lobster feast will last or whether the edge of lobster famine is lurking in the near future."
That's helpful information, especially for the socially conscious Times editors who summer in New England, not to mention the wealthy Northeast citizens who are constantly derided by the paper for actually believing that a cut in the capital gains tax will stimulate the economy. I wonder, however, what the peasants the Times nobly defends against conservatism think about this lobster conundrum. A town meeting, hosted by Sulzberger, R.W. Apple and Raines, perhaps held in Bill Clinton's untouched Harlem offices, is surely in order.
(6/5)
Though $18 million is nothing to sneeze at, Empire didn't get everything they were after in the suit. They wanted something closer to $1 billion, and they wanted to sock the tobacco companies with civil fraud and racketeering charges. Those things didn't quite work out.
What they did get them on, however, as [the Daily News described it,] were "deceptive business practices that hooked--and sickened--smokers and ultimately drove up the cost of health insurance for all New Yorkers."
In short, you could say that the tobacco companies were busted for not telling consumers the whole truth about a potentially dangerous product.
Okay then. Given those charges, let's take a look at who else Empire should be going after in the near future. How about automakers? And drug companies? And fast-food places? And companies that offer "low fat desserts"? And the big cereal companies? (Loaded with eight essential vitamins and iron my ass.) And cellphone makers? And chemical manufacturers, oil producers, health food stores, hospitals, the folks who make those annoying scooters--and insurance companies?
(6/5)
Exceptions exist, of course. John Platt, for one.
A fan, certainly, but not a fanboy, Platt fashioned perceptive, unadorned writing that placed rock, especially late-60s psychedelia, in its social and cultural contexts. Platt was born in July 1952 in the suburbs west of London, and had the good fortune to come of age when the city's live-music scene thrived. A librarian by training, he chucked that career--but not the researcher's sensibility it cultivated--around 1980 to found his own magazine, Comstock Lode, whose pages chronicled 60s UK mod and r&b, among other genres, while unabashedly celebrating West Coast psych bands: Love, the Grateful Dead, Moby Grape, early Captain Beefheart and San Francisco's often overlooked Charlatans. At the same time he quietly began amassing an enviable collection of original flower-power posters that flogged the era's gigs.
Like most such ventures, Comstock Lode suffered from a crippling cash-flow shortage, and Platt eventually abandoned it in the mid-80s, devoting his energies instead to articles, books and projects for British tv, including a collaboration for the BBC with Pete Frame, creator of the intriguingly nerdy "Family Tree" band genealogies.
Platt's London's Rock Routes, a history of the city's seminal 60s club scene, was published in 1985, two years after he'd co-authored the memoir Yardbirds with that band's former guitarist Chris Dreja and drummer Jim McCarty. Inside the Experience, in which Platt provided the connective tissue for the rambling reminiscences of Jimi Hendrix Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell, followed in 1990 (nice artwork, though, including some reproductions of posters from Platt's extensive collection). Platt also had a role in putting together a series of rock films for the British Film Institute.
While attending the 1992 Florence Film Festival, Platt met famed psych-era American photographer Amalie Rothschild, who persuaded him to write text to accompany her images from the heyday of the Fillmore Ballroom, and through her he was introduced to Marylou Capes, who would become his second wife. The couple settled in New York, from where Platt worked on books (Disraeli Gears: Cream and Murmur: R.E.M. for Schirmer's Classic Rock Album series), tv shows (a VH1 Legends episode featuring Eric Clapton) and film programs, most notably overseeing the 1996 "CineRock: Loud Films, Rare Music" fest at Lincoln Center, which thoughtfully included the 1967 documentary Tonight Let's All Make Love in London.
Before Platt died, age 48, of cancer on May 7 at home in New York, he was laboring on a history of Brit blues and r&b, plus a film encyclopedia. "And so castles made of sand," as one of his heroes, Jimi Hendrix, once wrote, disregarding proper verb tense, "melts into the sea, eventually."
(6/5)
I'll leave this bow to the fraternity of the incestuous media community for another day, but Kurtz's despicable attack on Lowry and Jonah Goldberg (editor of the fine National Review Online) does deserve a comment. The Post/CNN personality was apparently irked that Lowry dare criticize Newsweek's Jonathan Alter for an indescribably moronic defense of James Jeffords in the magazine's June 4 issue. [Last Wednesday, on NRO,] Lowry wrote: "Alter delivered the most embarrassing suck-up imaginable, a piece that could have been drafted by Jeffords's press secretary, that is, if he or she didn't have any shame." A reasonable assessment, I'd say, but Lowry gets weak-kneed when questioned by Kurtz: "[I]f I get up on a Wednesday morning and see a column I don't like, I'll write 750 words about Maureen Dowd. In the magazine [the biweekly National Review] you have to be a little more profound than that."
Why? It's not as if the majority of print pundits--say Richard Cohen, Paul Krugman, Gail Collins or Robert Kuttner--produce, to be charitable, more than one or two "profound" thoughts each year.
Kurtz, ever the objective journalist, elicited this unbelievable quote from the aggrieved Alter. "I think Rich is doing a good job of making the National Review almost as mean as Tom DeLay. It's a very smart marketing strategy... They play rough, and rough is more fun. It's part of the game... People send me e-mails full of dopey attacks--ÔI bet you've never written anything positive about a Republican in your whole life'--obviously never having read any of the columns I wrote praising John McCain during the campaign."
Oh, okay. Alter, along with 1000 other journalists vying to kiss McCain's ring, has gushed over the Arizona Senator. That's a convincing defense of his even-handed reporting. When Alter devotes a column to the wisdom of Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, I'll be glad to reconsider his status as a Paul Begala impersonator.
(6/5)
Everybody's favorite rebellious adolescents, Johnny and Luther Htoo, may be coming to America. When we last heard of those naughty Myanmar twins, now 15, they were leading rebel troops, called God's Army, in an ill-fated revolt against the Thai government. As AP reported this weekend, "the twins' followers said the boys who are Christians had powers from God. Their followers believed bullets couldn't hit them and mines wouldn't explode under their feet."
Then again, what most of us nonbelievers remember about them was that adorable AP photo from 1999 that showed Luther smoking a cigar.
Anyway, the boys have been in custody since surrendering to the authorities in January. Now there's serious talk of resettling them, their parents and some followers in the U.S.
We say bring them on! America is the land of opportunity, especially for celebrity teens. We can easily see them hosting their own ESL talk show... Cohosting an MTV beach party... Starring in a movie based on their exploits (if not allowed to play themselves, we see Cuba Gooding Jr. in both roles)... And of course the mammoth advance for their as-told-to autobiography is in the bag. Not to mention the points they'll get on creative development of the Revolt in Myanmar video game.
Or maybe they'd resume their old ways here, bringing authentic teen rebellion back to America, the nation that invented it, where it's been sorely needed for some time.
Whatever. This is America, where the possibilities for self-creation are endless, even for a 15-year-old stogie-chomping Myanmarite (Myanmartian?). We say, Welcome, Johnny! Howdy, Luther! You kids rock!
(6/4)
As we all know, in response to this growing "energy crisis" we're in (which, if you ask me, is about as fictional as that film critic), New York State has tossed together seven quickie power plants in the New York metro area, to stave off any California-type rolling blackouts this summer. And despite protests from community and environmental groups, [the plants are set to start operating soon, only a few weeks behind schedule].
There are new power plants in Long Island City, Williamsburg, Sunset Park, Rosebank and Brentwood. The first plant set to begin operation (by today), however, is in the Bronx...in Hell Gate.
Now, I know, it's no big deal. It's just a neighborhood on the East River, home to one end of the Hell Gate Bridge, the world's largest arch bridge. Still, though, I'm a firm believer in cheap symbolism. It rarely lets me down.
While I don't remember any mentions of electrical substations in Revelations or Nostradamus, I do think the idea of combining a government-contrived "crisis" with a bit of rushed, shoddy workmanship and a great deal of surging electrical power--then placing the whole thing in a place called "Hell Gate" and letting 'er rip--well, it just doesn't sound like it'll lead to anything good. I think rolling blackouts may be the least of our worries.
(6/4)
Once in a while I pick up The Park Slope Paper, the community news freebie that's distributed in the grocery stores and laundromats of my Brooklyn neighborhood. The Paper, with its preoccupation with, on the one hand, local crime-blotter incidents you'd never hear about in a publication with a less restricted focus ("Bike attacks continue in Prospect Pk"; "Victim faces burglar") and, on the other, neighborhood politics ("Neighbors: LDC Ôvision' omits our point of view"), inadvertently disseminates a vision of a New York City that the Giuliani era has actually done much to wipe out: a place in which criminals prey on citizens to what appears to be the approval of the NPR busybodies who chair committees and set the terms of the public discourse. In other words, a New York City commensurate with its caricature.
One article on the front page of the June 4 Paper caught my eye. "At LIU, teens get to question pols," the headline announced. "...[F]ormer deputy borough president Jeannette Gadson, Brooklyn Heights Councilman Ken Fisher and Park Slope-Flatbush state Sen. Marty Markowitz did their best to woo the hearts and minds of the 400 young Brooklynites with a mixture of joking and seriousness that rounded out the two-and-a-half-hour forum," the article read, and continued: "What, the teens wanted to know of the borough president candidates, were their budget priorities? How would they handle the problem of escalating tensions between cops and kids? And who was their ideal candidate for appointment to the Board of Education?"
Oh, sure. As if 400 Brooklyn kids really got together and used phrases like "budget priorities" and "ideal candidate for appointment"; as if any significant number of those kids have ever used the word "escalating" in their young lives. It's telling that the Paper's reporter doesn't quote any of these kids directly, but rather paraphrases their Ciceronian effusions. She should have stood by the door and asked the kids who the vice president of the United States is, or what country borders the U.S. to the north. She should have asked them to spell "escalating."
(6/4)