Joshuah Bearman

Why Do Serial Killers Always Keep a Scrapbook, Or Talk in Riddles, Or Compose Weird Rhymes About Their Crimes?

This story, by this great writer, is like a real life Silence of the Lambs!

Travel with Wells Tower, or Why Magazine Should Hire More Fiction Writers

Travel writing is mostly bad. It's partly the fault of the form; contemporary travel magazines are filled with 10 Best New Hotels/Bars/Spas on Yet Another Tony Exclusive Island or How to Eat Fabulously in This Most Glorious Setting You WIll Never See. Sometimes, quality sneaks in. And every so often the glossies still let Paul Theroux into the works so as to keep their bonafides burnished. But even he (I'm going to guess) doesn't get 15,000 words any more, which is what you really need to tell a story about a really far off place. Instead, we get magazine pages full of short and trite pastiches of breathtaking vistas, italicized delicacies, and instantaneous eurekas. This is the opposite of the actual experience of travel, which is both contemplative and confusing, internal and external, a messy surge of sensations both exciting and frustrating. And that includes the dynamic with travel companions, which can be the messiest of all. The point of good travel writing, it seems, is to mediate all that for the audience in a way that draws them into the writer's experience. Rather than spin a thin fantasy of something that will never happen (the reader lays out on St. Barthes), why not woo them with what did happen (George Saunders goes gonzo in Dubai).

Such is the mode of Wells Tower's "Meltdown" in Outside, in which he tells the tale of his and his father's (and ornery brother's) family trip to Iceland and Greenland. Tower's travel dispatch is fundamentally non-traditional: he doesn't know much about where he is, and doesn't really try to find out. The story is mostly about how Tower and his father, who survived cancer several years ago, have made an annual trip to celebrate his father's beating the odds. The trips are all ill-conceived, difficult, and, according to Tower, have often been nearly lethal themselves. Here's the set up:

Eight and a half years ago, when the oncological bookmakers gave my father three years to live, we sat together in his hospital room and vowed that, if he survived, the two of us would take a trip each year to celebrate his outliving his expiration date by another twelvemonth. When we cooked up this scheme, I think we both privately thought we were merely following timeworn etiquette that calls for grand travel fantasies when someone is dying. (Think Midnight Cowboy, Joe Buck to Ratso Rizzo in extremis: "When we get to Miami … .") But when Dad surprised us both by beating his rogue cells into remission, it would have been a thumb in the eye of St. Christopher to go back on our vow.

Tower is such a good prose stylist and humorist that you forget the story is not about the traditional travel poles of chasing a destination, or the destination itself, but how his bizarre familial relations are thrown into relief by plopping them down in some of the world's most inhospitably population locations. I could have used about 5% less jokes, but jokes are hard, and the others are so good that they compensate. Witness the lede:

In the Inuit village of Tasiilaq, on Greenland's east coast, in a bar whose name, as far as I can tell, is Bar, people are enjoying themselves as though the world will end tomorrow.

There are maybe 30 folks in here, few of them women, nearly all of them catastrophically drunk. Two men who look fresh from a seal hunt are locked in a dance that is part boxer's clinch, part jailhouse waltz. One of them falls. I can feel his skull hit the floor through the soles of my boots.

I'm on vacation with my father, Ed Tower, an ebullient man of 65 with a belly that strains his parka nearly to the point of rupture. We are not handsome men, but, as a result of their near-lethal intake of Tuborg beers, the few local females (none under 50 or so) have taken a shine to us. My father is flanked by two. One looks like Ernest Borgnine; the other, Don Knotts...

..."Do you dance?" the woman asks Dad. "Why not?"

I can think of several reasons, actually. One, those men by the bar are not looking at us kindly, and, it should be noted, you can buy guns in the grocery stores over here. Two, my father, survivor of an exotic strain of lymphoma, is still in delicate shape from a bone-marrow transplant a couple of years back, and I'm not eager to see him shake his fragile moneymaker on a dance floor that looks like a fourth-down blitz. Three, and most important, is the fact that, in my father's company, trips have a tendency to spiral into disaster. The mishaps are sometimes large and sometimes inconsequential, but the specter of calamity always rides in his sidecar. Here, on our ninth day, we are both still in one piece. We fly out tomorrow. The smart thing, it seems, is to quit while we're ahead.

A grinning elderly woman approaches me unsteadily. I hold out my hand and she falls over, bashing her face on my shin. I help her up. She thanks me, lists hard to starboard, and capsizes again.

It's so good for the most part that I could blockquote the whole thing! I won't. But do read on!

There Will Be Gas

More reading catch up! This time, I'm just learning about the vaporous gold in them there Catskills! This from a New York magazine piece last year by David France. Basically there's a gas rush going on in New York and Pennsylvania, beneath which sits the Marcellus Shale, a 385-million-year-old seabed that now holds 5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Extraction just got cheap enough to make it economically viable and so this untapped fossil fuel source, and the undeveloped country land above it, is now subject of a sudden and intense competitive prospecting craze. As France discovered from a note on his own bucolic property, "landmen" are cruising the back roads, furiously signing up land, strategically contiguous if possible, so as to corral competitors and make plans for pipeline routs. France follows one Daniel F. Glassmire VI, a 26-year-old, My Morning Jacket-listening, David Foster Wallace-reading, newly minted landman, as he tries to close prospects for his concern, Cabot Oil & Gas. Glassmire doesn't make a pitch with his partner, H. W. Glassmire VII, but maybe he will in the coming HBO series!

Duets with the Taliban

Just getting around to reading David Rohde's epic, five-part series on his capture by, and escape from, the Taliban, which — along with the nifty interactive add-on feature — is as gripping as one might expect. I hate to say it, but what a lucky break — from a writing and reporting perspective. Months face to face with the Taliban yields a much richer picture of such an enemy than could otherwise be gleaned from regular reporting, no matter how dedicated and diligent one might be. Spending time in close quarters yields unique detail, such as the Taliban's use of Hannah Montana-branded bedding (Rohde's own blanket was a Barbie comforter), and their predilection for The Beatles. The best part of the piece is sort of an anti-Stockholm syndrome, where Rohde hates his captors, but is forced by monotony to sing for them — Sinatra, Springsteen, and the Fab Four:  

After dinner on many winter nights, my guards sang Pashto songs for hours. My voice and Pashto pronunciation were terrible, but our guards urged me to sing along. The ballads varied. On some evenings, I found myself reluctantly singing Taliban songs that declared that “you have atomic bombs, but we have suicide bombers.”

On other nights, at my guards’ urging, I switched to American tunes. In a halting, off-key voice, I sang Frank Sinatra’s version of “New York, New York” and described it as the story of a villager who tries to succeed in the city and support his family. I sang Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” and described it as a portrayal of the struggles of average Americans.

I realized that my guards, too, might have needed a break from our grim existence. But I felt like a performing monkey when they told me to sing for visiting commanders. I knew they were simply laughing at me.
I intentionally avoided American love songs, trying to dispel their belief that all Americans were hedonists. Despite my efforts, romantic songs — whatever their language — were the guards’ favorites.

The Beatles song “She Loves You,” which popped into my head soon after I received my wife’s letter from the Red Cross, was the most popular.

For reasons that baffled me, the guards relished singing it with me. I began by singing its first verse. My three Taliban guards, along with Tahir and Asad, then joined me in the chorus.
“She loves you — yeah, yeah, yeah,” we sang, with Kalashnikovs lying on the floor around us.

The Best Zombie Story of the Year

More than forty years after George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead made critics question the future of a culture that could produce such a thing, that future is here – and it is full of zombies. There are zombie comics, zombie conventions, Rob Zombie Inc., and a Simpsons episode in which Bart informs Lisa that the zombies prefer to be called “living impaired.” There is even a growing movement of participatory fan-fueled performance-art “zombie walks” — BYOB (Bring Your Own Brains!) — where people don elaborately shredded clothing, powder themselves into a pall with makeup, add lots of blood, and spontaneously shamble together in public places.

The movement has been on the lurch since movies like 28 Days Later took zombies mainstream for the first time, and was followed by near-simultaneous appearance of the Dawn of the Dead remake and the homage-comedy Shaun of the Dead. That paved the way for George Romero’s first big studio release, Land of the Dead, a roaring comeback that garnered a standing ovation when his entrail-devouring cannibals finally debuted at Cannes in 2005. The next year, Mel Brooks’ son, Max, went on tour with his book, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, a “Studs Terkel approach” to zombie conflict that is headed for the cineplex. Then came the literary mash-up, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. And don’t forget the endless video games: Resident Evil’s many versions (and their movie spin offs), Dead Rising (which was reviewed with by me for the LA Weekly with such incredible insight that the text has been partly cannibalized (Get it?) for this little item), and Left 4 Dead, with its new, improved and unpredictable zombies. Topping it all off, the comedy horror flick Zombieland closed out the summer with a surprise $68m (to date), the highest box office for a Zombie movie yet, prompting more re-heated trend stories about how zombies finally, really, extra-for-certain have hit the cultural big time.

I guess they missed Will Smith’s I Am Legend, which came out in December 2007 (just in time for the holidays!), which was based on Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel, the proto-zombie anxiety tale of a sole survivor facing an infectious pandemic while barricaded in his home in Los Angeles and made $256 million – but, really, who’s counting? (Will Smith’s version was relocated to New York for effective apocalyptic atmospherics, which was then effectively undermined by the zombies, who looked like retarded motion-filtered, clip art monsters when they finally showed up.)

But since we’re talking origins, let’s peel it way back, to the first hints of human civilization: in the irrigated marshes of the fertile crescent, the Sumerians charted the heavens, erected stepped pyramids, and pressed their styluses into clay to record the Epic of Gilgamesh, a collection of myths that includes Ishtar threatening to knock down the Gates of the Netherworld and “let the dead go up to eat the living!” Every culture since has registered the same basic fear, from medieval Europe’s revenants to Haiti’s trodotoxinated zonbi, from which the word zombie originated.

And that brings us to Mischa Berlinski’s real-life trip to the real zombie underworld.

Yes, the best Zombie-related story in recent memory is not a comic, gore game, publishing coup, or blockbuster – it is an article in Men’s Journal. I often forget that Men’s Journal, like its Wenner Media companion, Rolling Stone (where I have written), is oneof the few publishing places where the glossy cover and glossier ads support solid, long form, narrative writing. And so when I picked up a copy at a friends house and leafed passed "Boys and their Toys" (or whatever was on the cover), I was glad to discover an epic, 8,000-word expose that promised “Voodoo, Sorcerers and Lost Souls.”

The piece is a detailed look at the elaborate system of secret societies, ritual magic, and pharmacologically-induced human trafficking that is the Haitian zombie culture. It is incredible. Even if you are familiar with Wade Davis, or have read The Serpent and the Rainbow, or seen the mediocre movie, Berlinski’s story is still incredible. Unlike Davis, who was doing research in his field, Berlinski just wound up in the Haitian countryside, started hearing about zombies, and looked into it. He had no thesis, or grantors to satisfy. He just decided to get to the bottom of something that sounded impossible. His story opens:

I moved to Haiti in the spring of 2007, when my wife found a job with the United Nations’ peacekeeping mission there… She was assigned to Jérémie, a small town on Haiti’s southwest coast….About a month after I arrived in Jérémie, a rumor swept through town that a deadly zombie was on the loose. This zombie, it was said, could kill by touch alone. The story had enough authority that schools closed. The head of the local secret society responsible for the management of the zombie population was asked to investigate. Later that week, Monsieur Roswald Val, having conducted a presumably thorough inquiry, made an announcement on Radio Lambi: There was nothing to fear; all his zombies were accounted for.

Hooked! The rest of the lede turns the reel even more:

I was eager to meet a zombie for myself, and began making appropriate inquiries. Several weeks later, my wife came home from a judicial conference. Making small talk, a local judicial official mentioned the strange case of zombification that his courtroom had seen not several months before. The case was, he said, “un peu spectaculaire.”

I met Judge Isaac Etienne a week or so later at his unfinished concrete house in the village of Roseaux…The judge was a boyish-looking man of 42, slender, wearing baggy surfer shorts, flip-flops, and a brightly colored Hawaiian shirt.

The dossier was, at bottom, a murder story, the judge said — but it was a murder story with the great oddity that the victim did not die.

With so much space, Berlinski gets a chance to include a succinct primer on how one comes is (putatively) zombified in Haiti, which I’ll make more succinct like so: poison; paralysis with full consciousness; live burial; psychological trauma of such burial; retrieval by sorcerer; application of hallucinogen drugs by sorcerer to perpetuate mindless state. Add to that the cultural context: Haitians believe in zombies, and so they are psychically susceptible to the conditioning. They think they’ve died and will be rejected by the living who have seen them be buried. And then they are so rejected. And this is how, Wade Davis argues, real people become zombie slaves to “sorcerers.”

If that’s hard to swallow, then how about the sorcerers’ system of secret societies that governs much of Haiti beneath the thin veneer of governmental institutions. Berlinski details the byzantine world of zombie administration, which sounds like an episode of Trueblood, with regional hierarchies of Chief Sorcerers and Departmental Chiefs and Presidents and Emperors and Queens and their sorcerer secretaries. Not to mention the zombie passports — documents that allow one to create, hold, or move your zombie from region to region. (Yes, such things exist; there are pictures.) Berlinski follows Madame Zicot, a woman trying to track down her zombified daughter, Nadathe, by navigating her way through the secret societies. (And yes, they do accessorize with candle-topped skulls and convene at midnight.) It is gripping as an occult procedural, and heartbreaking as a story of real tragedy. Eventually, Berlinski notes that if you take away the spooky magic, the zombie world is an institutionalized form of human trafficking, which prompts him into a well-intentioned form of gonzo journalism:

I am not wealthy by American standards, but this article will probably pay me more than Madame Zicot could hope to earn in a decade. I wondered whether this money would not be sufficient to buy Nadathe’s freedom, if she were still alive. Strip the story of its exoticism — replace the word “zombified” with “poisoned, kidnapped, drugged, and enslaved” — and you have a brutal crime. To profit from her enslavement, not having done all I could to liberate her, seemed to me to cross that narrow frontier that separates curiosity from exploitation.

Berlinski, it is nifty to note, is allowed to make his case among the secret societies only because of Obama’s magic; the international goodwill created by his election makes them open to entreaties from an American. As he gets drawn deeper in himself, Berlinski pauses to wonder if the zombie culture isn’t some kind of mass delusion, a false institution that is really just another layer of politics, an intricate system that allows people to exploit one another. The societies may be that too, but Berlinski thinks they’re not fooling:

You either believe in zombies, or you don’t.

For my part, I believe that a young woman named Nadathe Joassaint was poisoned, buried alive, stolen from her grave, drugged, transported, and enslaved. I believe that she is alive to this day and in the possession of a man I know only as Monsieur 17, in a region of the Grand’ Anse I feel better not naming in print.

There’s a reason for that candid (and journalistically refreshing) statement, but to explain why would reveal the kicker. I won’t spoil that, other than to say that there is a not-so-surprising surprise ending that is well worth reading the whole article to experience.

Happy Halloween!

Posts CAN Be Polished, Part II

Now here's something you don't see every day: a thoughtful, historical essay several thousand words long on the Huffington Post. The piece is a concise history of terrorism, or rather, of the modern chapter of terrorism, beginning in the nineteenth century, when political dissidence was first expressed as violence not just against the state but also citizens. The culprits then were anarchists, the pince-nez and mustachioed kind whose bombs really were big round iron balls with fuses, just like in the cartoons. Along the way, the article draws a convincingly qualified parallel between the extremists and reactionaries of yesteryear and today, and between the morale of both stories: blunt repression always makes it worse.

At first I thought: well, if the Huff Po can produce writing like that, maybe this unpaid blogger free-for-all isn't so bad after all. Then I realized that reason the piece is so good is that the writer, Johann Hari, is a wunderkind political columnist in England. And the fact that he chose (or had no choice other than) to contribute a moderate-length essay to the Huff Po rather than a magazine that can pay him (and where such writing might stand out as something worth reading) only sends me right back to my suspicious concerns about Huff Po. Nevertheless, I guess it's nice that such thoughtful work can find it's place alongside Tara Reid's plastic surgery scars. 

See? A Post CAN Be Polished

Tim Kreider's post on the NY Times' Happy Days blog about what he calls The Referendum -- the point when people start comparing their lives to those of their friends, and the ambivalent feelings such comparisons yield -- went around a couple weeks ago, but I just happened across it again, and achieving so much in just a thousand or so words, both on its own points and by providing a fine example of why blogging may not be the end of the world for well-crafted prose and actual ideas. Cheers! It's so good, it can't really be quoted, so here it is in full, with my favorite parts bolded:  

Recently an editor asked me for an essay about arrested adolescence, joking: “Of course, I thought of you.”

It is worth mentioning that this editor is an old college friend; we’ve driven across the country, been pantsless in several nonsexual contexts, and accidentally hospitalized each other in good fun. He is now a respectable homeowner and family man; I am not. So I couldn’t help but wonder: is there something condescending about this assignment? Does he consider me some sort of amusing and feckless manchild instead of a respected cartoonist whose work is beloved by hundreds and has made me a thousandaire, who’s been in a committed relationship for 15 years with the same cat?

My weird touchiness on this issue — taking offense at someone offering to pay me money for my work — is symptomatic of a more widespread syndrome I call “The Referendum.”

To my friends with children, the obscene wealth of free time at my command must seem unimaginably exotic, since their next thousand Saturdays are already booked.

The Referendum is a phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far, and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers’ differing choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt. The Referendum can subtly poison formerly close and uncomplicated relationships, creating tensions between the married and the single, the childless and parents, careerists and the stay-at-home. It’s exacerbated by the far greater diversity of options available to us now than a few decades ago, when everyone had to follow the same drill. We’re all anxiously sizing up how everyone else’s decisions have worked out to reassure ourselves that our own are vindicated — that we are, in some sense, winning.

It’s especially conspicuous among friends from youth. Young adulthood is an anomalous time in people’s lives; they’re as unlike themselves as they’re ever going to be, experimenting with substances and sex, ideology and religion, trying on different identities before their personalities immutably set. Some people flirt briefly with being freethinking bohemians before becoming their parents. Friends who seemed pretty much indistinguishable from you in your 20s make different choices about family or career, and after a decade or two these initial differences yield such radically divergent trajectories that when you get together again you can only regard each other’s lives with bemused incomprehension.

I may be exceptionally conscious of the Referendum because my life is so different from most of my cohort’s; at 42 I’ve never been married and don’t want kids. I recently had dinner with some old friends, a couple with two small children, and when I told them about my typical Saturday in New York City — doing the Times crossword, stopping off at a local flea market, maybe biking across the Brooklyn Bridge — they looked at me like I was describing my battles with the fierce and elusive Squid-Men among the moons of Neptune. The obscene wealth of free time at my command must’ve seemed unimaginably exotic to them, since their next thousand Saturdays are already booked.

What they also can’t imagine is having too much time on your hands, being unable to fill the hours, having to just sit and stare at the emptiness at the center of your life. But I’m sure that to them this problem seems as pitiable as morbid obesity would to the victims of famine.

A lot of my married friends take a vicarious interest in my personal life. It’s usually just nosy, prurient fun, but sometimes smacks of the sort of moralism that H.G. Wells called “jealousy with a halo.” Sometimes it seems sort of starved, like audiences in the Great Depression watching musicals about the glitterati. It’s true that my romantic life has produced some humorous anecdotes, but good stories seldom come from happy experiences. Some of my married friends may envy my freedom in an abstract, daydreamy way, misremembering single life as some sort of pornographic smorgasbord, but I doubt many of them would actually choose to trade places with me. Although they may miss the thrill of sexual novelty, absolutely nobody misses dating

I regard their more conventional domestic lives with the same sort of ambivalence. Like everyone, I’ve seen some marriages in which I would discreetly hang myself within 12 hours, but others have given me cause to envy their intimacy, loyalty, and irreplaceable decades of invested history. [Note to all my married friends: your marriage is one of the latter.] Though one of those friends cautioned me against idealizing: “It’s not as if being married means you’re any less alone.”

Most of my married friends now have children, the rewards of which appear to be exclusively intangible and, like the mysteries of some gnostic sect, incommunicable to outsiders. In fact it seems from the outside as if these people have joined a dubious cult: they claim to be much happier and more fulfilled than ever before, even though they live in conditions of appalling filth and degradation, deprived of the most basic freedoms and dignity, and owe unquestioning obedience to a capricious and demented master.

I have never even idly thought for a single passing second that it might make my life nicer to have a small, rude, incontinent person follow me around screaming and making me buy them stuff for the rest of my life. [Note to friends with children: I am referring to other people’s children, not to yours.] But there are also moments when some part of me wonders whether I am not only missing the biological boat but something I cannot even begin to imagine — an entire dimension of human experience undetectable to my senses, like a flatlander scoffing at the theoretical concept of sky.

But I can only imagine the paralytic terror that must seize my friends with families as they lie awake calculating mortgage payments and college funds and realize that they are locked into their present lives for farther into the future than the mind’s eye can see. Judging from the unanimity with which parents preface any gripe about children with the disclaimer, “Although I would never wish I hadn’t had them and I can’t imagine life without them,” I can’t help but wonder whether they don’t have to repress precisely these thoughts on a daily basis.

Yes: the Referendum gets unattractively self-righteous and judgmental. Quite a lot of what passes itself off as a dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others’ as selfish or pathological or wrong. So it’s easy to overlook that hidden beneath all this smug certainty is a poignant insecurity, and the naked 3 A.M. terror of regret.

The problem is, we only get one chance at this, with no do-overs. Life is, in effect, a non-repeatable experiment with no control. In his novel about marriage, “Light Years,” James Salter writes: “For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox.” Watching our peers’ lives is the closest we can come to a glimpse of the parallel universes in which we didn’t ruin that relationship years ago, or got that job we applied for, or got on that plane after all. It’s tempting to read other people’s lives as cautionary fables or repudiations of our own.

A colleague of mine once hosted a visiting cartoonist from Scandinavia who was on a promotional tour. My colleague, who has a university job, a wife and children, was clearly a little wistful about the tour, imagining Brussels, Paris, and London, meeting new fans and colleagues and being taken out for beers every night. The cartoonist, meanwhile, looked forlornly around at his host’s pleasant row house and sighed, almost to himself: “I would like to have such a house.”

One of the hardest things to look at in this life is the lives we didn’t lead, the path not taken, potential left unfulfilled. In stories, those who look back — Lot’s wife, Orpheus and Eurydice — are lost. Looking to the side instead, to gauge how our companions are faring, is a way of glancing at a safer reflection of what we cannot directly bear, like Perseus seeing the Gorgon safely mirrored in his shield.

ASME adding podcasting, etc. to National Magazine Awards

And the New York Times also finds it worth noting that the ASME party each year is so swank -- it has an open bar!

Advances in The Robot Army

A few weeks back, Doug McGray was kind enough to invite me to take the stage for Pop Up Magazine, his nifty new occasional (and hopefully more frequent) live event that puts a couple dozen people together in a sort of live, one-night-only periodical. Shockingly, all 400 seats at the theater were sold out for this thing -- no mean feat, as I can attest from the days of The World, Explained. Owing to deadlines, I drove up that day and hadn't really been able to prepare, but the beer was free and yeasty and I had two tall cups full and wrote out some notes in the dark and it turns out that people REALLY like a good caper story, no matter how drunkenly delivered. 

Anyhow, entertainment and learning were had by all and the whole think got me thinking about how much fun actual magazines ought to be. It also got me thinking how many great magazine writers there are out there whom I've never heard of. Such as Evan Ratliff, a freelancer and Wired regular who showed slides of himself in the many disguises he took on as part of a recent story for Wired in which he tried to go on the lam. I then checked out his other works, including a recent piece in the New Yorker about Jerry Baber, an engineer and self-taught munitions designer who has designed, among other weapons, a stainless steel automatic shotgun that shoots five shells per second and can be wielded with one hand. If you want to see a great lede, then read this story, which begins like so: 

At the age of seventy-four, Jerry Baber has winnowed his primary interests in life to four subjects: shotguns, robots, women, and cars. When Baber is holding forth—his default mode of communication being the filibuster—his conversation tends to fall somewhere among these categories. Often his passions intersect, as in the question of whether or not a Corvette is an ideal car for picking up women. (It is.) Similarly, Baber might be discussing his love of robots and shotguns, and whether, by combining the two, he is helping to shape the future of warfare from his garage. (He is.)

Closing out the opening section we find out why the story's subhed is "an Appalachian gunsmith’s robot army": 

Not long ago, Baber decided that his gun was so reliable and accurate that it could be mounted with confidence on unmanned vehicles. Armed robots, he believes, could offer crucial assistance in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; they could be employed on a street monitored by snipers or sent into a building harboring insurgents. Last year, Baber met with engineers at Robotex—a start-up in California that makes ground-based robots—and at Neural Robotics, a company outside Nashville that manufactures unmanned helicopters. Together, they created prototypes of small, remote-controlled armed machines. Baber keeps several in his workshop, and talks about them as if they were pets.

This was all of particular interest to me, as I have been mildly obsessed with the coming robot army ever since I wrote in The Believer about the fantastic vision of the future Air Force as dreamed up by military planners in their master document, Air Force 2025, a blueprint of theoretical systems needed to help the US maintain "Global Battlespace Dominance" in the 21st century. Among the myriad theoretical science fiction combat systems in those thousands of pages are things like: Concept No. 900522: Space-Based, AI-Driven Intelligence Master Mind System; Weather as a Force Multiplier; and, my favorite, Concept No. 900481: Destructo Swarmbots. According to Ratliff, military planners may soon no longer need to dream. Upstarts in Palo Alto and may be teaming up with Baber to take us one step closer to Skynet. Baber seems like a responsible guy for a man who built the deadliest short range weapon ever created, and I hope that "the man in the loop problem" stays theoretical. Sure, we can say we want to stay in the loop. But what if, one day, the machines don't want us there?

Now, for your enjoyment, the AA-12 in action: 

A Crazy Story

In which a murder victim's daughter tracks down the Mafia hitman-turned-Central-American-minister who killed her father. Eventually, she confronted the guy while wearing a hidden camera. But to get there, she spent twenty-seven years putting together what turned out to be an enormously complicated affair that investigators called The Octopus:

When Begley began looking into the Octopus case, she was overwhelmed. The stories went in every direction. There were connections with Saudi arms dealers, Nicaraguan Contras, the manufacturing of weapons on Indian land, renegade private security companies and a journalist who apparently committed suicide while investigating it. "A lot of it was lies, but a lot of it was true. I was able to confirm it," she said. "I was finally able to persuade the police to assign a detective to it. I just kept badgering them until they finally listened."

The guy was arrested last week. But there's more to this story! Why such a short-ish item with tantalizing allusions to details that are not provided? Come on! Murder, mystery, justice -- I want the whole scoop. I hope the LA Times -- or someone -- follows up.

Pictures From Pakistan

The Denver Post publishes a collection of stills by Emilio Morenatti, an Italian photographer for the AP who currently covers South Asia. We hear a lot about Pakistan these days: a taliban putsch, terrorism, civil unrest, angry lawyers, madrassas, honor killings, poverty, a failed state. What I like about these pictures is that they portray these abstract ideas in situ -- on the ground, in vivid, emotional detail on the faces of real people. A single very good photo attached to one newspaper story can be effective, but taking in a couple dozen of those pictures says something about the whole that the parts can't:

View the rest here.

A Strange and Lovely Email

From a friend. With the subject line: FROM THE BARRICADES.

In front of the market I saw a man down on his hands and knees, crawling and barking like a dog. Someone gave him a bottle of water and he doused his head as though he were on fire.

Walking into the store I watched, not with the detached eyes of the city dweller, but knowing that he is me, only down on his paws, no longer able to stand and pretend.

When I came out the medics were strapping him to a stretcher but the howling never stopped.

I Would Be Proud If I Came Up With This

Yesterday, I spent part of the morning arguing with a friend as to the ongoing importance of film criticism. He said that film critics were like bees in September: dying slowly and stinging wildly in their final days. I said: Feh! Criticism is the last bastion of meaningful writing for a mass audience. My friend resorted to he elitism canard about how Ain't It Cool News and shit like that is more relevant to the people's tastes. I guess I'm not "the people," because I don't care what fanboys think about Avatar. (Which, if you ask me, looks retarded, and has no chance of escaping the long shadow of the fractionally expensive and work of genius, District 9.) Even if you don't agree with Manohla, she cares about the transcendent meaning of film, and I'm all for that. There's nothing better than reading a great film review, even if you're uninterested in the movie. Like, for example, Dennis Lim's consideration of the latest Final Destination -- a movie I could never see; my friend Starlee and I once considered creating a series of horror film reviews that would be based on their Wikipedia entries, since we would be too scared to watch the actual movies -- in which Lim manages to concoct and sell a critical connection between the four Final Destinations and the metaphysics of Ingmar Bergman:

Their first innovation is the casting of Death itself as the antagonist, which turns out to be quite pleasing from a design perspective. These are remarkably streamlined, clutter-free movies, unencumbered by the need to identify the killer or his motivation, let alone explain why he appears to die at the end of one film only to be revived at the start of the next. There is no supernatural or psychological back story and — a rarity in this most charged of genres —no sociopolitical subtext to speak of. At most, for those so inclined, the movies function as memento mori, posing cosmic questions about fate and mortality. The arc of any “Final Destination” film — a futile, movielong negotiation with Death — echoes that of the Bergman classic “The Seventh Seal.

See? Take that, Ain't It Cool News!

The Last Farmer of Palos Verdes

Column One enlightens again, with one of those bittersweet "last" stories:

Hatano, 82, is the last farmer on the Palos Verdes Peninsula -- and the last link to a Palos Verdes few remember, one dotted with farms worked by Japanese immigrants and their families. Their garbanzo beans and tomatoes, nourished by rain and ocean mists, were known worldwide...

For $631 a year, Hatano leases two sites totaling 14 acres from the city of Rancho Palos Verdes. He still drives to his fields several times a week to make sure things are running smoothly....

When he retires, the land will revert to the city and a century-old tradition will end. "It represents our last connection to a previous way of life," says Judi Gerber, author of "Farming in Torrance and the South Bay." "I know that way of life is gone, but it's living history."

More!

When The Perfect Story and Perfect Writer Are Matched

You get this incredible Sunday NYTimes Magazine piece from a couple weeks back by Jack Hitt. Hitt never goes wrong anyhow, but this odd tale of Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic's hiding in plain sight in Belgrade as a long-haired mystical healer provides an opportunity for the unlikely combination of international justice, cultural insight, and a surprising dose of humor (especially for the NY Times) in one article. With just 5,000 or so words, the amount of narrative and nuance Hitt manages to layer in about identity and politics and some Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde suggestions about The Inner Struggle of Man is  astonishgly efficient. Add to that the fact that Hitt almost gets killed in a right-wing bar -- and then manages to turn almost getting killed into a punchline -- and the piece should get some kind of award. Why isn't there a pulitzer category for Funniest News Feature? I hereby create, nominate and award this piece for that category, if only for the following passage, in which Hitt visits a sex therapist named Bojovic who was working with Karadzic's alter-ego, Dragan Dabic:

Bojovic is a man of many inventions and theories, which is how he and Dabic connected. He explained that his current work is a study of his nation’s penises. Before he would discuss Dabic, he insisted on walking me and Tesanovic through a scrapbook with some 2,000 Polaroid close-ups of middle-aged, mainly Serbian penises. Bojovic said that he had recently proved that Serbian men can have active sex until the age 102 and Serbian women until 84.

He seemed especially interested in treating “strong-blooded women who cannot live without sex.” For them he has invented a special device called an aplikator, which can bring on a “gentle orgasm” and which can also be marketed (he insisted on telling me despite my best efforts to stop him) to “men who have problems with the colon or problems in the bathroom.” He does not ignore the active man, however. For womanizers, especially, he has invented the Spermosan. It is a small metal cup that attaches snugly to the testicles; through the cup, Bojovic detonates “a gentle surge of electricity that makes the sperm fall asleep, and then a womanizer can go womanize without being afraid of an unwanted pregnancy.” Even though this invention is “the one most deserving of praise,” he reported that the total number of clients for the Spermosan was “not many.”

Punyverse is a funny title

But what kind of jackass takes a cheap shot and calls Richard Bey's choice of red wine "purple swill"? I like Matt Haber, but why you gotta kick a man when he's down is all I'm saying.

Turns Out Jeffrey Goldberg is Funny!

On the cover of this month's Atlantic: "Why I Fired My Broker," a meandering and highly entertaining personal essay that concludes that the brokers don't know anything anyhow and if they did they wouldn't care about helping Jeffrey Godlberg or the rest of us monetary mortals. From a scene at a Fifth Avenue soiree, the party of a friend, the friend being a multi-millionaire and his friends also being multi-millionaires, all of whom had gathered in these times of economic distress to talk about charity:

...I thought, This is Bill Ackman standing before me. He’s a great investor. Maybe he can give me some advice.

So this is what came out of my mouth: “What do you tell the ordinary mortal—say, the person who works in the press that you talked about—what do you say to the person who has $20,000, $50,000, $100,000, or $200,000, maybe, parked somewhere doing nothing? What is your advice right now for that person?”

I looked around. The wizards in the room were having difficulty calculating figures of such humble size. I had thought $200,000 sounded like a large and unembarrassing number. But the room reacted as if I had asked, “Bill, I have 75 cents in my pocket. Do you think I should buy Twizzlers or a big red gumball?

Then comes the more important question:

“What’s the percentage chance we’re going to move to a barter economy?” I asked.

“I think it’s small,” Ackman said.

“Small”? I had been hoping for “Zero.” “Zero” would have been a fine answer, and not because I have nothing to barter except for a stack of old SmartMoney magazines, but “Zero” because, by the time my 12-year-old turns 18, I would like to be able to use my portfolio of stocks and bonds as a flotation device, and not as kindling.

Turns out the best advice Goldberg gets is from a sentimental survivalist:

THE WAY I SEE IT, it’s all a con game,” Cody Lundin was saying. “What I mean is that Wall Street has always been an illusion. Now it’s an illusion that’s crumbling. Wall Street is like someone who’s having heart trouble. It’s in constant need of resuscitation, but after a while, it just doesn’t work anymore. People think that Bernard Madoff was unique, that he was an illusion, but he’s just an extension of the same illusion, the same con game. This is one of the reasons I don’t like to have any debt. When you have debt, you become part of this illusion, and sometimes you get trapped by it.”

We were standing outside in a foot of snow in the mountains above Prescott, Arizona. Lundin was arguing so cogently against the American culture of easy credit, in tones far more thoughtful than one hears on cable television, that I forgot for a moment that he wasn’t wearing shoes, or socks. He was standing in the snow barefoot. Also, in shorts.

“It’s all about regulating core body temperature.” For long hikes in the snow, he wears three pairs of socks, without shoes. He suggested I try this.

Other things Lundin asked me to try include making fire with sticks, eating mice—“a free source of protein in survival scenarios”—and living without electricity for a week to “see where it hurts.” Lundin himself eats mice and rats he traps at his off-the-grid passive-solar house in the wilderness, because “why waste free protein?”

Lundin is a freak; twin blond braids fall from his bandanna-covered head, giving him the appearance of a stoner Viking.

Zing! Lundin's doesn't just tee up some funny turns of phrase but also provides more perspective on finances, as a veil of illusion, which winds up having a deeper effect on Goldberg than you might imagine.

Ultimately, that's the point of the piece, which could have also been called The Tao of the Dow. If you don't worry about getting Fifth Avenue rich, you don't need to worry about financial advice. And if you don't have to worry about financial advice, you'll be happier. It makes the same point you might find in a business-minded story on individual investiong, but through storytelling. Nice work. More please.

Dawidoff and Dyson

So I just got around to reading the epic and epically controversial Nicholas Dawidoff NY Times Magazine profile of long-time legendary physicist and fairly recent climate change heretic, Freeman Dyson. Observation number 1: I'm sure glad I didn't grow up in England in the 1930s, where small childrens' faces were apparently rubbed with sandpaper. As for the science part, I see what the fuss is about. Mostly. Dyson does slander James Hansen, who gets little chance to respond. Dawidoff was not trying to give a special voice to a climate change skeptic, but he had to navigate a tricky path here. If he really wanted to present the compelling tale of a brilliant but wild heretic against the establishment, an interesting dynamic to be sure, Dawidoff should have made sure there was space to really dig in to the arguments. Dyson says (with no evidence) Hansen is an opportunist. Hansen says Dyson doesn't know what he's talking about it. That's the central axis of the story, such at it is concieved, and it gets very little attention and almost no detail.

Nut aside, the story is an entertaining mini-biography of an inveterate contrarian. That point was surely made, but perhaps not strongly enough. Dyson's innovative thinking also makes him a technofuturist whose  more fantasticalideas have had more traction in the world of science fiction than science. Dyson's calculations about how climate change will enable a green future for all the planet, for example, might be better contextualized for the readers if they were to also realize this is the same guy who thought we could build an army of biological robots that could colonize asteroids and harvest their resources for us. Or something like that. You get the idea. Nifty. But not exactly practical. And when Dawidoff mentions Dysonian ideas like the Orion project, it is not fully explained that this is a cool idea that was basically impossible.

Another approach to the story altogether, I might dare to suggest, might have been to ignore the sensational, news-peg hot button issue of the day and take a step back to think about the role of Dyson's style of unorthodox thinking in science. Sure, maybe he is out of his depth in atmospheric science. Doesn't mean he can't throw ideas out there, no matter how odd. (Although, one might point out that when he notes how Greenlanders are now proud of their ability to grow cabbage, Dyson is veering into the rhetorical territory usually reserved for true nuts like Inhofe.) What kind of effect does it have in the consensus community when there is a brilliant critic? Get all Gladwell on that shit! Maybe there is some dynamic between synthesizers and specialists to be extrapolated from Dyson's career. Or as Dyson (sort of) put it, what is different about the frogs toiling in the mud and birds surveying from the sky? It seems that a profile of a guy like Dyson offers the opportunity to look at how science can be both challenged and advanced by contrarianism. It likely would have been more interesting. And more fitting for a profile of a well-known contrarian scientist nearing legacy time. To instead turn Dyson into a spokesman for climate change skepticism, it seems to me, does the most disservice not to science but to Dyson himself.

A Sneak Preview of Coming Genius

My pal Stephen Elliott, prolific author, political organizer, newly minted editor, and general force of nature, has a new book coming out and he wants to give you a chance to read it early! Don't delay. There aren't that many advance copies. Early birds will get the worm. And by worm, I mean a memoir/true crime courtroom drama that involves murder and sex!

Loving The Walrus

Aren't pleasant surprises great? Especially when they are a bright spot in the otherwise dark horizon print publishing? Somehow, I had missed entirely that there was a magazine called The Walrus. Moreover, it is a solid, quality, long form magazine. Like a Candian Harpers. And wouldn't you know it, a cursory investigation via my secret research tool, called Wikipedia, revealed that The Walrus is not only all those things, it is new, and meant specifically to be like a Canadian Harper's.

The article that brought me to The Walrus is this one. "The Archipelago of Fear," it's called, and it's about how the security-driven architecture of development and reconstruction in Afghanistan is obstructing the very goals of development and reconstruction. Or, as the subhed asks: Are fortification and foreign aid making Kabul more dangerous? The writer, Charles Montgomery, goes to Kabul and discovers a schizophrenic landscape: crumbling infrastructure, housing and roads lined with open sewers and sqatter settlements highlighting the country's forty five per cent unemployment are punctuated here and there by high-priced villas, hotels, and security compounds catering to the international military presence and aid community:

We couldn’t afford more than one night at the Serena, so Tilo had found us another island in Kabul’s archipelago of high-security compounds. And what an island it was. The guest house (whose name and location I won’t disclose, due to the security concerns of the international organization that runs it) inhabited a pair of walled gardens lush with honeysuckle and rose bushes. There was a badminton court, a gym, and a party room that shook on its weekly salsa nights. But it was the pool bar that distinguished the place, especially on Fridays, when bikini-clad babes and their beaus draped the lawn or frolicked in the California-blue pool. The beer was cold, and the burgers dripped with American ketchup.

It was hard to believe we were in Afghanistan. And really, we weren’t. Kalashnikov-armed guards kept Afghans from approaching the compound gate unless they happened to be employed there as waiters, cleaners, or bartenders...Like the Serena Hotel, our walled country club was a monument to the failures of reconstruction that could only serve to inflame and alienate Kabulis.

We've heard some of this before: the shocking $10,000 monthly rents in Kabul; the opium-fueled warlord villas side by side with UN agencies where officials who can't visit the sites they're funding; the five layers subcontracting that causes causes a project to lose half its money to skimming. But Montgomery suggests a cause and effect between the mode of development and its failure:

Seven years after the Taliban’s ouster, Kabul was supposed to be a bastion of stability, from which peace and prosperity would ripple across Afghanistan. But if Maiwandi was right, then the failures of reconstruction were actually contributing to a feedback loop of fear, fortification, and instability. I was fascinated and troubled by the possibility that foreign aid might be helping remodel Kabul into an even more dangerous place.

And this isn't just some fun with critical studies! Montgomery has done his homework, and makes the case:

Can the shape of a city really change the psychology of its inhabitants? It’s not an outrageous thesis. In 1997, the citizens of Bogotá elected as mayor an adherent of what some call the “economics of happiness.” Armed with studies suggesting that people could be made happier and more engaged by boosting feelings of safety, equity, and trust, Enrique Peñalosa ordered that fences around neighbourhood parks be ripped down, and handed road space to bikes and pedestrians, among other measures. Despite Colombia’s ongoing civil war, feelings of optimism in Bogotá spiked during his three-year term. Traffic accidents plummeted. So did the murder rate. Peñalosa’s ideas are now being adopted elsewhere, including in crime-plagued Mexico City.

This was more than an aesthetic critique. Those who look at the intersection of psychology and urban form suggest that the short-term gains from fortification might be overshadowed by the hostile response it fuels. Aggressive architectures — such as high, bare, cement walls — have been found to produce a backlash of vandalism and incivility in peaceful cities. Buildings offer cues suggesting how people should act. They tell us about our relationships with one another. University of Victoria environmental psychologist Robert Gifford once put it to me this way: “Buildings are symbols. They communicate to people, even if it’s not what their architects intend.” Fahim Hakim suggested that in Kabul, the fortifications around foreign compounds reinforce Afghans’ suspicion that those inside the walls have more in common with their former Soviet occupiers than they admit. “We just don’t know if they are here to protect us or themselves,” he said.

But beyond the thesis what makes this story is the flat-footing. And the word count to tell the story of what it means to really see Afghanistan. Long form triumphs again. Montgomery makes some brave forays into Kabul, unaccompanied by security, to provide a unique view at the bizarre reality of Afghanistan. Highlights are his visit to Sherpur, a fancy new neighborhood:

One sunny morning, I convinced Tilo to join me in a common pastime for internationals in Kabul: the hunt for a Sherpur dream home. The streets were a mess of broken rock and open sewers clogged with garbage, but amid this public poverty lay a phantasmagoria of private wealth. The mansions stood three, four, even five storeys high, with champagne-tinted windows, candy cane columns, mirrored cupolas, and gold paint so chaotically collaged that the loops of razor wire adorning the balconies seemed almost a whimsical flourish. Roman fountains! Swimming pools! Concrete fauna! Sherpur’s aesthetic roots were international —there were splashes of Dubai, Peshawar, and Miami — but fuelled by a local phenomenon: buckets of booty from war, corruption, and the opium trade. We couldn’t agree on the nomenclature. Was this narcotecture or warlord kitsch?

Zing! Makes you wish that the photographer, and his stunning special ghostly technique, had gone along that day. Or, if he did, that The Walrus had published his pictures online in an extra photo essay.

And I Thought Facebook Was Mostly For People To See My Awesome Status Updates

And they are totally awesome, as I'm sure most of you already know. I mean: Joshuah Bearman Blames It On The Rain?!?!? Come on, how cool is that, right?

Well, like me, you may be surprised to discover that there are other uses for the internet. Have you heard about online shopping? And apparently, political foment is an online activity. Heard about that one too? Well, this big piece in the NY Times magazine from yesterday takes a new look at how Facebook has formed a political vent and organizing tool in the middle east, particularly in Egypt, where there are nearly a million members. And once you get past the Lets Kill The Jews Causes stuff, the article moves on to the more novel role of online organizing in domestic political unrest and party-forming. What's interesting is that the ease of Facebook has provided Egyptian twenty-year-olds not just with a political voice but with an alternate to the accepted, or tolerated, or at least established, political opposition of the Muslim brotherhood:

When I spoke to Wael Nawara, a 47-year-old Ghad activist who is a co-founder of the party, he explained why, for him, getting on Facebook was such a big eye-opener. If you look at Egyptian politics on the surface, he said, you might think that the Muslim Brotherhood is the only alternative to the Mubarak regime. But “Facebook revealed a liberal undercurrent in Egyptian society,” Nawara said. “In general, there’s this kind of apathy, a sense that there is nothing we can do to change the situation. But with Facebook you realize there are others who think alike and share the same ideals. You can find Islamists there, but it is really dominated by liberal voices.”

Shortly thereafter, the State Department optimists appear to voice their hope that these groups can be the seeds for civil society organizations. I like the sound of that, although I'm not so sure about the State Department's own Facebook group called “Alliance of Youth Movements.” Dare to Keep Kids Off Extremism!

By the way, can I just make the interesting observation that in open societies, the internet's aggressive contrarians are 4chan types -- people who want to test the boundaries of freedom -- whereas it's the closed societies who see it as a medium of liberalism and political moderation. OK, so, universal human freedom established, I have some growing gifts to give and a game of Word Twist going and I haven't posted to I Flip My Pillow To Get To The Cold Side in awhile, so GTG!!!!

Hard Times, Kind Words

All the doom and gloom about the LA Weekly's sad state of affairs is true, but even with no staff and no budget it's worth pointing out that even in the absence of resources (and a managing editor!), the dedicated few can still put together a nice issue. Like last week's, for example, which started with a whimsically weird airplane romance by Sophia Kercher. Shows you what the Town section is meant for. Then Gendy finds a local story about a replica phoenician vessel. And the indomitable writing machine Scott Foundas turned out a solid look back at two decades of Soderberg and also a piece about Soderberg's forgotten Sundance contemporary, Wendell B. Harris, Jr. A whole paper thrown together by three people -- just like old times!

If Proust Was Bedridden in Morningside Heights and Bit Into a Bagel, Or Maybe A Slice Over At Koronet

This is what he would have written (as channeled by modern day belletrist and electronic group pen pal of yours truly, Kevin Baker):

We feasted on $4 platters of Indian food in restaurants on Sixth Street where you could bring your own wine. We went everywhere by subway, riding in gray, graffiti-covered cars where half the doors didn’t open and a single, sluggish fan shoved the air about on summer nights. We took a cab sometimes, when there were five of us and we could get a Checker, one person riding on the jump seat, staring out at the long avenues of the city.

It was a gray city, a weary one, an older one. There were, in those days, pornographic theaters in good neighborhoods; Bowery-style wino bars with sawdust on the floor on Upper Broadway; prostitutes along West End Avenue slipping into cars with New Jersey license plates. It was a city, too, that seemed to open up into an infinite series of magic boxes, of novelty shops and diners, delicatessens and corner bakeries, used record stores and bookstores.

It's Not New To Give Props to Matt Labash

And I really do try not to read the Weekly Standard. But every so often, Labash gives a reminder as to why, politics aside, he's a great magazine writer. Case in point is his massive cover story on Detroit from a couple weeks back. The overture is a crisp summary of how the clouds gathered over Detroit, after which Labash makes a valient effort to find some silver linings, mostly through the prism of his bromantic journocrush, Charlie LeDuff. Whereas the opening is a sort Grand Guignol about the death of a city, a death so spectacular and bizarre in the details that ou can't help but find it amusing at times, the vignettes that follow -- about the tragic death of a firefighter, visiting the Motown musuem with Martha Reeves, and a homeless man named Wayne Williams who actually came to Detroit to find work (!) -- turn that story into something heartfelt and personal. There is no larger picture, no Whither Detroit? But maybe that wasnt the point. Or maybe that's what Labash hoped to find, and realized it was impossible to say. Although perhaps something concrete could have been said about the auto industry, which made a tantalizing appearance as a structural pole around which to turn the piece. For whatever's lacking there, it's compensated for by the extra props Labash gets for giving a homeless man a lift and spending the afternoon with him:

His name is Wayne Williams, and he has a gentle spirit. We get to talking, and I quickly lose interest in the goats. He says he moved to Detroit two years ago. He was a gravedigger back in Alabama, and he came here to get a better job.

"You came to Detroit to get a better job?" I ask.

"Yeah," he says, smiling. "I know better now."

He says he's tried to get a job in over 100 places, everywhere from construction to fast food to gravedigging again, but hasn't managed. The box he is carrying is full of clothes that he got out of a dumpster. He walks the empty streets waiting for passersby, seeing if they want to buy any. His own clothes are all from charity, which might explain why he wears snowboots that look like they belong to a 10-year-old boy.

I ask him where he lives, and he shows me. He lives beneath a Rosa Parks Boulevard underpass, in the shadow of Tiger Stadium, which has been mostly torn down, though the preservationists are trying to save the last of it. The Tigers now play at Comerica Park, though the company the park's named for has fled to Dallas.

He shows me his lean-to boxes and blankets, and a Bible sitting on a bridge girder as though it were his bookshelf. I ask how he could sleep, it's so incredibly noisy. He's used to it, he says, and he wants the traffic. That's why he's there. He figures there's less chance of getting killed if he sleeps where motorists can see him. A few months ago, he was robbed and thrown off an overpass. He shows me his still-swollen thumb and the scars on his head and back. "I feel safe under the bridge," Wayne says.

We go back to my truck. He asks me for nothing. But I tell him I'll give him a lift to wherever he's going since he's been a good guide, and also slide him twenty bucks. He offers me a breast-cancer awareness pin. He found a bunch of them in a dumpster and is going to try to sell them, but thinks I should have one for free.

We talk local politics a little. With time on his hands, he reads all the newspapers he finds. He's disappointed in Kwame: "Great leaders take care of their people." He says he would make a good one because "I love the human race." He prays for them, as well as for Detroit, he says, which he worries about. I ask him if he gets lonely out here. He says yes, he does, but a red-tailed fox sometimes comes to visit him, though it's too scared to approach, so he'll roll food down the overpass embankment to it. Plus, he talks to God a lot. He calls him "my partner."

"All I want to do is live to be an old man," Wayne says. "That's what I ask my partner for."

Foreign Policy Relaunch

Just what you've been waiting for, the new new Foreign Policy!

They teamed up with Slate, hired a bunch of writers, snappily redressed the look, and I like the results so far. Among the highlights, an interview with Petraeus, who says, Aghanistan will be a longer, harder slog than Iraq:

I didn’t say it could be. I said it would be. My assessment was that Afghanistan was going to be the longest campaign of the long war. And I think that assessment has been confirmed by events in Afghanistan in recent months.

 Also, a photoessay of Hamas summer camp.

Counter-Revolutionary Road

There is much to say about Revolutionary Road. I'm talking about the film, which I can't stop thinking about. There is also much to say about the book. I haven't read it, but those who have are using the film as a opportunity to revisit the novel's meaning. Very welcome, as is this interesting story from the New York Times about Phyllis McGinley, a onetime famous poet who is mostly forgotten because she, unlike her literary and intellectual contemporaries, found inspiration in the muted eggshell colors of suburban Westchester. McGinley, coincidentally, is a friend of mine's grandmother. She was also on the cover of Time, and, ironically, won the Pulitzer for poetry the same year that Revolutionary Road appeared. She was later targeted by Betty Friedan and followers as a "housewife writer" because she was one of those women who thought that education and housework were not mutually exclusive, a belief she summarized by writing:

“Surely the ability to enjoy Heine’s exquisite melancholy in the original German, will not cripple a girl’s talent for making chocolate brownies.”

As it happens, I've read Heine in German and recently made a delicious apple pie with a kitty kat face!

Where does that leave me and my Male Mystique? In the arms of a good woman, that's where.

Which reminds me: what I realized while watching Revolutionary Road is that the entire literature of suburban dissatisfaction, or horror, in the case of the Stepford Wives, is built on the idea that something terrible lurks below the happy surface of the eggshell-colored homes. But the emptiness and dread is really disappointment. Postwar America was the first time in human history that people were told that they could be happy in three easy steps. Driven by economics and marketing, people were made a promise, one that couldn't be delivered, thus igniting fifty years of broken hearts. If they never told us things could be perfect, the fall wouldn't have been so hard. The something terrible that always lurks below the manicured surface is just human reality. There is always unhappiness, tragedy, drama -- even in the suburbs. Which somewhat belies the thrust of Revolutionary Road and its literary kin: if there's one we learn from the Wheelers it's that people do feel things in Connecticut. 

The Weekly That Was

I finally picked up the LA Weekly's 30th Anniversary issue and wound up reading it cover to cover in one sitting. When I started writing for the LA Weekly, it was one of the few magazines (and it is a magazine, despite the newsprint) where you could write what you want, and turn in 10,000 words on, say, the sole survivor of the Heaven's Gate cult, and then see it in print a week later. What I didn't realize, having come to the LA Weekly fairly recently, is that it had always been this way. I mean, I had always assumed that those stacks of yellowing papers in the back closet no one went into contained a great legacy of editorial daring and the writing that followed; I just had never seen it myself, mostly because it has never been put online nor anthologized.   

This issue is a guided tour of that legacy. Among those highlights was Harold Meyerson's ambitious plan to put the Weekly out daily during the Democratic National Convention in 2000 at the Staples Center. That was the summer I interned, and I filed 300 words at a time for Harold, who almost single-handedly write the papers copy like he was taking dictation. (We called it The Harold Examiner.) It's hard to imagine covering national politics in force now, and it's even harder to imagine the LA Weekly having foreign correspondents, as it did in Central America in 1980s, when Ginger Varney ran into Oliver North before Iran Contra and Greg Goldin wrote about massacres in El Savador long before The Truth of El Mozote and Marc Cooper put together a secret war primer for the cover. Living up to the role as an alternative media source in the country's second largest city, there was real politics and real writing, often at the same time: in 1992, I learned, Tom Carson went to the RNC and came back with an enormous missive than included a phantasmagoria called Dogfucker Blues wherein Bush 41 was imagined as a man who really loved his canines:

He couldn’t remember when it had started. Prep school, maybe. ... But even before Pearl Harbor, when he’d been a kid in Connecticut, there’d just been something about putting it to a dog that excited him.

He’d never told anyone. Even at Skull and Bones, when he was lying naked in the coffin, while the candle dripped hot wax on his belly, he hadn’t been able to blurt it out, the dog thing. He’d just made up some stuff instead. Some business about Negresses and whips — the same things all the other fellows said.

He’d had human mistresses too — sure. For show. How strange that even his secrets were for show. But dogs were better. More — well, some damn word: docile. Less threatening. They didn’t laugh, and they wouldn’t talk, because they couldn’t talk. And if they could talk, who’d believe a dog?

There was one thing he hated to think about, and so he never did: the Dog-people.

He’d never actually seen any of them. But one day in 1975, when he was running CIA, his deputy director had come to him with disturbing reports of a new kind of monstrous creature being sighted across the United States. Some had human heads and canine bodies, some the reverse. Some were just horrible squishy things — jellied masses, furry here and naked there, with people-eyes and doggy-lips, and bits of both human and canine limbs sticking out of them. Most of those died at birth.

Luckily, it had never occurred to his deputy director to check the locations of the sightings against his own boss’ business trips. But even so, he had to be careful. Acting very concerned (he was, of course, but not like that), he ordered that every last mutant be tracked down but pronto. Then they were to be sealed up in cases in supersecret locations around the country, and injected with the special cryogenics fluid.

Such look backs are always nostalgic, but this one can't help but feel elegaic. Papers aren't the same papers they once were, and the Weekly is no different, but it's surprising to realize what the Weekly once did with less, back when I was in primary schook, and how much more things mattered then. Scott Foundas acknowledges this openly in his retrospective of the Weekly's grand tradition of film criticism, which started with Michael Ventura attacking the Deer Hunter for being so good and hit high stride with Manohla Dargis (my first mentor), like so:

“In Malick’s universe,” wrote Dargis, “the Japanese soldiers, an American private who pries gold teeth from his victims, the monomaniacal Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte, all sputter and agitated neck cords), even the enraged American soldier who kills two Japanese prisoners in cold blood — are all the same. They’re men who are not bad themselves, but are forced to do bad things, men who invariably weep and keen over their horrendous actions. ... [James] Jones might agree, except he’d say the men are all the same because they’re meat. For Malick, they’re the same because they are part of an unbroken universe in which a blue butterfly flutters through the black haze of battle, a pink orchid is swallowed up in a fireball as a bamboo wind chime peals one last time. In this world, in which love conquers all and war is a sad but totally natural occurrence, no one is to blame, no one is guilty, no one is responsible. Of all the remarkable things about The Thin Red Line, a film at once beautiful and utterly repulsive, the most remarkable is that Terrence Malick has made an amoral movie about one of the most deeply moral moments in modern history.”

At Nix's Check Cashing, You ARE Somebody Special!

If you grew up in the Los Angeles area, you know Nix, the ubiquitous hole-in-the-wall check cashing chain. If you grew up in the Los Angeles area and listened to the radio, you know the Nix jingle: At Nix Check Cash-ing, You're Some-bo-dy Spe-cial!

Like most people, I always assumed that Nix was a very effective purveyor of high cost financial services to the poor; that they exploit desperation and the lack/distrust of real banking for high fees. A recent New York Times Magazine article by Doug McGray (an interesting writer whose Foreign Policy piece from years ago on Japan's cultural capital is a must read) says otherwise. He stipulates the problems with payday loans, and the $40,000 in fees a lifelong Nix customer might spend. Having spent some time in Western Unions in various states with my alcoholic mother, I can tell you first hand about the "poverty penalty." You have less, so you pay more, somehow, for basics like groceries and banking. McGray does make the interesting point that Nix fees are very clear, posted and confirmed at every step by cashiers, whereas the big banks, as we all know, try to sneak all kinds of fees -- overdrafts, late payments, account minumums, etc. -- on to our statements and hope we don't notice. (The fuckers.) More importantly, McGray says, is that the man behind Nix, Tom Nix, has always been devoted to his customer base. He started in the grocery business with his father, and started extending credit and cashing checks for customers. The article also suggests that Nix's jingle isn't just marketing: 

Nix hires from the neighborhood and pays well enough that cashiers stick around. Word spreads, and in Watts or Highland Park or Pacoima, that reputation often carries more weight than some bank ad on a bus stop. “It’s social marketing 101.

I frequently saw cashiers address customers by name and ask about family or friends in common. One customer asked if the manager could come over, then broke the news that her husband had passed away. “What happened?” the manager gasped. Then, shaking her head: “He always came in with his pennies.” And Nix dresses up branches less formally than banks do — no suits, no office furniture, no carpeting — so a construction worker can show up straight from his shift, in dirty clothes, and, Nix says, not feel out of place.

And that customer service has created a strong brand loyalty. By way of example, McGray talks to a guy who is actually named Johnny Bravo. I imagined it was this Johnny Bravo, even though I know it wasn't:

Anyhow, Johnny Bravo, is an ex-marine and current delivery driver:

He told me he gets a payday loan every other Friday, pretty much without fail. Sometimes he needs it for bills. Sometimes it’s for gas — he owns a big, thirsty S.U.V. But mostly he described the loan as cash to enjoy his weekend.

“How much do you think you spend a year on payday loans?” I asked.

“Well, finance is about 45 dollars; add that up . . . ,” he said, and paused. “Comes out to a pretty good chunk of change,” he admitted. “But I don’t think of it that way.”

Bravo is exactly the kind of case consumer advocates bring up when they call for a ban on payday loans. But for better or worse, the guy loves Nix. “They treat me with respect, they’re really nice,” he said. He’s especially fond of the manager, Beatriz. She grew up in the neighborhood and has worked at Nix for almost 20 years now.

I find it to be a satisfying surprise that all these years Nix really did think we are special. At least someone gets something in exchange for the fees. Even more important, McGray says, is where Nix is headed. It was the persistent banking vacuum in poor communities that created today's Nix, whose size and reach may now enable it to fill that vaccuum:

Tom Nix’s life, and his work, is the story of how we got here, to a separate and mostly unequal financial industry for the poor. But it may also be the story of a new way out. Last fall, Nix sold his entire chain for $45 million to one of the country’s largest credit unions, Kinecta, which turned around and gave him an unlikely assignment: Put a credit-union window in every Nix store and help Kinecta take mainstream banking services to some of L.A.’s poorest neighborhoods — by thinking less like a bank and more like a check casher.

Nix has started opening Kinecta credit union windows at its locations. Tellers ask customers if they want to open free savings or checking accounts. They answer questions. And they sign people up. McGray says that if Nix is successful at bringing basic banking back to these communties, the bigger banks will follow. Which would be a good thing, obviously. But then those banks would have to come up with an awesome jingle.

Very Delayed Kudos

To this New Yorker article from the August 4, 2008 issue by William Dalrymple about the realm of sacred prostitution in India. Fans of technique must admire the lede, almost entire in the voice of the Devadasis, women "dedicated" to a life of marriage to a deity, which in practice means institutional sexual subservience:

“Of course, there are times when there is pleasure,” Rani Bai said. “Who does not like to make love? A handsome young man, one who is gentle . . .”

She paused for a moment, looking out over the lake, smiling to herself. Then her face clouded over. “But mostly it is horrible. The farmers here, they are not like the boys of Bombay.”

“And eight of them every day,” her friend Kaveri said. “Sometimes ten. Unknown people. What kind of life is that?”

“We have a song,” Rani said. “ ‘Everyone sleeps with us, but no one marries us. Many embrace us, but no one protects.’ ”

“Every day, my children ask, ‘Who is my father?’ They do not like having a mother who is in this business.”

“Once, I tried to open a bank account with my son,” Rani said. “We went to fill in the form, and the manager asked, ‘Father’s name?’ After that, my son was angry. He said I should not have brought him into the world like this.”

“We are sorry we have to do this work. But what is the alternative?”

“Who will give us jobs? We are all illiterate.”

“And the future,” Kaveri said. “What have we to look forward to?”

“When we are not beautiful, when our bodies become ugly, then we will be all alone.”

“If we live long enough to be old and to be ugly,” Kaveri said. “So many are dying.”

“One of our community died last week. Two others last month.”

“In my village, four younger girls have died,” Kaveri said. “My own brother has the disease. He used to be a truck driver, and knew all the girls along the roads. Now he just lies at home drinking, saying, ‘What difference does it make? I will die anyway.’ ”

She turned to face me. “He drinks anything he can get,” she said. “If someone told him his own urine had alcohol in it, he would drink that, too.” She laughed, but harshly. “If I were to sit under a tree and tell you the sadness we have to suffer, the leaves of that tree would fall like tears. My brother is totally bedridden now. He has fevers and diarrhea.” She paused. “He used to be such a handsome man, with a fine face and large eyes. Now those eyes are closed, and his face is covered with boils and lesions.”

“Yellamma never wanted it to be like this,” Rani said.

“The goddess is sitting silently,” Kaveri said. “We don’t know what feelings she has about us. Who really knows what she is thinking?”

“No,” Rani said, firmly shaking her head. “The goddess looks after us. When we are in distress, she comes to us. Sometimes in our dreams. Sometimes in the form of one of her children.”

“It is not the goddess’s doing.”

“The world has made it like this.”

“The world, and the disease.”

“The goddess dries our tears,” Rani said. “If you come to her with a pure heart, she will take away your sadness and your sorrows. What more can she do?”

Dalrymple is a well-known historian of India and he is able to plainly explain how such a practice developed. In short, there was a golden era of the Devadasi, when they had higher social status, more like courtesans, but those days are long over. It is now a variant of commercial sex work with a sacred sheen. And the story of Rani, the woman whose story Dalrymple tells, is heartbreaking. Do read.