26. July 2008 by admin.

For the last couple of weeks, my flaky Internet connection at home got even flakier, to the point where it was up for only a couple of hours in the middle of the night. “Call the cable company and complain,” my wife told me.

But then I’d have to dig up their phone number, and the account number, and wait for twenty minutes on hold, and then they’d tell me, “We’ll get right on it,” and then I’d probably have to call again. It was easier to simply live without it. Pointless Web surfing is a bad habit, except that I can’t update my blog.

A couple of days ago, the connection came back up: I guess someone else complained.

* * *

All of that is rather pointless, except as introduction to my current funk. If my mother saw me writing this post, and read the title, she’d knock me upside the head. “Stop your self-pity,” she’d tell me.

*     *     *

Yesterday afternoon, my wife called me at the office: there’s was a concert in Prospect Park, and she wanted to see it. As I read the description, it was a performance of music from the movie Powaqqatsi. I was mildly interested, so I agreed.

We got to the Prospect Park Bandshell, paid our admission, and I saw that we had a choice: we could sit on seats in the bandshell, or spread out beyond it, on the lawn. This is good, I thought: I had brought a ground cloth, and we could stretch out and relax, since the performance was not due to start for another hour.

Instead, my wife pulled me toward the bandshell, to the second row behind the seats that had been cordoned off for VIPs. I really didn’t want to sit in an uncomfortable metal folding chair for four hours, with no legroom, hemmed in by crowds so that it would be a major production to go to the can, but I’m the good husband, so I went.

Worse, I hadn’t brought my computer, or anything to read. But my wife had brought a play that she was studying for one of her classes, so at least I could read over her shoulder.

Powaqqatsi is one of a series of three movies about life and (although those responsible will jump up and down and swear otherwise) how modern civilization is screwing it up.  There is no plot, no dialogue, not even any visual references to specific places: we’re somewhere in Asia or Africa or wherever, but we can’t quite tell where. The visuals are a series of mostly dreary images from these exotic locales, of people doing the little things they do to keep their world going. These are interspersed with images of our modern world, chosen and edited for ugliness.

This is accompanied by grinding music that is somewhat related to the visuals, occasionally echoing the sounds that would have been present during filming, but mostly just grinding. Sometimes, the music evokes a feeling of triumph, but there is no triumph on the screen.  In fairness, the live music was the best part of the production.  It would have been stirring if it had been presented by itself, or with better visuals.

Perhaps the real art of Powaqqatsi is that it causes a group of people to assemble themselves, experience it, and feel edified.

*     *     *

And while I was writing the previous section, the Internet connection at my house went down.  About an hour later, it’s up again.  I had better finish this quickly….

I went to Powaqqatsi by default: it was my wife’s idea.  But if it was my decision, what would I have done?  I probably would have wanted to watch the tube for a bit, and then go to sleep.

But  what do I really want?  If all doors had stood open, and I weren’t tired after a long work week, what would I want to do?

Alas, I really don’t know….

Posted in Navel-gazing, Life Goes On, Movies | No Comments »

7. July 2008 by admin.

While on our evening walk, my wife and I came across the temporary waterfall that was set up on the Brooklyn shore, near the Promenade. Last week, the scaffolding was set up, but the waterfall was not in operation. Now it’s turned on, and it looks like… scaffolding with water coming out the top of it.

There is such a thing as good public art. A few years ago, The Gates, a series of wooden archways with orange curtains, was installed in Central Park. That was fun: the orange contrasted with the white and gray of the park in winter, and each archway was a new revelation, inviting one to see the park again for the very first time.

But this waterfall thing isn’t it. Perhaps the waterfall nestled under the Brooklyn Bridge looks cooler, but the ones that I could see, near the Promenade and on Governor’s Island, were dwarfed by the city around them.   (There is a fourth waterfall further north, on the Manhattan side.)  The waterfalls are not colorful, and not particularly eye-catching. They contribute only noise and humidity, two things that are already here in Brooklyn in more than sufficient quantities.

Who thought this was a good idea?

Posted in Dysfunctional Government, Brooklyn | No Comments »

6. July 2008 by admin.

An editorial piece in today’s Daily News, decrying the slow progress on the World Trade Center memorial, cited the remarks of former New York City Mayor Giuliani on leaving office in 2001, shortly after the events of 11 September:

You know, long after we’re all gone, it’s the sacrifice of our patriots and their heroism that is going to be what this place is remembered for. It could be a place that is remembered 100 and 1,000 years from now, like the great battlefields of Europe and of the United States. And we really have to be able to do with it what they did with Normandy or Valley Forge or Bunker Hill or Gettysburg. We have to be able to create something here that enshrines this forever and that allows people to build on it and grow from it.

At the time, nobody called him on it: we were still overwrought with what had happened, and Mayor Giuliani had done a wonderful job in keeping the city together after 11 September.  But now that we have some distance from the event, we might consider:

• Normandy:  The Allies landed in Normandy as a first step to retaking France and western Europe from the Nazis.  They secured a beachhead and advanced from there to end the war in Europe in less than a year.
• Valley Forge:  It wasn’t really a ‘battlefield;’ it was where the Continental Army encamped for the winter of 1777-1778, during which they became stronger and ultimately succeeded in driving the British out of what is now the United States.
• Bunker Hill:  The Continental Army actually lost the battle of Bunker Hill, an effort to secure the Hill as an artillery site.  But the British took heavy losses, and ultimately lost the war.
• Gettysburg: We remember Gettysburg for President Lincoln’s famous speech (’Four score and seven years ago…’).  But Lincoln would not have given the speech there if the Union forces had lost the battle of Gettysburg, and we would not remember it if the Union had lost the Civil War.

The winners write the history books, and the winners build the monuments.  When there is a monument to defeat, even when built by the winners afterward, it tends to be small, understated, conciliatory.  (There is, for example, a monument at Dunkirk, not far from Normandy, where the British and French were driven out by the Nazis some years before.)

In other words, there seems something profoundly wrong with building a big elaborate monument to getting one’s own ass whupped.  On the other hand, this won’t be the first time: witness the Oklahoma City National Memorial.

Have pain and suffering become the psychic coin of the realm, as triumph and exultation were in the not-so-distant past?

And what does that mean for the future?

Posted in World Trade Center, Dysfunctional Government | No Comments »

5. July 2008 by admin.

Last night, my wife and I watched Independence Day, the 1996 movie with Will Smith, in which hostile aliens from outer space start destroying major cities.  It was one of my son’s favorite movies when it came out years ago, and was a huge commercial success.  But my wife hadn’t seen it before.

She was impressed, and thought it was a very well-made movie.  As I watched it with her, I wondered why it seemed so wonderful.

“You don’t watch action movies anymore,” my son often says to me, and it’s true.  And it’s not just that I’m busier now, or that I more often see movies with my wife than with my son: the latest crop of action movies no longer appeals.  I couldn’t care less about the exploits of Spider-Man, Ironman, the Fantastic Four, Hellboy, or any of the comic-book superheroes prowling the screens today.

And when I watched Independence Day last night, I understood why.  Independence Day told the story of ordinary mortals who were pressed to become heroes.  And so it was with the James Bond movies, The Peacemaker, Armageddon, and the other action movies that my son and I enjoyed in the 1990s.  While sometimes it was the hero’s job to be a hero, in every case the hero was still an ordinary person.

I am starved for the sight of such a hero in the movies or television: an otherwise ordinary person who rises to a challenge, faces it with grace and skill, and prevails.

Last week, I went to see Get Smart with my son.  Maxwell Smart was never a hero: he was an amiable buffoon who happened to solve the problems at hand.  And while the movie tends more to action than the 1960s TV series did, it’s still more of a comedy.  So while it was fun, it didn’t hit my hero spot.

And then there’s Hancock, this year’s Will Smith movie.  Hancock is an otherwise ordinary guy with superhero skills.  But since he apparently doesn’t know what to do with them, he begins the movie as a drunken bum.

It was a truism where I used to work (a very large organization) that there are ‘no more heroes.’  In some quarters ‘heroics’ is almost a dirty word: it’s the way unsophisticated, immature organizations accomplish things.  The Disney animated movie The Incredibles took a tongue-in-cheek view, positing a world in which the superheroes were forced to retire under the threat of lawsuits.

Over 400 years ago, Sheakespeare wrote in ‘King Henry v’:

In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;

In other words, the hero is there inside of us, waiting to be unleashed should the circumstances present themselves.

But if we’re told all our lives that there are no such things as heroes, what will we do?

Posted in Movies | No Comments »

4. July 2008 by admin.

Last Sunday, Wesley Clark, former general and Democratic Presidential candidate, remarked on Face the Nation that “I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be President.” The remark related to the Republican candidate, John McCain.

It was, perhaps, a rude thing to say, but not entirely out of place.  Much of McCain’s appeal is based on his having been shot down over Vietnam and serving several years as a prisoner of war.  And as for a qualification to be President, I’d rather have a guy who flew a fighter plane and didn’t get shot down.

But the McCain camp worked themselves into a lather over the remark, suggesting that Clark was asserting that McCain’s military service did not qualify him to be President.

Well, it doesn’t!  The last President to have actually served in the military (as opposed to the National Guard) was the elder George Bush.  And there are thousands of ex-fighter pilots, and probably hundreds of ex-fighter pilots who were also prisoners of war: are all of them entitled to be President?

It was also suggested that Clark apologize for his remarks.  He didn’t, but Barack Obama had to address the issue, indicating regret that Clark had taken the campaign off-message.  Politics makes cowards of us all.

The result of this is that we got through another week chasing our tails because someone said something refreshingly honest, instead of the standard manufactured blather, or, worse yet, actually addressing the issues.

Posted in Presidential election | No Comments »

3. July 2008 by admin.

And then, there’s the planned WTC Memorial.

When the Port Authority reported that the projects on the World Trade Center site were seriously delayed, the head of the foundation building the memorial insisted that it was ‘essential’ that the memorial be completed by 2011. Apparently wishful thinking will make it so. Or is it that he fears that the rest of us will have moved on with our lives?

Of course there should be a memorial to the original Twin Towers and the people who lost their lives on 11 September. But does that mean that a dozen acres of prime Manhattan real estate should be given over in perpetuity for moaning and wailing?

After the events of 11 September, we were all in a state of shock. Some people suggested that the site be left alone. There were letters to the newspaper editors, full of resentment that the subway and PATH people set to work in the depths of the Pit to restore their respective facilities: how dare they take my loved one’s resting place for a train station!

Eventually, in this overheated atmosphere, a plan emerged, with two reflecting pools covering the footprints of the original Towers. It effectively precludes the use of the site for other purposes. While there is green space and (I’d like to imagine) places to sit, I can imagine that there will be howls of protests about letting hod dog vendors into the area, lest it spoil the somber mood of the place.

The foundation responsible for the memorial (you can read more about it at http://www.national911memorial.org/) reported in March that they had met their $350 million fundraising goal for the project. That sounds like a lot of popular support until you read a little further: about 80% of the total comes from donations of $5 million or more, and over 95% comes from donations of $1 million or more. Only a relative handful came from ordinary people who sent in a few dollars for the cause.

So I guess it will get built, eventually. But I’d rather have a useful park, where one might go for a twilight concert or something, than a monument to our pain and suffering.

Posted in World Trade Center, Dysfunctional Government | No Comments »

2. July 2008 by admin.

Yesterday’s newspapers reported what we, as New Yorkers, had already understood for a long time: that the plans for the new structures that were supposed to replace the World Trade Center were irretrievably screwed up, and that, without several months of further analysis, it would not even be possible to make a reasonable projection about when they might be finished.

We used to be a city, and a nation, of big plans and big achievements: the first New York subway was designed and built from scratch in eight years; we won World War II; we went to the moon in a decade; the original World Trade Center towers were built in eight years.

After the attacks of 11 September, we rebuilt the necessary pieces of infrastructure pretty quickly: the power grid got fixed in a few months; the IRT subway that ran through the site was reopened in a year (it would have been sooner, but Governor Pataki wanted to preside at the reopening ceremony); the PATH terminal and the tunnels to New Jersey were back in a little over two years.

And then, when it came to properly rebuilding the site, the wheels fell off.

What happened?

There are lots of things that one could point to, but an obvious one is the difference between leadership and management. The Port Authority in the 1960s, had a vision of how they would improve the city by building two really tall buildings. They held on to their vision, despite some measure of public opposition, and the original Twin Towers were built.

Today, the management of the project is fractured. The Port Authority owns the site, but is subject to direction from the state, the city, Larry Silverstein (to whom the World Trade Center site was leased shortly before 11 September), and a cast of characters. Worse, nobody seems to see anything wrong with this.

A project like this, with many competing interests, needs leader whom everyone trusts, who has a reasonable understanding of the interests involved, who can fairly decide when someone won’t get exactly what they want, and who has the authority to make his decisions stick,

But that isn’t the modern management style. There are no heroes; there are no ‘lone wolves.’ Instead there is management by consensus, a thoughtful balancing of the interests of the ’stakeholders.’

The problem is that leads to decisions that are ’safe,’ but really crappy:

• The proper way to show that we refuse to give in to the terrorists is to build something as awesome as the original Twin Towers. Replicating the Towers would be a good idea, but isn’t the only alternative. But as much as the site and the New York psyche cries for iconic skyscrapers, that would be too dangerous. So instead we have a parade of boxes.
• The actual height of the Freedom Tower (minus the spire) is actually only slightly shorter than the original Twin Towers. So it really isn’t that much less dangerous, if we’re worried about an event similar to 11 September.
• And who gave us the name ‘Freedom Tower’? The site is still called the World Trade Center, and the other buildings will carry World Trade Center addresses. Are we really celebrating freedom in a building that had to be redesigned so as to make it more resistant to truck bombs?
• The Port Authority, afraid that commercial tenants might not want to occupy an iconic skyscraper, has leased about 30% of the space in the Freedom Tower to other government agencies. While this guarantees a revenue stream to the Port Authority, it’s also the kiss of death for A-list tenants who would pay top dollar to occupy a building where they wouldn’t have to rub elbows with civil servants.

More tomorrow, or whenever I have some time to write….

Posted in World Trade Center, Dysfunctional Government, Things Falling Apart | No Comments »