Links galore, dear readers!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Apr. 27, 2007”
Jesus, take the seatbelt
Welcome to NJ, dear readers! It’s the state where three consecutive governors have suffered broken legs while in office! Given that our state’s biggest cultural export is the Sopranos, this is starting to get a little suspicious. . .
Our most recent gubernatorial leg-breaking occurred when Jon Corzine’s SUV wiped out while traveling 91 mph up the Parkway. The guv was on his way to a Lady Knights/Imus summit, and this was important enough for his driver to blow 26 mph over the speed limit and chase cars out of the left lane. Not a smart idea, given how terrible the drivers are in NJ. You’d think he at least would’ve worn a seatbelt. (Fortunately, I wasn’t on the road with them, because I probably would’ve stayed in the lane and pretended not to see the lights.)
Anyway, the Agitator has a nice piece about the story, and the phenomenon of politicians using “official business” as an excuse to push people out of their way:
When you live in the D.C. area, this kind of thing happens all the time (not the accident, the VIPs taking over the road), and just from personal observation, I’d say it’s happening more frequently. There seems to be an increasing feeling among many politicians that their meetings, their business, and their appointments are somehow more important than everyone else’s. Therefore, they can fly down highways, ignore red lights, and purge everyone else to the side of the roadway. If they can get their own police escort or caravan, even better.
The Imus thing
I can’t muster up much energy to write about Imus’ firing. I’m not a listener, so I can’t characterize his show and “what he meant” or offer any other context-creating remark. I feel bad that this whole event has helped Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson consolidate their roles as Kings of All Black People In America, since they’re a couple of charlatans.
I do marvel over the fact that, while he got fired for making a dumb comment about female athletes, his comment had nothing to do with the most prevalent stereotype about female athletes.
Life’s Rich Pageant
Design Observer has a neat article about Rem Koolhaas and his CCTV building in Beijing. I’m on record — as much as this blog serves as record — as saying that there’s no goddamn way that building is going to stand up. But evidently it’s at 14 stories and rising.
Anyway, the article discusses Koolhaas’ wacky theorizing vis-a-vis designing such a massive structure in China. The writer, William Drenttel, launches some harsh criticisms of Koolhaas, as we see here, in an excerpt from K’s Beijing Manifesto (in italics) and Drenttel’s followup:
In the free market, architecture = real estate. Any complex corporation is dismantled, each unit sequestered in place. All media companies suffer a subsequent paranoia: Each department — the creative department, the finance department, administration, et cetera — talks about the others as “themâ€Â; distrust is rife, motives are questioned. But in China, money does not yet have the last word. CCTV is envisioned as shared conceptual space in which all parts are housed permanently, aware of one another’s presence  a collective. Communication increases; paranoia decreases.
It’s one thing to build the building. But isn’t Koolhaas sounding like an apologist for the corruption and extreme capitalism of Beijing? His manifesto seems to embrace the language of Mao for a media conglamerate that is one of the the great powers in the People’s Republic of China, and the source of much of the censorship in that country. According to Koolhaas’s thesis of Forward Compatibility: “China is characterized by the need to spread opportunity and information rather than protect manufacturers and other established interests. It could use its dominant position, the force of its numbers, its economic power, and its central government to lead the world into a digital future.” What would lead an architect of Rem Koolhaas’s standing to voice such propaganda? Perhaps Koolhaas is simply taking advantage of the pervasive authoritarianism that is still the Chinese norm. Design approvals? No problem, when everyone serves at the pleasure of the Party! He almost seems to be luxuriating in the absence of the nuisance of the free market.
“Lead the world into the digital future”? Maybe Koolhaas could try typing “tibet democracy” into a search engine in a Beijing internet cafe and see how that central government perceives the digital future.
Anyway, Drenttel condemns the building for using so damn much steel, which appears to be the only way that the thing is going to beat my prediction of tipping over in a stiff wind:
CCTV, at only 55 stories, requires 123,750 tons of steel for 4.8 million square feet of space, or 51 lbs/sq. ft. of steel [compared to 31 lbs/sq. ft. for the Twin Towers]. The punch line is that CCTV is the architectural equivalent of a gas-guzzling SUV. A structural engineer might talk about pounds of steel per square foot as a measure of a building’s structural efficiency. CCTV has a beautiful structural design considering what it is required to do, but any engineer, I believe, would describe it as a “heavy” building. By comparison, the World Trade Towers were a super tall, extreme structure and they were still 40% lighter than CCTV. There is a lot of extra steel (20 to 30 lbs/sf) in the CCTV structure simply to resist overturning because of the weight and stress of its free-floating bridge, even assuming contemporary code and seismic requirements.
The issue is simple: all this steel is there to support a design conceit, albeit a beautiful one, of “an eye catching megastructure which looks like it ought to fall over.” Rory McGowan, the ARUP director of the collaborating structural engineers, “admits that the structural gymnastics have a purely aesthetic justification.”
Getting back to my point about that digital future (and the lies we tell ourselves to make it through), I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so many major projects are going to China and places like Dubai, where there’s huge money and an authoritarian government. It must be a joy for architects to work in that environment, at least as much as they can gratify their “creative impulses” without getting derailed by local zoning boards. Of course, the buildings aren’t in a vacuum, and architects can decide how much they’ll take into account the regional politics that enable their personal freedom.
(Bonus VM tie-in: Just as this morning’s Montaigne selection helped characterize my own, um, peculiarities in communication, a quote from the article about Koolhaas’ architecture helped sum up the Gil Roth Experience: “raw, confusing, impersonal, uncomfortable, oppressive, theatrical and exhilarating.”)
Change of Approach
According to Jackson Diehl in the WaPost, it looks like we might see some progress in stopping the war in the Darfur region of Sudan:
[L]ast Monday President Bush’s anger rocked the Oval Office when aides presented him with a plan for sanctions against the Sudanese government. Raising his voice, he demanded that his special envoy for Darfur, Andrew Natsios, and national security adviser Stephen Hadley come up with something stronger. [. . .]Bush is expected to approve more unilateral U.S. sanctions against Sudan, probably sometime after Easter. Among other steps, these will target assets of three Sudanese leaders and prohibit business in dollars with several dozen Sudanese companies, including an oil services firm. The United States could also help to rebuild former rebel forces in southern Sudan, which signed a peace deal with the government in 2005.
I hope this really does signal a new phase in the efforts to stop the killing in the region, but last week I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s actually going to end up like this: In keeping with family traditions, Hillary gets elected president in 2008 and Bush sends in buttloads of troops with an ill-defined mission right around Christmas.
Response and responsibilities
For a month or two, Slate has been running excerpts from Clive James’ new book, Cultural Amnesia
I thought the Terry Gilliam one went off the rails a bit, pursuing a discussion of torture that probably could have been written without including Gilliam’s masterpiece, but it’s still an engaging essay. With a number of the other essays, James appears to be pursuing the question of artists’ responsibilities in the world, vis a vis the political tumult of the 20th century. (It’s not only about artists, but they seem well represented in the 110 profiles the book contains.)
Thus, the discussion of Borges has to get at his relationship with Argentina’s junta, while the take-no-prisoners profile of Sartre posted today questions the nature of JP’s resistance during the war as well as his avoidance of the truth about the Soviet Union. (It also touches on the subject of the necessity of bad writing, a favorite topic of mine.)
The excerpt that I enjoyed the most — I haven’t read them all — is the one discussing Rilke and Brecht, even though I haven’t read much of Rilke beyond his poetry and know nothing of Brecht’s work. The essay contrasts Rilke’s art-for-art’s-sake with Brecht’s art-as-politics, and finds Brecht wanting. (Okay, it finds Brecht a noxious scumbag.) But James goes on to make an interesting and subtle point about the relation between the artist — particularly the ‘word artist’ — and his beliefs, and perhaps between the artist and the audience.
Give it a read (and go check out some of the others) and let me know what you think.
Not just tan: Spartan
In keeping with my inner classics-geek of that previous post, here’s Victor Davis Hanson on 300, the movie adaptation of Frank Miller’s comic book
[T]he impressionism of 300 is Hellenic in spirit: its buff bare chests are reminiscent of the heroic nudity of warriors on Attic vase paintings. Even in its surrealism — a rhinoceros, futuristic swords, and an effeminate, Mr. Clean-esque Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) who gets his ear flicked by a Spartan spear cast — it is not all that different from some of Euripides’ wilder takes, like Helen or Iphigeneia at Taurus, in their strange deviation from the party line of the Homeric epics. Like the highly formalist Attic tragedy — with its set length, three actors, music, iambic and choral meters, and so forth — 300 consciously abandons realist portrayal.
I don’t remember a ton of the comic book. The one time I read it, I was at a friend’s house in Auckland, NZ, trying desperately to stay awake till nightfall, so as not to get wrecked by jetlag. Fortunately, he was one of the greatest cartoonists in the antipodes, and had a room full of comics that I hadn’t read.
And, yes, I’m thinking of catching 300 at the local IMAX. Sue me.
(Here are some terrible pix from the premiere.)
China Syndrome
This massive article on China purports to have been written by only two reporters, but its portrayal of China’s economy and social condition is so fragmented and contradictory that I have to assume at least six different writers contributed pieces to it, and that their editor was on vacation.
This piece on China’s first-strike capacity is much more internally coherent. Unfortunately, it seems to propose we return to a cold war-style arms race.
Oh, and Yao Ming is the slowest guy in the league.
Unrequired Reading: Feb. 2, 2007
Look, kids! More links I didn’t have time to write about this week!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Feb. 2, 2007”
300 Pimps
I’ve never been a car aficionado. My brother seemed to inherit Dad’s Corvette-gene. Not that he would go off and spend big cash on a sports-car or anything, but he did go for a Mustang back when he was single. Me? I’ve owned three cars: a Hyundai Excel, a Saturn SL1, and a Honda Element. I’m not exactly stylin’ and profilin’.
That said, I admit that I once had a certain fondness for the Chrysler Crossfire. I think it’s largely because it looks like a coupe that a Micronaut would drive.
In the last year, I’ve become enamored of the Chrysler 300. I think it’s largely because it looks like something Batman would drive.
At first, I thought the 300 was a car for oldies, but then I noticed younger drivers in them, and started seeing tricked-out (sorry: pimped) models. Personally, the “black rims” thing always struck me as silly-looking, but it was a good indicator that the big-barrel sedan had crossed over. I found that I really liked the car’s lines, and wondered if it might be time to retire the Element of Style.
I was able to talk myself out of buying one because of Chrysler’s corporate ownership. Mercedes-Benz, which acquired (“merged as equals with”) Chrysler in 1998, employed Jewish slave labor during WWII. Around the time of the merger, economist Steve Landsburg wrote a neat article about the implications of “punishing the child for the sins of the father” when it comes to corporations:
Corporations can be punished for misdeeds in at least two ways. One is a consumer boycott and another is a (voluntary or involuntary) fine. Both kinds of punishment have been visited on Daimler-Benz (though arguably at levels that are small compared with the underlying offenses). In the 1980s, the corporation paid about $11 million to the descendants of its slave laborers.
Who exactly suffers from those punishments? You might think the $11 million came from the pockets of those who owned Daimler-Benz stock in the 1980s, but that’s not necessarily the case. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that in 1950 it becomes foreseeable that Daimler-Benz will eventually make reparations. Then every share of Daimler-Benz stock sold between 1950 and 1980 sells at a discount reflecting that expectation. Without the discount, nobody would buy the stock. So given sufficient foresight, the prospect of a 1980 punishment hurts the 1950 owners, even if they sell in the interim. And those who buy stocks after 1950 are not punished at all, because the discount compensates them for the fine.
He makes some interesting arguments in that piece. Lately, I’ve been rethinking my aversion to buying a sorta German car, and not because I wanna zoom around in that 300. It’s more a question of globalization, and the moral lines we draw in the sand. I mean, because I drive a car, I can’t help but prop up Arab dictatorships. That said, I can elect not to do publicity for a country that has a strict anti-Israel policy. But I don’t know how viable it is to protest so selectively.
For instance, my wife drives a Mini Cooper. The parent company is BMW, which makes it problematic for me. My knee-jerk reaction is not to support a German car company.
That said, the car is assembled entirely in the UK, and it seems to me that the British could hold an awful lot of resentment toward Germany. So, does the fact that commerce helps both nations serve to ameliorate some of the ill-feelings from from those nations’ past behavior?
I don’t think I’d ever buy a German-brand car (M-B, BMW, VW), but I can imagine that people whose family served in the Pacific theater consider me a traitor for buying a Honda. Any of you guys have issues about this sorta stuff? Are there nations/nationalities you wouldn’t buy from?
Anyway, all of that is a very roundabout way of posting links to a couple of BusinessWeek articles. The first is about how DaimlerChrysler’s CEO is under siege because of the company’s poor performance (and its avoidance of reality). The other is about Freeman Thomas, the guy who designed the 300. Both stories come with neat slideshows, including shots of two of Thomas’ new vehicles for Ford.
Thomas’ description of the philosophy behind The Interceptor (no comment) probably skewers my exact reason for liking the 300: “This is a car that is at once for the mature car buyer, but for someone who likes to stroke his bad boy side. He wants a grown-up car, but wants to feel fun.”
For the record, I would not ‘stroke my bad boy side’ with a German car.