The poetry of architecture

Saturday evening after a hard day of spring cleaning, we took a stroll from our place at 4th Street and Broadway to the Hudson River, but this time, instead of turning southwest on Christopher Street for a short walk past theaters, bars and headshops, we continued on 4th Street where it jogs sharply northwest for a much longer walk past other micro ecologies. Busy little restaurants spilling onto the sidewalk, complicated nineteen-teens cornices on the four- and five-storey apartment buildings, little trees along the kerb. And, because it was our less accustomed route, it all seemed fresh. At the corner where 4th Street crosses 12th Street and Eighth Avenue -- the grid of Greenwich Village is skewed and overlaid against the grid of the rest of Manhattan -- I had to stop and marvel at the many textures of brick, idiosyncratic roof lines, varieties of shops and signage, and colors or the buildings and their roofs against the layers of pink and purple of the western sky. One step in any direction would thrust me into a different narrative of the multistoried city.

This morning then I was glad to have the leisure of this holiday to read Ciudades habladas, poems celebrating cities, especially the city of Buenos Aires, by Jorge Ramos -- that is, Jorge Ramos the Argentinean architect, not the Mexican anchor on Univisión or any of the other Jorge Ramoses you and I might know. More on these tomorrow. I want to quote some of the verses to you. They are as delightful as a walk through any grand city at dusk. And you know, poetry and architecture have this in common: they are both kinds of built environment.

Books I didn't finish reading

In recent years I've been reading like a good Protestant, finishing every book I started no matter how disagreeable. But life is short and there are so many books waiting to be read that now I'm ready to abandon the ones that really put me off, like Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections -- I got as far as the talking turd. And other books which, though vaguely interesting and on important topics, are just dull, like Francisco Martín Moreno's novelized history of oil exploitation in Mexico, México negro.

Tell Bush to Uphold the Law

By signing this petition from EPIC: PETITION TO PRESIDENT BUSH

US Army: "dysfunctional, angry and near losing its honor"

Josh Marshal's blog for May 18, 2004 is a letter from an unidentified (for obvious reasons) US Army intelligence officer in Iraq. The occupation is a disaster, even the US's former supporters can't wait for our troops to leave, and the US Army is degrading itself, he writes. Check it out: Apocalypse Again, From Talking Points Memo 

Torturing the language, abusing the prisoners

Check out Amy Gahran's blog entry for May 21, on Loaded Words and Tortured Definitions, on U.S. media's avoidance of the word "torture" to describe what's been going on in Abu Ghraib.

Recommended reading: America's mercenaries

Outsourcing taken to dangerous extremes -- dangerous to our democracy as well as to other people. Read Should we support our mercenaries too? by another National Writers Union colleague, Don Monkerud.

Tough time for satirists

My friend Don Monkerud has been trying to write satire about the follies of the Bush administration. It's getting really tough. The stuff going on now -- bombing a wedding party and then trashing their own henchman's headquarters (Chalabi) is beyond satire. Take this quote from Bush (that is captured in a film clip in the new documentary, "Control Room," about Al-Jazeera). As Caryn James reports in today's NYT (The War's Dark Side: Filling in the Blanks):

There, President Bush is shown commenting on Americans captured by Iraqis, saying, "The P.O.W.'s I expect to be treated humanely, just like we're treating the prisoners we captured humanely."

Try to satirize that!

Being conspicuously nice to some Iraqis

Sophia Niarchos, a colleague in the New York chapter of the National Writers Union, writes:
This morning in one of my rare viewings of network TV, NBC's Today Show news reported about a very young Iraqi child with a major tumor in the neck area who was brought to the U.S. so that her life might be saved by American doctors in, I think, Ohio (hmmm, isn't that a "battleground" state?). There was video of her being put on a helicopter, of her mother in an interview, of the child herself, of doctors discussing their hopes for a happy ending.

In a country where HIPAA compliance (protecting patient privacy) is required of medical professionals and where photos of flag-draped caskets of unidentified soldiers are (or were) not permitted, how is it that this Iraqi family can have their privacy invaded? Could it have anything to do with the military's need for a "goodwill" story to keep this war looking like a benefit for the Iraqi people? To keep Americans looking like heroes? They haven't shown us the people we murdered, have they?

Kerry, just do it!

Forward from our friends at MoveOn:

Dear friend,

As George Bush's poll numbers drop quickly, John Kerry is facing an important choice -- perhaps the most important choice he'll make in his campaign. He has to decide whether, as some consultants will urge, he should be cautious and run toward the center, or whether he should present a bold agenda for change and rally Americans around a vision for our future.

Through his history, Kerry has made a practice of standing up for bold initiatives to provide health care, protect the environment, and safeguard the right to reproductive choice. Together, we need to let him know that we want him to be his best, boldest self -- to go big, ask more of us, and power his campaign on the politics of hope.

Please join me in calling on John Kerry to "go big" at: www.moveonpac.org

Thank you.

"Condi's a jerk"

You knew that already, of course, but look who's saying it! Read Casualty of War by Wil S. Hylton, in the forthcoming June issue of GQ. "Four years into an embattled Bush administration, Colin Powell is hard at work at something he's never had to worry about before: salvaging his legacy."