Saturday, April 26, 2008

Paul Krugman on Obama's Pennsylvania defeat

Anyone interested in the Democratic primary (and who isn't?) should read Paul Krugman's excellent column in the April 25th issue of the NY Times. Krugman suggests that perhaps Hillary managed to triumph in Pennsylvania (despite heavy odds) because of her no-nonsense style, her command of details, her economic policies-- that these resonate with voters "in a way that Obama's eloquence does not."

Krugman's analysis of how the Obama campaign has slipped over from "Yes we can" to "No she can't" is enlightening. As is Krugman's observation that the Obama campaign has "put far more energy into attacking Mrs. Clinton's health care proposals than it has into promoting the idea of universal coverage." Krugman has elsewhere pointed out in convincing detail the clear superiority of Hillary's health care plan. In this column he goes on to question whether the supposed "new politics" espoused by the Obama campaign is a useful way to clarify the huge disparity between Bush politics and the Democrats' message. The Democrats, he says, can (and should) present themselves as the party of prosperity and economic security-- the party responsible for Social Security and Medicare, the party responsible for the splendid surpluses of the Clinton years. Indeed, the "contrast between the Clinton economy and the Bush economy is the best free advertisement the Democrats have had since Herbert Hoover." Yet the Obama campaign's "new politics" tries to blame both parties for our current disastrous situation. Krugman sees that tactic as very dangerous-- "a self-inflicted state of confusion." Even, perhaps, a recipe for defeat in the fall.

Monday, April 21, 2008

Jean Nouvel's ArtfulTower

 
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Will New Yorkers finally be gifted with a host of eye-filling, mind-bending post-millennial buildings? I hope so, but if we're in for an architectural renaissance, it's been slow in coming. For too long our city has been notorious for its grey-bearded attitude towards architecture. In the late 90s there were some intimations of a new openness-- one thinks, for instance, of Christian de Portzamparc's anti-perspectival LVMH building on 57th Street. More recently, we've had Santiago Calatrava's soaring designs, Norman Foster's multi-faceted Hearst Magazine tower, and, in the past year, Frank Gehry's wind-blown InterActive Corporation in Chelsea and Bernard Tschumi's bulging Blue Building on the Lower East Side.

I was excited when I first learned that Jean Nouvel was about to begin building in New York. Since he emerged in the 1980s in Mitterrand's France, the innovative Nouvel had been creating wonderful architecture everywhere else in the world, it seemed, and he's even gone on, this year, to win the Pritzker! His first two projects for our city were a bit disappointing, but now there's the Tower Verre-- Nouvel's thrilling design for an unconventional 75-story skyscraper.

Located at 53 West 53rd Street, adjacent to the Museum of Modern Art, the Tower Verre would provide three floors of much-needed expansion galleries for MOMA. A residential condo and a hotel would sit atop the galleries. The developers might have avoided controversy and satisfied cranky neighbors if they'd opted for a dull glass box, another midtown mediocrity, for the site. Nouvel's design is anything but dull. The Tower Verre is electric, eccentric-- it torques and turns, it makes lively theater out of its revealed criss-crossing elements, and it exploits the required zoning setbacks to narrow upwards to a dramatic, ethereal spire. Community members complain that the tower reaches too high, that it would be 100 feet taller than the Chrysler Building. But that's part of the design's interest. The height and shape of Nouvel's tower would cleverly complement Chrysler, playing against that building's Art Deco crown to create a provocative 21st-century addition to Manhattan's skyline.

But will the Tower Verre get built? Right now the project's chances seem less than brilliant. Nouvel's design is under attack by the usual forces of reaction-- the stodgy defenders of architectural banality, vociferous NIMBY community members, and even a few nervous public officials. Since the building would involve the transfer of air rights from St. Thomas Church and the University Club, the Landmarks Preservation Commission must approve the project. At a recent commission meeting, most of those speaking out were reportedly negative. It would be a shame-- and a loss for the city-- if the nay-sayers succeed in killing Nouvel's splendid tower.

Saturday, April 19, 2008

On Becoming Immortal, or the Elevation of Jean-Loup Dabadie

What does it take to be seated sous la coupole today? Not what you'd think. The bar for induction into the Academie francaise has dropped to a new low.

Take the latest "immortal"-- he's the lyricist and screenwriter Jean-Loup Dabadie, voted in on April 10th. Le Monde mocked the selection, calling Dabadie a "saltimbanque." Well-- what has this fellow done to merit being chosen? He did write a couple of novels (one at the age of 17) and several screenplays for Claude Sautet and others. But apparently he's best known for the 300 songs he "authored" (as they phrase it in the Academie's press release). The lyrics were written for Juliette Greco, Serge Reggiani, Nana Mouskouri, Jean Gabin, Yves Montand, and ("inevitably," according to TLS) Johnny Halliday. The secretary of the Academie claims that they are just moving with the times. Movement can be up or down, of course. So what's happening here? Is it possible that this downward droop is in fact a reflection of the notoriously lowbrow taste of France's new president?

Friday, April 18, 2008

Banville Despite Himself

I'm a longtime Banville fan. I admit it. I've read and enjoyed almost all of his books, take pleasure in their play of language, their allusive links. I loved the Nabokovian trilogy that begins with The Book of Evidence. I thought The Untouchable was a stunning transformation of the Anthony Blunt story. I liked the ironic traces of DeMan and Althusser in Shroud. I thought fondly of Murdoch when I read The Sea. With each new volume, I was prepared for a surprise. Yet I was taken aback when I learned that Banville had written his next book under a pseudonym, albeit a peculiarly transparent one. Why? Did he intend to adopt another style? Was he creating a different kind of book? Did he want to address a different audience? Was he looking for a larger readership? I was curious, but decided to put those questions aside and to read Christine Falls as if it were written by an unknown writer-- some obscure Irish debutant named Benjamin Black.

At first reading, I was (as I suppose the author hoped) duly ensnared by the novel's plot, a willing victim of page-turneritis. This new book did indeed seem to be different. A sport of a novel-- an entertainment, a "thriller." The noir story, with its nefarious baby-smuggling ring and the ghoulish doings of the trans-Atlantic Dublin/Boston Irish mafioso, was compelling enough and did catch me up. So yes, I thought. This is a departure-- a trip into another novelistic species.

Recently, I decided to reread the book-- and to read it as if written by Banville. This time the juicy character details jumped off the page rather than the now-known plot. Quirke's, of course, primarily. His ambivalent familial entanglements, his deceptions, his half-in-love-with-death pose, his uneasy morality, his great clumsy size but tiny feet (nicely noticed by his niece/daughter Phoebe), his flashy silver cigarette case, his incessant drinking, his crooked smile, his artist's mannequin, his turkey carpet, his lack of a first name, his extraordinary sensitivity to smell, his expensive clothes, too elegant for the low places in which he finds himself, and probably too good for his dark job as a pathologist in the morgue of the Holy Family Hospital. I was also more amused this time by Q's amorous encounters. Odd that this bearish, morose, self-absorbed, sardonic, easily bored, often soused or, when not, then hung over, guy is so (inexplicably?) attractive to all shapes and ages of women-- his sister-in-law, especially, but also various young nurses, aging widows, nuns both young and old, shopgirls...

Then there's the Banvillesque (almost cinematic) habit of vision-- the offbeat way characters are positioned in a scene. They can be watching others from unexpected angles, i.e., looking down on someone below, or observing another across lines of moving traffic, or glancing up at a figure seen in a half-lit window. Occasionally a character will stand sideways, perhaps at an acute angle to the wall, and only then peer through a doorway into a room. Never direct, never straight on, even when there's no one to see-- Quirke, for instance, is caught looking upward, eyeing "the tall windows, thinking of all those shadowed rooms with people in them, waking, yawning, getting up to make their breakfasts, or turning over to enjoy another half hour in the damp, warm stew of their beds," but not seeing a soul.

Benjamin Black is Banville-brilliant about much else in the novel-- about weather, about a world of smells, about the changing feel of the air. The dank, gloomy atmosphere of Dublin, the sinister texture of the city's bars, the freezing wind and biting sleet of wintry Boston-- all seem as central to Christine Falls as Quirke et al. and the noir plot. So why, I ask you, bother with the pseudonym?