Monday, November 05, 2001

Remora

Right after 9/11, Eric Boehlert published a nice compendious look at the WTC buildings.

His sources were agreed that the buildings were an exercise in elephantiasis, the bigger is better aesthetic of despots, pharaohs, and Rockefellers. Nelson and David were the men behind the WTC. The financing, the shady way the Port Authority suddenly had extra port authority to build the things, the running off of small merchants, the choice of an architect/drone, Yamasaki, were all about what NYC was in the seventies -- a sort of Trojan graveyard in which the buzzardly rich picked the bones, while the angry poor cried among them, scrapped up livings from the broken streets, and were instilled with the ethic of hopelessness. Yamasaki was type-cast: he'd processed modernism into a plutocratic pleasing tic, discarding its utopian beginnings, and distilling its totalitarianism into pure Brasilia; his own eccentricities simply made things worse:

"And then there were the unusually narrow office windows that robbed tower inhabitants of what should have been an indisputable perk: the view. Yamasaki was afraid of heights and decided in order to make everyone feel secure while they worked in the offices, the windows, set between columns, would be just 18 inches across, narrower than Yamasaki's own shoulder span."

Well, in this week's New York Obs, Nicholas von Hoffman goes on a rampage about the Towers. von Hoffman is one of those muckraking journalists who rode in on the sixties, re-discovering capitalism's black secret: profit has little to do with the economist's juiceless picture of it as a sort of epiphenomena of efficiency. No, profit is made, and the making of it, like charcuterie, requires a certain high imperviousness to the squeals of dying animals. Although way back in 1830, Balzac already understood this, the generation of sixties journalists seemed especially transfixed by the insight, which was not covered on any of the tv quiz shows they saw as kids. Hoffman went from writing for the Washington Post, I believe, to writing the biography of the ultimate American confidence man, Roy Cohn. Unlike Murray Kempton, who Hoffman has obviously thought about a lot, Hoffman doesn't really have that last bit of sympathy for the sinner. This is why he has lately sounded like H.L. Mencken -- not from the good period, but from the forties. Hoffman has spent the nineties in a state of perpetual irritation. Limited Inc had its own trouble with the nineties, the era of the mendacious Clinton, the end of welfare as we know it, and the heavy skewing of the wealth index to the top of the pile, (not to mention that sound (what's that sound?) in the background (everybody look what's going down) -- which turned out to be the bombing of Iraq) but Hoffman was irritable to a degree that even got on our nerves. We like the way he stubbornly remains unaffected by an afterglow of sentiment for the ruined towers, but we really mean unaffected. Here's the second graf:

"Never the same again goes the cry of regret. But why? And why should we want it to be the same? I am not, of course, speaking of the lives lost, yet the crime of Sept. 11 does not obviate the truth of the World Trade Center towers: They were a couple of ugly and ill-proportioned buildings of egotistical dimension and heartlessness. They had nothing noteworthy about them but gross altitude. It was by height alone that they drew attention away from the graceful Empire State Building, that old, fine-lined, Art Deco candlestick in the sky. The Empire State is a building worthy to be a symbol of a city, but the W.T.C. towers were two blunt, aluminum-clad hippo teeth stuck up in the air, symbolic of little more than the crassness and philargyry for which New York is known. They were Governor Nelson Rockefeller�s "Fuck you, everybody, I�m more powerful than you are�my balls are bigger and my dick swings a larger arc than yours."

More in that vein pours out of his pen. I don't know about the dick swinging a larger arc, although it is a very rat pack image -- the early seventies, you will remember, were immortalized by such White House sayings as Spiro Agnew's threatening to put Katie Graham's "tits in a wringer.' This is what you get when you unleash gin and Hugh Hefner on the 50s college male population, then follow up with a decade of luscious stories of flower girls giving it up for free, I guess.

No comments:

Asking

Yesterday, I watched a very sparkly Biden official, who looked like he had just come from the Ken-at-High-School-UN box, answer questions fr...