Saturday. Hmm. Since my posts are all going into the archive, and hence will remain unlooked at and unneeded, in that state of suspended animation known to vampires and retired vice presidents, I figure this is a good time to make some recommends - you know, explore the Net's Black Sea, those odd and mystic reaches, where who knows what can jump out and seriously scare you. Recommend one is a magazine named Vice - the site is named Viceland. They have an interview with a twenty-four year old Italian director and actress who wants to make an even sharper nail out of porn and violence, like her daddy, an old shockmeister moviemaker, did. And then they have this: THE ROAD TO EUPHORIA - A True Story of Dealing E back in 1993. This is an absolutely funny account of trying to sell a drug before its time - namely, Ecstasy to Manitobians and the like in 1993. Those lumberjacks and meatshop men want to party like its 1988, with your standard crack pipe, and they don't know what to make of the chic divinity in a white pill that this guy is dealing - like, does it go well with Moosehead? Here's a quote, a potdealer explaining where how to market the product to the yahoos, with a sidenote about the history of the substance :

"And second you got to find a jazzy name. You should call yours White Lightning or Pearl Buzz, too bad they didn�t think to throw in some color. You need color in the psychedelics business. You could have Pink Nike or Chocolate Rave, although E ain�t a real psychedelic, in the sacred sense I mean. It came out of the designer drugs in Southern Cal back in the 70s. Originally, there were supposed to be five Es: Ecstasy, Euphoria, Empathy, Epiphany, and Enlightenment, but the DEA grabbed the principal guy in Laguna before he could get all of the Es done up. Then the bikers came along with their bathtub PCP and fucked up everything. The rest is history, but hey, real Es got some integrity.�

And we have so little integrity in the modern world, n'est-ce pas?

Please read the 12:36 am post first.

The New Colonist is a webzine. Not a lot of people have heard of it, but it does an ace job of reporting on urban culture and issues. Also, isn't it nice to see a webzine not go down like some junky cosmonaut, to quote a song? Eric Miller has a nice article on the abuse of eminent domain laws.
AH, I know, I know -- those are sleepin' words, pardner - eminent domain. But while the legalese puts the good people to sleep, city honchos often operate as front men for corporations and developers by using the power to seize property in order to suppress "blight." Here's a quote from the piece:

"But just what is blight? Can a business district will almost full retail occupancy be considered blighted? Can a discount store be labeled as blighted so that an upscale chain can move in? Can a golf course constitute blight? Can a working factory be labeled as blighted so that another factory can raze the plant to build a new facility? Increasingly, the answer to these questions is yes.

In Las Vegas, some legislators and community activists recently opposed a new �development,� not on the grounds of saving historic buildings, but on the grounds that the local government may have larger goals than removing blight. The group demanded that potential beneficiaries in �blight removal� schemes be named.

Nevada Assembly woman Chris Giunchigliani introduced legislation that would redirect five percent of redevelopment money away from commercial projects to be used for sidewalk repairs, street lights and other improvements, but according to the Las Vegas Sun, officials �came out in force� to object to redevelopment money being used for neighborhood blight. "

To fight blight is one thing, but to find out who benefits from that fight is a dastardly usurpation of a timehonored government function - graft and the redistribution of wealth upwards.

Okay, I'm rather splenetic today. Mal d'actualites, don't you know. It is one of those days, Congress rolls over for Bush, the planet's whacked, and Dick Cheney, in all his goutridden and disgusting length, is infused with a feeling of youth. Doesn't it make you sick? Write me at the Editor

Calling Ralph Nadar -
Last year, much heavy weather was made of Nadar's "betrayal" of the progressive cause by running against the oleaginous Al Gore, Among the organizations that berated Nadar's lese majeste was the Sierra Club. Well, Sierra Club, what do you think of your big dumb dead Dems now? According to a nice piece in the Times today, Bush's energy bill, routinely denounced by Dem bigshots when it was wheeled out, was quietly voted for by Dem bigshots when it was on the floor. Roll of Shame in a minute. First, two quotes from the NYT article:

"One decisive factor appeared to be support for drilling and opposition to substantially higher fuel efficiency standards among Democratic members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Representatives Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, Edolphus Towns of New York, Earl F. Hilliard of Alabama and James E. Clyburn of South Carolina were among Mr. Bush's supporters on both measures. Each refused to comment."

Why would they refuse to comment? Perhaps because they were selling their constituents down the river? Unfortunately, they could do this because they know their constituents don't know it. The ranks of the enviro and consumer movements are lilly white, and this is beginning to tell in the kind of pull these groups can exert. It doesn't have to be this way. God knows, the most egregious environmental crimes wrought against human beings in this country by the oil companies and the highway lobby are aimed against black and hispanic neighborhoods - for example Cancer Gulch, the extraordinary concentration of refiners and petro-chemical factories south of Baton Rouge in Louisiana - which I presume Bennie Thompson knows about.

"Environmentalists were also stung by the opposition of several senior Democrats. In addition to Mr. Gephardt and Mr. Bonior, Representatives James L. Oberstar of Minnesota, the ranking Democrat on the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure; Paul E. Kanjorski of Pennsylvania, the minority whip at large; and Martin Frost of Texas, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, all voted in accordance with the president on at least one of the two major energy amendments."

That's right, kiddies - the Dem minority leader in the House and the Whip voted for Royal George's Flush as in, flush the environment down the toilet. There will be a progressive movement in this country - I'm sure of it - AS SOON AS WE DRIVE A STAKE THROUGH THE HEART OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY!

And while we are at it about the progressive coalition - guess who did the watercarrying for the Auto companies about blocking raising the CAFE standards - that is, blocking raising that requirement for fuel efficiency in cars, which - attention to those of you enamored of Bill and Al's excellent adventure in the White House - hasn't been raised since the Gipper's funfilled decade? The UAW, that's who. On this issue, Unions in this country are still adhering to the Peronista standard - the only thing that counts is money, the corporations have the money, let's play with the corporations. Well, they've been beaten by the corporations every time they take this stance. It doesn't seem to matter, however - the George Meany learning curve seems set in concrete up there in Detroit. Plus, the threat to cut jobs - always the standard tropism of the Big Three whenever they are poked about, oh, getting rid of lead in gas, or making cars that don't explode like balloons filled with gasoline - seems to galvanize unions like the volts zipping through Frankenstein's monster. But this is an instance which might cost them - after all, they need the environmentalists to block trade deals (giveaways like NAFTA).
I'd like to give you a hall of shame - the names of the 36 Dems who voted for the bill - but you have to parse out the individual Dems at the Roll Call supplied by Yahoo.

This site is definitely a find:
rockcritics.com
I've always wanted to like rock critics - to find that magic skipping style supposedly developed in the early seventies by Rolling Stone's best - but usually they disappoint me. Nick Tosches is an exception, at least in his history/extended muse on Country music, and his bio of Jerry Lee Lewis (the biography of Dean Martin, on the other hand, gets stuck in its own jam). But face it, rock critics have much more glamour than us poor book reviewers.

You never know what you're gonna find on the Net - still. For instance, the Paris Review has been putting up its interviews. The latest one is of Rick Moody. I have to get to the interview I am supposedly writing up today, although I've been so lazy lately I wonder if I should resist this undertow, this doggy inertia.
Write me at the Editor

Annals of Business Life

I've been following the news stories in the Times Business section about AremisSoft ever since the company claimed it had discovered the key to wealth in Bulgaria. According to its initial press release, the company was all set to sell the Bulgarian government something like a hundred million dollars worth of software - and then the Bulgarian government said, hey, wait a minute, we don't have that kind of money. It was all a scam, but as soon as this scam broke the surface in the news, the company execs and some brokers who'd been shilling AremisSoft stock counter-attacked, claiming this was a company of exemplary prospects being viciously attacked by shortsellers. Well, today's news is that the company "misplaced" its profits. Darn it, they'd stuffed that money in some old jar in the kitchen and just couldn't remember where. More Trouble for Maker of Software

Here's my favorite quote from the article:

"In addition, the company said that Michael Tymvios, its chief financial officer, had resigned for health reasons and that its auditors could not find $5.4 million that AremisSoft booked as revenue last year. AremisSoft said it had asked PKF, its auditor, to review its books, but that the inquiry had been delayed because AremisSoft had been unable to contact its own executives to get information that PKF needed to complete the review."

Apparently everybody connected with AremisSoft has simultaneously been afflicted with telephone aphonia - the article goes on to list the unreturned calls to the president, the brokers who were shilling the stock, etc.

AremisSoft is just the most extreme version of a quiet re-evaluation of the profits that were made by companies in the bubble years. There was a WSJ article about that last week, which I can't link to, since I am not a WSJ subscriber. But do you hear any contrition from the bubble boosters, the James Glassmans (of the infamous Dow36,000 book)?
No. Contrition, my dear, is for losers.

Everybody is talking about the rude obit of Katherine Graham crafted by some anonymous minion of Scaife's Pittsburg rag. The best part of the National Post article, by Mark Steyn, is this (first a quote from the Pittsburg article, then Steyn's comments):

"She married Felix Frankfurter's brilliant law clerk, Philip Graham, who took over running The Post, which her father purchased at a bankruptcy sale. Graham built the paper but became estranged from Kay. She had him committed to a mental hospital, and he was clearly intending divorce when she signed him out and took him for a weekend outing during which he was found shot. His death was ruled a suicide. Within 48 hours, she declared herself the publisher."

That's the stuff! As the Tribune-Review's chap has it, Mrs. G got her philandering spouse banged up in the nuthouse and then arranged a weekend pass with a one-way ticket. "His death was ruled a suicide." Lovely touch that. Is it really possible Katharine Graham offed her hubby? Who cares? To those who think the worst problem with the American press is its awful stultifying homogeneity, the Tribune-Review's deranged perverseness is to be cherished. Give that man a Pulitzer!"

Unfortunately, he ruins the mood by getting to his point, which is that Katie Graham was soft on Clinton - a rather ridiculous charge, as anybody who read the Post during the dismal impeachment days knows. Or at least, it is ridiculous as Steyn couches it. If Steyn's problem with the Post that they did not harp continually on Clinton's willingness to bomb Sudan for petty political gain, certainly an impeachable offense in my book, then I would have been all with him - but no, Steyn thinks that Monica =Watergate. The delusions of the right have no end.

On the other hand, give The Spectator, definitely a rightwing magazine, a prize for a really scathing obituary by a Andrew Gimson. He starts off with a killer lede: "Helmut Kohl has buried many bodies in his time, and now he has buried his wife Hannelore." He manages to stuff into the first graf an jibe at Kohl's arranging the funeral in a Roman Catholic church for a supposed protestant suicide, and then ends on this wonderfully abrasive note:
"The German media had already, almost without exception, swallowed Mr Kohl�s explanation for her death, which was that she was suffering from such an agonising allergy to light that for the last 15 months she had only been able to leave the house under cover of darkness."

Subsequently, Grimson shows that Hannelore Kohl's curious condition might have had less to do with the heliophobia, and more to do with his husband's "companion/secretary," Juliane Weber.

Basic subtext is the fat guy strangling his wife, then unctuously conducting her obsequies in a cathedral stuffed vest to wurst with Deutschland's best and brightest, in a tableau right out of Georg Grosz. Probably took his chippie out for funeral meats, afterwards. Much more topical than Philip Graham's suicide, right? I wasn't expecting such a bracing little tale from the Spectator, of all places.

Back in June, when Roland Dumas was sentenced to a pittance punishment, I got up a head of steam and wrote my friend MB an e-mail which read:

I don't know if you have been following L'affaire ELF, but the sentences came out today, and Dumas got basically six months. That is so outrageous I can barely believe it. The french elites definitely protect each other - to an alarming and disgusting extent. Even in the USA, not a standard by any means, the secretary of Defense being on the take would have brought a sentence of at least 5 years or more. I don't remember how much John Mitchell got, but I think it was something like that.
It did get me thinking, however, about Dumas' old patron, Mitterand, and whether he was, possibly, the worst Western leader since 1945. I think Nixon has to have that honor, but Mitterand is a close second. His system of traditional corruption - you know, it was through ELF that M.'s government basically fronted money to Kohl - his gutting of socialism, so that it is impossible to know, nowadays, if you are a voter, whether a vote for the socialist or the conservative will result in more conservative politcies - his dirty-ness in Africa, especially Rwanda - his intellectual filthiness, starting with his collaborationist past - hmm, yeah, right after Nixon. Even Thatcher and Reagan weren't as bad as old M. Really, if Europe takes a lunge towards fascism again - as is possible with Berlusconi - it will be because of the seeds left by the eighties - the sort of triangle of corruption, Andreotti/Craxi -- Mitterand -- Kohl.
Ah, as Rimbaud used to say,
Mon triste coeur bave � la poupe.

And then, still not finished with the subject, I wrote:

I am still steaming over the Dumas trial. Finally I've been able to read most of the net newspapers about it - and one of the things which does make me, well, sad, is how it was reported in Liberation. Which used to be a lefty, investigative paper. It seems to me that their reporting, here, was pretty establishment. Something has gone out of Libe - they are too interested in being cool, nowadays. They'd rather report on some goddamn trend in French pop music than on who is giving who money under the table.
I guess the thing that amazes me most is that Dumas' ex-mistress got a tougher sentence than he did. That makes no sense to me - her job, as procuress for ELF, would not exist except for the fact that she was indeed able to procur for ELF, via Dumas. She was just an instrument.
But anyway, what really amazes me is that a thug like Dumas still has his influence in the PS - and more, that Jospin is doing his best to stifle the few legislators who are willing to go after the elite crooks, including Chirac. The NYT quoted the mayor of Paris as saying that if they made arrests for all the corruption, they'd "empty" the political field.
My god, what a system.
Well, I might have been too harsh on Libe.
Anyway, the point of the post today, people, is that the tie between the financing of the CDP in Germany, Mitterand, and ELF, still has not become totally clear. Maybe poor Frau Kohl knew too much. Reach me for comments at the Editor