Remora

Lucky Limited Inc went out with a gorgeous woman to dance the Halloween jitters away last night. The revelers in the streets looked suitably bleery, and the first club Limited Inc went into, The Metro, was busy trying to become the club it will never be -- it's your two bar, 4 dollar Shiner set-up, some ragged sofas scattered around (with their suspicious cushions where you know somebody has recently spilled something but you can't see it? Cause of the shadows?), and a concrete dance floor below a stage where the band was oddly low energy, all the signs pointing in the direction of a much cooler club in, say, the East Village. The Metro shouts, we aren't really here. As for the low energy which the band was trying to wrestle into something vaguely interesting, well, some shake and bake rhythm was coming out of the drum section, but since Limited Inc was there to dance (and his partner, very Rita Hayward-ish in a stunning vinyl outfit, was ready to rhomba), and there was no scene, we made our way out of there and up to reliable Antones. Antones has lately become Limited Inc.'s spot. It wasn't crowded, but at least the band didn't sound like they'd doused themselves with barbs and scotches before the set. In fact, they sounded damn good, and exuded some South of the border throb that did Limited Inc a huge favor --
- it put a dreamy smile on the face of the beautiful dish he was with. The rest is dance history.

Remora
Limited Inc remembers with fondness Halloweens of yore - the costuming, the secret hurling of rotten eggs at the neighbor's prize Oldsmobile, the decorative touch with dog turds flambee and the ringing of the doorbell, giggles in the dark as we ran to the bushes -- such, such were the joys. But this Halloween we want to give our readers a special fright, some horror they can treasure up for the golden years. That is why we recommend this article by Kenichi Ohmae in New Perspectives Quarterly. The undead, monsters reassembled out of corpse parts, mad knifethrowers, phantoms of the opera, they might give one the ephemeral tingle, but there's nothing like sober economic statistics to bring on a dead faint and heart palpitations. The article is a scathing survey of the financial sleight of hand by which the Clinton administration contained infection from the Japanese slump. Old Doctor Bush, our cornpone POTUS, has poo-pooed the old Clintonomics, and, according to the article, he's about to get a big surprise. His advice amounts to the standard boilerplate about letting the marketplace sort out the dead from the living, the bankrupt from the solvent. The gov, in this view, should stand back and let unemployment do what it will, in order to have a healthier tomorrow. Well, Ohmae points out, lets say the Japanese government actually pays more than lip service to this insane advice. The zombies among Japanese banks and corporations might not just roll over, but but Doc! they might actually struggle to survive. Eek! Then Daddy Warbucks might have to put on his thinkin' cap. You can't smoke capital out of the holes, unlike terrorists, and since he has a complete moron for a Treasury secretary (did Limited Inc say that? Apologies all around. Not a COMPLETE moron. Really, what were we thinking?), we shouldn't expect common sense from that quarter. Well, in that potential struggle, these moribund investors will need resources, which means pulling massive amounts of capital out of investment positions here in the States. Here are two grafs with some striking claims:

"I believe that the Dow will decrease by one-third from its peak. When the Dow was 12,000, it would have been 8,000 without the influx of foreign capital.

Who will suffer the most?

The capital flight back into Japan will be close to $550 billion, of which $320 billion is in Treasury bonds. The Japanese hold approximately 10 percent of all outstanding US government securities-more than any other single country."

It is a little noted facet of economic theory that sometimes, it pays to be crooked. In the early 90s, American regulators and the Fed knew that technically big banks, like Citicorp, had suffered enough of a loss in the bursting of both the stock and real estate bubbles in the Heimat and the double whammy of the real estate bubble in Tokyo and its collateral effect in emerging markets that they were in default of the rules regulating banks. That is, they had to start monetizing assets in order to maintain balances against debt. But the Fed looked the other way, and eventually the situation solved itself. James Grant has written a nice and disgusted book on this, but it isn't that disgusting. Here we are facing another situation in which the better part of financial valor is to cook the books. We'll see what happens.

Do the numbers, and have a happy and safe Halloween, y'all.

Remora

Another magazine is roadkill - not exactly eyecatching news as the Stock market finds the center cannot hold, and the ceremony of innocence is lost among postal workers nationwide. This magazine, too, it isn't exactly Lingua Franca. It's Famous Monsters of Filmland. Apparently the articles in this magazine exerted a formative influence on a lot of very bad directors in Hollywood, among them John Landis. So why don't these bad directors, who can eat off silver plate, could fill their swimming pools with 20 dollar bills, have spent tons, no doubt, to promote trade with Colombia (heh heh), why don't they shunt some ready in the direction of their childhood formative influence? Not a question that Caitlin Liu asks in her acticle:
Auction Could Kill 'Monsters'

Here are two grafs that plug into a very California feud:

"Last year, after a trial during which Landis and author Ray Bradbury testified for Ackerman [former editor/publisher of the magazine], a Van Nuys jury found Ferry [current publisher/editor of the magazine] liable for breach of contract, libel and trademark infringement. Ackerman won a judgment of about $500,000 and rights to the pen name "Dr. Acula." Ferry has appealed.

Shortly after the verdict, Ferry transferred his assets to his housemate, declared himself broke and filed for bankruptcy protection, court documents show. The judge found the asset transfers to be fraudulent because Ferry was trying to keep them out of the hands of creditors such as Ackerman, Avery said."

Why can't Limited Inc use these telltale bits to make a fortune, you know, in the screenplay trade? We confess, the color by number scenario could be put together by the merest hypnotized piker and surely sold to some narcissistic someone out there in Beverly Hills. Of course, in the process, avoiding use of the term "Dr. Acula," which would be wrong, just wrong.

Remora.

Sadness. Yesterday Limited Inc went to the rally gainst the death penalty. We saw a poster advertising it, and made a note to go. Limited Inc is not an inveterate rally-goer, but these days, these grim days, needed some poetic counter-thrust. And what better protest than to protest against the cruel, extensive intention to murder, taken by the state and its officers?

All rallies in Austin are as obsessed with the capital building as Moslem pilgrims are with Mecca, although for opposite reasons: instead of worshipping, we come to metaphorically destroy. Routine for this rally, like the anti-WTO rally, was: forces gather in that park on 5th street across from the post office, forces get pumped by a few speeches, forces shuffle down the sidewalk out third street, past the groovers who wave at us from the coffee shop and past Fado's and then left turn up Congress and after various and sundry chants have been tried out and the cops have motorcycled past so we know that they have motorcycles (I suppose this impresses upon us that if we suddenly get the urge to hurl bricks through windows, we WILL be run down by flashing blue lights), we all pool around the Capital steps and listen to more feisty oratory.

When we got to the park, there was a desultory group with some tables set up, and we mistakenly thought for a second that the march had already occured, because the scene looked so evidently like backwash. B-b-but no, the backwash was the group -- a pitiful collection of middle aged freaks like us, with a few tatted youths, and (best part of the whole thing) at least twenty African Americans-- usually the rallies we've been to are as pale as the chalky shores of Albion, and that always bugs us no end. There couldn't have been more than two hundred there. Instead of expressing a strong minority opinion, our march seemed to express an arcane eccentricity. It was pathetic. And when we got to the Capital, the feisty oratory was off-key. There was an address from a woman whose daughter had been murdered that was painful to listen to, partly because we felt she was being exploited, somehow.

Here's the rub: to my mind, it is alright to be for the death penalty if a member of your family has been murdered. We would be for it, then, like a shot. We're a revengeful little prick, all in all, but even if we weren't, we'd still feel we owed it to the victim to want to kill the killer.

I talked about this with my friend MB last night. Opposition to the death penalty, for both of us, doesn't depend on an act of forgiveness, but is rooted in a separate conviction, that the state shouldn't add another murder to one (or more, oftentimes) that has already been committed.

In that conversation, I learned that MB and Limited Inc have different notions of what forgiveness is. Forgiveness takes up remarkably little space in ethical theory. When Jesus, dying on the cross said, forgive them, they know not what they do, what was he talking about? Could they not be forgiven if they knew what they were doing? For MB, Jesus didn't rise to the occassion, which would have required that they knew what they were doing in order for the act of forgiveness to be perfect. As you can tell, MB has high standards. So is forgiveness an insight into some intellectual lapse? Well, that doesn't seem to fit the way I think of forgiveness. There's an article in the New Republic this week (but not online) that reviews Andre Comte-Sponville's "A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues," and the reviewer does a little conceptual analysis of forgiveness.

But to get back to my original topic. Perhaps we should have lobbed some bricks through windows. Or simply not marched. I know, of course, that the death penalty is as popular in Texas as football. I know the death penalty is wrong. I know that fact must, sooner or later, yield to conviction, if conviction is tireless enough. But this is a dreadful time to come out against death. So many people are eager to see it.

Which brings me to the odd article by Phillip Weiss in the NY Observer. Weiss puzzles me -- second graf of the article will tell you why.

Vietnam ended marriages. The husband was for the war and the wife was quietly against it. Maybe they were Republicans, and the wife turned slowly Democratic. She didn�t talk about it openly. The husband�s change of view came years later, and was reluctant.

That was before feminism, but it seems as if the same divide is occurring over the war against terrorism. I left the country in mid-October, but before going I was at several gatherings where the women ran down the jingoistic rhetoric of the Bush administration, and then the men drifted off and discussed the war in somewhat gonzo terms. "What do you think we should do?" I said to one friend. "Go over there and ice �em," he said. We shook hands. At a birthday party, a biker told me about off-the-books assassination squads that roam free in mountains in the Far East. We both grunted with approval. A third friend and I drank red wine before his stone fireplace and talked about how some action was required. An artist, but he seemed to be saying "Love it or leave it," and I found myself agreeing."

Is Weiss serious? The article goes on to quote dissenting e-mails from his wife, who must wonder at that lede. And what to make of that "shaking hands" scene. Is the frat boy in Weiss coming out, or what?

Remora

The great images of prostitution in the 19th century - the century of Nana -- feed by unconscious and subterranian streams into the Storyville photographs of EJ Bellocq. Walter Benjamin would have recognized the spirit of the Passagen in the itchy copulations implicit in the professional smiles of girls reclining in desolate, straw cushioned cribs, or the sentimental decorations which cluttered the rooms of the higher class tarts, and the lost allusions to a debased and by this time comic myth of Oriental sensuality that runs right into the chinese motifs decorating the ceramic chamber pots under the often used beds in the quality houses as well as the porcelein bric a brac behind glass and lock and key in the overstuffed steamboat mansions along St. Charles from which the better, regular clients came. Ornament is crime, the Viennese Modernists said. Ornament is where the dream of Lustmord, sex killing, begins. Limited Inc saw Bellocq's work in Al Rose's book on Storyville. I was living in New Orleans then myself, and vaguely knew that Pretty Baby, the Louis Malle film, was based on this book. But when I looked at those prints, I knew I was seeing something mad -- something that Manet's Olympia hinted at. It was the madness of a man who can't get over what is between a woman's legs. He can't get over the sight, smell, touch of the thing, he can't get over how the vagina is the body becoming the body. Bellocq, of course, might never have read Nana, certainly didn't know Rimbaud, but this is what gives his work its power: he had to make it all up. The most startling photos were, of course, the ones with the heads of the women erased. The erasures are concentrated, jagged scribbles; they look as though they were done in some fury, figurative damage to a figure, the transfer of rancorous passion that still looks criminal. The story was that Bellocq's brother, a priest, must have worked over these photographs. Even then I wondered why a priest would be destroying the faces instead of the bodies -- what was the point? Now Lee Friedlander, who restored Bellocq's photos, is saying that he believes Bellocq himself did it. One of the Roses has a great article on the subject at Exquisite Corpse.



Here's a graf:

Recently, Lee Friedlander has re-examined the plates and tried to duplicate the scratching with a sample area, but the emulsion flaked off instead of scratching. The emulsion around the original defacement in some areas is folded over gently, and could only have done so when wet. Therefore, E.J. Bellocq probably defaced the negatives shortly after he developed them in the early 1900s.
In one photograph, however, a woman wears a carnival mask that has been incongruously positioned to hide her eyes, possibly echoing some ambivalence that made Bellocq scratch the faces from so many of the negatives. Yet the approach to the women's faces is not the only curious aspect of Bellocq's Storyville work. In one pair of photographs, a woman stands clothed in the first image in front of heavy wooden doors, but in the second image, she is nude, her face has been scratched from the negative, and a heavy couch has been pushed in front of the door. A locket, another repeating motif in Bellocq's Storyville work, also becomes visible in the second image. One of Bellocq's defaced nudes is actually shown examining her locket. But the pair of images mentioned above is not the only example of couches in front of doors in Bellocq's Storyville nudes. One such image shows clearly that there is already a lock on the door, and a cord from an electric light has further been wrapped around the lock in what looks like a final obsessive attempt at privacy. Why would Bellocq feel the need to use a couch, a lock, and a wire to keep the door shut in an expensive brothel? Rugs used as hasty partial backdrops and, in one case, sawhorses also suggest that Bellocq may have intended to drop the backgrounds from his images, vignette, or otherwise alter the images to imitate the saccharine romantic photographs and paintings he hung on his walls. In fact, one of Bellocq's portraits is clearly shown vignetted and framed in one of the two studies of his desk.

Remora

If you sup with the devil, use a big spoon, as Tolstoy, or my grandmother, said. Limited inc is always confusing our grandmother with Tolstoy -- difference is, our grandmother sold Avon, Tolstoy didnt. In any case, the saying means, if you dabble in evil, evil will get ya. And so it goes with this military campaign. Bombing Afghanistan, or Kabul and other targets, had a certain military logic. Just as prelimary bombardments in any war target military hardware, vulnerable personnel, and sites which are strategically key, such as communications systems, so I suppose -- we all suppose, here at Limited Inc, having only the filtered information that our patriotic media has so wonderfully denuded of any content shocking to the naive American citizen -- that was the point of the first wave of bombing.

Now, however, the bombing is serving another, and less justifiable purpose. In fact, unjustifiable, I'd say -- nasty, illegitimate, criminal, these are other terms that come to mind, but I'm a bit saturated with invective right now -- and that is to remind the Heimat that the commander in chief is still ferocious and on point. We have to consider the neandrathal element in the populace. In fact, they find ululation, here and there, never so clearly as in this posting from Scott Moore at Slate.

"But regardless of the source [of the anthrax], if you believe, as I do, that the poison is being spread by al-Qaida operatives in the United States, you have to ask: What the hell are we waiting for in terms of killing the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan? From what I read in news reports, we�re taking our sweet time about bombing their front-line positions. There have even been reports that senior Taliban leaders were fleeing Kabul and other cities to go to the front lines because they thought they would be safer there. Wouldn�t round-the-clock B-52 raids reduce the front lines of the Taliban to something resembling the pile at 1 WTC in a matter of days? But we aren�t doing that because we hope �moderate� elements of the Taliban will defect and form a coalition with the Northern Alliance after the war. Let me offer a suggestion: Let�s worry about post-Taliban Afghanistan post-Taliban."

Notice the clever/unclever phrase, "reduce the front lines of the Taliban to something resembling the pile at 1 WTC in a matter of days?" As if there were anything in Afghanistan that, standing or ruined, was going to resemble the tallest skyscrapers in New York City. It is the American conceit that all wars are winnable if you use enough ferocity. It stands in troublesome disjunction with another American conceit: that we fight for moral reasons only. If, for instance, Scott Moore had said that he desired, like Charles Manson, or Jeffrey Dahmer, to play in the slimy viscera of dead Afghanis, he probably wouldn't have had his forum -- but of course, he keeps his bloodlust technologically condomed, so we think, sure, let's use our vast explosive capacities to spread jihad warrior gore over the mudhuts of Afghani villages. Something in me, however, thinks this isn't a good idea.

It seems that all involved confess that the military gain to begin with was small. Now it is miniscule. And there is this thing about bombs -- explosions pick out bodies randomly. So with each new bombing, we increase the amount of collateral casualties. We in fact move from warfare slowly but surely to organized terrorism, in the classic sense of spreading terror among an unarmed population. The Times headline story today has definitely turned Limited Inc against continuing this phase of the war. Here's the banal first graf:

"Huge explosions shook Kabul today on the Muslim day of prayer as United States jets kept up their bombing raids on targets in and around the capital, witnesses said."

Tickets go to the first caller who names how many NYT headlines stories begin with "explosions shook Kabul today"...

If the UN does intervene here, it might save us from ourselves.

Guardian Unlimited Observer | Observer site | UN set to appeal for halt in the bombing

Remora
One Vincent Browne for the Irish Times has written a scathing newspaper column revealing a scandal of major proportions -- people on the Net were mean to him! In his first graf, he describes the response to an article he'd written, entitled Afghans victims of US terrorism:

"A Mr Nelson ... wrote: "I read your article and all I have to say is: go f**k you f***ing queer butt f***ing . . . I hope the US bombs Assolastan until every rag has been killed . . . Hope you get AIDS f***er".
There were tens of other such responses, in all 339 e-mails, almost entirely from the United States from people who had read the column on the Yahoo.com website, where it was posted. The response was overwhelming vituperation offering an insight into part of the mind of America at this time. Of the 339 responses only about 30 were supportive of the views expressed."

Mr. Browne goes on in the tone of shock I associate with schoolteachers asking, who threw that paperwad. He has either never written anything for the Internet, or has only transacted with the most high minded sites, say, the Wilfred Sellars Philosophy Portal. His last sentence is a good gauge of his mindset: we have either the unruly students over there, or the ones that did their homework over here. I especially like the "insight into the mind of America." Hmm, I wonder if Mr. Browne has ever been tempted to go to an Irish pub, and if he has, I wonder if he's ever strolled to the the Gents with a belly full. Now just Imagine him, dear reader, shaking off the excessive Harp, and surveying, with increasing consternation, the racism, the unwarranted, impossible and sometimes drawn suggestions re the female anatomy and its uses, and other scribbles indicative of the "mind of Ireland" at this time. Mr. Browne would no doubt tuck in and fly in the horror Christian shows in Pilgrims Progress for one of Satan's typical lures. Browne doesn't apparently know that between the ages of 12 to 21, there are a lot of boys out there, and they like nothing better than to say, "you f**cking c*cksucker", or use Assolastan (which just doesn't have the ring of the well beloved Assotollah of the hostage years). The prim, shocked tone, and the idea that the only correct response, indicative no doubt of the better sort, would be 'supportive of the views expressed" is the clincher -- I mean, this is the school teacher in a nutshell, this is the one it was so much fun, when I was in high school, to discombobulate -- the fart sounds coming from the back row, the stray spit ball, the furious threats to make all the class stay after school. It comes back to me in a rush, darling Clarkston High, which has proudly produced more than its share of illiterates and crack addicts. Join me now in a rousing hymn of the Pink Floyd favorite, 'We don't need no Education." Or no, don't. Just join with me in sending Mr. Browne a message.

Turning to the right, we have Andrew Sullivan, who seems to be thrown at me from all directions. Why is he famous and I'm not is the question many in my household ask. But let's not get into that. Two friends have recently sent me columns of his, and one of them was rather astonished at the flood she produced -- she said that my inexhaustibility on a subject where I was not being remunerated might have something to do with my lack of remuneration in general. This friend goes for the jugular, sometimes. Anyway, Sullivan, in a benign mood, turns his eye to the "loony left,' the knee jerk anti-Americans, the traitorous pink, and his eye alights, at last, on Christopher Hitchens, who Sullivan thinks shows some glimmering sanity, as he so manfully did about that outrage on the Constitution, Clinton's infamous bj, so that maybe, as these lefty cohorts fade away into the sunset, conservatives can grapple with respectable people on the left who agree with them at all times. The usual tripe, in other words. What I do think is interesting is the graf about Hitchens:

"One immediate response is to argue that the U.S. itself created Osama bin Laden in its war against Soviet communism. This isn't true--but even if it were, doesn't this fact, as Mr. Hitchens has argued, actually increase the West's responsibility to retaliate against him?"

Someone once said that in foreign affairs, as in love affairs, you always forget your next to last partner (okay, someone didn't say that, I said it, I just thought it sounded more sophisticated if I put in the someone said part). In the Gulf war, we turned on a dime from watching Saddam decimate Iranian troops with billions pumped into him from the Kuwaitis and the Saudis, and with our connivence in keeping his chain of material supplies alive, to Saddam as Hitler. Of course, the US didn't create bin Laden, they merely created the fundamentalist muhadjeen of the 80s, and then pronounced the ruins of a Soviet free Afghanistan a stunning success. What the left said at that time is that encouraging people to battle against communism is one thing, encouraging them to battle, as was done in the 80s, against atheism and civil rights for women in the name of Islam --- and if Sullivan was interested, he could find plenty of material that showed the US Intelligence people were not only doing this, but were quite proud of doing this ---- did infinite damage to the country. And that damage would be multiplied as the battle against godless Communism became the battle against the Infidel. Back in 1982, the latter phrase had a stirring ring, with CIA men fancying themselves little Lawrences of Arabia. Now, of course, we know what that means. To pretend this didn't happen is, well, did someone say the loonie right?