Nihil Obstat

One From The Stacks: The Bridge on the Drina

2012-01-27T18:13:00.000-08:00

“Of all the things that life drives man to shape and build, none, I think, is as precious as bridges . . . They serve no arcane or evil purpose.” - Ivo Andrić

When he drafted that sentence, Bosnian writer Ivan "Ivo" Andrić would have had no way of knowing that the object that inspired its writing -- and became the backdrop for the book that helped win him a coveted Nobel Prize for Literature – would one day run red with the blood of innocents, bearing witness to the very evil of which he absolved it.

Last week I went to see the film In The Land of Blood and Honey, Angelina Jolie's directorial debut about the Siege of Sarajevo. Shot over 42 days mostly in Hungary, Jolie relied on Bosnian and Serb cast members to tell the story of forbidden love between a Serb captain and his Muslim prisoner. The film generated significant controversy in Bosnia and was protested by both rape victims – who found the love affair between jailer and victim offensive – and ethnic Serbs – who objected to what they saw as the vilification of their national identity. I think that caught Jolie off guard a bit since both she and Brad consider themselves deeply committed to social advocacy issues and have their own multi-ethnic brood to prove it.

At one point Jolie even lost permission to film in Sarajevo; it was eventually restored but filming was nevertheless cut from ten to just three days, during which the Academy Award-winning actress ceded directorial responsibility to an assistant. I guess you can't please everyone.

I personally found the film moving and insightful, and balanced on the whole, albeit historically restrained (the Serbs, it should be noted, were the victims of their own ethnic cleansing during the First and Second World Wars at the hands of Croatian Catholics and Muslims, an injustice that is mentioned only in passing in the movie.)

Anyone whose ever met a Serb knows them to be extremely proud people – a nationality grounded in a sense of place and history. A people who stick together, for better of worse. Albanians are the same. I knew lots of Albanians when I worked in the restaurant industry and I can tell you, they have no doubt that they are the proverbial shit. Americans find this somewhat hard to understand. Not that we don't think we're the shit, but it's different. We're the shit by association, by hard work and military might, by hubris and a sense of collective entitlement, perhaps. But not by genetics. That's because we live in a new country defined by its heterogeneity; Serbia on the other hand is the grizzled old man of nations. Opinionated, coarse, boastful. Serbs will talk about the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 AD, which paved the way for centuries of Ottoman rule, like it happened yesterday; and many still sees it as a personal affront, one that has yet to be avenged. For them the war was nothing less than a crusade for payback. The Battle of Kosovo comes up briefly during the movie In the Land of Blood and Honey, in a conversation between two Serb soldiers, and it made me think of Andrić's book.

A Croat and a Catholic, Andrić was born in 1892 in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had only recently changed hands from the Ottomans to the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. He was raised in Višegrad on the river Drina in eastern Bosnia, which would become the setting of the book The Bridge on the Drina, and, many years later, the backdrop for bloody ethnic violence during the Bosnian civil war.

His muse, the Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge, was completed in 1577 AD by the Ottoman court architect Mimar Sinan. It was named in honor of Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, an Ottoman statesman who was brought to the court in Constantinople as part of the Devshirme program -- which is featured predominantly in the earlier parts of Andrić's book. Under Devshirme, young Christian boys were taken from their families and forced into service of the Sultan as Janisarries – a professional military class. Andrić begins his book with a description of Mehmed Pasha's kidnapping:

“On that November day in one of those countless panniers a dark skinned boy of about ten years old from the mountain village of Sokolovici sat silent and looked about him with dry eyes. In a chilled and reddened hand he held a small curved knife with which he absent-mindedly whittled at the edges of the pannier, but at the same time looked about him. He was to remember that stony bank overgrown with spars, bare and dull grey willows, the surly ferry-man and the dry water-mill full of draughts and spiders' webs where they had to spend the night before it was possible to transport all of them across the troubled waters of the Drina over which the ravens were croaking.”

I probably read The Bridge on the Drina in a week, maybe a bit more, riding its pages across four centuries, from Mehmed Pasha's midnight ride, through the bloody Serbian revolts against Turkish despotism, the reconquest of large swaths of the Balkans by Austria Hungary, and, in the end, the sound of German boots and exploding Serb shells announcing the start of the Great War.

The book's main character, its protagonist, is the bridge itself, sturdily observing generations of peasants and traveling nobles, conniving officials, soldiers and bandits, while reclining figures lounged upon its kapia drinking Turkish coffee from brass cups. It witnessed song and courtship, executions and betrayal, and the shouts of Muslim and Christian children playing in its shadow, because during their years of shared triumph and hardship, “Turks, Christians and Jews mingled together."

Andrić won the Nobel Prize for his body of work in 1961 and died in 1975. Two decades later Višegrad, would be the scene of some of the worst ethnic cleansing of the Bosnian civil war. Hundreds of Bosnian women were raped, while Andrić's noble bridge became a killing field as victim upon victim of Serb paramilitaries was dumped into the Drina, turning its turqouise waters crimson and its parapets oily and slick.

And as it has done for centuries, “The bridge remained as if under a death sentence, but none the less still whole and untouched between the two warring sides.”

Details:

The Bridge on the Drina (paperback)
By Ivo Andrić
Published by University of Chicago Press (1977)
Originally published in 1945 by Prosveta Publishing Co., Belgrade
Translated from Serbo Croat by Lovett F. Edwards
Introduction by William H. McNeill
Purchase date unknown; bought used; price $0.50 (price inscribed in pencil on title page)
Condition: Good (slight cover damage)

About this project

Raquelle

2012-01-24T09:19:00.000-08:00

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2012)

For the love of books

2012-01-23T16:31:00.000-08:00

One from the stacks:
Giving my books a second life on the Web

Like most writers I have a lot of books. They surround me while I work and I find that soothing and dispiriting at the same time. They remind me of all the work I haven't done; and sometimes that makes me want to give it all up and get a normal job like everyone else. A job that ends at five o'clock and requires no more of me than can be crammed into the space of eight hours and five days, so that the rest of the time I can do all the other things I enjoy, like running and cooking and dining out and drawing, and playing drums and just sitting in front of the television with my wife and my dog without feeling like I should be in front of the keyboard...well, writing.

Writing for a living (or more accurately, assuming anyone cares what you write) can lead, if unchecked, to unrestrained arrogance; and the presence of books, lots of books – by writers much better than myself – helps keep me in my place. But more often they are less trenchant, reminding me that I am engaged in a timeless pursuit, a linguistic crusade for truth and beauty that I should be honored to count myself a part of it. I know I'm not alone in saying books – printed books, on paper, not electrically charged particles of liquid crystal – are inspirational.

I've never counted my books, nor do I have a reasonable estimate of how many I might have. Sometimes they are an immense burden. And I mean that in the literal sense. Books are heavy as shit, and hard as hell to move. At 41 I just bought my very first house; in other words I've spent the entirety of my adult life as a renter, moving myself and my books an average of once every two years. It's a pain in the ass, and I know I've stayed places (and with people) longer than I would have liked to because of my reluctance to pack my books.

Every time I move, my books are the first things boxed and the last unpacked. Also with each move I invariably determine that when I finally get around to unpacking them, I will catalog them in some relevant way – typically in the standard manner, alphabetically by author; but on at least one occasion I settled on regional classifications subcategorized by genre (Continental fiction, American nonfiction, English reference...you get the idea). This has yet to happen, which can make looking for an individual volume frustrating to the point of madness. As you can see from the photograph above (which shows just a tiny corner of one shelf) more often than not my library endures in perpetual disarray, a prolonged state of literary anarchy in need of a bibliophilic Dear Leader to instill order and discipline.

Given all the drawbacks of mass book ownership it shouldn't come as a surprise to know that I sometimes question the rationale of carrying these thousands of pages around at all. On more than one occasion I've considered tossing them, or more likely giving them away. Once, many years ago, I sold my entire collection to a young entrepreneur who was trying to open an indy bookstore (a noble if foolish endeavor). I needed the money. And he needed the books. I don't remember getting much for them, but it was enough for what I needed at the time. I never did get to visit the store and can't say with any certainty if it ever even opened. I've since replaced some of the books I sold (a collection of Paul Bowles' short stories comes to mind). I wouldn't sell my books now. Mostly because I no longer see them as individual items, commodities if you will, but as something much more personal: A library is an intellectual self-portrait of he who created it.

I do however occasionally commit to whittling down my library and disposing of the more expendable volumes. I like placing them in a box in front of my house and watching from the window as passersby rifle through the books I've determined are no longer worthy of standing sentry on my shelf. Let them bother someone else for a while.

Yet I'm still plagued by the notion that my books are waiting for something to happen that never will. Do they tire of being shuffled from place to place, collecting dust in between moves? I make sure to give them attention. I like pulling them down at random and flipping through the pages. Sometimes I find old notes, bookmarks from bookstores that I visited that no longer exist, or highlighted passages that long ago had meaning. Sometimes the words still do and it's like finding a little piece of treasure I'd forgotten I had. Other times, removed from whatever context inspired me to make the notation in the first place, they are cryptic messages from another time, another me, and I take pleasure in trying to decipher their (and my) meaning. But except for a handful of favorites, I rarely read books twice. There are too many unread ones that still require my attention.

It's high time that I did my books some justice. With more and more people turning to e-readers and tablets, the printed book needs it more than ever. So I've decided to give my own modest collection a renewed purpose, and hopefully give something to you at the same time.

At random intervals (i.e. when I feel inspired to and have the time) I will feature a single volume from my library with a brief (or sometimes not so brief) assessment of what it meant to me and why I think you should read it (or not).

I won't tell you I'm going to work through my entire library. For one thing I'll probably lose interest before long and then I'd have made a promise I can't, or won't keep. And anyway not every book in my library is worthy of the time. Not to mention, I haven't read them all. Any true bibliophile who tells you they have is lying through their teeth. As I've already noted, book collecting is as much about being in the presence of great books as it is about reading them. Which is why, no matter how many e-readers are sold and how many e-books marketed, the printed volume will always have a place in the world of the true lover of literature. This is my way of honoring my library – or part of it at least – with a second life on the Web.

Stay tuned.

U.S. military's reprehensible history of animal cruelty

2012-01-22T08:34:00.000-08:00

"Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test … consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.” — Milan Kundera

Some things just can’t be unseen. They etch themselves into our consciousness waiting for the right moment to leap into view and remind us how utterly contemptible the world can be, and, too frequently, the depths of depravity to which humans willfully descend.

Last week, as the major networks and newspapers burned hot with the story of four young U.S. Marines urinating on the bodies of several dead Taliban fighters somewhere in the unforgiving wilds of war-torn Afghanistan, a video crossed my desk showing U.S. service members engaged in behavior so barbarous that it makes piss-gate look like a Boy Scout cookout. And yet, despite the fact that it depicts similarly clad troops operating in the same theater of war, chances are you haven’t even heard about it. Click here to read more at The Philly Post...

Urban Landscapes

2012-01-21T17:56:00.000-08:00

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 2011

On The Street

2012-01-17T09:50:00.000-08:00

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2011)

Defending Monogamy or How Gay Unions Can Save Marriage

2012-01-13T09:17:00.000-08:00

In December, the Pew Research Center released a study revealing what many people of my generation already know: Fewer Americans are choosing to get married these days than at any other time in our nation’s history. Barely half of adult Americans are married today. By contrast, when my parents were getting hitched in 1963, 72 percent of their peers were joining them at the altar.

And yet at the same time straight people are rejecting the institution of marriage, tens of thousands of homosexuals—many of whom are already in long-term committed relationships—are fighting for the right to partake of it. As a married heterosexual, let me just say I’m pulling for them. Contrary to popular conservative rhetoric, allowing gay people to formally acknowledge their commitment to each other won’t doom marriage; instead, it might just save it. Click here to read this piece at The Philly Post.

Raquelle

2012-01-09T12:48:00.000-08:00

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2012)

Sharif

2012-01-09T12:34:00.000-08:00

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2011)

Joshua

2012-01-08T12:54:00.000-08:00

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2012)

The Culture War will be won by attrition

2012-01-05T11:01:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday, Iowans officially christened the 2012 primary season, handing Mitt Romney an oh-so-subtle early victory and, sadly, putting an end to the colorful and entertaining campaign of Michele Bachmann.

It’s nothing to get excited about. The Iowa Caucuses are notoriously unrepresentative. More than 90 percent of the state is white, and upwards of 70 percent of Iowans identify themselves as evangelical Christians (not exactly an ideal cross section of America, or even the GOP for that matter). Yet, as I watched the results roll across the television screen and read about them later in the paper, the ritual got me thinking about Republican voters—their hopes, fears and motivations—and, more generally, those of the roughly 50 percent of Americans of all stripes who will likely turn up at the polls next November.

What is it that makes them tick?

We think we know the answer: It’s the economy, stupid. Only it’s not. Click here to read at the Philly Post

Needles and the damage done

2012-01-03T09:13:00.001-08:00

With a single sentence buried in the 1,200-page omnibus spending package for 2012, signed into law last week by President Obama, social conservatives in the House quietly took a hatchet to one of the most effective strategies cities have for preventing the spread of HIV. The provision ended federal support for needle exchange programs that have been backed by most major health organizations, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and Obama himself.

The subcommittee responsible for the rider is led by Rep. Denny Rehberg (R., Mont.), who once told a reporter: "The problem with AIDS is, you got it, you die. So why are we spending money on the issue?" AIDS advocates say the change will likely doom countless addicts to contracting HIV as well as hepatitis C. Click here to read at The Philadelphia Inquirer...

Raquelle

2012-01-01T12:01:00.000-08:00

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2011)

Top-five politcal embarrassments of 2011

2011-12-29T11:57:00.000-08:00

Journalists love lists.

Journalists love lists so much that they place them side-by-side with such noble endeavors as the profile and the expose among the seven main article types taught in magazine-writing classes. (There's even a list of the top list headlines, if you can believe that).

There are of course things journalists love more than lists, and one of them is watching politicians step in their own poo. Lucky for us there was a lot of that going on in 2011. This year we witnessed something of an epidemic of foot-in-mouth disease. A entire colony of the virus seems to be attached to the GOP presidential field, passing from one candidate to the next like a lollipop at a chicken pox party. But Democrats too have had their share of stupid, shortsighted or just plain “ick” moments, some involving their mouths, and others attached to less auspicious parts of the body.

My magazine writing professor instructed us to use odd numbers for our lists, like the nine best TV shows of the year, or – come to think of it – the seven main article types taught in magazine-writing classes. He said they stand out more that way and leave the reader wanting more. So in honor of him, I give you the five biggest political embarrassments of 2011. Click here to read more at the Philly Post.

Can Iraq survive the Americans?

2011-12-23T05:22:00.000-08:00

“By definition, you cannot impose democracy; you cannot force people to make a free choice.” -- Edward Peck

On November 14th, months after combat operations officially ended and two weeks before he was scheduled to ship out, 23-year-old Army Spec. David Emanuel Hickman rolled over an improvised explosive device while traveling through Baghdad in a convoy of military vehicles and became the last U.S. service member to die on active duty in Iraq.

The distinction places him in the company of U.S. Marines Charles McMahon and Darwin Lee Judge—who were killed during a rocket attack on Tân Sơn Nhứt Airport during the American evacuation of Saigon—and U.S. Army Sergeant Anthony J. Marchione—a photographer’s assistant who was fatally wounded while taking aerial pictures of Tokyo three days after Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender of Japan at the end of World War II. Not a single one of these “last casualties” was over the age of 23.

The chilling sadness that attends their deaths is hard to shake. It’s not that they are any more tragic than casualties that occur in the beginning, or the middle, of a conflict; there is no monopoly on tragedy. Yet more than the others, I think, their deaths underscore the capricious nature of war and the utter senselessness of the violence levied upon young people by the whims of their elders. Read this story in its entirety at the Philly Post...

The professor and the pornographer

2011-12-16T11:43:00.001-08:00

One Nation Under Sex: How the Private Lives of Presidents, First Ladies and Their Lovers Changed the Course of American History,
By Larry Flynt & David Eisenbach
Palgrave MacMillan, April 201
264 pp

When Larry Flynt's new book, “One Nation Under Sex,” arrived in my mailbox a week before I was scheduled to sit down to an interview with the iconoclastic pornographer, First Amendment crusader and all around rabble rouser, I'll admit I didn't know what to expect.

The promotional materials promised the book would “explore the origins of America’s fascination with sex scandals and explain how we can put aside our political moralism and begin focusing on the real problems that threaten our nation.”

I'd read Flynt's 1994 autobiography, “An Unseemly Man,” and found it to be a sophomoric if amusing chronicle of the publisher's life, most memorable for its account of the author's childhood experimentation with chicken sex. Not exactly heady stuff.

So, what to make of a volume of U.S. political history penned by a man who once wore the American flag as a diaper and was famously tossed out of the U.S. Supreme Court for calling the Chief Justice an “asshole?”

The incongruity was not lost on Flynt. “I knew that nobody would read a history book by a pornographer,” he said during a promotional stop in Philadelphia, “so I reached out to someone they would [read].”

That someone is David Eisenbach, a professor of American history at Columbia University who’s written two books on media and politics – including one on the history of the gay rights movement and its impact on American polity (Gay Power: An American Revolution, Carroll and Graf, 2006). In 2009, Eisenbach produced a series of shows for the History Channel titled “Beltway Unbuckled” that explored the sex lives of several U.S. presidents. Eisenbach says it was around then that Flynt – who had seen the show – called him “out of the blue” with an invitation in Los Angeles.

“He said he had been thinking about writing a book on this subject and thought we should work together,” said Eisenbach. The 38 year-old New Yorker knew he was taking a calculated risk putting his name on the project; but Eisenbach says two things swayed him: the once in a lifetime opportunity to work with Flynt and the desire to see his work discussed beyond the gilded halls of academia.

The product of the collaboration is a breezy yet surprisingly dense 264-page narrative that takes the reader on a guided tour of the boudoirs and backseats of America’s leaders from the dawn of the republic to the Clinton years (and the unwashed blue dress that nearly took down a president.)

Flynt's penchant for thinly-sourced conjecture and checkbook journalism notwithstanding, “One Nation Under Sex” is unadulterated historical reportage -- painstakingly referenced with well over 1,000 citations (a testament to the work of Eisenbach and his two research assistants, who spent the better part of two years poring over primary source materials in presidential libraries from Hyde Park to Little Rock.)

“This book is the first-ever made to consolidate the history of this subject—presidents, first ladies, mistresses and lovers and to find out how it affected policy,” said Flynt, during an end of summer promotional tour in Philadelphia “Most history books are published by conservatives and they don't want to know about sex. They want to know about politics and policy. That's why so much history got shoveled around.”

While sex is the vehicle through which the narrative unfolds, the real stories here are the evolution of the American media’s relationship to its leaders and the cutthroat nature of partisan politics; the scandals described in “One Nation Under Sex” are only relevant insofar as they can be exploited to undermine a rival’s political career, steer public sentiment in a favorable direction, and, in many cases, change the course of history.

From the “Peggy Eaton Affair,” during the presidency of Andrew Jackson – which helped turn John C. Calhoun from an ambitious but relatively harmless vice president into a rabid secessionist and one of the first South Carolinians to lobby for a break from the Union – to the more recent Monica Lewinski scandal – which is blamed for distracting president Bill Clinton from his determination to take out up-and-coming terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, the authors take pains to reveal how sex scandals and policy outcomes are inextricably linked – with the end results typically not in the national interest. Read the entire review and part of my interview with Larry Flynt at AlterNet.

What happened to the U.S. Postal Service?

2011-12-12T06:26:00.000-08:00

Tradition holds that: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night” will keep the United States mail from getting through; but in the end it may be simple economics that dooms one of the oldest and most trusted government agencies in America.

That, and good old-fashioned politics.

Last week Postmaster General Patrick R. Donahoe announced that come spring the U.S. Postal Service will shutter 3,700 retail facilities, and more than half of its 500 mail processing centers, in an effort to address a $5.1 billion deficit in 2011. Also gone will be next day mail service; half of first class mail will now take up to three days to reach its destination, while the other half will get there in two.

It’s estimated that more than 100,000 employees will lose their jobs as a result of the cuts. Donahoe is also seeking congressional approval to cut out Saturday delivery, which he says will save the agency some $3 billion annually.

The operational efficiencies — as the Postal Service refers to them — are aimed at reducing costs by $20 billion by 2015 in order to return the agency to profitability, according to David Williams, vice president of USPS Network Operations. That would be a noble accomplishment, except for the fact that — on paper at least — the USPS already turns a profit every year. But a mandate contained in the Postal Service Accountability and Enhancement Act — a 2006 reform bill that was signed by President George W. Bush — created a highly unusual burden on the agency that within a single year helped turn it from an operation that pulled in $1.4 billion in profits in 2005 to one that now bleeds cash like a sieve. Read this article in its entirety at The Philadelphia Tribune

On The Street

2011-12-06T08:49:00.000-08:00

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2011)

This Is America. This Is America on Drugs

2011-12-01T12:28:00.000-08:00

Imagine spending billions of dollars a year to advertise a product to a group of people who aren’t even authorized to buy it. Sounds pretty crazy right? Well not if you’re a pharmaceutical company. Thanks to lax laws that make the United States one out of only two countries in the world (New Zealand is the other) where prescription drug makers are allowed to hawk their products directly to consumers on television and radio, the airwaves are chock-full of little green butterflies (Lunesta), smooth-talking bumblebees (Nasonex), and middle-aged hunks who can’t get it up (Cialis, Viagra, Levitra) all working toward one goal: convincing you that you’ll be healthier, happier, sexier, if you can just get your doctor to write you a prescription. Read more at The Philly Post...

Occupy Philly Day 53: Eviction Deadline

2011-11-28T14:36:00.000-08:00

Norquist’s Nay-Sayers Put Nation at Risk

2011-11-27T11:06:00.000-08:00

If there was ever any question about why Congress has such a low approval rating, consider the following statement:

“Despite our inability to bridge the committee’s significant differences, we end this process united in our belief that the nation’s fiscal crisis must be addressed and that we cannot leave it for the next generation to solve.”

It was made jointly by Sen. Patty Murray (D., Wash.) and Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R., Texas), the co-chairs of the the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction – known paradoxically as the “super committee” – seconds after announcing they had failed to come up with a bipartisan plan for reducing the federal deficit by $1.2 trillion over the next ten years. As a result, instead of a nice piecemeal approach of mutual sacrifice – one that would comprise both necessary cuts to domestic programs and an expiration of tax breaks for the richest Americans – discretionary spending will get slashed in 2013 (without any attendant increase in revenue), putting the country on what National Journal economics correspondent Jim Tankersley has called “autopilot towards austerity.”

Not for nothing, but boasting of unity and a shared commitment to the next generation under circumstances like that is the kind of patronizing hubris that only a politician would have the nerve to mount. Read on at the Philly Post...

Photo Essay: Monuments of Laurel Hill

2011-11-21T12:28:00.000-08:00

"Angels & Martyrs" - Photographs 2009-2011
Highbrow Magazine November 2011

On The Street

2011-11-19T16:14:00.000-08:00

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2011)

November 17 Day of Action - Philadelphia

2011-11-18T12:35:00.001-08:00

Occupy Wall Street and the Bull Moose

2011-11-17T11:31:00.000-08:00

Teddy Roosevelt's Declaration of Principles of the Progressive Party (August 7, 1912): "The conscience of the people, in a time of grave national problems, has called into being a new party, born of the Nation's awakened sense of justice. We of the Progressive Party here dedicate ourselves to the fulfillment of the duty laid upon us by our fathers to maintain that government of the people, by the people and for the people whose foundation they laid.

We hold with Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln that the people are the masters of their Constitution, to fulfill its purposes and to safeguard it from those who, by perversion of its intent, would convert it into an instrument of injustice. In accordance with the needs of each generation the people must use their sovereign powers to establish and maintain equal opportunity and industrial justice, to secure which this Government was founded and without which no republic can endure.

This country belongs to the people who inhabit it. Its resources, its business, its institutions and its laws should be utilized, maintained or altered in whatever manner will best promote the general interest.

It is time to set the public welfare in the first place."

Read the full manifesto of the Progressive Bull Moose Party. Sounds kinda familiar doesn't it?

Internet-Powered Boycotts Beat Corporate America

2011-11-07T11:52:00.000-08:00

In last week’s column I urged readers to declare electoral independence by boycotting the political parties and dropping all partisan affiliation from their voter registration cards. Though I didn’t know it at the time, I was riffing on a theme. Two weeks earlier, my wife and I had initiated our own mini-boycott, this of a more personal nature, when we learned that Bank of America would start charging us five dollars a month for the privilege of spending our own money. The bank’s decision to levy a monthly fee for debit-card use wasn’t especially surprising. This was the same institution, after all, that foreclosed on a woman who wasn’t even behind on her mortgage, locked her out of her home for a week and—just for good measure—held her parrot hostage (and some people wonder why I find corporations so fundamentally creepy). read more

Environmental Abstracts

2011-11-05T15:49:00.001-07:00

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2011)

Why I Am (Still) Not a Democrat

2011-11-01T05:03:00.000-07:00

Several years ago, in the wake of the 2008 presidential election, a colleague and former editor asked me to write a piece explaining my recent decision to leave the Democratic party and re-register as an Independent. The article, which I titled “Why I Am Not a Democrat,” never ran (I think, in those heady days of Hope and Change, it simply wasn’t good form for the progressive press to take aim, even tangentially, at the party of the savior of the Left, Barack Obama). And so the story disappeared into the abyss of my C-drive, where it has remained ever since, lost among the unsent letters, half-finished short stories and other typographical detritus that accumulates there.

I thought of that story last week, the day after seven would-be GOP presidential contenders met for the ninth time in Las Vegas to trade barbs and try to convince members of the faceless monolith known as the Republican party that they have what it takes to beat the incumbent president and do a better job of running the country. As I reflected on Rick Perry and Mitt Romney’s slugfest, Herman Caine’s asinine tax plan, and how much Michele Bachmann must really like the taste of her own foot, I was reminded of what led to my decision to drop my own lifelong party affiliation and join the millions of Americans who choose to vote unfettered by partisan identity. read more...

On The Street

2011-10-27T10:22:00.001-07:00

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2011)

Why Pennsylvania Doesn’t Need the Death Penalty

2011-10-25T11:06:00.000-07:00

Last week the nation’s highest court chose not to hear an appeal filed by the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office that sought to reinstate the death sentence of Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted in 1982 of murdering Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. The ruling comes nearly a full decade after a U.S. District Court judge first vacated the sentence in light of prejudicial jury instructions, and just months after the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision following an order to reconsider from the Supreme Court.

It’s now up to District Attorney Seth Williams to decide whether to pursue a new sentencing hearing for Abu-Jamal, a process that would not only dredge up painful memories for the victim’s widow, but is destined to take place in an atmosphere very different than that of three decades ago, when the original sentence was levied.

In 1982, the year of Abu-Jamal’s conviction, capital punishment was overwhelmingly popular in the United States, with nearly three-quarters of Americans favoring it. Since then support for the death penalty has fallen across all segments of society, even among groups that represent the families of victims.

Two days after the Supreme Court decision on October 13th, Gallup released new poll numbers indicating that support for the death penalty is at its lowest level in 40 years. While a majority (61 percent) of American citizens still support it in cases of murder, evidence shows the impetus is emotional (revenge-based) and not practical. Barely a third believe capital punishment is a deterrent to future crimes. And contrary to popular belief, victims’ families rarely get a sense of closure after executions; quite the opposite, families report that the endless appeals process and decades of legal wrangling in death-penalty cases only serve to prolong their pain and more often prevent closure. Read more...

Words of wisdom from an American patriot

2011-10-20T15:52:00.000-07:00

The second half of FDR's Commonwealth Club Address, delivered September 23, 1932, in San Francisco.

"A glance at the situation today only too clearly indicates that equality of opportunity as we have know it no longer exists. Our industrial plant is built; the problem just now is whether under existing conditions it is not overbuilt.

Our last frontier has long since been reached, and there is practically no more free land. More than half of our people do not live on the farms or on lands and cannot derive a living by cultivating their own property. There is no safety valve in the from of a Western prairie to which those thrown out of work by the Eastern economic machines can go for a new start. We are not able to invite the immigration from Europe to share our endless plenty. We are now providing a drab living for our own people.
Our system of constantly rising tariffs has at last reacted against us to the point of closing our Canadian frontier on the north, our European markets on the east, many of our Latin American markets to the south, and a goodly proportion of our Pacific markets on the west, through the retaliatory tariffs of those countries. It has forced many of our great industrial institutions who exported their surplus production to such countries, to establish plants in such countries within the tariff walls. This has resulted in the reduction of the operation of their American plants, and opportunity for employment.

Just as freedom to farm has ceased, so also the opportunity in business has narrowed. It still is true that men can start small enterprises, trusting to native shrewdness and ability to keep abreast of competitors; but area after area has been preempted altogether by the great corporations, and even in the fields which still have no great concerns, the small man starts with a handicap. The unfeeling statistics of the past three decades show that the independent business man is running a losing race. Perhaps he is forced to the wall; perhaps he cannot command credit; perhaps he is “squeezed out,” in Mr. Wilson’s words, by highly organized corporate competitors, as your corner grocery man can tell you.

Recently a careful study was made of the concentration of business in the United States. It showed that our economic life was dominated by some six hundred odd corporations who controlled two-thirds of American industry. Ten million small business men divided the other third. More striking still, it appeared that if the process of concentration goes on at the same rate, at the end of another century we shall have all American industry controlled by a dozen corporations, and run by perhaps a hundred men. Put plainly, we are steering a steady course toward economic oligarchy, if we are not there already. (emphasis mine).

Clearly, all this calls for a re-appraisal of values. A mere builder of more industrial plants, a creator of more railroad systems, and organizer of more corporations, is as likely to be a danger as a help. The day of the great promoter or the financial Titan, to whom we granted anything if only he would build, or develop, is over. Our task now is not discovery or exploitation of natural resources, or necessarily producing more goods. It is the soberer, less dramatic business of administering resources and plants already in hand, of seeking to reestablish foreign markets for our surplus production, of meeting the problem of under consumption, of adjusting production to consumption, of distributing wealth and products more equitably, of adapting existing economic organizations to the service of the people. The day of enlightened administration has come.

Just as in older times the central government was first a haven of refuge, and then a threat, so now in a closer economic system the central and ambitious financial unit is no longer a servant of national desire, but a danger. I would draw the parallel one step farther. We did not think because national government had become a threat in the 18th century that therefore we should abandon the principle of national government. Nor today should we abandon the principle of strong economic units called corporations, merely because their power is susceptible of easy abuse. In other times we dealt with the problem of an unduly ambitious central government by modifying it gradually into a constitutional democratic government. So today we are modifying and controlling our economic units.

As I see it, the task of government in its relation to business is to assist the development of an economic declaration of rights, an economic constitutional order. This is the common task of statesman and business man. It is the minimum requirement of a more permanently safe order of things.

Every man has a right to life; and this means that he has also a right to make a comfortable living. He may by sloth or crime decline to exercise that right; but it may not be denied him. We have no actual famine or death; our industrial and agricultural mechanism can produce enough and to spare. Our government formal and informal., political and economic, owes to every one an avenue to possess himself of a portion of that plenty sufficient for his needs, through his own work.

Every man has a right to his own property; which means a right to be assured, to the fullest extent attainable, in the safety of his savings. By no other means can men carry the burdens of those parts of life which, in the nature of things afford no chance of labor; childhood, sickness, old age. In all thought of property, this right is paramount; all other property rights must yield to it. If, in accord with this principle, we must restrict the operations of the speculator, the manipulator, even the financier, I believe we must accept the restriction as needful, not to hamper individualism but to protect it.

These two requirements must be satisfied, in the main, by the individuals who claim and hold control of the great industrial and financial combinations which dominate so large a pert of our industrial life. They have undertaken to be, not business men, but princes-princes of property. I am not prepared to say that the system which produces them is wrong. I am very clear that they must fearlessly and competently assume the responsibility which goes with the power. So many enlightened business men know this that the statement would be little more that a platitude, were it not for an added implication.

This implication is, briefly, that the responsible heads of finance and industry instead of acting each for himself, must work together to achieve the common end. They must, where necessary, sacrifice this or that private advantage; and in reciprocal self-denial must seek a general advantage. It is here that formal government-political government, if you choose, comes in. Whenever in the pursuit of this objective the lone wolf, the unethical competitor, the reckless promoter, the Ishmael or Insull whose hand is against every man’s, declines to join in achieving and end recognized as being for the public welfare, and threatens to drag the industry back to a state of anarchy, the government may properly be asked to apply restraint. Likewise, should the group ever use its collective power contrary to public welfare, the government must be swift to enter and protect the public interest.

The government should assume the function of economic regulation only as a last resort, to be tried only when private initiative, inspired by high responsibility, with such assistance and balance as government can give, has finally failed. As yet there has been no final failure, because there has been no attempt, and I decline to assume that this nation is unable to meet the situation.

The final term of the high contract was for liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We have learnt a great deal of both in the past century. We know that individual liberty and individual happiness mean nothing unless both are ordered in the sense that one man’s meat is not another man’s poison. We know that the old “rights of personal competency”-the right to read, to think, to speak to choose and live a mode of life, must be respected at all hazards. We know that liberty to do anything which deprives others of those elemental rights is outside the protection of any compact; and that government in this regard is the maintenance of a balance, within which every individual may have a place if he will take it; in which every individual may find safety if he wishes it; in which every individual may attain such power as his ability permits, consistent with his assuming the accompanying responsibility...

Faith in America, faith in our tradition of personal responsibility, faith in our institutions, faith in ourselves demands that we recognize the new terms of the old social contract. We shall fulfill them, as we fulfilled the obligation of the apparent Utopia which Jefferson imagined for us in 1776, and which Jefferson, Roosevelt and Wilson sought to bring to realization. We must do so, lest a rising tide of misery engendered by our common failure, engulf us all. But failure is not an American habit; and in the strength of great hope we must all shoulder our common load."

Are corporations the new aristocracy?

2011-10-18T13:38:00.000-07:00

Last week I drew criticism from some in the state’s business community for daring to suggest that the decision to potentially turn essential public services over to the corporate sector might require a bit more scrutiny than I felt the Governor’s new panel on privatization was apt to provide.

In the wake of the sometimes heated, but more often courteous exchange of written dialogue with members of the panel and others who represent the interests of the private sector, I decided to give my typing fingers (all four of them) a chance to regain some of their strength and focus on a less controversial topic this week.

Then I saw General Electric chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt on CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday, and I decided that discretion would have to wait a week.

From the relative safety of my kitchen table I joined Immelt (who in January was named by Barack Obama to chair the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness) on a 20-minute whirlwind tour of his company’s facilities in the U.S. and Brazil as he expounded on the globalization of capital, the inequity of corporate tax policy and how GE is helping America by giving cutting-edge avionics technology to China so it can better compete with Boeing, another U.S. company.

Then came the coup de maitre; at the end of the segment Immelt was asked point-blank by correspondent Leslie Stahl if corporations have a civic duty to boost American jobs, to which the executive, trying his best to appear contemplative, responded with a shake of his head:

“I work for investors,” he said. “Investors want to see us grow earnings and cash flow, they want to see us be competitive, they want to see us prosper.”

And there it was, plainly spoken from the mouth of one of the most powerful business executives in the world: We are here to make money. Period. Read more...

More Occupy Philly

2011-10-09T12:06:00.001-07:00

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (October 8, 2011 - Day 3)

Occupy Philly

2011-10-07T11:29:00.001-07:00

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (October 6, 2011 - Day 1)

On The Street

2011-10-03T15:41:00.001-07:00

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2010)

Philly Post: The Christian Hijacking of America

2011-09-30T05:34:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I stumbled upon a stunning factoid over at the Washington Post that left me momentarily flummoxed: Just over half of Americans (57 percent to be exact) believe in evolution. What that means is that more than four out of 10 people presumably believe that some other process, or processes, gave rise to the human race. Intrigued, I did a little digging and found a Gallup poll released last year that revealed strikingly similar results but offered a bit more detail; it found that 40 percent of Americans still believe in Creationism—that is, that the world and everything in it was conceived in toto through the divine will of a single, all-powerful deity.

I dug a little deeper and discovered that when controlled for political affiliation, the results are even more skewed, with more than half of registered Republicans reporting that they believe the Judeo-Christian God created humans in his own likeness sometime within the past 10,000 years.

Yes, you read that right. 10,000 years.

That got me to thinking about the current GOP front runners for the presidential nomination—candidates, like Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, whom only weeks ago I was lambasting in this very column for being so vastly out of step with the beliefs and values of the overwhelming majority of Americans. Now here I was, being confronted with the possibility that a sizable minority of the American population subscribes to a similar, if not the very same, archaic belief system.

Then it occurred to me that these people vote, and I’ll admit I got a little weak-kneed. After taking a few deep breaths (and a swig of hooch to calm my nerves) I decided to do what I do best, get to the bottom of things by finding out what was happening to my country and how we had strayed so far from our founders’ vision on the role of religion in the national discourse. Read more...

Monastery of St. Clare

2011-09-27T15:14:00.000-07:00

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (9/24/2011)

Philly Post: Jimmy Carter is right on Palestine statehood

2011-09-23T09:58:00.000-07:00

In 2006, former president and Nobel laureate Jimmy Carter drew the scorn of the Israeli government and its supporters when he published a book outlining a plan for peace in Palestine that equated Israel’s policies in the occupied territories with South African “apartheid.”

For context, the International Criminal Court classifies apartheid as one of 11 “crimes against humanity” and defines it as an act “committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”

In other words, it’s not an accusation to be made lightly. Read more ...

Light Paintings

2011-09-20T09:39:00.000-07:00

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2011)

Philly Post: Why I’m Hoping Big Tobacco Wins in Court

2011-09-19T10:49:00.000-07:00

The other night, my wife and I sat down to watch True Grit with Jeff Bridges, an event that we’d both been looking forward to with alacrity given that our schedules rarely permit 110 minutes of uninterrupted leisure time together. The film was a worthy nod to the original, incidentally, with an exceptional performance by 15-year-old Hailee Steinfeld as the protagonist Mattie Ross; unfortunately, the price of enjoying it (beyond the five bucks I paid to rent it, that is) was sitting through the 90-second anti-smoking ad that is now standard operating procedure for nearly any film that carries as much as a whiff of that universally maligned weed known as nicotiana tabacum, or more commonly, tobacco. Read more...

On The Street

2011-09-13T14:04:00.001-07:00

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2008)

Philly Post: Saving America's Working Class

2011-09-09T05:18:00.000-07:00

The following appeared in the Sept. 8 edition of The Philly Post

Last Friday, as Americans geared up for a long weekend of potato salad and discount shopping, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released some somber news: The nation had netted not a single job in August. It was the first time that happened since 1945 (although there have been plenty of times since then that the nation lost jobs).

Nevertheless, by Monday the news had cast a pall over many Labor Day celebrations and injected others with a spirit of worker solidarity reminiscent of turn-of-the-century Progressivism. In Rochester, as in other municipalities, participants and spectators of the largest Labor Day parade in the city’s history took aim at union-busting Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, while in Detroit, Teamsters chief Jimmy Hoffa rallied a crowd waiting to hear from President Obama with what amounted to a declaration of war against the Tea Party.

But while Hoffa’s address may have been a warranted if crassly delivered expression of collective worker indignation, it was largely misdirected in its focus. Sure, the Tea Party makes an inviting target, but Washington has elevated undercutting American workers to the level of art form for years and under both parties. From lopsided trade agreements that pushed investment overseas to convoluted tax policies that keep it there, Washington has had its boot on the throat of the working class since the beginning of the end of American industry in the late 1970s. (There was still a boot left over for the middle class; but that’s another story altogether.) Read more.

On The Street

2011-09-08T03:18:00.001-07:00

San Juan, Puerto Rico (2011)

On The Street

2011-09-02T11:49:00.000-07:00

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2010)

Philly Post: Rick Perry thinks you're going to Hell

2011-09-01T13:31:00.000-07:00

The following column is from the Sept. 1 edition of The Philly Post

A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation national poll released on Monday found that Rick Perry now leads the pack among GOP presidential hopefuls, with more than one in four Republican voters saying they would cast a ballot for the longtime Texas governor. I’m not sure what scares me more, the idea of a Perry presidency or the fact that one of my neighbors might be among those who would support it.

Rick Perry is not your average Republican, a fact that—taken at face value—may seem like a refreshing change to a GOP voting base fed up with politics as usual. But underneath the elephant suit, Perry is a far-right demagogue who supports repealing the Sixteenth and Seventeenth amendments (which authorize the collection of income taxes and the popular election of senators, respectively) and scrapping our 235-year tradition of checks and balances by giving the legislature the ability to overturn Supreme Court decisions.

Anyway you slice it the Texas governor is a fringe candidate; that he represents an extremely vocal minority can’t be denied (radicalism by its very nature is vocal), but Perry’s beliefs are obscenely out of step with the majority of voters from both parties, which makes his current popularity that much more confounding. The paradox would be intriguing if it weren’t so scary. Read More...

Light Paintings

2011-08-28T10:56:00.000-07:00

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2008)

Philly Post: PA GOP is wrong on medical pot

2011-08-26T04:55:00.000-07:00

Two bills sit in Harrisburg limbo as thousands of patients suffer.

On Monday, the Daily News ran a cover story about the plight of Colleen Begley, a New Jersey medical marijuana advocate who is facing more than a decade in prison for possessing two pounds of pot that she says were destined for people with ailments ranging from migraine headaches to AIDS.

At first glance Begley’s case is not unlike thousands of others across the country involving American citizens who are being—or have been—prosecuted under archaic drug laws that place pot in the same category as heroin (and treat it even more stringently than cocaine, which, as a Schedule II narcotic is deemed medically beneficial). Yet the fact that Begley’s story made it to the front page of a major out-of-state newspaper is indicative of shifting attitudes toward pot—and ultimately, I think, a growing distaste among most Americans for seeing otherwise law-abiding citizens assaulted (Begley was punched by police) and jailed for what most consider a relatively innocuous weed.

Despite a push by Democratic lawmakers in Harrisburg to give Pennsylvanians access to medical pot, two versions of the Governor Raymond P. Shafer Compassionate Use Medical Marijuana Act appear destined for the great docket in the sky, following their predecessor bills from the last session. The GOP leaders tasked with reviewing them—Sen. Patricia Vance (a former nurse, of all things) and Rep. Matthew Baker—have said they have no plans to hold hearings. To continue reading, click here.

On The Street

2011-08-24T14:12:00.000-07:00

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2009)

Philly Post: Life without parole isn't child's play

2011-08-18T08:41:00.000-07:00

(This is the first of a new weekly column that will appear every Thursday at Philadelphia magazine's blog The Philly Post.)

Determining the best way to deal with minor offenders has consumed judges and lawmakers for decades; it’s been just five years since the Supreme Court banned the death penalty for offenders under 18 years of age, and theory and practice are still evolving.

Minors are psychologically incomplete human beings. According to social psychologist Erik Erikson—who literally wrote the book on personality development—adolescents have yet to develop a coherent concept of self or “ego identity” and therefore lack the sense of continuity that adults take for granted. The dark side of this fact is that young people are by nature impulsive and rarely take into full account the consequences of their actions. This can make them considerably more dangerous than adults. I’d rather be confronted by a 30-year-old with a gun than a 14-year-old with one. You can reason with a 30-year-old. Kids, on the other hand, are unpredictable, and their violence is typically senseless and unmitigated.

But should someone that isn’t even old enough to drive a car be legally considered so irredeemable that they should be locked away for the rest of their lives? That’s the question facing Lawrence County Judge Dominick Motto, who must decide whether Pennsylvania will gain the notorious distinction of prosecuting the world’s youngest prisoner facing life without parole. Read the entire column here.

PW Interview: Larry Flynt

2011-08-16T09:43:00.000-07:00

He’s been tossed out of the U.S. Supreme Court for calling the chief justice an asshole; he’s been shot by a white supremacist for publishing interracial photos; and he’s spent six months in jail for refusing to divulge a source. Now 68, the years of hard living and fighting have taken their toll on Hustler publisher Larry Flynt. Wheelchair-bound since the late ’70s—his speech slurred from a painkiller-induced stroke—Flynt struggles to finish a sentence without choking on his own saliva.

But the iconic pornographer and 1st Amendment crusader shows no signs of slowing down, although age and wisdom have definitely chilled him out a bit. Gone are the flag-desecrating, vitriolic-filled tirades of old, replaced instead by the sober perspicacity of a modern-day sage. I caught up with Flynt in his suite at the Four Seasons when he was in town promoting his new book, One Nation Under Sex. Read my Q&A with Flynt at Philadelphia Weekly.

On The Street

2011-08-02T15:02:00.000-07:00

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2011)

On The Street

2011-07-29T12:32:00.000-07:00

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2011)

Light Paintings

2011-07-26T14:15:00.001-07:00

Untitled

2011-07-22T15:14:00.000-07:00

Sunflowers

2011-07-20T15:05:00.001-07:00

Light Paintings

2011-07-18T14:43:00.000-07:00

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2010)

On The Street

2011-07-13T19:15:00.001-07:00

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2011)

On The Street

2011-07-12T15:25:00.000-07:00

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2011)

Urban Landscapes

2011-07-08T13:44:00.000-07:00

San Juan, Puerto Rico (2011)

Struggle for Equality in Antebellum Philadelphia

2011-07-07T10:47:00.000-07:00

Starting this year and continuing through 2015, Americans will commemorate the 150-year anniversary of one of the bleakest periods of our collective history — the four years between 1861 and 1865 that bore witness to the American Civil War.

The War Between the States saw more Americans killed in action than any conflict before or after, and left large swaths of the country’s terrain and populace devastated; it also marked a turning point in African-American history — culminating in the 13th Amendment, which was ratified on December 6, 1865 and officially abolished slavery in the United States.

As such, the next four years will be a time for somber reflection on the collective trauma that our country endured, and a celebration of the values that prevailed on the bloody fields of Gettysburg, Bull Run and Antietam — those of unity, freedom and equality.

It all makes for a nice story; the truth, however, is more complex and less likely to fit into a convenient and heroic frame. Union northerners were not beyond reproach for playing their own role in perpetuating the institution of slavery (even the nation’s most enduring monument, the U.S. Capitol building — completed in 1826 — was built using slave labor).

Historians today are no longer obliged to see the Civil War as the noble battle for universal rights and an end to the abomination of slavery as it was once portrayed, but rather are more inclined to present it as a confrontation between two economic forces — one industrial and one agricultural — with different visions for the role of the federal government in the lives of the states. While abolition did become a component of the struggle, it was as much a political maneuver as a gesture of human rights. It was not until the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863, in the second year of the war, that President Abraham Lincoln made any official movement on the issue. And, even then, the Proclamation only extended to slave-holding Confederate states, while union slave states — including Maryland and Delaware — were exempted from the executive order. (Delaware’s slaves were not emancipated until the ratification of the 13th Amendment.)

History serves as a reminder that, like all conflicts of such scale, there was nothing simple about what led up to the American Civil War. This was especially true for the nation’s free Blacks, who had only recently found a voice for demanding equal status and were constantly reminded that the road to emancipation would require something more than a piece of paper and an eloquent speech. Read More

On The Street

2011-07-06T15:42:00.000-07:00

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2010)

Street Portraits

2011-07-05T13:36:00.000-07:00

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2010)

Sharif & Raquelle

2011-06-30T19:19:00.000-07:00

Philly settles stop-and-frisk suit

2011-06-28T09:34:00.000-07:00

Update: The City of Philadelphia has agreed to settle a federal civil lawsuit filed on behalf of eight plaintiffs, all men of color, who say the Philadelphia Police Department is misusing its "stop and frisk" policy to conduct racially motivated stops of black and Latino men in the city.

Under the settlement agreement the Philly P.D. has agreed to collect data on all stop and frisks and store this information in an electronic data base. It will also provide officers with necessary training and supervision with respect to stop and frisk practices and establish a monitoring system in which the police department, plaintiffs' counsel, and an independent court-appointed monitor, Dean JoAnne A. Epps, from the Beasley School of Law at Temple University, will review and analyze the data. Dean Epps will have the authority to recommend appropriate practices and policies to ensure that stops and frisks by the PPD are in compliance with the Constitution.

Read my original reporting on the case here.

Click here for information on the settlement.

Camden. N.J.

2011-06-24T18:10:00.000-07:00

West Side Wall

2011-06-17T14:07:00.000-07:00

New York, NY, 2009

2011-06-16T11:30:00.000-07:00

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2009

Impressions: 6/15/2011

2011-06-15T10:13:00.001-07:00

Walking, San Juan, PR, 2011

Impressions: June 14, 2011

2011-06-14T05:30:00.000-07:00

Polka Dots, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2007

The Mask (Series II)

2011-05-17T12:29:00.000-07:00

More Environmental Abstracts

2011-05-03T15:33:00.000-07:00

The Mask (series)

2011-04-25T14:30:00.000-07:00

Farewell to a Freak

2011-04-12T09:59:00.000-07:00

Coney Island buried its freak last weekend (one of them at least), a lamentable passage for anyone that ever tried to plink him.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has decided it’s time to “Disney-fy” the place. It’s a figure of speech of course. Thankfully, despite early rumors, Disney won’t actually be coming here (nor will Trump, another early rumor).

Instead, Central Amusement International -- an Italian company -- will lead the rejuvenation, a good part of which involves stripping the boardwalk of the businesses that made it unique, to be replaced, no doubt, by Dippn’ Dots and I'm guessing at least two Starbucks. At last word, a handful of the original places – the Coney Island 8 as they come to be known -- have been given a one-year reprieve, after which they will have to skedaddle. Shoot the Freak will not be one of them, having been bulldozed (illegally) back in December.

They say all good things come to an end. I wish I could be so conciliatory.

Over the years I’d made it a Sunday ritual to pop off the Belt Parkway on the way back from weekends at the beach for a hotdog, a beer and a shot at the Freak. (In truth, I much preferred to watch other people shoot the Freak, which made for more continuous fun).

You could plunk down five bucks for a rack of marble-sized balls of red and yellow paint and go to town; the words “Live Human Target” in giant yellow letters on the back wall left no mystery about what you were supposed to do. There was the Freak – a modern day gladiator in his arena of dirt and detritus -- puffing on a cigarette and taunting his assailant with a hand on his crotch, or shaking his ass and spitting at his sneakered feet. Or else he’d cut and run, zigzag, bank and spin, navigating the soil pit like a ballerina on crack behind his paint-smeared tin shield and acting, well, perfectly Freakish. Other times he’d just stand there, quietly contemplating his fate with the stoicism of a Greek god, too hung over from Saturday night to resist and in no shape to dodge the paint pellets that were about to slam into him.

For while it was hard to tell if there was one Freak or many. The helmet and goggles covered anything identifiable. I always guessed there were many. I think being the Freak must have been a limited engagement gig, with a high rate of burnout. But once in a while I liked to entertain the possibility that over all those years there was really just one guy, an überFreak, who took enormous pride in his role as human target.

Years later I read an interview with the owner of Shoot the Freak, Anthony Berlingieri, who confirmed that there was more than one Freak; in fact there were many, many Freaks – a succession of perhaps 50 since Berlingieri opened up shop in 2002. High turnover, he said. It’s hard to find a good Freak these days.

The Freak’s sendoff was fittingly over-the-top: a New Orleans-style funeral procession spewing brassy jazz down West 12^th Street and onto Riegelmann Boardwalk – the crowd at varying times somber and celebratory. The mourners, their heads down in reverence, wind past Ruby’s Old Tyme Bar & Grill. They wriggle and jerk past the Wonder Wheel (how small it looks now!).

The procession advances. The Freak’s coffin is hoisted by six dark-clad pallbearers, until finally, it reaches its destination.

The word of the day is “Rebirth” and without missing a beat the eponymous guest of honor (in the form of a busty mermaid) pops from the Freak’s coffin, a vision in gold and green hell-bent on scrubbing away the pastiche of sea water, burnt sugar, sweat, blood and Fry-O-Lator grease; the aroma of the Caucasus, the Levant, the Maghreb; the odor of cigars, cheap perfume, hairspray and weed smoke. And grease. Did I mention the grease?

I can almost remember the first time I smelled it. It was thanks to my father, a native New Yorker whose teen-aged jaunts to Coney Island were the stuff of legend. He took my sister and me every summer for a Nathan’s and hot caramel corn. Two, three times a season...more if we pressed him.

I remember feeling like I’d wandered into a forbidden movie set. Tattooed men and women, transvestites, an endless sea of Puerto Ricans, the barkers hawking rigged games, salsa music blaring from the Eldorado Bumper cars, and the Hellhole, forever unexplored; the very sight of its winged devil, standing guard above the door, raised the hair on my young neck.

And of course there was the Wonder Wheel. The first time my father took us on it he insisted we sit in one of the swinging cars. I think I probably resisted but it wouldn’t have mattered. He reveled in this shit. He smiled devilishly as he watched us grip the sides of the metal cage for dear life, our eyes counting, surveying, testing every 60-year-old nut, every rusting bolt. I was sure that every next pendulum thrust of the car would be our last, that the crunch and screech of metal on metal would be the last thing I’d hear (besides my sister’s screams) and we hurtled through the air to the boardwalk below. We always had our hot dogs after the Wonder Wheel.

I remember biting through the tensile skin of my first Nathan’s (at the time only available at Coney Island), its telltale pop baptizing the tongue with nitrates and pork grease. Now you can find the grill-seared delicacies in every mall on the East Coast, but they’re not the same; they're more fizzle than pop, which, I suspect is what people who remember the old Coney Island will soon be saying about the new one.

Alas the sands of time are finally shifting on this wondrously bedraggled strip of sand and surf. What washes up in its place remains to be seen, but one thing's for sure, it won’t smell as good.

Environmental Abstracts

2011-03-06T10:48:00.002-08:00

The Essential Todd Bracher

2011-02-26T10:18:00.000-08:00

Read my full interview with designer Todd Bracher in the March/April issue of Design Bureau magazine.

Todd Bracher is standing before a room full of admiring design enthusiasts and talking about fish. Well, not fish, but rather a fish. And not just any fish, an Anglerfish to be exact. It’s a brutish thing to behold, with sharp jutting teeth, spiny flesh and bulging eyes; yet to Bracher’s mind, this homely creature from the depths couldn’t be more perfect.

“It has this luminescent lure as part of its body that glows light, and attracts fish, which it then eats,” he explains.

The Anglerfish, he says, was part of the inspiration for one of his signature pieces. Called ‘Stick,’ (Designer, 2009) it’s a stunningly simple light fixture - a lamp for lack of a better word. But this is no ordinary lamp. Stick is “lamp” boiled down to its essence; it’s the square root of lamp.

The same could be said about any one of Bracher’s pieces. A student of Darwin, his process best resembles natural selection. His pieces don’t so much grow as evolve, shedding unnecessary parts along the way. If design were poetry (a comparison the artist is fond of making) Bracher, who turned 36 in October, would compose haiku.

“Reduction is a very important part for me…how can we take away everything and just leave what we need behind, and that reveals for us something new, something that’s genuine and truthful, that’s not trying to be anything but what it is,” he says. “That’s what I try to find in my designs.”

A native of Long Island, after graduating from New York’s Pratt Institute, Bracher embarked on what he calls his real education, traveling first to Copenhagen, where he studied at the Danish Design School on a coveted Fulbright design fellowship. It was in Denmark that Bracher says he learned the “poetry of design.” And it shows. His pieces are refined and functional and it’s easy to see the influence of renowned Danish industrial designers like Arne Jacobsen, Verner Panton and Henning Koppel in his work.

From Denmark he traveled to Milan where he paid a cold call to the noted furniture company Zanotta, eventually becoming the first American to design a piece of furniture for the company -- proving that success is as much tenacity as it is talent. He ended his decade overseas as design director at Tom Dixon’s studio in London.

Since his return to the U.S. in 2007, Todd Bracher Studio in New York has been attracting a lot of attention. Bracher’s been called the “future of American design” by the New York Daily News and has won numerous awards. Interior Design named his T-No1 table -- designed for Fritz Hansen -- Product of the Year in 2008; and he’s twice been nominated for Designer of the Year by the Danish magazine Bolig. In 2008 he was named New Designer of the Year at New York's International Contemporary Furniture Fair. He was also the winner of the UNESCO design award and has been the three-time recipient of the ID award.

To the casual observer, Bracher’s work screams minimalism; but don’t call him a minimalist. He prefers to think of himself as a naturalist. “Is a butterfly minimalist? Is a tree?”

Bracher doesn’t take credit for creating a thing, but instead will tell you he coaxed it out by establishing the right set of circumstances for the object to reveal itself. To date, he’s helped everything from tables to kitchen utensils reveal themselves, mostly by paying attention to truth in nature.

“Singularity is the way that we communicate truth, it’s one idea, you can understand it you can evaluate it, it’s not hidden in complexity, it’s not over complicated, it’s not diluted,” he says. “And that’s the way I like to package or contain these ideas about design. How can I take everything out and leave behind just the essence?”

When I caught up with Bracher in October, during DesignPhiladelphia 2010, he was in his second year as a creative director of the Danish luxury brand Georg Jensen and was preparing to launch a new chair for Humanscale.

Click here to read the interview in the March/April 2011 issue of Design Bureau magazine.

Biding Time Zombieland

2011-02-16T14:05:00.000-08:00

It is late afternoon and I am sitting at my desk surrounded by bits of work in various stages of incompletion. I’m wiped. In between trips to the sink to throw cold water on my face I’m coming to terms with the fact that I got absolutely nothing accomplished today.

Around me sits the evidence of this: fitful starts, unresolved diversions and abrupt endings, the remnants of a day’s work staring back in the illegibly scribbled notes and bookmarked volumes that decorate my tiny desk.

My Yahoo! inbox screams at me in mocking boldface, and with each incoming text message my phone chirps, reminding me that somewhere, out there, is a person I don’t have the time to acknowledge.

Things weren’t always like this. I guess it didn’t start getting bad, real bad, until about six months ago. I had been getting these headaches. They’d start in my forehead and work their way down and forward into my eyes, two swollen orbs, lead-heavy in protest.

They weren’t terribly painful, more of generalized malaise, as if a giant hand had grasped my head and was slowly, steadily squeezing. More troubling than the pain, the headaches were accompanied by a sensation of intellectual torpidity, a complete loss of clarity and focus, the sensation that my brain was being smothered, suffocated, wrapped in cellophane of mediocrity.

In short I felt, well… dumb.

And then, just as quickly the feeling would pass and for some period of indeterminate length – minutes, hours, sometimes even days, I was back on my game.

My initial reaction to these recurring episodes (one I’d used before with varying success when faced with adversity) was to simply ignore them. For weeks I pushed my concerns aside, assuming I was working on too little sleep, or drinking too much. So I tried getting in bed earlier, capping the bottle sooner; but it had no effect. The next afternoon, or perhaps the one after, the same thing would happen. When it did, all I could do was lower my head to my desk, close my eyes and listen to the brain cells scream as they died.

By the end of the summer I was beginning to believe that whatever it was I was suffering from was not only chronic, but degenerative, and that I should make the most of whatever sliver of time as an intelligent life form I had left.

It went on like that for three months, maybe more (as if I remember). Then one morning I received an e-mailed invitation to take part in an event its hosts called the “First Annual Information Overload Awareness Day.”

The pitch was pretty convincing:

Information overload describes an excess of information that results in the loss of ability to make decisions, process information, and prioritize tasks…the problem costs the U.S. economy $900 billion per year in lowered productivity and throttled innovation.

That last statistic is courtesy of Basex, Inc., the knowledge economy research firm that was organizing the event. Its tagline, “Management science for the knowledge economy” pretty much sums up what the company does. Basex offers consulting and data on the impact of information overload on the people who use it the most: those who traffic in information. People like me.

According to the company, as an average knowledge worker I receive 93 e-mail messages a day, most of which are probably unnecessary.

“If every knowledge worker in the U.S. were to send 10 percent fewer messages,” Basex estimates, “the cost of information overload would be reduced by as much as $180 billion per year.”

I’ll admit I’d never heard of Basex, or information overload (Somehow, in the never-ending deluge of facts and figures that passed through my brain on any given day, I’d missed the reams of research and attendant articles on the subject that began appearing on the scene in the mid-1990s and continue to dot the technomedia landscape today); but the news was cathartic. I realized that what I’d been suffering from was in fact a social illness, not a biological one, and that meant it could be cured, perhaps with relative ease. I was being bombarded with so much information that my mind was no longer able to process it.

I contacted Basex and reserved a media spot on the call roster (maybe I didn’t mention, this was an online event). After writing the day and time down on several Post-It notes, which I placed strategically around my desk, I set about doing some research.

According to the press materials, Basex had created the event to “call attention to the problem of Information Overload [in its material Basex capitalized the affliction to give it proper weight], how it impacts both individuals and organizations, and what can be done to lessen its impact.”

Information has become the world’s leading commodity, a free and boundless one. For those of us who thrive on the stuff, why wouldn’t we take as much as we could get our hands on? At least that’s I did. After all, isn’t consumption the American Way? There’s more information floating around out there than ever before. The author William Van Winkle points out that a Sunday edition of The New York Times alone carries more information than the average 19th-century citizen accessed in his entire life.

We’re gluttons for the stuff.

But more information doesn’t translate to more smarts. Learning isn’t like weight training, where the more you lift the stronger you get; on the contrary, the brain isn’t a muscle at all, but a complex network of circuits and synapses and receptors, and expanding it requires finesse, patience and quietude lest it snap like a twig under the pressure. The faculties of higher order beings are nourished by this quietude.

The great religions know this. Speaking on the importance of meditation and mindfulness, the late Thai monk, Venerable Ajahn Chah said: “Making the mind energetic and making the body energetic are not the same. To give the body energy we have to exercise it, to push it, in order to make it strong, but to make the mind strong means to make it peaceful…”

Such calmness leads to insight, which in turn leads to wisdom. Unfortunately, we are losing this lesson with every mouse click.

Higher societies are societies of reflection, a vital faculty that has become a rare commodity. Humans are contemplative creatures. It is what first set us apart from the beast, our tendency to reflection, our ability to focus, problem solve, to figure stuff out. Wisdom for the ancients was an active endeavor and information the fuel that propelled this activity. Today we are passive, eagerly sucking up everything in our path, and the quicker we can do it the better.

According to Nielsen the average person views more than 2,500 individual webpages a month, spending an average of less than a minute on each.

With every webpage we surf, every 30 second video clip we stream on YouTube, every tweet we digest, we lose our capacity for critical thought, active thought, creative thought. We have become like swollen sponges.

Adding the problem is that the increase in quality of information has been met by a parallel decrease in quality. Even when we think we’re getting a beneficial piece of information, chances are we are not. Take Twitter, for instance. In 2009 Pear Analytics studied 2,000 Twitter messages and broke their contents into three categories: those that are conversational, those with pass along value, and those that are “pointless babble.” The winner? You guessed it, babble -- accounting for more than 40 percent of total tweets. How much actionable information does the average Facebook subscriber get for his seven hours a month spent on the site?

Though many of us are familiar with the feeling of being overtaxed, few of us recognize the psychical, emotional, spiritual and physical damage we’re causing ourselves with all this intake. And I should know. By the time I learned about Information Overload, it had walloped me.

What Basex set out to tackle is a uniquely 21st Century problem, but the term Information Overload is not a new one. It was coined by the American futurist Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book “Future Shock.” In it, Toffler warns of a future where technological advancement has outpaced human emotional, intellectual and spiritual growth. Toffler isn’t some kind of utopian a radical. Far from it, he was an editor at Fortune magazine and has been called the third most influential business voice by management consulting firm Accenture (he lost out to Bill Gates and Peter Drucker). He holds the distinction of receiving accolades from both the Financial Times and People's Daily.

“Citizens of the world’s richest and most technologically advanced nations will find it increasingly painful to keep up with the incessant demand for change that characterizes our time. For them, the future will have arrived too soon,” the author warned.

As a side effect, he said, man would become increasingly detached and isolated, bombarded with stimuli from all directions and unable to adequately cope with such rapid change. This would lead to a kind of sickness, which Toffler called Future Shock. The social psychologist Eric Fromm made similar observations as far back as the 1950s.

The idea that man could become sick from advancement seemed inconceivable, counterintuitive and, indeed, a bit scary. It was also enlightening. I realized that my own feeling of dullness and lethargy is part of a full blown plague, a global pandemic that within a generation threatens to turn the entire thinking population between the ages of 18 and 50 into Jell-O headed numbskulls amped up on Red Bull and Adderall. I imagine a world of info-zombies heads so stuffed with bits of information that they can no longer remember their names.

On the day of the Basex event, a Tuesday, I got a large coffee, smoked a cigarette and placed myself in front of the PC for what I assumed would be an extended presentation on the causes, effects and solutions for information overload. I called the number to the webinar provider and keyed in the special access number I had been given only to be told by a recorded voice that the number was not valid. I tried again, but got the same response. I was beginning to lose patience now.

I double checked the access number against the e-mail I had received from Basex in response to my original query. They matched. Maybe I had waited too long to call in and the meeting was full? Perhaps. Was it possible so many people had logged on that it brought the Web server down? Not likely. There was nothing left to do but call Basex and find out where the error was. I dialed the phone. A pleasant young man answered the phone. He seemed pleased to hear a journalist was covering the event. I told him I wanted to verify my log in number, and he proceeded to check it against the event participant list.
“Yes that’s correct,” he said.
“Well, I’m having trouble logging in,” I said.
“Logging in?” he asked, sounding perplexed.
“Yes, I’m trying to get in the event with this number and it’s not accepting it.”
“You mean now?”
“Yes now!” Why is he not getting it? I’m thinking.
“Um, sir, the Information Overload event is next Tuesday.”
“Of course it is,” I said quickly and hung up.

I’d like to report that things have gotten better since then, that I’ve stopped checking my e-mail every 20 minutes; that I don’t simultaneously read two books and three magazines and wonder why I can’t finish any of them. But alas I do. Habits die hard, and I have an information dependency. But today I’m aware of the dangers, and like a two pack a day smoker, I fight with myself, sometimes triumphant, sometimes not, to be more attentive to what I’m putting in my brain. I’m happy to report that I’m the only one of my friends that doesn’t have a Facebook account. I do tweet however; for the time being I will accept my daily mental fatigue, as the cost of doing business in the information age.

Dancers 1

2010-12-28T11:23:00.001-08:00

Dancers 2

2010-12-28T11:21:00.000-08:00

Snow on Bainbridge Street

2010-12-17T10:32:00.000-08:00

Glass Abstractions 1-4

2010-11-28T15:12:00.002-08:00

2010-11-28T15:12:00.001-08:00

2010-11-28T15:11:00.000-08:00

2010-11-28T15:10:00.000-08:00

Raquelle

2010-11-11T07:35:00.001-08:00

2010-11-11T07:34:00.004-08:00

2010-11-11T07:34:00.003-08:00

2010-11-11T07:34:00.001-08:00

2010-11-11T07:33:00.001-08:00

2010-11-11T07:31:00.000-08:00

Philadelphia Fashion Week - Finale 10/9

2010-10-12T20:33:00.001-07:00

2010-10-12T20:32:00.001-07:00

2010-10-12T20:29:00.001-07:00

2010-10-12T20:27:00.001-07:00

2010-10-12T20:25:00.001-07:00

2010-10-12T20:23:00.000-07:00

2010-10-12T20:22:00.001-07:00

2010-10-12T20:16:00.000-07:00

2010-10-12T12:08:00.000-07:00

AP: Census Finds Record Gap Between Rich and Poor

2010-09-28T05:18:00.000-07:00

The income gap between the richest and poorest Americans grew last year to its widest amount on record as young adults and children in particular struggled to stay afloat in the recession.

The top-earning 20 percent of Americans — those making more than $100,000 each year — received 49.4 percent of all income generated in the U.S., compared with the 3.4 percent earned by those below the poverty line, according to newly released census figures. That ratio of 14.5-to-1 was an increase from 13.6 in 2008 and nearly double a low of 7.69 in 1968.

A different measure, the international Gini index, found U.S. income inequality at its highest level since the Census Bureau began tracking household income in 1967. The U.S. also has the greatest disparity among Western industrialized nations.

At the top, the wealthiest 5 percent of Americans, who earn more than $180,000, added slightly to their annual incomes last year, census data show. Families at the $50,000 median level slipped lower.

"Income inequality is rising, and if we took into account tax data, it would be even more," said Timothy Smeeding, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who specializes in poverty. "More than other countries, we have a very unequal income distribution where compensation goes to the top in a winner-takes-all economy."

Lower-skilled adults ages 18 to 34 had the largest jumps in poverty last year as employers kept or hired older workers for the dwindling jobs available, Smeeding said. The declining economic fortunes have caused many unemployed young Americans to double-up in housing with parents, friends and loved ones, with potential problems for the labor market if they don't get needed training for future jobs, he said.

Rea Hederman Jr., a senior policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, agreed that census data show families of all income levels had tepid earnings in 2009, with poorer Americans taking a larger hit. "It's certainly going to take a while for people to recover," he said.

The findings are part of a broad array of U.S. census data being released this month that highlight the far-reaching impact of the recent economic meltdown. The effects have ranged from near-historic declines in U.S. mobility and birth rates to delayed marriage and the first drop in the number of illegal immigrants in two decades.

The census figures also come amid heated political debate in the run-up to the Nov. 2 elections over whether Congress should extend expiring Bush-era tax cuts. President Barack Obama wants to extend the tax cuts for individuals making less than $200,000 and joint filers making less than $250,000; Republicans are pushing for tax cuts for everyone, including wealthy Americans.

The 2009 census tabulations, which are based on pre-tax income and exclude capital gains, are adjusted for household size where data are available. Prior analyses of after-tax income made by the wealthiest 1 percent compared to middle- and low-income Americans have also pointed to a widening inequality gap, but only reflect U.S. data as of 2007.

Among the 2009 findings:

* The poorest poor are at record highs. The share of Americans below half the poverty line — $10,977 for a family of four — rose from 5.7 percent in 2008 to 6.3 percent. It was the highest level since the government began tracking that group in 1975.

* The poverty gap between young and old has doubled since 2000, due partly to the strength of Social Security in helping buoy Americans 65 and over. Child poverty is now 21 percent compared with 9 percent for older Americans. In 2000, when child poverty was at 16 percent, elderly poverty stood at 10 percent.

* Safety nets are helping fill health gaps. The percentage of children covered by government-sponsored health insurance such as Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program jumped to 37 percent, or 27.6 million, from 24 percent in 2000. That helped offset steady losses in employer-sponsored insurance.

* The 2009 poverty level was set at $21,954 for a family of four, based on an official government calculation that includes only cash income. It excludes noncash aid such as food stamps.
Arloc Sherman, a senior researcher at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, noted the effects of expanded government programs in cushioning the impact of skyrocketing unemployment. For example, the Census Bureau estimates that 3.6 million people would have been lifted above the poverty line if food stamps were counted — a number that would have reduced the 2009 poverty rate from the official 14.3 percent to 13.2 percent.

Sheldon Danziger, a University of Michigan public policy professor, said while the U.S. has developed policies to combat poverty, it has trouble addressing ever-widening income inequality — even with a growing federal deficit and previous warnings by former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan about soaring executive pay.

An Associated Press-GfK Poll this month found that by 54 percent to 44 percent, most Americans support raising taxes on the highest U.S. earners. Still, many congressional Democrats have expressed wariness about provoking the 44 percent minority so close to Election Day. "We're pretty good about not talking about income inequality," Danziger said.

- Associated Press

Routines & Sketches

2010-09-06T12:08:00.000-07:00