Neil Bush, Creep; Hairy Sporrans; Best Nonfiction Books; Germond's Honest at Last
Most undignified move of the week was undoubtedly Christie Todd Whitman's gift of a Scottie to the impending First Couple, even though they already have a dog. The hairy little bribe landed Whitman the top job at EPA. If she'd given the Bushes a Great Pyrenees she'd probably have got the Defense Dept.
Dick Cheney is allowing us Gerald Ford fans a nostalgia hit with the appointment of Alcoa chieftain Paul O'Neill as Treasury secretary. Back in Ford time, O'Neill was at OMB. It's great to see an industrial tycoon at Treasury instead of a snotty academic like Larry Summers or bond trader Robert Rubin. O'Neill will have the economy tumbling in ruins in double-quick time, working in concert with Alan Greenspan.
I'm not quite sure George W. quite realizes that the provincial cameraderie of Austin, TX, is not appropriate to the nation's capital. He emerged from his meeting with the world's most powerful man with his arm around Greenspan's shoulders. Then he physically manhandled Greenspan, spinning him toward the cameras. This was lèse-majesté on the order of a courtier rearranging Louis XIV's perruque. Shortly thereafter, Greenspan had his revenge by failing to lower interest rates, prompting havoc on the NASDAQ described by one analyst as hitting "a soft temporary bottom," which sounds nice. (Actually the Sun King was proud of his abundant hair and only took to wearing a wig in 1670, after he had been on the French throne for 27 years. It was his dad, Louis XIII, prematurely bald, who copied the Abbe La Riviere's periwig, thus setting the fashion.)
Apropos White House canines, I once met the woman who gave Franklin Delano Roosevelt his little dog Fala. This was back in the mid-1980s when I was writing a piece about a shadowy but immensely powerful group called Scenic Hudson, which musters the WASP elites in fearsome array to protect and revive the river. One such blueblood was Alice Sukely, who was well advanced in years but feisty at the time of our encounter.
It wouldn't be impossible to fit up a sporran with some sort of minicam. These purses, in which Scotchmen carried oatmeal and other necessities, can be of considerable size. I remember seeing a ceremonial sporran made of an otter skin, with the head forming the flap. When we had to rig ourselves out in full Scottish military dress at my school, Glenalmond, outside Perth, our sporrans had horsehair ornamentation about a foot in length. It was bizarre to see scores of sex-starved young lads all busily shampooing their sporrans the night before the big military parade.
The original sporran was a simple leather pouch. The horsehair was part of the Gaelic cult that saw the wholesale invention of clan plaids in the Celtic kitsch frenzies of the early 19th century.
On the subject of Madonna, the Conservative Party is hoping to capture her as a supporter and publicist. Michael Portillo, shadow chancellor and love object of the Tory right wing, knows Madonna. The man regarded as the Tory would-be leader-in-waiting has apparently been a friend since Madonna's engagement to Ritchie, whose father and stepmother are active members of Portillo's Kensington and Chelsea constituency association.
According to The Scotsman, "Tory image-makers will be rubbing their hands with glee. Compared with the task of promoting the likes of William Hague and Ann Widdecombe, the prospect of the shadow chancellor hobnobbing with the queen of pop is a golden opportunity to portray the Conservative front-bench as a fashionable cause."
For a moment I thought I was going to be able to linkMadonna's name to that of Mies Van der Rohe, the prince of Modernist architecture. The British popular papers would have paid a fortune for my hot tip. Alas, though they are Englishmen whose names begin with P and end with O, suggesting perhaps Iberian lineage, nothing else, so far as I know, conjoins Portillo and Lord Palumbo. The latter is the toast of Modernists here by dint of his purchase around 1970 of the Farnsworth house outside Plano, IL, built by Mies Van der Rohe in the late 1940s. It's generally acknowledged, not least by the appropriator himself, that Philip Johnson's glass house in Connecticut was a knockoff from Mies' plans for the glass house he started planning for Edith Farnsworth in 1946.
I visited it this fall, a day before going to Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright's home in Wisconsin some three hours north of Plano. Portillo has sunk plenty of money restoring it, and having Miesian furniture and veneers made to replace the original stuff submerged in the big floods of 1996. Since increased settlement around Plano is reducing drainage, the Fox River now threatens the Farnsworth house almost on a yearly basis, and apparently Portillo is thinking of putting the whole structure on some type of hydraulic stilts, to shoot it heavenward in the event of untimely downpour.
It's a wonderful structure, though Farnsworth, who first keenly admired, then fought bitterly with, Mies, said it was a strain to live in a glass box. Wright actually respected Mies but attacked the Farnsworth house as exemplifying the communistic totalitarianism of the Bauhaus architects. Amid the McCarthy anticommunist scare, Elizabeth Gordon published The Threat to the Next America, in the April 1953 issue of House Beautiful: "There is a well-established movement in modern architecture, decorating and furnishings which is promoting the mystical idea that 'less is more'... [I]f we can be sold on accepting dictators in matters of taste and how our homes are to be ordered, our minds are certainly well prepared to accept dictators in other departments of life."
Mies did like to impose furniture and arrangement of same upon his clients, but then, so did Wright, and Mies' chairs were certainly more comfortable. As Wright admitted, he never could quite figure out what to do about chairs, and spent most of his life banging up his legs on the angular chairs he built, with those high backs to compensate for his diminutive stature. In The Natural House, published in 1954, Wright wrote, "My early approach to the chair was something between contempt and a desperation. Because I believe sitting to be in itself an unfortunate necessity not quite elegant yet, I do not yet believe in any such thing as a 'natural' chair for an unnatural posture. The only attractive posture of relaxation is that of reclining."
Soon you'll be able to get to Plano via commuter train from downtown Chicago. There's a very good little Texan barbecue stand on the main street, run by a nice fellow from Houston. He was glad to get a copy of Al Gore: A User's Manual, which I signed (and which is now selling for $6.90 down from $22 on Amazon, which tells us something about Al Gore's future).
The South Pole: An Account of the Norwegian Antarctic Expedition, 1910-1912 by Roald Amundsen; one of my all-time favorites, Adorno's Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life; Auerbach's Mimesis, one of the greatest books of literary criticism, I think written in a prison camp without benefit of a library, hence its clarity; also written in prison was Marc Bloch's Feudal Society; Roland Barthes' Mythologies, one of the founding texts of the new journalism, written as weekly essays for Le Nouvel Observateur; Bataille's Eroticism: Death and Sensuality.
For movie fans we offer Andre Bazin's Orson Welles. Bazin was one of those French movie fans half a century ago who sat in the Cinematheque in Paris watching second-grade American films, timing each shot, and eventually was the leading force in Vingt Ans du Cinema Americain, a special issue of Cahiers du Cinema listing their favorites, like Frank Tashlin and Sam Fuller.
In the mid-60s in London it was de rigueur to have this guide. Each week we would look through What's On, the local London entertainment guide, which in those distant non-auteur days would list the stars, sometimes the scriptwriter but not the director. Then we would use another French reference work to find out who directed Pick Up on South Street (Fuller), then check on Fuller in the Cahiers. Then we would use the A-Z London map to figure out the week's viewing. For example, the Notting Hill Gate Classic might be showing Buñuel's Robinson Crusoe at noon; then onto the District line to hasten to the Tooting Bec Classic to catch The Searchers at 2:30; then to some distant fleapit in South London to watch an Italian peplum movie at 6 p.m., and then perhaps up to the Hampstead Everyman for Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind. I did this for a couple of years, and then more or less gave up movies forever.
One of my occasional companions on these jaunts was Peter Wollen, who went on to write Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, attacked by Ken Tynan in The Observer in tones so choleric and philistine that Wollen's future was absolutely assured. These were the days in the UK, remember, when all the talk was of "political commitment" and leftists would trek off dutifully to watch Room at the Top, about class ambition in the north of England.
The only time I ever tried to write a movie treatment I offered a synopsis about a psychotic CIA man (I had Lee Marvin in mind) chasing someone through the great restaurants of France. The movie impresario Oscar Lewenstein threw me out of his office, spluttering that my effort was the "most immoral" he'd ever seen. Twenty years later they were all making movies about French kitchens.
The nice thing about Vingt Ans du Cinema Americain was the letters from the American directors, many of them stunned to receive this Gallic recognition. "Thanks for remembering Frank Tashlin," gasped the director of The Girl Can't Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? I knew Tashlin already from his wonderful children's book about the totalitarian mind-set, whether capitalist or socialist, The Bear That Wasn't, far superior to Orwell's 1984 and much shorter.
Others in the best 100 in translation? Benjamin's Illuminations; Chinook Texts, compiled and translated by Franz Boas, with the help of his Indian informant Hunt. The Abbe Breuil's The Evolution of Rock Art in the Caves of France; Caillois' Man, Play and Games. I wanted to put in translated cookbooks, but couldn't come up with much beyond Curnonsky's Traditional French Cooking. Euclides da Cunha's Rebellion in the Backlands is a must, as is Debord's Society of the Spectacle. Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth nestles next to Foucault's delightful History of Sexuality.
Freud? Jeffrey St. Clair and I debated over Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and The Interpretation of Dreams, and finally put them all in. Marx gets in because the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts were only translated in the 20th century.
Who else? Heyerdahl's Kon Tiki, naturally; Huizinga's Waning of the Middle Ages; Levi Strauss' Tristes Tropiques; Adolf Loos' Ornament and Crime; Peter Sloterdijk's effervescent Critique of Cynical Reason; Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book, whose translation by Ivan Morris is one of the great literary feats. Check it out on www.counterpunch.org.