Category: Personal

It’s done. We are now living in our new apartment on Court Street between Nelson and Huntington. Never again will we have to walk home to our old place at Butler and Bond.

The move itself was, inevitably, exhausting, but it would have been endlessly worse had we not let the movers pack for us.

Last Saturday, four strapping Israelis arrived and in just six hours crammed all our belongings into boxes and delivered them to our new address. I sneaked out early with a granny cart full of all our frozen foods, wheeling down past the Ferrara Brothers cement plant and along the industrial weirdness that is lower Bond Street along the Gowanus Canal.

But the Gowanus fringe is no longer where we live. Instead, we’ve found our way into Carroll Gardens proper, the old Italian neighborhood depicted in the movie Moonstruck. There are pizzerias and Italian delis, restaurants and markets galore, not to mention a social club with a beautiful garden where old men sit around outside on folding chairs and argue in Italian.

Carroll Gardens has a reputation as a neighborhood where you could break into someone’s basement and break your legs falling from the roof — indeed, in 1918 Al Capone was married at St. Mary Star of the Sea, a Roman Catholic church that was dedicated in 1855. What they say about mafia neighborhoods — that there’s nowhere safer — isn’t entirely true, but there does seem to be a sense that people are watching out to make sure no bad elements move in. I heard a story about a young professional who, when asked how he was doing by his older Italian neighbor, said “Not so good. I got mugged the other day.”

“Really? I’m very sorry to hear that. What did he look like?”

“Um … He was black, young, about my height.”

“Uh-huh. I’ll make sure it gets taken care of. It won’t happen again. How much did he take?”

“Oh, not that much. About eighty bucks.”

“Eighty dollars? I’m very sorry about that.” The older man then pulled a fat billfold from his pocket and peeled off four twenties, which he handed over to the young professional.

In New York City, this level of neighborhood watch is frankly reassuring.

As for the apartment itself, it’s coming together nicely. But I will refrain from going on and on about furniture placement, wall drilling, etc. My friends already have to hear enough about that, because it’s all I’m thinking about. Let me just end by saying that we are very, very happy with our new home.

This week has been a hectic rush to produce detailed comments on the draft outcome document of the high-level plenary meeting of the General Assembly, which will take place on September 14-16. This is the raw material, warts and all, and it has been fascinating to see how rough this draft is, and in what ways. Certain sentences just hit syntactic or grammatical brick walls, and I get the sense that some of this difficulty is translational: the document is presumably being hashed out in all six of the UN’s official languages, so whenever a particular committee agrees on a formulation in, say, Spanish, it is then hurriedly translated into the other five languages. And considering how much attention is paid to this or that word, the translators probably lean toward literalism, with the attendant risk of producing sentences that are somewhat tortured in their destination languages.

Then there’s my personal favorite, in paragraph 31, which reads, “We are convinced that eradication of poverty and hunger is crucial for the achievement of the [Millenium Development Goals].” I, too, am convinced of this, because the very first Millenium Development Goal is Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. I was pleased to be permitted to work into our statement a takedown of this particular tautology.

Okay, so I’m a dork. But I love this stuff.

UN Quietly Pushed Into East River
Or so says The Onion.

Meanwhile, Daniel Kleinfeld has alerted me to an apparently serious comic about the UN taking over America. In the preview pages, we learn that the secretary-general is Jaques Chirac, that Usama Bin Laden is the representative from Afghanistan, that Chelsea Clinton has married Michael Moore(!), and that Sean Hannity is not only a pirate radio broadcaster (just like Christian Slater in Pump Up the Volume) and the last voice of reason in UN-America, but also the proud owner of a seriously hardcore robotic arm.

Sometimes the hysterical right is just weird.

So it looks like the withdrawal talk is going mainstream, or at least as mainstream as Fred Kaplan in Slate, who is generally supportive of getting American troops the hell out of Iraq.

Kaplan raises the interesting possibility that Prime Minister al-Jafaari has been thwarting attempts to train an Iraqi security force precisely because the U.S. has said it will stick around until such a force is viable, and he doesn’t want us to leave because he fears being toppled by Sunni revanchists. So goes the rumor in Baghdad, anyway, according to Kaplan. In response, he argues, we ought to put the fear into al-Jafaari by giving him a timetable for withdrawal.

Then one of two things will happen. Either the Iraqi security forces will start coming together, in which case we could leave by mid-2007; or else the Iraqi security forces will remain a hopeless disaster, in which case there would be no reason for our troops to stick around because the war would be unwinnable, so we could leave by mid-2007.

I’m amazed by how fast this sort of thinking has been taking hold. Not that it’s bad or wrong thinking, but it goes against the platitudes of the 2004 election about staying the course. But I guess everyone wants an exit strategy, and no one wants to prolong this fiasco.

Personally, I think it’d probably be good for us to get the hell out of Iraq. If things go badly enough once we’re gone, we can always reinvade and topple the latest government in Baghdad. That’s the sort of thing we’re good at. In the meantime, the rest of the world, including Iran and North Korea, would have to take note of the fact that we would once again have our whole military available to fling at whoever pisses us off. And while I have no desire to see us at war with either of those countries, it would be good if our enemies at least had to fear that a full-scale invasion is plausible.

Courtesy of the excellent music blog aurgasm, I have just discovered The Cat Empire, an Australian band with an eclectic, jammy sound that is somehow reminiscent of both early G. Love and old AC/DC, if AC/DC had a killer horn section, or if G. Love were into ska. Or something.

I highly recommend checking out their website and watching the video for “Hello,” then visiting aurgasm and downloading the two tracks they’ve made available.

If you asked your typical Brooklynite to name a major development project in town, you’d probably hear about the controversial, Frank Gehry-designed Brooklyn Nets arena that developer Bruce Ratner wants built over the Atlantic Yards, a derelict patch of MTA land. Or you might hear about the Fairway and Ikea planned for Red Hook.

But surprisingly little attention has been paid to the plans for a new Visual and Performing Arts Library, or VPA, which would sit across the street from the new Nets complex. Designed by Mexican architect Enrique Norten (who is profiled in a Slate slideshow), the clean lines of the VPA would be an interesting contrast to the expressionist jumble of Gehry’s fantasyland.

Of course, no one can be sure that any of this stuff will actually get built. But I do expect the landscape of Downtown Brooklyn to look decidedly different ten years from now, and it could do worse than to become a showcase for innovative contemporary architecture.

Today is my one-year anniversary at the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Korea to the United Nations. Assuming I make it to work tomorrow (or on any subsequent day), this will become the second time in my entire life that I’ve held a job for more than a year. My teaching stint in Korea lasted precisely a year and no more, while my time at STV was mercifully cut short at 11 months. The only place I stayed longer than here was DoubleClick, where they gave me free sodas and stock options and there were video games and ridiculously hot women in the sales department.

So a year in, how’s it going? No, I did not get a cake like the one in the picture. But I still love the job, and I’m getting to do substantive work regularly. The new ambassador is great, and I’m excited about the upcoming September Summit, when President Roh Moo-hyun will be in town to speak at the General Assembly alongside our own president and other world leaders. In other words, I expect to be sitting right here in two more years, telling you all that I’ve never held any other job for as long.

Are we looking to cut and run in Iraq? That’s what General George Casey, our commander in Iraq, seems to be saying. I think the administration is floating this as a trial balloon to see how people react. If the response is negative, they can always disown the general’s words. If there’s not a big blowback, I expect that we’ll soon be hearing about plans to ditch the country.

It would fit with our general approach, which has been to pretend everything is going swimmingly and stick to our imaginary timetables as if the prewar fantasies about flowers in the streets had actually come true. We pushed forward with the invasion, the occupation, the disbanding of the Iraqi army, the handover of sovereignty, the election. We’re pushing hard to get the constitution done on time. Why not declare victory and leave once that’s done? Sure, there will still be an insurgency, but “freedom is messy,” and it won’t be our problem anymore.

The polls show that the majority of Americans are not confident we’ll win in Iraq, and a majority now — finally — believe the government intentionally misled the public on Saddam’s WMD. There’s a certain sentiment that we should see this thing through, but I don’t think that feeling is strong enough to create any serious resistance to a pullout, in stages, while the White House keeps saying everything is going according to plan. Democrats will mount half-hearted complaints and scold the president, but they know their constituents never wanted the war in the first place.

And despite the evident awfulness of invading a place, creating total chaos and then leaving it to wallow in miserable violence, I’m not sure our hanging around will do much good either. Stay the course? What course? It’s not like we’re winning. I worry that what seems like the ethical approach — cleaning up our own mess — may in fact be something like the ethical approach taken by Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in Vietnam, where they couldn’t see any decent way to ditch the allies to whom we’d promised protection and victory. So we spent an unnecessary six years bombing the hell out of Vietnam and widening the war to Laos and Cambodia and tearing American society apart before finally leaving our allies behind anyway.

So, is it time to cut and run in Iraq? I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.

Check out M.I.A.’s latest video, Bucky Done Gun. It’s a bit of an incoherent mishmash — the theme seems to be some kind of Brazilian favela shipwreck revolution — but hey, the song is great, and it’s a chance to watch Ms. Arulpragasam shake her thing in her charming if peculiar way. Oh, and those horns that sound like something out of Black Orpheus? They’re a sample of “Gonna Fly Now,” better known as the Theme from Rocky (as in Balboa).

In other M.I.A. news, she’s featured on the final track of the new Missy Elliott record, Cookbook, which is fitting. For one thing, Missy’s latest single, “Lose Control,” has the same vocal rhythm as “Bucky Done Gun” (listen to M.I.A. saying, “Mia’s so doable,” then listen to Missy saying, “Make you do a double take”). And if there’s anyone M.I.A. sounds like, it’s Missy, who gets a shout-out on M.I.A.’s “Fire, Fire” (“Click suits and booted in the Timberlands/Freakin’ out to Missy and Timbaland”).

Oh, and don’t forget that M.I.A. and her DJ, Diplo, are playing SummerStage in Central Park on Sunday, August 7, along with DJ Rekha, New York’s reigning queen of bhangra. Get there early!

Bonus: You can watch an audience completely not getting M.I.A. here, in this bizarrely shot clip from Jimmy Kimmel Live.

I posted yesterday about my fear that the wrong man would end up “full of bullets on the subway floor.” It turns out that it had already happened: the London police killed the wrong man, a Brazilian unconnected to any terrorism at all.

One hopes that the NYPD is taking note. And at least this shooting is big news and an international incident, with the Brazilian foreign minister, Celso Amorim, is on his way to London demand an explanation from his counterpart, Jack Straw. Still, how different is this kind of shooting at the wrong man from the overzealous roundups that filled our prisons in Guantanamo, Bagram, Baghdad and elsewhere? The American people have mostly turned a blind eye to these human rights violations abroad, but one wonders whether, by accommodating ourselves to the reality of Guantanamo, we have made it easier to accommodate ourselves to something similar at home. When the first wrong man is cut down in America, will we shrug it off as the price of liberty?

It occurs to me that our response to 9/11 has not been all that different from our response to Pearl Harbor, if you leave out the part where we participated successfully in the major wars that were already underway across Eurasia and North Africa. The glory and cameraderie of that endevor have perhaps helped us to see the internment of the Japanese as a minor incident in a larger drama. And the immediacy of the war delayed the seizure of paranoia that arrived after the victory, when Red purges racked our country and our social politics devolved into a panicked loyalty to a clenched-teeth domesticity.

The analogy is of course limited. You can’t just write off World War II and its impact on America that easily. But there is a pattern in American history of shocks followed by hyperreactive violence: Harper’s Ferry exploding into the Civil War, the explosion of the Maine leading to the conquest of Cuba and the Philippines, the sinking of the Lusitania throwing us into the bloodiest war in history. And too often, these violent periods have been eras of repression at home.

Although, as a friend pointed out recently, this is an unusual convulsion of militarism, in that the young are not, in fact, joining up.