Category: Personal

I hadn’t been to the UN complex in a while, so I decided today to swing by for lunch. I was hoping to pick up a copy of A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals from the UN bookshop, but they didn’t have it in yet. Mildly disappointed, I headed for the cafeteria, but then caught sight of a large crowd gathered in the lobby in front. I almost turned back, but then decided that as the crowd was outside, the cafeteria itself might not be completely swamped.

As I drew nearer, I noticed flashbulbs and lights and cameras, and then I caught sight of what was in the middle of it all: Kofi Annan, making some kind of presentation for International Women’s Day, speaking in his quiet voice so that it was hard to hear him even with the amplification. I only stayed for a few moments, but it was interesting just to stand nearby and see in person someone who I’ve seen so often on TV. He looked pretty much like he does on TV, but then I was never closer than about twenty feet. It is, to date, the closest I have ever been to a world leader, although I’m hoping this will change next fall, when President Roh Moo-hyun will be visiting. We’ll see whether I manage to get within twenty feet of him.

So Bush has nominated John Bolton to be the American ambassador to the United Nations. This is, unfortunately, a man who has declared that the UN doesn’t exist, who has been openly hostile to both the UN and multilateral diplomacy generally. He has declared that “It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law.” As undersecretary of state for arms control, he has spent the last four years vigorously thwarting all attempts at multilateral arms control. (here.)

It’s a shame that just when the UN is becoming more relevant and reforming itself, the United State should choose to ignore and denigrate it.

On Sunday night, Jenny and I had dinner at the Second Avenue Deli. My great-aunt Sylvia lived for decades across the street in an apartment that faced St. Mark’s Church — it was her apartment we stayed in when we first got back to New York in 2003 — so Abe Lebewohl’s palace of cholesterol has been something of a family institution since its origins in 1954, and it was to the Second Avenue Deli that we adjourned after Sylvia’s funeral last summer.

The Second Avenue Deli is, of course, a classic, and also a holdover from an earlier era. But unlike the Carnegie Deli, which is now mostly for tourists, Katz’s and Junior’s, which has been taken over by Lower East Side hipsters, or Junior’s in Brooklyn, which now serves a largely African-American clientelle, The Second Avenue Deli is still an ethnically Jewish institution, from its thousand-year-old waitstaff (even the two old Chinese guys feel authentically Jewish, like potstickers after Yom Kippur) to its decidedly nose-heavy patrons.

Our Sunday night visit, however, was an accident: we’d intended to eat at Veselka, but were stymied by a gigantic tour group that was trying to squeeze into the overcrowded restaurant, so instead we decided to get our Ukrainian fix two blocks up, where there was still a wait, but a shorter one. When we were finally seated, packed in between two other tables, the fun really began.

After waiting for some time, we finally got some attention from our waitress, an elderly woman whose hair obviously lives in curlers at night. She announced her presence by flinging a plate of coleslaw onto the table in such a way that I felt it necessary to wipe away the scattered cabbage bits. A few minutes later, she came back with the pickles, again tossing them with enough force to spread them around the table a bit. Then she disappeared for a while, but at last returned to take our orders — or so we thought. She stood behind me, her pen poised over her opened bill case, and said, “Oh?” I reached for my menu to open it and begin my order, but I must have been too leisurely, because she then said, “Oh!” again, snapped her bill case shut and wandered off to do something by the cash register. She returned a minute later, this time allowing us to order — cholent and a kasha knish for me, Hungarian goulash for Jenny, Dr. Brown’s cherry sodas for us both. (If you think of the Second Avenue Deli as exclusively a sandwich joint, you’re missing out. I have eaten a fair bit of cholent in my day, and the Second Avenue Deli’s is exquisite.)

Our meal arrived soon after. “Move that, honey,” the waitress croaked at Jenny, gesturing with a hot plate of goulash toward Jenny’s coleslaw plate. “I need a space to put this.” Jenny complied, and the goulash was duly slapped down, with my cholent following soon after, then the knish, and at last the two glasses of ice and two cans of soda. The last items were the straws, which the waitress withdrew from her apron pocket and then dribbled onto the table, flicking them free of her fingers as if they were someone else’s snot. I don’t think I’ve ever seen straws treated so contemptuously. A while later, totally unsolicited, she wandered past and slapped a pile of napkins down on the top of our water carafe. The service put me in mind of my parents’ descriptions of Ratner’s, where they used to go after concerts at the Filmore East, and where, they claimed, you could count on your waiter to deliver your glass with his thumb in it.

Getting the check was another complicated challenge, but when we did, I made sure to tip big. After all, you can’t get service like that just anywhere!

Topic: Middle East

As I was walking back from the gym today, I crossed paths with a substantial protest march consisting of maybe 150 Lebanese, draped in their red-and-white flags emblazoned with Lebanon’s famous cedar trees and chanting, “What do we want? Syria out!”

It was a curious sight in a number of ways. It was a further reminder that events in the Middle East have immediate ramifications here in America. As the protesters shouted beneath the windows of the Syrian Mission to the United Nations, I had the thought that this is something they probably couldn’t do in Lebanon itself, at least not without fear.

The protest also made me reflect on just how much has changed in the Middle East since 9/11. We are now facing at least the possibility that Iraq will become a stable democracy, Syria will withdraw from Lebanon, Lebanon will democratize, Egypt will at least make a show of holding multiparty elections, Iran will strike a deal with Europe to halt its nuclear program, Afghanistan will hold viable elections, and the Israelis and Palestinians will at last make peace. Not one of these things has actually happened yet, mind you, but they are all at least possibilities rather than just pipe dreams. And let’s not forget that we’re all buddies with Libya now, too.

For better or worse, the United States invaded Iraq, lying about its motivations and stumbling badly in its management of the aftermath. I disagreed with the invasion at the time, and I continue to believe that it was a mistake. So what if all goes well in the Middle East, and all these distant possibilities turn into solid realities? Will I have been wrong?

No. This is a little like the argument some people make that colonial powers like Britain in India or Japan in Korea weren’t all bad because they developed infrastructure and industry. This is true, of course, but to assess the value or harm of colonialism, you can’t just measure the state of industrial development at the beginning and the end of the colonial periods, because that assumes that without colonialism, progress would have been zero. Yes, Koreans would say, Japan did promote and develop industry, but Koreans were already heading in that direction and would have done it faster and with far less harm to the Korean people. (The most egregious examples of this kind of thinking involve Stalin, who did raise literacy rates and industrialized a nation, but at the cost of destroying that nation and its people for generations and into the present.)

So yes, our invasion of Iraq has certainly had an effect on the region. Without it, Saddam Hussein would likely have remained in power for a long time. Afghanistan, however, would have been invaded by pretty much any American who was president on 9/11, and someone else might have done a more thorough job, perhaps making some meaningful progress in pushing Pakistan and India to compromise instead of cozying up to the Uzbeks. Iran’s reform movement has done best when the U.S. has ignored it, robbing the Iranian reactionaries of their favorite foil. Libya’s negotiated settlement with the U.K. was a longstanding effort, not a result of our invasion of Iraq. And Arafat’s death would almost certainly have shaken the demoralized Palestinians even without our invasion of Iraq.

So the big differences, had we not invaded Iraq, would be that Saddam would still be playing cat-and-mouse under a largely effective sanctions regime, and Syria would be much less frightened. On the other hand, we’d have much greater political capital in the region, and we might well have been able to push Egypt and Saudi Arabia to ease up on the political repression. And we would’ve had a lot more energy to expend on dealing with the real regional threats, Iran and Pakistan, and on North Korea.

That said, we can’t roll back time, and the Bush administration, having stirred things up considerably, now faces a number of historic opportunities to help things settle again in a way that genuinely improves the lot of millions in the region while making America and the world more secure. Should they make the right choices and succeed, it will be to their credit.

So have you been itching for a vacation, but uncertain where to go? Why not try North Korea! This fascinating post on Boing Boing provides links to a must-watch Flash movie put out by the [North] Korean Friendship Association, along with some bizarre exchanges they had with the North Korean organization regarding bandwidth.

This weekend, BAM Cinematek in Brooklyn is showing a retrospective of the films of Korean director Park Chan-Wook. The only one of his movies I’ve seen is Joint Security Area (better known as JSA among Koreans), which begins with a murder at the border between north and south Korea and gradually unfolds into a fascinating exploration of the tensions and loyalties of the young soldiers who face each other each day across the border.

The film is definitely worth seeing if you’re interested in South Korean perceptions of the north. Enormously popular when it was released a couple of years ago in South Korea, JSA takes a perspective that is popular with the younger generation of South Koreans, casting the ongoing struggle between North and South as a sad, anomalous and artificial division of two populations that are essentially in sync. Whether this is actually true is unclear — I’ve read that defectors from the north have had a difficult time adjusting to life in the south, and we can only guess at the extent to which indoctrination and separation has made northerners different from southerners. Still, JSA gets at the deep sense most Koreans have that they are ultimately one people, that reunification is a historical inevitability.

Plus it’s a gripping film, and it involves Chocopie, so how can you go wrong?

Okay, so I feel like it’s time to put in my two cents on The Gates (which, for those of you who live on the moon or are reading this 400 years after I wrote it, is the big Christo project that has lined 23 miles of Central Park with orange vinyl gates draped with orange vinyl fabric).

As a work of public art, The Gates was startlingly controversial, and I think that the controversy is perhaps the best way to approach the art itself. There seemed to be four classes of complaint against The Gates. The first is that it was a waste of the city’s money, the second was that it wasn’t something else, the third was that it wasn’t anything, and the fourth was that it was ugly.

The first complaint, of course, is false: the Christos financed the project themselves, and not a penny of city money was spent. The second complaint, however, gets at what made this installation different from so much public art in New York city. I heard various versions of this complaint — that the Christos should have let people graffiti the gates, that the $23 million they spent was a waste of money, that it’d be great if they allowed other artists to put their work (read: more likeable work) in the park, that the only good thing about The Gates was the way they got people talking about public art. The Gates seemed to generate a kind of furious looking away, coupled with a kind of inspirational force that pushed people to imagine their own works of art.

As I kept hearing this variety of complaint, I began to think about other public art in New York City, which generally does not drive people to demand something else. From the high art of Jeff Koons’s Puppy at Rockefeller Center, to the charming rotundities of Tom Otterness along Broadway, to the lowbrow Cow Parade, the dominant mode is cutesy. In the subways, too, we find images of fuzzy ducklings reenacting the first subway ride. I have no particular problem with cutesy public art, but its ubiquity suggests that New Yorkers — or at least the New Yorkers who decide on public art — have grown nervous about anything ambiguous or provocative, anything that startles without providing a ready resolution. In other words, about art.

The Gates was resolutely not cute. Christo and Jeanne-Claude and their artistic pretentions may be cute, but neither the actual structures themselves nor their collective presence were the least bit likely to induce the warm fuzzy feeling we get from looking at a flowery puppy, a colorful cow or a sad rotund bear. In keeping with Christo’s long history of wrapping and obscuring, The Gates presented instead a kind of blankness, which is why people felt so compelled to imagine other things onto them. Without actually wrapping anything, The Gates achieved the effect of wrapping. And this is the source of the third complaint: that they weren’t anything, that anyone could have done it, that there was nothing artistic about it.

Christo’s work is, it must be admitted, not the sort of thing that takes a craftsman’s hand. At this point, however, post-minimalism and post-earth works and post-Jeff Koons — indeed, post-R. Mutt — I think we can accept that an artist needn’t be a craftsman. And, considering the sheer scale of the work, not to mention its power to draw hundreds of thousands of people to Central Park in February, it is resolutely something, not nothing.

Nor is it quite the blank slate some people insisted they were seeing. The color was billed as saffron, but it was, rather, the color of traffic cones and other obstructions. One could be either horrified to find this color of inconvenience strewn about the park or thrilled at how it had been transformed. It is also the color of torii, the orange gates that sometimes line the paths to Shinto shrines in Japan. Like torii, The Gates felt like a sanctification of the environment in which they were placed, and the hushed spectators tended to respond as if they were witnessing or participating in some mildly sacred ritual. What gave added strength to this feeling was the sheer beauty of the work itself.

So some people thought they were ugly. I went to see The Gates in the new-fallen snow on Presidents Day, and they were not ugly. The stands were a bit inelegant, but the sight of the fabric billowing out in the breezes, of the light filtering through them, of the trails framed in them and the wild tangles of bare branches highlighted by the angularity of the arches, was beautiful. The Gates were what they were, and if you were willing to be there and experience them as that, without demanding that they be something else, they were startlingly lovely. They achieved what minimalism can at its best, transforming and intensifying an environment to create a new experience. This effect of minimalism tends to fall flat in museums, where the space is carefully decontextualized to begin with, so that there is nothing for the art to transform. In Central Park, it had a transcendent quality that I was glad to experience. And if there was no deeper meaning beyond a bit of narcissistic Central Park worship, so what?

For those of you who have bookmarked either [the palaverist] or [UNist] directly, I recommend that you change the bookmark to http://www.palaverist.com. Thanks to the glories of RSS, the homepage now shows the latest posts from both blogs, so you can see if there’s anything new and click accordingly.