Ruminatrix
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Friday, Jul 11, 2003
It's about oil
It sounds impossible (or oxymoronic) but there's a very interesting piece by John Cassidy in the New Yorker on the Iraqi oil industry -- past, present and future. In the print edition only, unfortunately (what is it with these people?):
Critics in Europe and the Arab world suspect that [the Bush Administration's] agenda includes encouraging Iraq to leave OPEC, thereby challenging the oil cartel's power to set prices. Attempting to undermine OPEC would be a big snub to Saudi Arabia, America's most important ally in the Arab world, which dominates the organization. But some people in the Administration seem willing to countenance such a move. One of them is Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, whom the Pentagon flew to Iraq during the war. "We have a new ally in the Middle East -- one that is secular, modern, and pro free market," Francis Brooke, an American political strategist who has been Chalabi's adviser for almost a decade, told me. "It's time to replace the Saudis with the Iraqis." Since the war ended, Iraq has missed two OPEC meetings, raising further questions about its relationship with the oil cartel...The Iraqi Republic (founded in 1958) had only a few years of unalloyed prosperity (1972-80) before Saddam's ten-year war with Iran (and other ruinous arms races) drained profits. That war in turn severely damaged the Rumalia oil fields in southern Iraq, engendering the crisis that led to the invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent UN sanctions. So what are the odds of prosperity and peace under the new order?
Cassidy estimates that with a population estimated to be about 30 million in 2010, and $55bn/year in oil revenues, Iraqis would each earn around $5 per day. While this is above the current World Bank poverty line of $2 per day, Iraqis would still be much poorer than Kuwaitis or citizens of the Gulf Emirates. "If Iraq is to prosper during the decades ahead, it will have to diversify its economy and other sources of income, something that will only be possible only if Iraq is transformed into a peaceful, stable land with an effective and stable leadership."
The alternative is long-term civil war, as in Angola, Congo, Indonesia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone: "developing nations with valuable natural resources, [where] violent internal conflicts are the norm."
Wednesday, Jul 02, 2003
Fun in the sun
A new issue of New York Review of Books features: Norman Mailer on GWB qua male model and model of masculinity. There's also Luc Sante on Arthur Kempton's book Boogaloo from the gospel roots thru George Clinton to Tupac on down; and some Elizabeth Hardwick Russian litcrit. (The print edition also has an excellent piece on Iraqi Shiites, plus Misha Glenny on murders and the mafia state in Serbia, by the way).
Though why you'd want to read when it's gloriously sunny outside I don't know. Find a shady tree.
Saturday, Jun 28, 2003
Sleepless in Mecca
Back in this hot city I am reading Elizabeth Hardwick's extraordinary memoir "Sleepless Nights." Two excerpts:
"The unspeakable vices of Mecca are a scandal to all of Islam and a constant source of wonder to pious pilgrims."Of an ex-lover:
For the pilgrim to Mecca the life of the city trembled with its dangerous salvations.
The 1940s
New York: there I lived at the Hotel Schuyler on West 45th Street, lived with a red-cheeked homosexual young man from Kentucky. We had known each other all our lives. Our friendship was a violent one and we were as obsessive, critical, jealous and cruel as any ordinary couple. The rages, the slamming doors, the silences, the dissembling. Each was for the other a treasured object of gossip and complaint. In spite of his inclinations, the drama was of man and woman, a genetic dissonance so like the marital howlings one could hear floating up from the courtyard or creeping up and down the rusty fire escapes....
I slept with A three times and remember each one perfectly. In all three he was agreeably intimidating , and intimidating in three ways. 1. The murmured bits of dialogue, snatched from the air, grammatical encrustations, ellipses. Isn't this the kind of evening the best of all? or, usually I. On and on in small whispers: better than and women who and one time -- small, dark drifting comparisons. 2. A seizure of spritual discontent and graver asceticism, mournfully impugning. 3. Regretfulness, kindness, charitable good humor, apologies for the lateness of the hour. Where's your little red coat? Can I take you to a cab? Or: You'll never want to see me again... too late... too early... no cigarettes left.Wonderful, lucid, as un-nostalgic as can be. Happy Gay Pride Sunday and a hug to the Supreme Court -- or a majority of them, at least.
...In those days I did not care to enjoy sex, only to have it.
Bunkerland
A weekend out of town in Montauk (water too cold to swim in), a week of dawn-to-past-dusk workdays afterwards -- pretty soon a weblog's gone to weeds. Or maybe just overgrown with all the rain. And now the sun is out at last it's hard to stay indoors again.
During World War II the hills just below Montauk Point held a barracks/gymnasium, disguised as the church of a "typical" fishing village, its spire an observation post. It was part of Camp Hero. First the base housed 16" gun-batteries protecting the entry to Long Island Sound, and later a military radar station looking for Soviet bombers New York-bound. Now it's open to the public, or at least the above-ground portions of it.
I don't know why the melancholy of empty seaside forts appeals to me. But they feel haunted, either by their vanished garissons or by the returning beachgoers who replace them. Airplanes made all those coastal bases as obsolete as battleships, but there are plenty of other surviving blockhouses bunkers and casemates left --- they are indestructible, even as the ocean reclaims them with its relentless erosion. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.
Eleven miles up the road from Camp Hero in Amagansett, in the ill-fated Operation Pastorius, four German saboteurs went ashore from a U-boat in June of 1942 with instructions to blow up American power stations(four more were landed in Florida) . One of them, after checking the expired dollar bills he had been issued for money, turned himself in to the FBI almost immediately. The eight became legal pioneers of a sort, as their secret trials at the Justice Department set the precedent for the still-evolving (or -devolving) treatment of "enemy combatants" during wartime in this country. Six went to the electric chair; two were imprisoned then released in 1948. Nowadays, GPS- equipped and able to call in airstrikes rather than carrying plastique, wouldn't they be considered "Special Forces," the vanguard of a modern fighting force?
Friday, Jun 20, 2003
Locked and Loaded on the F train
On the F train yesterday, a man is declaiming to everyone, in a deep James Earl Jones tone, carefully enunciating, as if reciting lines: "Check your weapons guys, we hit the beach in five...no four minutes..." He is of indeterminate age, somewhere beyond thirty. At one point he holds a plastic soda bottle to his ear like a walkie-talkie. Then comes: "Many weapons of mass destruction can be carried in a suitcase. You all know what a suitcase looks like, don't you?..." I catch a few bars from the Star Wars theme hummed deadpan.
Each sentence is repeated two or three times, in case you didn't hear him the first time. Are these lines from old movies or is he an addled combat veteran? Or just one more of the city's walking wounded, back in the subway to shelter from the rain? But I can feel unease building among the passengers -- his doomsday ramblings are more troubling than any of the common variety spare-change pitches. You don't hear much about suitcase bombs on the subway these days, though I've seen soldiers patrolling the Union Square station at night-time with their M-16s at the ready...
Then, just before my stop: "Don't touch women. Don't let them touch you. Only gays and children do that." Is that from Full Metal Jacket? Consternation...What's with this guy? Then he says: "I never met a woman who wasn't a government agent. They ask for all kinds of information, try to get into my stuff..." And at once smiles break out all around the subway car, even the women, well some of them at least...
Monday, Jun 16, 2003
Baghdad after the Fall
The scale and seeming purposefulness of the sabotage has been the source of countless rumors. Iran's slick, twenty-four-hour Arabic-language news station—the only television available for weeks after the war—helped popularize one in particular. "The Christian right wing which controls Washington seeks to wipe out Eastern civilization," declared one commentator, adding that this evil intent was "based on the ideology of Francis Fukuyama that says ancient cultures have no value because America's superior culture has replaced them."
The vaunted accuracy of American bombing did not help the invader's reputation. When bombs strayed into civilian neighborhoods, it was assumed that these were deliberate targets. Leaving aside such "mistakes," the bombs also happened to destroy many of Baghdad's modern architectural showpieces. "Even Saddam's palaces, they were the property of the people, not of Saddam," complained a political scientist at Baghdad University.
Yet the loss must still be placed in the context of a land that has probably been ravaged more often by war than any other on earth. One of the world's oldest bodies of literature is the series of Sumerian laments for the destruction of the cities of Eridu, Nippur, Ur, Turin, Sumer, and Unug. Since its founding by the Caliph al-Mansour in 762 AD, Baghdad has itself been conquered by foreign armies no fewer than fifteen times, and razed to the ground more than once. Considering its fabled wealth and glory in medieval Islam, the city has markedly fewer historic monuments than, say, Cairo, Damascus, or Istanbul...
...I find Karim on a noisy street corner outside the hotel where he is staying, looking bemused and slightly uneasy. A former Communist, he fled the country three decades ago. He runs a publishing house in Damascus that has long been a haven for Iraq's exiled intellectuals. Now on the fringe of the furious politicking among Baghdad's myriad new parties, he has not been encouraged. Between fundamentalists intent on seizing power and Baathists determined to keep their clammy grip, and amid tensions between the "insiders" and those coming from abroad, there seems little room for dreamy liberals of the old school.
Naseer Ghadire, a young writer who has never left Iraq, tends to agree. Intense, thin, and with a passion for French philosophy and the Beatles, Ghadire spent six years at a Shiite religious seminary and three in prison before deciding Nietzsche was right about God. "No one wants to admit it," he says. "But the fact is that the only ones who really fought Saddam were either religious people or a handful of atheist intellectuals. The rest all felt that whatever his faults, he represented them, he expressed their nature."
Ghadire's own loathing for the fallen regime is unquestionable. And yet he says that just before the war, he confessed to himself that he had no desire to be "liberated." "It would mean I would have nothing to define myself against, nothing to fight against. I would have to be responsible, to think of living a 'normal' life." And besides, he adds, the sight of American soldiers slaps him like an insult...
...What makes the picture doubly uneasy is the Iraqis' own conflicted feelings. It is hardly possible for them to like America when they consider Washington's record of first supporting Saddam, then punishing his people with sanctions, then bombing the place to get rid of him. Yet neither do they have much liking for anyone else —none of the neighbors, and certainly not fellow Arabs who defended Saddam in the name of Arab honor. The Americans are an obvious affront to national pride, and perhaps even more acutely to religious pride. But they are also the only guarantee of security just now, and of the return to normality that is inherent in the promise to rejoin the wider world.
The ambivalence cuts across ethnic divisions. Kurds regard the two Bushes as national heroes, yet they fear that America may again betray them as it has several times in living memory. Christians yearn for Western protection, yet worry that the end of Baathist secularism may have uncorked the wicked genie of political Islam. The Shiite clergy, despite schisms over their proper role in politics, deliver a surprisingly uniform message. America has served its only purpose by getting rid of Saddam. Its army is here at our sufferance, and sooner or later we will make them leave.
More? Max Rodenbeck life after the fall.
Saturday, Jun 14, 2003
From the Ozarks to the Lower East Side
A picture of Pickles, 135 Rivington's newest tenant.
Friday, Jun 13, 2003
Don't Swing A Cat Here
Part of the plerasure of life in this city is the richness of the signage, particularly of the handwritten sort. A local halal snack bar, -- popular with Pakistani cab drivers -- on Houston near Avenue A, advertises fare priced by "plate" or "bowel" -ful. I will eat there soonish.
My favorite sign is not handwritten but carefully typed out. In the bathroom of a shiatsu massage place in the East Village is an idiosyncratic variant of a sign all bathrooms in NYC are legally obliged to display. It reads:
Empoyee Must Wash Your HandsNot funny, you say? Well it's in a bathroom with no sink in it, just a urinal. There's not enough room there to turn around, let alone have the employee wash your hands there. They do great massages, however.
Pannino
After work last night, walked home under thundershowers to bar veloce (the link shows their second location, but it looks just like the one on Second at 12th Street). There's always a tape of sixties b&w Italian movies playing on a video monitor. Bottles are stocked in perforated pillars. Grilled sandwich: speck and molten tallegio ($8), with a glass of Salice Salentino 2000 ($8) from Leone de Castris. Both delicious. Back out into the rain utterly satisfied.
Friday, Jun 06, 2003
Boulot, Metro, Dodo
In the middle of a thirteen-day work burst, which includes some 14-hour double shifts, so I have had very little free time -- for this, for TV, for dining out, etc, etc. The job has minor irritations, which would be easier to handle if we were making better money. But I quite like surrendering to the routine for now, the austerity of it. And I am learning some wine-related things too, not just at the high end. Still, it's tiring to spend 8-14 hours on one's feet. I'm short of sleep most days, hungry at midnight. So when I have "down time", instead of spending it planning my next move, or catching up on paperwork, I find myself napping or snacking...and now there's another full-time dependent to take care of around the apartment. More about her in a minute.
By the end of next week I should be able to scale back my restaurant work commitments to five days a week, though nothing's definite yet. I also want to check out what's available in sommelier courses, but I'm still trying to decide whether cramming my head with all that detail is what I want to do. You know, as in "do with my life," not as in "kill some time doing."
Pickles update: The vet says she can't go into the street for another six weeks, when she'll have a last round of immunization shots. Apparently NYC's sidewalks are too rich in bacteria for a ten-week-old puppy to handle. Meanwhile we are training her with disposable pads placed just outside the apartment, so she'll be ready to go outside later.
Her equivalent to the boulot metro dodo (job, subway, bed) triad is "piss/shit, play, sleep," with a tacit fourth term "eat" understood. Being a terrier, she plays in great manic bursts of crazy energy (plus chewing: signs of some teething?). These are punctuated by deep naps. Not unlike a two or three year-old child, really.