The Rumpus.net » Zoe Blackler

Life Stories Roundup

Zoe Blackler — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 00:04:21 +0000

In this week’s roundup, there’s a late night talk show host with a following of occultists, conspiracy theorists and would-be time travellers, a wannabe Warhol with his own hippie art collective and New York’s most honest cabbie.

Mies Giep, who helped protect Anne Frank, and later saved her diary is remembered. And in a fantastic essay in the Observer, Andrew Anthony explores the life and strange death of a Marxist academic, a cheerleader for Pol Pot.

There’s an eight year old boy abandoned by his mother and a presidential candidate behaving badly. A cyborg, a failed coup and a bizarre suicide. And two more deaths: both expected, both quietly heart-breaking when they come.

VIGNETTE

If you’re going to learn your real father isn’t the man you’d always thought he was, you could do a lot worse than Joshua Bowler. Last year at the age of 55, Bowler discovered he was the son of Lord Glenconner, former owner of glamorous party island Mustique. Better still he already knew Glenconner, who as the father of a schoolfriend had become something of a hero to Bowler during his teens. It’s a happy ending they both deserve. Bowler’s late mother, who in 1950s bohemian London had modelled for Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon, was a chaotic character who fell into drug addiction. Glenconner, now 83, has tragically lost two of his three other sons, one to drugs and the other to AIDS. (Story by Margarette Driscoll in The Times)

In retrospect, Glenconner says, Moraes must have known he was the father “but she never said a word to anyone and it is very much to her credit that she never tried to take advantage of me in any way”
And, poignantly, it turns out that Glenconner had bought one of Freud’s portraits of Moraes, which had hung on his study wall for 30 years. “I always remember her as she was in that picture,” he says, “a pensive girl with a blanket wrapped round her shoulders looking out the window at the ducks outside Lucian’s studio.”

Read the rest in The Times

VIGNETTE

Hippie art collective DD172 is an art gallery cum photo studio cum indie band rehearsal space housed in a four story warehouse in New York’s Tribeca. It’s also Damon Dash’s bid at reinvention. The 38 year old fallen hip-hop artist and self confessed pretentious hippie wants to create his own version of Warhol’s Factory – and to do it in one of Manhattan’s wealthiest neighborhoods. The New York Observer’s DM Levine pays a visit, bumps into DJ Mos Def, meets an Edie Sedgwick blond and still doesn’t know quite what’s going on.

Down the hall I found Mr. Dash, in tight jeans and chunky black-framed glasses, smoking a joint, a group of followers huddled around him like a football scrum. “Damn, my payroll just keeps getting bigger and bigger,” he said, to no one in particular. He’d just hired a new graphic designer—a young 20-something who’d shown Dash his portfolio and gotten himself on the payroll in the course of about three minutes. Then he grabbed me by the shoulder. “Come with me while I get a haircut.”

He headed into a private back room and slumped into a leather desk chair while a barber gave him a trim. “I’m a businessman,” he told me. And this new space, which he opened just a few months back, he said, is a “branding company.”

The idea is that this hippie experiment might give him a new life in New York, the city that made him and then the city that beat him down.

Read the rest at The New York Observer

FIRST PERSON

Jillian Weise’s new prosthetic leg takes some getting used to. She doesn’t just have to learn to walk again, but must come to terms with being a cyborg: the electronic limb runs off software, it beeps and buzzes. There’s a romantic back story here too that she only touches on, an unsatisfactory love affair with Henry.

There were roses by the door. From Henry. I couldn’t even carry them inside. I called him: “Can we go to the mall? I want to hold on to your arm and practice walking. I want to pretend we’re shopping for you. O.K.?”
“I need a new jacket,” Henry said. That’s one of the reasons I loved him. I didn’t have to say anything else. Henry was not a good boyfriend, obviously, but I still think he was a good person. He didn’t teach me how to walk, but he gave me cover in Banana Republic and J. Crew as I taught myself. I think if you’re going to become a cyborg, you need a Henry. Someone to try on jackets.

Read the rest at The New York Times

FIRST PERSON

After British cabinet ministers Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt led a failed coup to topple Gordon Brown last week, Westminster hacks were left to ponder just what the pair were thinking and how it all went so wrong. The Times has the inside track: Hoon’s diary entries for the week, as discovered by Hugo Rifkind. Wednesday finds him choosing a co-conspirator.

The obvious choice is Patricia Hewitt.
“So,” she says, after an early morning council of war. “Here’s the plan. We just send out an e-mail just after Gordon has done quite well at PMQs, advocating the sort of secret ballot that our party constitution makes no allowances for whatsoever.”
A good start, I say.
“After that,” she continues, “I use my famously winning personality to get backbench support, while you employ all of those slick media skills that made you absolutely not a totally hapless figure of fun throughout the entire Blair Government.”
Easy, I say.
“Then,” she goes on, “provided six or seven Cabinet ministers show a bit of backbone, we’re laughing!”
This is fantastic. What could possibly go wrong?

Read the rest at The Times
See also Steve Bell’s cartoon in The Guardian

STORY

One of the oddest stories this week concerned Guatemalan lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg whose apparent murder in May plunged his country into crisis. In a video tape that emerged after his death, Rosenberg pointed the finger at President Colom. “If you are watching this message, it is because I was assassinated by President Alvaro Colom,” he says to the camera. Thousands of protestors took to the streets and for a while the accusation threatened to bring down the president. But on Tuesday, a United Nations backed report found that Rosenberg had in fact staged his own death. His ex wife’s cousins had organized the hit men for him, unaware they were assisting a suicide.

If one mystery has been solved, however, another remains. Who was behind the double murder of Rosenberg’s girlfriend Marjorie Musa and her father the month before?

On May 10, 2009, Rosenberg went for his weekly bike ride, receiving a phone call from the killers during which he gave them final instructions. He waited five minutes on a grassy patch near a gangly group of bougainvilleas for the hit men to come and kill him. In the days leading up to his death, Rosenberg bought a grave site for himself and one for Marjorie Musa. He left his law firm, turning over control to his law-student son. And he purchased a beach house on Guatemala’s Pacific coast for his family, according to investigators and family members. “For someone like my uncle to be driven to this extreme, he must have been incredibly frustrated,” Rodas says. “He must have been devastated.”

Read the rest at TIME
Watch the video on YouTube

STORY

For those of us who grew up in London where taxi drivers train for three years learning the location of every street, square and venue across the city, the ignorance of most New York cabbies is source of much frustration. And as if not knowing the difference between Clinton Street and Clinton Hill isn’t bad enough, they’re also famously rude.

Not so new arrival to the city, Mohammad “Mukal”Asadujjaman. When Asadujjaman found more than $21,000 in cash and expensive jewelry in the back of his cab, he set out to return it. The money, along with passports, belonged to a group of Italian tourists he’d taken to Penn Station en route to Long Island. And so the cabbie drove the 50 miles to Patchogue to find them. History doesn’t relate, however, how long the journey took him, whether he drove there via New Jersey or whether the friend who accompanied him had to get out his own satnav.

Asked if he was tempted to keep the cash, Asadujjaman acknowledged the money would have allowed him more time to study, ”but my heart said this is not good.” He also turned down a reward, saying he could not accept it as an observant Muslim.

”I’m needy, but I’m not greedy,” said Asadujjaman. ”It’s better to be honest.”

Read the rest at The New York Times

PROFILE

In this fantastic piece, Andrew Anthony in The Observer explores the life and strange death of Malcolm Caldwell. Largely forgotten today, Caldwell was a history lecturer at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies during the 1970s and a major figure in protest politics. He was unkempt and likeable, a revolutionary Marxist, and until his murder in Cambodia in 1978, a cheerleader for Pol Pot. Through Cadwell’s story, Anthony offers a fascinating insight into the naivety of the arm-chair revolutionary, the link between Marxist-Leninist ideology and communist terror and the insane brutality of the Khmer Rouge regime.

A few weeks ago I linked to an article in Der Speigel comparing the Cambodian mass murderer Duch with the Nazi Adolf Eichmann. Duch, who ran a torture camp under Pol Pot, is the only man ever to stand trial in a UN-sanctioned court for the atrocities perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge. He has just been found guilty of crimes against humanity and is awaiting sentence. As Anthony shows, Caldwell was connected to the monstrous Duch in life through ideology and a shared devotion to Pol Pot, and also in death through the torture camp S-21.

In Pol Pot, Caldwell found someone with an argument that suited his purposes. Pol’s plan was a massive increase in rice production to finance Cambodia’s reconstruction. It required collectivisation and slave labour, though Caldwell preferred to see the effort in terms of spontaneous revolutionary spirit. In the event, owing to the shortage of technicians and experts (who were killed as class enemies) and lack of peasant support, production fell well short of targets. But terrified of underperforming, regional commanders still sent their designated contribution to be exported. The result was the opposite of self-sufficiency: famine. Unable to accept the shortcomings in his plans, Pol instead blamed spies and counter-revolutionaries, and that meant that, in the absence of rice, spies and counter revolutionaries had to be produced. The network of torture camps was the only area of Democratic Kampuchea’s infrastructure that met its targets.

Of these dreadful facts, Caldwell remained ignorant on the Friday morning in Phnom Penh that he was taken in a Mercedes limousine to see Pol Pot. The setting for the meeting was the former Governor’s Palace on the waterfront, built during the French colonial period. In a grand reception room replete with fans and billowing white curtains, the two men sat down and discussed revolutionary economic theory.

Read the rest at The Observer

PROFILE

Every night some 3 million Americans tune in to hear George Noory’s radio show, Coast to Coast AM. Noory’s late night reality is one of aliens, time travel, 9/11 conspiracies, suspicious murders and vampires. In contrast to other talk show hosts he has a quiet spoken, sympathetic approach to callers that’s earned him a special place in the lives of night workers, insomniacs and occultists. Timothy Lavin spent a night in the studio to find out more about the man and his show. He leaves a little seduced; from his description of the encounter, Coast to Coast sounds like a comforting place to be in those lonely, early hours. Here he learns that Noory’s belief in the occult grew out of a formative childhood experience.

Noory’s paranormal odyssey began, appropriately, in the liminal space between sleeping and waking. One day, when he was 11 or so, home in bed and sick with a fever, he felt himself float to the ceiling and hang there, tethered by some unseen mechanism, looking down on his sleeping body. The moment was brief and scary. But it left within him both a conviction and a compulsion—a feeling that something unseen animates the world, and the impulse to investigate it. The next day, he searched the library and found The Projection of the Astral Body, by Hereward Carrington and Sylvan Muldoon, a briefly famous handbook on out-of-body experiences. Not long afterward, his mother gave him Walter Sullivan’s We Are Not Alone. His fascination with the occult burgeoned. He joined a UFO club and developed a close relationship with his cousin Shafica Karagula, a psychiatrist and the founding mother of New Age medicine.

Read the rest at The Atlantic

PROFILE

The New Yorker profile this week is Calvin Tomkins on the South African artist William Kentridge and unfortunately it’s only available for subscribers. A major exhibition of Kentridge’s work opens at Moma in February and his production of Shostakovich’s opera The Nose premieres at the Metropolitan Opera in March. The series of films that launched international interest in Kentridge’s work in the late 1980s happened almost by accident, he says. At 34, considering himself a failure at everything he had ever tried, he turned back to drawing and from there to hand drawn animations. Kentridge’s success has been aided by historical circumstances. His early development took place in the context of the cultural boycott of South Africa, an isolation he says that helped him find his own way. The subsequent interest in non-European, non American artists came at just the right time for him. “I am interested in a political art,” he says, “that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain endings. An art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check and nihilism at bay.” The piece also presents Kentridge the family man, who made puppets with his children and knows how to decorate a cake.

Read the summary at The New Yorker

OBITUARY

Miep Gies, who protected Anne Frank and her family while they were in hiding from the Nazis, died this week aged 100. After her memoirs were published in the late 1980s, Gies travelled the world speaking on the lessons of the Holocaust. The New York Times wrote an appreciation on its leader page of the gift she gave to history.

Working with her husband, Jan Gies, a member of the Dutch resistance, and three other employees of Mr. Frank’s business, she provided books, emotional support and nourishment. She traveled on her bicycle to spread her food purchases among different grocers in order to avoid suspicion. After the Gestapo raided the hiding place in August 1944, Mrs. Gies made a bold but unsuccessful attempt to bribe Gestapo officials to spare the lives of the eight arrested Jews. She is owed the world’s debt for preserving Anne’s diary, which she hid unread in the hope that its young author would survive and return to claim it.

Mrs. Gies was the last surviving member of Anne Frank’s protectors. Their collective story is an enduring reminder that human beings always have a choice, even when millions were acceding to unspeakable evil.

Read the editorial in The New York Times
Read the obituary in The New York Times
Watch an interview with Gies at Washington Post

OBITUARY

The French film-maker Eric Rohmer has died aged 89. Rohmer was a leading figure in post war new wave alongside directors Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut. His films were (in the words of Tom Milne) “a highly original and endlessly fascinating attempt to render the interior exterior by mapping out the maze of misdirections that bedevil communications between the human heart and mind.” He also published, with Claude Chabrol, a classic study of Alfred Hitchcock. Rohmer guarded his privacy fiercely, so not much is know of his private life story. This extract is from a 2001 interview in The Guardian.

Rohmer’s deeply held conservative and Catholic values have not always endeared him to the French, particularly his film-making contemporaries. By the Sixties, Cahiers du cinéma had become radically politicised. Rohmer and the more conservative Truffaut were allegedly antagonised by their colleagues on the journal, among their number probably the greatest exponent of New Wave radical cinema Jean-Luc Godard. Jim Hillier’s anthology Cahiers du Cinéma has Rohmer accusing his colleagues on the review of a kind of ‘terrorism’ designed to force him (and Truffaut) to embrace ideas of radical modernism and leftism. In response, Rohmer is quoted as saying that one should not ‘be afraid of not being modern… you have to know how to go against the trend of the times’.

Read the 2001 interview in The Guardian
Read the obituary in The Guardian

OBITUARY

With his animated clay figure Gumby, Art Clokey, who has died at 88, touched the lives of children around the world. Clokey’s own childhood was touched by tragedy. When at the age of eight his father died in a car accident, his mother and her new husband put him in an orphanage. Clokey later drew on the image of his late father when he created Gumby, whose head is shaped after his father’s lopsided hairdo.

Clokey’s 1953 experimental film, “Gumbasia,” used stop-motion clay animation set to a lively jazz tempo. It became the inspiration for the subsequent Gumby TV show when Sam Engel, the president of 20th Century Fox and father of one of Clokey’s students, saw the film and asked Clokey to produce a children’s television show based on the idea.

In the 1960s, Clokey created and produced the Christian TV series “Davey and Goliath” and the credits for several feature films, including “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini.”

Gumby’s ability to enchant generations of children and adults had a mystical quality to it, said his son, and reflected his father’s spiritual quest. In the 1970s, Clokey studied Zen Buddhism, traveled to India to study with gurus and experimented with LSD and other drugs, though all of that came long after the creation of Gumby, his son said.

Read the rest at The LA Times
Watch a video of Gumby at Boing Boing

OBITUARY

Brad L Graham was one of the first non-geeks to take up residence on the web. He helped build the kind of community online that he’d already found in Austin’s theatre scene. Today we take for granted that behind the blog or the online comment is a real person, but Brad was instrumental in showing that to be true, and in so doing he helped make the web a more social place. Anil Dash has posted a moving personal tribute to his friend on his blog Anil Dash: A blog about making culture.

In that era, before meetups and tweetups and mass political movements organized by bloggers, Brad recognized that not only were there real humans interacting on these sites, but that all of us who shared our thoughts online were part of a creative community every bit as legitimate and unifying as his work in theater. And the evidence of that belief is everywhere. Over the days since Brad’s passing, amidst the heartbreak, I’ve seen literally dozens of people say, in their own words, “Brad was the first online person I ever met in real life.” In cities all over the world, in one-on-one meetups to cities he’d never visited, or in his legendarily inclusive hundreds-strong Break Bread with Brad annual drinkfest in Austin, Brad brought together people who hadn’t yet realized how they had made real, significant relationships online.

Read the rest on Anil Dash’s blog

BOOK

John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s sensational account of the 2008 presidential campaign Game Change has been getting lots of attention this week. If the extract in New York Magazine is anything to go by it’s a racy read. This section charts the downfall of John Edwards, his extramarital affair and the growing disillusionment among his staff. But while the narrative flow of Heilemann and Halperin’s account relies on its lack of attribution (which also gave them access to all sorts of off the record confidences) we have to take the salacious detail on trust. And as Lee Seigel points out at The Daily Beast, the reality of other people’s relationships is hard enough for the people involved to understand: the Edwards marriage and the portrait of Elizabeth has a certain cartoon quality.

Elizabeth and her family were waiting at the campaign headquarters in a small room with big windows overlooking an expansive lawn below. Hundreds of people were there for the rally, listening to a bluegrass band. Edwards and his aides arrived straight from the airport and breezed into the room. Hunter was toting her camera, sticking like glue to Edwards, acting the way she always did—too familiar, too intimate. Always jealous of anyone, male or female, who seemed close to John, Elizabeth watched Hunter working the room. The expression on Mrs. Edwards’s face said: Who is this woman? And what is she doing here? Icily, Elizabeth asked Hunter to back off. “Excuse me, we’re trying to have some privacy,” she said.

Read the rest at New York Magazine
Read Lee Siegel’s comment at The Daily Beast
Read Tina Brown on the bigger story in Game Change at the Daily Beast

BOOK

Lewis Jones at The Telegraph reviews a new translation of The World of Yesterday, the memoir of Stefan Zweig, in his day one of Germany’s leading writers.

Zweig sent the manuscript to his publisher the day before his death, in a suicide pact with his second wife, in Brazil in 1942, so one might expect an extended suicide note, but it is far from that. It is, rather, a kind of obituary, not of its author but of the world he grew up in, of which he rightly saw himself as a distinguished representative: “nine-tenths of what the world of the 19th century celebrated as Viennese culture was in fact culture promoted and nurtured or even created by the Jews of Vienna”.

…His account of the Nazi death cult, its systematic destruction of the humane culture he so loved, and of his own persecution and exile makes painful reading, but is enlivened by shrewd and sympathetic vignettes of such friends as Wells, Joyce, Ravel and Strauss

Read the rest at The Telegraph

BOOK

Graham Farmelo has won the Costa Biography Award for his biography of Paul Dirac. Although described by Stephen Hawking as “probably the best theoretical physicist since Newton”, Dirac’s name has passed into obscurity. But when Farmelo began digging into Dirac’s life story he found dynamite. (Interview by Ally Carnwath)

Dirac is not, Farmelo admits, the most obvious subject for a prize-winning biography. His shyness was as renowned as his eureka moments; he may have deduced the existence of anti-matter through his theories but he was so bad at small talk that he once sat in silence for half an hour before responding to a question about his holiday plans. Farmelo was told by fellow physicists not to bother writing about him as there was nothing there.

But the more he dug, the more he discovered to refute Dirac’s dry reputation: “This X-certificate family life, this poisonous marriage of his parents, becoming a Washington lobbyist, going to the killing fields of Stalin. It’s the most extraordinary stuff and it was coming out month after month…”

Read the rest at The Observer

RADIO

This week I spent some time catching up on radio I’d missed over the holiday. The highlight was the New Year’s Day edition of This American Life. Eschewing prediction, the show focused instead on concrete life events that are sure to happen in 2010. The first one is a real weepy.

Listen to the show on This American Life’s website

FILM

A documentary about Patti Smith, Dream of Life by Steven Sebring, is on the way. The rock legend has also published a memoir of life with Robert Mapplethorpe.

Watch the trailer
Read the profile at New York Magazine
Read an excerpt from her memoir at Rolling Stone

MULTI-MEDIA

Wow. Another weepy. This by Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist Carol Guzy: a slideshow of photos with sound of 104 year old Miss Classie as she approaches death. Watch it. It draws you in slowly, the way Guzy herself was drawn in. In an accompanying piece she writes about her own grief, for Miss Classie and later her own mother, and about how hard it was to put down her camera as death got closer. Did she achieve her aim ”to portray the honesty of Classie’s decline yet maintain the dignity of her humanity”? Without doubt.

Watch the gallery at The Washington Post
Read the accompanying article at The Washington Post

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Life Stories Roundup January 8; Life Stories roundup December 31; Life Stories roundup December 24; Life Stories roundup December 16

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To see previous roundups visit Life Stories.

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Life Stories Roundup, This Week 1/1–1/8

Zoe Blackler — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 23:00:49 +0000

A roundup of profiles and life stories from around the web.:

To receive this roundup as a weekly newsletter please send an email to lifestoriesroundup@gmail.com with “signup” in the subject line

FIRST PERSON

In this compelling account, Katharine Hibbert describes the year she spent living off skips and supermarket leftovers. Having lost her job, unable to pay rent, she decided to walk away from her conventional existence and live without money. Setting off with a sleeping bag, a couple of changes of clothes and a £20 note, she went looking for the squatters and freegans who could show her how to survive. Of most surprise to her was how quickly it all became routine. In her old life Katharine was a journalist, so it’s of little surprise to us that there was a book in it. Though if you’re wondering if that supplied half her motivation there are no clues here I’m afraid.

In my first two months as a squatter and a scavenger I spent 54p – less than a penny a day. Ten pence had gone on a sheet of photocopying and the other 44p had bought me a KitKat at my lowest ebb in the first week. It was extraordinary how quickly it had become routine to get through a day without cash. I’d slept on a mattress every night and hadn’t had to go more than two days without a wash. Before I’d set out, I’d been worried I’d have to live with chaotic or drug-addicted housemates. I’d asked my boyfriend to expect a text from me every evening to tell him I was OK, so that he would raise the alarm if something went wrong. But, after the first couple of nights, I felt silly writing a message. Even when I was low and lonely, that I was safe went without saying.

Read the rest at The Guardian

FIRST PERSON

Barack’s brother George Obama had a privileged upbringing in Nairobi, Kenya, but during his teens and early 20s lost himself in drink, drugs and gangster violence, ending up in prison on robbery charges. When he was released, he founded a youth group and set up a football club for ghetto kids. While his brother has risen to be the leader of the most powerful country in the world, he says he hopes to be a leader among the poorest and most powerless.

Eventually the press found me in my slum. My new notoriety was a blessing and a curse. Many people presume I have a direct line to the White House, but I don’t. I’ve only met my big brother twice and have spoken to him just once since the election, to say congratulations. Still, because of our connection, I managed to pull in funds from philanthropists to support the work of the youth group. I raised enough money to buy the team gold and green uniforms—with their own numbers on the back. Last fall, Obama’s Champs won the Nairobi Super League—a feat that, just a couple of years back, would have been unthinkable for a team from the slums. With the sponsorship I’ve attracted because of my last name, we can now afford to take buses all across Kenya for matches.

Read the rest at Newsweek

FIRST PERSON

These four moving stories show the damage done when adults find out they were adopted as babies. All four discovered later in life, most learning the secret from strangers. One says it made him question the right to keep his father’s war medals, another who only found out aged 60, says he understands now why he always felt he didn’t belong. (Interviews by Kate Hilpern)

Hilary Moon, 60, was 48 when she discovered that she was adopted. She is divorced.

“About eight years ago, my biological sister sought me out. She put me in touch with my birth mother, to whom I look incredibly similar. I’ve met others in the extended family, too, and I even changed my full name to what it was before the adoption. With all my adoptive family dead, and a large birth family still alive, it just made sense to me. But, actually, they’re a funny lot and I can’t say I feel any great bond with them.

“The whole situation has left me feeling neither part of my adoptive nor my biological family, and the lack of a sense of belonging in either can make me feel lonely if I let it. When people ask me who is my next of kin, I say, ‘I haven’t got one’, because that’s how it feels.”

Read the rest at The Guardian

VIGNETTE

Zadie Smith’s father loved classic British sitcoms like Hancock’s Half Hour and Steptoe and Son and he passed this love on to his children. Even after she left for University, education and class forcing them ever further apart, Zadie and Harvey still had Hancock, Basil Fawlty and Monty Python. They left it to the comedy to speak about the painful divisions between them. As her father lay dying in a Felixstowe nursing home, she refused to see the black humour, the absurdity, attempting instead to stage-manage his death. The futility of her efforts, and later her refusal to see his body left her “suspended in a bad joke in which a living man inexplicably becomes two pints of dust and everyone acts as if this were not a joke at all but, rather, the most reasonable thing in the world.” The power of the last paragraph is lost a little in this online version since a mistake means it runs into a repeat of the entire piece. Or were the subs having their own joke? Harvey hadn’t realized the end had come and neither will you dear reader.

Conversely, the death we speak of and deal with every day, the death that is full of meaning, the non-absurd death, this is a place-marker, a fake, a convenient substitute. It was this sort of death that I was determined to press upon my father, as he did his dying. In my version, Harvey was dying meaningfully, in linear fashion, within a scenario stage-managed and scripted by the people around him. Neatly crafted, like an American sitcom: The One in Which My Father Dies. It was to conclude with a real event called Death, which he would experience and for which he would be ready. I did all the usual, banal things. I brought a Dictaphone to his bedside, in order to collect the narrative of his life (this perplexed him — he couldn’t see the through line). I grew furious with overworked nurses.

I refused to countenance any morbidity from my father, or any despair. The funniest thing about dying is how much we, the living, ask of the dying; how we beg them to make it easy on us. At the hospital, I ingratiated myself with the doctors and threw what the British call “new money” at the situation. Harvey watched me go about my business with a puzzled half smile.

Read the rest at the Times Online

VIGNETTE

Deborah Orr commits the most nauseating act of celebrity gushing in the pages of The Guardian. She’s speaking out in defense of Sadie Frost’s naked spread in Grazia.

Sure she’s slender, she’s toned, and she keeps herself in good nick. Anyone can do that, given the motivation. But Frost’s flesh has a special quality. It looks both soft and firm, like no female flesh I’ve never seen…. I’ll never forget her unique, indefinable, pure loveliness, and the pleasure it was to just sit there, drinking it in.

Read the rest at The Guardian

STORY

Why Van Gogh cut off his own ear has been the object of much speculation. The Art Newspaper believes it can now reveal the answer. A still life painted the following year includes a letter from Van Gogh’s brother. From the postmark and other circumstantial evidence, the paper concludes that Vincent found out about his brother Theo’s engagement before his self-mutilation and that this was the cause of his distress. Vincent feared that Theo would withdraw his emotional and financial support once he was married. Not everyone is convinced by this theory, as evidenced by the comments. The paper stretches speculation further, suggesting the inclusion of the fateful letter in the painting could have additional significance. (By Martin Bailey)

Although it is speculation, the postmark on the envelope might represent a coded message that the strong links between the two brothers would survive. The Musée de La Poste in Paris told us that although “Jour de l’An” postmarks were widely used in the run-up to Christmas and New Year in the 1880s, most are fairly small marks, rather than the more prominent words inscribed by Van Gogh. This suggests that the personalised postmark may have been Vincent’s way of stressing to Theo that the letter depicted was a very particular one—and that he wished his brother well for the new year.

Read the rest at the Art Newspaper

STORY

This week felt like an episode of Spooks (or MI5 if your American, though probably actually 24) with the revelation that the suicide bomber Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, (aka Humam Khalil Mohammed) who killed seven CIA officers and a Jordanian spy was in fact a double agent. If this really had been Spooks, however, the fictional Harry Pearce would have made sure we never read about it in the newspapers. That Al Queda felt relaxed enough to take on the complex job of running a double agent is bad news for the rest of us. The story got several places digging through their archives for pictures of former double agents. TIME’s “dossier” includes the fantastically creased face of Dusko Popov, inspiration for Ian Fleming’s James Bond and Ashraf Marwan who came to a mysteriously sticky end in 2007. The New Republic also has a good roundup.

Agency officers had traveled from Kabul, the Afghan capital, to Khost for a meeting with the informant, a sign that the C.I.A. had come to trust the informant and that it was eager to learn what he might have gleaned from operations in the field, according to a former C.I.A. official with experience in Afghanistan.

The former official said that the fact that militants could carry out a successful attack using a double agent showed their strength even after a steady barrage of missile strikes fired by C.I.A. drone aircraft.

“Double agent operations are really complex,” he said. “The fact that they can pull this off shows that they are not really on the run. They have the ability to kick back and think about these things.”

Read the rest at The New York Times

See the TIME “dossier”
See The New Republic’s slideshow

PROFILE

Former AIDS activist Larry Kramer, creator of ACT UP and co-founder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, revolutionised the treatment of HIV, becoming a gay hero in the ’80s. Today, after nearly dying of liver disease, he is writing an alternative history of the United States, recast as a gay nation. In The American People, his sprawling work in progress with echoes of Moby Dick, he outs Lincoln, Washington and Lewis and Clark among others. In this probing profile, Jesse Green wonders if this search for a great gay father in history is driven by his lack of one in childhood. Green’s portrait is that of a man who has had his moment, unable to adapt and mellow with changed circumstances. Marginalised and disappointed, Kramer’s anger, so effective 25 years ago, is now misdirected in vicious spats with friends and associates.

But who is the enemy now? Not that old standby, the medical Establishment, which gave him a liver and thus his life. Nor his insurance company; Kramer gratefully pays almost nothing for the thousands of dollars’ worth of anti-viral and anti-rejection drugs delivered monthly to his door. As for homophobia, it may now be too diffuse to respond to the full-bore strategy of a Kramer-style attack. The “lack of anger” he finds around him, and which he has attempted in recent years to replenish from his own apparently bottomless supply, similarly cannot be attacked head on. And sitting on a sofa in his third-floor apartment (he’s terrified of heights because they invite jumping), sweet little Larry—asking after one’s health, cuddling his terrier—seems to know it. Of course one quickly remembers that even pets are made part of the struggle. A few years (and another dog) ago, when Koch moved into his building, Kramer was ordered by management to keep his distance, at least verbally. So when Kramer ran into the ex-mayor in the mailroom one day, he looked at his pooch and said, “Don’t go near him, Molly, that’s the man who murdered all of Daddy’s friends!”

Read the rest at New York Magazine

PROFILE

In 1967 when he was just 15, Choi Sung-Yong’s father, a South Korean fisher boat captain, was abducted by agents from North Korea. For four decades he’s been trying to trace his father, in the process putting in place an underground railroad between North Korea and China. So far he’s managed to free seven South Korean abductees – more than the Seoul government, reluctant to take a strong line, has managed to achieve. (By Martin Fackler.)

His efforts — and his role with Abductees’ Family Union, which lobbies for the families of 505 civilians thought by the South Korean government to have been kidnapped — have earned him wide attention in the South’s media. They have also, he says, led to death threats from the North.

As a result, he is now afraid to travel to China. But he says he will press on until he finds out what happened to his father, who would be 99 years old now if still alive, or at least retrieve his remains. His father’s former crew said his father had been kept in the North because of his war record, and Mr. Choi fears he may have been executed.

“I have been a headache for the South Korean government,” Mr. Choi said. “But I am finally carrying out my filial duty to my father.”

Read the rest at The New York Times

PROFILE

Chess genius Magnus Carlsen has had an electrifying rise. Last November, at just 18, the Norwegian teenager became the youngest World No. 1 in the game’s history earning him the moniker Mozart of Chess. His success is not the result of parental pushiness. The primary concern of his father, who says he’s spent more time urging his young son to do schoolwork than play chess, is that the game should make him happy. Despite the grumpy photo, Carlsen insists he isn’t plagued by the obsessiveness that has driven other grandmasters to madness. By Eben Harrell

Carlsen joins chess’s élite at a time of unprecedented change. He is one of a generation of players who learned the game from computers. To this day, he’s not certain if he has an actual board at home. “I might have one somewhere. I’m not sure,” he says. Powerful chess programs, which now routinely beat the best human competitors, have allowed grand masters to study positions at a deeper level than was possible before. Short says top players can now spend almost an entire game trading moves that have been scripted by the same program and that such play by rote has removed some of the mystique of chess. He likens chess computers to “chainsaws chopping down the Amazon.”

But Kasparov says Carlsen’s mastery is rooted in a “deep intuitive sense no computer can teach” and that his pupil “has a natural feel for where to place the pieces.” According to Kasparov, Carlsen has a knack for sensing the potential energy in each move, even if its ultimate effect is too far away for anyone — even a computer — to calculate. In the grand-master commentary room, where chess’s clerisy gather to analyze play, the experts did not even consider several of Carlsen’s moves during his game with Kramnik until they saw them and realized they were perfect. “It’s hard to explain,” Carlsen says. “Sometimes a move just feels right.”

Read the rest at TIME

OBITUARY

I’ve been hoping for an excuse to include something by Laura Barton. The way she writes about music is emotional without ever tipping into sentiment, lyrical without ever becoming pretensious. This, atypical, piece, is a tribute to Vic Chesnutt who committed suicide on Christmas Day, aged just 45. She was looking for a voice to capture how it felt to hear he had died, when she realised it was Chesnutt’s own that she was looking for – the rasping voice she first heard at a sad, lost time in her own life.

Chesnutt was one of those rare artists for whom there seems an absolute marriage between voice and lyrics. His voice was dirty and cracked, with something secondhand and much-used about it, and it seemed to rise up from some dark, deep, doleful place in the pit of him. He sang in Sponge of both “the ancient odour of the streets” and of how “all my gravy must have soaked into something”. And that is precisely how his voice sounded: well-trodden and long-aged, a stench as much as a sound, and somehow deprived of some once-known joy. There was always a pang to it, always a belly-lurch, always a feeling of the sudden gulf of loss.

Read the rest at The Guardian

OBITUARY

Tsutomu Yamaguchi, was the only official survivor of both atomic blasts to hit Japan in World War II. He died on Monday in Nagasaki, Japan aged 93. (By Mark McDonald.)

Mr. Yamaguchi, as a 29-year-old engineer for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, was in Hiroshima on a business trip when the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945. He was getting off a streetcar when the so-called Little Boy device detonated above the city.

Mr. Yamaguchi said he was less than two miles away from ground zero that day. His eardrums were ruptured, and his upper torso was burned by the blast, which destroyed most of the city’s buildings and killed 80,000 people.

Mr. Yamaguchi spent the night in a Hiroshima bomb shelter and returned to Nagasaki, his hometown, the following day, according to interviews he gave over the years. The second bomb, known as Fat Man, was dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, killing 70,000 people.

Read the rest in the New York Times

Read the interview in The Independent

BOOKS

In his second memoir, the poet John Burnside describes how he turned away from drugs and alcohol to find salvation in solitude and nature. After being diagnosed with apophenia, (a desperate search for meaning in unrelated things, a search for an overarching order), he walked away from the psychiatric ward and headed for suburban south London, eventually finding a way out of the madness. In the years since, Burnside has won numerous awards for his poetry. For Aida Edemariam reviewing Waking up in Toytown “the seeming disjuncture, in this memoir, between the squalor and desperation he describes and the precision and beauty of his language is like a proof of his achievement – a kind of higher sanity.”

One day, late in the book, he finds himself travelling in Norway, far inside the Arctic circle. Arriving early at the small local airport, he sits and gazes out at the whiteness of the airfield. “I sat a long time, that day, waiting for my flight – and some of me is sitting there still, enjoying the stillness, becoming the silence, learning how to vanish. Every day, in every way, I am disappearing, just a little – and it feels like flying, it feels like the kind of flight I was trying for, that first time, when I was nine years old – but it has nothing to do with the will, and it has nothing to do with trying. If it happens at all it happens as a gift: and this is the one definition of grace I can trust.”

Read the rest at The Guardian

BOOK

Elizabeth Gilbert has just published a follow up to the contrived self-help memoir Eat Pray Love that became such a ludicrously big hit. That this new book finds her just as neurotic and shallow, but without either justification or a decent tale to tell is causing reviewers no end of glee. Hitched charts Gilbert’s supposed commitment crisis when faced with the prospect of marriage. Since this seems more of a legal formality than a major life change, is her anxiety really about whether she can deliver another killer best seller? Lizzie Skurnick reviews for The Daily Beast.

Why Gilbert is so desperately undone by the notion of the green-card marriage is ostensibly the author’s question to herself, but it increasingly becomes one for the reader. Even a Homeland Security officer, as he takes Felipe away, feels compelled to explain the obvious. “No, seriously—what’s the problem?” asked Officer Tom. “You two have obviously been cohabiting already. You obviously care about each other, you’re not married to anyone else… you could always sign a prenuptial agreement… I mean, if you’re worried about going through all the financial mess of a divorce again. Or if it’s the relationship issues that scare you, maybe some counseling would be a good idea.”

Read the rest at The Daily Beast

The Rumpus.net » Zoe Blackler

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