The new ICA in Boston

The new ICA on the waterfront, Nov. 22, 2013

The homer in me can't resist putting it this way: on a recent trip to Boston I had a chance to finally see the second-best contemporary art museum in Massachusetts. The Institute of Contemporary Art is a perfectly respectable museum, with a marquee new building, but it's no MASS MoCA.

I had once visited the ICA's former home, in a converted firehouse in Back Bay which it had quite clearly outgrown. But that it took so long to get its new facility says a lot about the politics of art funding around here. In the 80s and 90s, while MoCA was struggling through its long gestation, no institution complained louder and longer than ICA. The couldn't believe the state would spend tens of millions of dollars on a brand new contemporary art museum in the middle of nowhere.

Maybe they had a point, but since I live here in Berkshire County and not in Boston, I can't give it too much thought. Boston has a lot of cultural offerings and economic opportunities. We get the short end of the stick often enough — there are real reasons why in many ways we feel closer to New York than to Boston.

The new ICA, like MoCA, was built at at time when museums must be considered more than simply places to store art. Today, they have to be part of a broader economic development scheme, in their case an effort to bring something to the desolate stretch of waterfront between the Moakley Federal Courthouse and the cavernous new convention behemoth. It seems like that project is coming along in a rather fitful way. Walking to the are from South Station, it feels like lots of parking lots and glass towers, not like a neighborhood in any meaningful way. In a city with such a deep history, and with so many vibrant and ancient communities all around, the ICA finds itself anchoring the one part of Boston with no personality whatsoever.

The building itself is quite an achievement, in a very showy way. Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, it shows off its engineering skill and cutting edginess every way it can, through its contours of glass, steel, and concrete. The effect can be disorienting — it feels to me like it was built upside down. Many of its enthusiasts talk about how open it is, how it interacts with the water in front of it. All true, I guess, but you might also note how noisy it is, and how many of the spaces don't make much sense. One of the weirder features is something called the "mediatheque," a long narrow pod emerging from the belly of the building which is filled with rows and rows of computers, and where visitors are invited to relax and watch videos and other content relative to the exhibits. That's alright, but scourge of concrete building, I couldn't help but notice the giant crack in one of the upper steps.

The building got me thinking about architecture in Boston, and led me to a strange realization: the much-maligned Boston City Hall might be the last truly brave and interesting thing built in that city. Partly that's for the simple reason that it came from a distinct school of thought, and had the guts to stick to it. Whatever would replace it — and the new mayor has already said he's open to the idea — would be timid, flashy, and as brave as an investment banker's new BMW. You only have to look around the Financial District from across the Fort Point Channel to see how dumb and bland things have gotten. One mediocre high-rise with a cheap gimmick feature next to another. And don't even get me started on the TD Bank Garden.

These are building that just do their job. And the job of the new ICA is to shout, "Look at the neat arty thing sitting over here!" And the exhibits on display didn't really convince me that any serious path-breaking work is going on. A retrospective of the work of Amy Sillman, which was entertaining, along with an obvious show of new work considering the boundaries of painting, and the work of a photographer who takes unflinching images of postindustrial society. In other words, nothing really surprising.

There is so much awesome stuff in Boston. A day at the Museum of Fine Art is as great an art experience as you can have in America. On my last trip, I paid my first visit to the Isabella Steward Gardner Museum, which boasts an astonishing collection hiding in a quirky setting (perhaps too quirky at times, but that's just me). Boston also has an amazing aquarium, a stupendous science museum, and a world class symphony. But contemporary art remains an afterthought.

My daughter's first Bruins game

My daughter and I made our first trip together to the TD Garden last month, where we saw the Bruins take care of the Carolina Hurricanes, 3-2 in overtime. I wrote about my thoughts about her first game compared to the games I went to when I was a kid in a column for the Eagle. 

How to explain the day John Kennedy died

It is still shocking how badly the Kennedy assassination traumatized us, how it launched millions of rounds of conspiracy theorizing, historical taxonomy, and sorrowful speculation about missing futures. And on this key anniversary, it feels as if all we can do is helplessly circle around the sadness at the heart of it all, about the event itself.

It is a thing that still lives and thrives in a fog of words, feelings, and memories. If we aren't careful, it can be a crutch of self-pity and misplaces frustration. And I think we need help thinking about what is important about it and what questions and challenges it raises that we still have to face. So if I can add my little bit, I'd point readers to something Daniel Schorr wrote in the New York Review of Books in October 1977 that shines through the event's aftermath like a light.

Schorr's essay, which is alas behind a archive paywall, is a patient and methodical effort to connect the investigations done by the Warren Commission in the aftermath of the tragedy to the work done in the mid-1970s as America sorted through the violence, horror, and shame of the 60s. Specifically, he dug through the findings of the Church Committee, which had hauled before the American people all the mischief and skullduggery its secret security services had carried themselves into. It was the kind of shocking and painful public reckoning that only a healthy democracy can live through, and people like me who remember it were in no way surprised by the recent NSA revelations, but have been horrified by our shrugging indifference to them.

Many of the things that Schorr explains in detail were new then but in the past decades have been well-digested and, sadly, forgotten. In particular, he looks at the CIA and the Mafia's efforts to turn back the Cuban revolution. It was both horrifying and plainly ridiculous:

"My favorite plot — nonlethal — was what someone in the CIA called “elimination by illumination.” It was dreamed up by General Edward Lansdale, Robert Kennedy’s coordinator for the hidden war against Castro. Never put into execution, the plan was to spread the word in Cuba of the imminent Second Coming of Christ, with the corollary message that Castro, the Antichrist, would have to go. At the appointed time, American submarines would surface off the coast, sending up star shells, which would presumably inspire the Cubans to rise up against Castro."

And Schorr also casually hints at scandals that continue today. For example, that Bill Moyers, who makes a living as a self-righteous media scold and sanctimonious old fart, almost certainly knows way, way more than he's telling about some important things. Specifically, Schorr notes that Moyer, as a top LBJ aide, was part of the conversation about the effort in the days after the assassination to cut off speculation about motivations and any possibility of Communist involvement (that's in the Church Committee report). And so, until that man speaks — and real reporter Robert Caro has spent decades politely inviting him to do so — he's a fraud and anything else he has to say is bullshit.

See, what I'm really talking about is journalism, and how they can help fix a problem. So much of what a reporter can do is really just putting things in context, of explaining the history and the mechanics of a complicated thing in a simple way. And by doing so, he probably comes closest to finding a motivation than anyone else:

"Had the [Warren] commission not been so completely sidetracked from every Cuban lead, it might have found what this reporter was able to find—buried in the commission’s own files or later dug up in congressional investigations and from other sources.

Where the 'Castro revenge' theory had run aground was on the lack of evidence that Oswald had any contact with anyone who knew about the CIA’s secret plotting against the Cuban leader. But Oswald did not need to have such contact to reach the conclusion that Castro, his hero, was being threatened and that he, in turn, could become a hero in Cuba by responding to the threat."

All the evidence is lying in plain sight; you don't need grassy knolls or magic bullets. Just the moral awareness of the irony of what had come back to haunt us:

"The possibility that Oswald acted on his own, inspired by Castro’s statement, cannot today be proved, but it has the elements of the fortuitous and the lunatic that sometimes govern history. The “conspiracy,” then, would have been a conspiracy of interlocking events—the incessant CIA plots to kill Castro, touching off a Castro warning, touching off something in the fevered mind of Lee Harvey Oswald. 

It would be comforting to know that Oswald acted on his own—not as part of some dark left-wing or right-wing plot to strike down a president. It is less comforting to realize that the chain of events may have started with the reckless plotting of the CIA against Castro, perhaps in pursuit of what it thought to be Kennedy’s aim. An arrow launched into the air to kill a foreign leader may well have fallen back to kill our own."

As you can see, Schorr is a hero to me, and I'm amazed at the variety of ways his courage took shape. When he wrote that piece for the NYRB, it was just about a year after being effectively fired by his long-time employer, CBS News, who wouldn't support him in an effort to protect the name of a source who had leaked a suppressed Congressional report about CIA overreach.

The more things are the same… CBS wouldn't stick up for Schorr then, but look at what they stand up for today: television personality like Lara Logan, who interprets her job as "Chief Foreign Correspondent" as being like a press officer to make members of the military-industrial complex look heroic and cool, cheerfully do their dirty work of slandering opponents, and have pictures of herself looking cute taken in tanks and helicopters. That's what corporate journalism is worth. And that's why so little makes sense any more.

Anyone who ever had a heart...

It's been nearly two weeks since Lou Reed died, and after reading as many tributes as I could find, and listening to most of his albums since, I'm pretty confident that most listeners got him all wrong.*

I've never been a big proponent of the New Criticism school of literary criticism, the idea that all you need to understand a work of art can be found right in the text itself. I was an English and History major all those years ago, after all. But as a mindset it is a pretty effective tool when sorting through popular culture — and it really lights up Lou Reed's work, which is too often befogged by his reputation and easy assumptions.

Lou Reed's work meant a lot to me, and since he died I've been struck by the strange number of ways his words and music are woven into my life. The first song I listened to after my daughter was born was by Lou Reed (it's how she got her middle name, in fact). Certain songs can summon thoughts and feelings with magical thoroughness: each time I hear "Sunday Morning" I'm back on certain New York streets at certain late hours remembering certain things — an insane feedback loop of nostalgia, sorrow, and regret that is so intense I don't want to talk about it. Some memories I can't even make sense of. Like that one afternoon shortly after I'd moved to Williamstown and was overwhelmed with how remote and lonely it felt, and the song "Dirty Boulevard" came on WEQX. Something about hearing it at that moment made me so happy I nearly cried.

This is all means quite a lot to me, but what I want to talk about is how he lives in our culture. The conventional line, which you've heard over and over again since his death, is that he was a consummate outsider, a poet of rough, beautiful, alternative lifestyles in the big, bad city. A chronicler of those things in the night that are frightening yet strangely attractive.

Well, a little, maybe, but no.

Let's go to the text. Consider the song "Perfect Day." The prejudiced reading is that it must have something to do with how groovy it is to get stoned in the park. But there is nothing in the song that suggests anything of the sort. You have to — and too few people can for some reason — take it at face value: that it is about how nice it is to spend the day with someone you love. Anything more and you are missing the signal by broadcasting your own noise.

The shocking truth is that Reed was an almost perfectly irony-free romantic, which is so weird and counter to his counter-cultural reputation — not to mention the generally accepted understanding of his prickly personality — that he becomes revolutionary.

The songs are crystalline images of very powerful emotions, and they work best when you trust him and meet him on his own terms. A real favorite song of mine is "Coney Island Baby," which captures the weird longing to be accepted and terror of boredom that is as perfect a summary of teenage longing as you'll find. But to really get it, you have to understand what it means to want to play football for the coach, and not think it means something kinky or sarcastic. You have to believe in the "glory of love" with all the seriousness and logic half-formed youth can muster. And, of course, you have to let "I swear I'd give it all up for you" be the last word.  Doesn't matter what "it" might be. You probably felt that way once. I hope you did.

Throughout his work he was exploring what we have in common. Think about Transformer, an album that can't shake its reputation as a roman a clef about drag queens, junkies, and whores. But none of that really matters if you don't know, or even better, can get past, the novelty of it. If it weren't such a plain amazing song, it would astonishing that "Walk on the Wild Side" is the song everyone knows from his solo period (and I'm still figuring out how my state senator tweeted his memory of driving down Route 7 blasting the song with his dad in the car… his dad being our long-time district attorney). This is very human and universal, like the best art is, about alienation and loneliness and redemption. About fun and the desperate lengths we go to make our lives less dull and sad. It's a fortunate, collateral effect that it happens to maybe make you realize how much you have in common with people you might too quickly dismiss as marginal.

And I really think that Lou chose his subjects out of an abundance of compassion. Even his legendary prickliness is a function of his intense sincerity and earnestness. He couldn't be bothered with the deep artifice we demand of public figures. He obviously had many deep personal relationships, so he wasn't a total misanthrope.

When you look at the work all together, you see what values are at work. Tolerance, community, curiosity, cynicism about nothing but cynicism itself. His art is about the incredibly ancient and durable and maybe trite idea that life is really worth all the trouble if you are honest with yourself and look at it right.

* Not really true. As with so many things his wife Laurie Anderson gets it: "Lou was a prince and a fighter and I know his songs of the pain and beauty in the world will fill many people with the incredible joy he felt for life. Long live the beauty that comes down and through and onto all of us."

Chinese compromises

China is enormous and important — culturally, economically  it is a place that can't be ignored. But there are lots of questions we need to ask about exactly how to engage with it. That is, how to be respectful and open-minded about another culture while still preserving our idea of universal western values. And I don't think our sense of history or of the world beyond our borders has prepared to understand these challenges.

I was thinking about this when I read the story in today's Times about how readily Western publishers censor works for publication in China.

Such compromises, almost unheard of just five years ago, are becoming increasingly common as American authors and their publishers are drawn to the Chinese market. With a highly literate population hungry for the works of foreign writers, China is an increasing source of revenue for American publishing houses; last year e-book earnings for American publishers from China grew by 56 percent, according to the Association of American Publishers. Chinese publishing companies bought more than 16,000 titles from abroad in 2012, up from 1,664 in 1995. [my italics]

Some people, who are trying to make a buck, have done the math and figured that this is the way to go. I'm not sure that I am convinced. But that this isn't a big conversation is a serious concern.

This is, in part, what I was writing about in my column about Xu Bing's "Phoenix." Americans have lost the ability to navigate international situations that aren't black and white.

Anselm Kiefer arrives at Mass MoCA

'Narrow Are the Vessels'

Whenever a new building opens at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art it's a treat. Especially when it is a facility dedicated to a major and controversial artist. As the Globe's Sebastian Smee noted, the new building is about a lot of things — a career coming into focus, a museum continuing to stand on its own feet. But it is also about pioneering a new model of private / non-profit partnership in the arts. And for the Berkshire art world, it is another exciting step, as MoCA cements itself as the kind of place that attract Big Name international artists like Xu Bing, and lends some of that sheen to exciting young artists like Jason Middlebrook.

I went to visit the new space when it opened late last month. The building, which is near the Hadley Overpass on a previously unused portion of the campus, is as grand and severe as Kiefer's work. It is pitch-perfect for the works on display, and my only complaint is that it is much smaller than I would have hoped (only three works, really, but each of them is a doozy).

It begins with Narrow Are the Vessels, which MoCA-goers will remember had been in the main gallery for some time awhile back. The piece is a pile of long slabs on concrete, with rusty rebar jutting out in a menacing way, and crumbling bits of cement scattered on the floor. It looks like the aftermath of a bombing or an earthquake, the product of some sort of violence. But you realize after a few minutes that you've never seen concrete with such graceful curves and undulations, and wonder what this might have been before it became wreckage.

One of 30 paintings on display

Within a gallery inside the gallery is the 30 painting series Velmir Chlebnikov, a tribute to the "Russian poet and futurist who created complex analytical systems based on esoteric mathematical calculations meant to reveal vast paradoxes in logic and in the progression of history." In particular, it is about famous sea battle through the years, and seeing them together evokes the cycles of tides and weather and water that will haunt you if you go to the sea in the right frame of mind. Each canvas is encrusted with pain, and suggests its subject the way J.M.W. Turner's seascapes do. They speak of dark nights on a moonlight sea, the silent frightening depths, the fog, the lonely strand and scattered wreckage washed ashore.

Each of the pieces is about the patterns that emerge from chaos, about the grace and beauty of these moments in the present, and the ways they harden into memory and history. It is lyrical and human, and not as cold and distant as it seems at first. It's a perfect addition.

Keeping a watch

After years of being off our mind, left to the weird realm of luxury items advertised in the Wall Street Journal and such, we seem to be ready to start thinking about wristwatches again. The rumor mill is chirping that Apple and Android are working on Dick Tracey jobbers, which I guess would be a more accessible and convenient than the dinner table platters some smartphones are beginning to resemble. Reading up on it, I realized that I hadn't even worn a watch since July, which got me around to fixing my favorite and I'm really much happier because of it.

I love watches, really, dating back from when they were intense objects of desire, mostly because my mom wouldn't get me one until I could tell time on a regular analog clock — which was probably pretty wise. I finally got a Casio digital watch once, which I wore until it fell apart, and lusted for one of those calculator watches, which could have permanently altered my relationship with school mathematics. I still remember noticing them, and I particularly remember my Uncle Gerry showing me his, which could keep military time which he said he could never keep straight from when he was in the service.

I bought my current watch in spring 2000, and it remains very special to me. I'd long wanted a Swiss Army watch since I saw a friend in college with one, and when my previous one broke I decided the time was right. I bought mine at one of those odd Midtown electronics stores, which was in my office building on Broadway and 57th. It is a Wenger  — which I guess is the RC Cola to Victorinox's Coke — and I likely paid too much, but it is still with me. It was important because I was still even then getting over a nasty break-up, and the idea of marking my future hours and days in a totally new way was very appealing to me. I thought about all the time I'd looked down at my old watch waiting to meet whats-her-name, etc., and it was like getting a totally fresh start.

And together we had a lot to mark! I counted down the minutes before my wedding on that watch, I timed the minutes between my wife's contractions when our daughter was being born on it. Nothing about it suggests "bling," it is serviceable, now considerably scratched and scuffed, but wholly a part of my life.

And in July, I very nearly lost it. I mentioned earlier that getting home from my trip to Croatia this summer involved a six-hour bus trip from Istria to Venice, which finally ended at San Basilio ferry terminal. After I grabbed my bag and jumped off the bus, I was about halfway to the terminal when I looked down to check just how awfully late we were when I saw that the watch was gone. I ran back to the still parked bus, urged the driver to open up, and prowled around what had been my seat on my hands and knees, pulling up the cushions, running my hand between the cracks (and really: yuck). No luck. The magnificently annoyed driver stood behind me watching, commenting that I probably lost it at the rest area where we stopped near Trieste on the way. I knew that wasn't the case — I'd been checking regularly at the end of our trip because I was desperate for it to be over. I knew the driver wanted to get going, that it was nowhere to be seen, and I quietly made peace with the idea that I'd lost it, somehow, in Venice. It was sad, but sometimes things just fly away when they have to.

To make perfectly sure, I left the bus through the rear door as I had the first time, and made sure to look around on the ground nearby just in case. I took a quick peak underneath the bus and, voila, there is was, just about beneath the rear tire, moments away from getting unceremoniously pancaked. Seems the strap had broken when I pulled on my backpack, and it had dropped. That strap, which I had gotten in Hungary a year earlier, had been giving me problems for awhile. I snatched it up, held it up for the driver to see (jerk), and put it snugly in my pocket, where it would remain for the rest of the trip.

Back home I put the watch on the shelf by my keys, and there it remained. In our age, it is pretty easy to get away without having a watch — we have our phones and their are clocks all over and there is blessed routine as well. But since I got around to fixing it and wearing it again I've felt much more relaxed in a hard to pin down way. Wearing a wristwatch is like having a temporal map on your arm, an non-intrusive presence that helps you locate yourself within your surroundings. Perhaps ironically, it gives you the comfort and security to live in the moment.

Just as long as you make sure the thing doesn't fall off.

The Negozio Olivetti

The strangest five euros I spent this past summer were at the Negozio Olivetti, which is just off the Piazza San Marco in Venice and a place that would be very easy to brush right past. It is near one of the passages on the far end of the square, closer to the Museo Correr than the Basilica, just beneath the arched arcade that lines the square. The little museum is a faithfully recreated typewriter shop, and in its way a statement of how Italy's fame for commerce and innovation evolved into a flair for design and the curation of lovely things. 

The place caught my eye on a blisteringly hot afternoon when I almost by accident found myself in the tourist Bermuda Triangle between the Basilica and the Rialto. I don't know what precisely I thought I was doing, but when saw all those typewriters in the window I stopped in my tracks. I've been obsessed with the machines since I bought my first one at a second-hand electronics and gadget shop in Jersey City in 1999. My somewhat decrepit, rebuilt Royal electric was a great start, so fun to draft out things with its noisy ease. Through the years I picked up more typewriters, often as gifts from people who knew my weird fascination. My current favorite is an Olympia SM9 from the early or mid-1960s, a great triumph of West German industrial craftsmanship that is as reliable as it is heavy (it is lovingly described by some as only "semi-portable"). I love when it rests next to my MacBook on the desk, like the twin poles of function and design, content and form.

But I've always longed for, maybe lusted for, an Olivetti, especially a Lettera, preferably with some cool candy-colored casing. Those guys are sleek and portable, and their very "thwack" seems both more sharp while mysteriously effortless and nonchalant — sort of like the way Italian dudes can pull off wearing a scarf and jeans.

So on that summer day I had to know why there were all those vintage machines lined up in the window. I walked inside, which was mercifully air conditioned, into what looked like a showroom, or possibly a museum. Turns out it was both. I asked the lovely young lady reading a very serious, thick book behind a desk what this place was, and she explained in her heavily inflected English that it was basically both: a museum about a shop.

Back in 1957, the Olivetti company commissioned a Venetian architect named Carlo Scarpa to design what they hoped would be a "business card" for the company. The place was ostensibly supposed to sell typewriters, but also the brand. Already Venice was awash in tourists, and the company was ready to spend to make sure that some of those international jet-setters would get an eyeful of Italian typographical excellence.

And boy did they! The space was small and narrow and dark, but Scarpa completely reshaped it and loaded it with brilliant design elements. The most important feature is a central staircase right in the middle of the two-story space, with stone slabs that form a sort of zig-zag pattern that looks a bit like the Black Flag logo, and similarly gave me a sense of movement, of pistons pumping or the arms of a typewriter rhythmically fwapping the paper. The slabs are Aurisina marble, from near Trieste, which honored local building traditions, and the shelves are of rosewood with teak flooring, which almost feels Asian in its clarity. Simple steel rods hold the wood up, very modest and very functional. The light is diffuse and insistent, and the sound of clacking keys is played on the soundsystem, which is a touch of overkill if you ask me. The various typewriters — and calculators, cash registers, etc. — are displayed with the dignity they deserve. But it's a shame you can't touch anything. It's also a shame the whole thing takes minutes to get through, which makes the admission fee feel a bit steep (also, the reason I don't have any photos from the inside is that I refused to pay extra for the photo ticket).

The company closed the shop in 1997, but in recent years a government agency called the Fondo Ambiente Italiano got involved to restore it to what it was like in its glory days. The FAI lists as its mission to "serve as the mouthpiece for the interests and expectations of the public, actively supervising and intervening on their behalf across the country to defend Italy's landscape and cultural heritage."

Venice is the sort of place that demands the kind of melancholy and nostalgia that made me imagine whether in a hundred years or so we'll have in America a similar group that will painstakingly recreate the first Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in New York.

Twelve years on

I can't be the only one who feels that the anniversary of Sept. 11 has sprung up on us with remarkably little attention. That the epoch-making horror of our lifetime would become something that would remembered in the context of the calendar, set amongst events and memories great and small, new and old. For years I was certain that that this would remain the thing around which all else revolved, and it certainly did for awhile. But this year feels like the first time I've noticed that its place in our imagination has evolved — that we have processed the details well, choosing what to cling to and what to forget — even as we continue to stumble through the world born that day.

I can see it in the way the day is commemorated, which is similar to how it always is: the gathering at Ground Zero for the recitation of the names. It is an event that is always touching and sad, but is certainly no longer "news" the way it was for many years. One of the most telling things about our culture over the past few decades has been our insistence on remembering tragedy through each individual name. It reflects in part our understanding of the value of each human life, which is a sort of triumph of human empathy if you think about it in a historical context. But I would suggest it also reflects the way we perceive the world, of our (post)modern divided consciousness that includes what we see and know face to face, and what we absorb through images and broadcasts and the internet. It is as though each individual one of us can't process enormous, inhuman tragedy unless we can get a human handle on it. A long time ago, you heard news about things like this by word of mouth, or a newspaper, and what you heard was a story. Someone — an eyewitness, a reporter, basically, another person — began putting it into a narrative that made sense for you. All we have now is a fractured jumble of images and sounds and bits of commentary. So I wonder we choose to remember with such loving attention on the names as a crutch, out of the fear that otherwise we'll make too great an abstraction of something we instinctively know should remain personal and immediate.

But the trouble with doing so is that time wins this argument, as it wins all arguments. Today, the names are being read once again, and it means something desperately important to a lot of people, but less and less to most of us. I just checked, and you have to scroll halfway down the NY Times website to find any mention of Sept. 11.

What is real, and what remains, are the ideas that sounded like trite pundit-speak from the moment they appeared. That we do truly live in another world, that nothing has been the since. So much that has happened in these 12 years reflect this. Consider how we've trundled off to war and come back again, and now find ourselves paralyzed by what to do about Syria. There is a lot we can look back upon with remorse, because we know that if we hadn't squandered so much goodwill from that day — the one point of hope in an otherwise perfectly horrible thing — we might live in a better world today. We live with all that, everyday.

On anniversaries you are reminded to "remember," as if there is a danger we might forget, and it's perhaps too painful to think about how they remind us how far we've gone. Perhaps this is natural, but this year seems like the first that I've felt Sept. 11 was a very long time ago. This is the first year that I've looked at snapshots of the victims and noticed how out of style their glasses and shirts are.

What doesn't change is how shocking the images remain, no matter how familiar they are. If you think about it, you don't really see them that often because we've done an astonishing job of censoring them from ourselves. We saw the images of exploding airplanes, of tumbling towers, of falling bodies, of clouds of rubble, and knew they were stuck with us. We tagged them as "very super important" and carefully filed them away, and we don't live with them in anything like the way I thought we would.

And since this is a moment to reflect on the past, there is also bound up with it a moment to think about the future. Without being morbid, just realistic, it is likely the next great tragedy, will be recorded on a million smartphones. Already, our experience of the next thing is being shaped, and it will be very different than Sept. 11.

When there are no good options

Secretary of State John Kerry's testimony before Congress this week arguing for military action in Syria is incoherent nonsense because it couldn't be any other way. Everyone who honestly tries to think about this unspooling catastrophe ends up bound in loops and knots. It's just more dramatic for Kerry, who has to explain in a steady voice that we aren't going to war, just authorizing a "response," and we aren't clear what that might look like, but it certainly won't entail "boots on the ground." Round and round, explained with professional earnestness. From the man who once, a generation ago, asked Congress how you could ask a man to be the last to die for a mistake. I feel bad for him.

This is what happens when a nation has to honestly discuss matters of life and death and the course of nations. This is an important moment, but it is not a repeat of the run up to the war in Iraq. While it is certain that the Bush administration's foolishness hangs heavy over everything that we do, it is only in the sense that we wasted every scrap of goodwill we once had with the wider world, which makes everything harder. But Obama is not Bush. There is no malice, no cynical efforts to twist matters for hidden ends.

No, this is nothing like 2003. We are having an actual debate. Those of us who were against that war remember how much worse it was, the feeling of hopelessness, isolation, and helplessness in the face of mass delusion. Today, half my twitter feed is made up of anti-war sentiments. We are in a different world. And it is insulting to hear pundits claim it is the same. Recovering warmongers like Andrew Sullivan talk about this like AA members badmouthing about demon alcohol.

We should be grateful we are going through this process. I applaud President Obama for throwing the matter to Congress, which is not only politically savvy in spreading the blame, but it forces that cracker factory of a legislature to grow up and behave. And not coincidentally, it is the right thing to do according to our Constitution, which has been ritually ignored in these matters since 1964. (Among the most unpleasant aspects of this is how often I have to agree with Sen. Rand Paul).

There is nothing black or white here, and those that think it is, whether Sen. John McCain and Medea Benjamin, are profoundly misguided. It comes down to this: whether you are for war or against, whether it happens or not, you should feel uncertain and shitty about it. Because this is a perfectly uncertain and shit moment.

After thinking about this months, I've decided I'm opposed to action because I don't think it will help anything, and I we have neither the ability nor the will to bring order to this hornet's nest. More killing courtesy of our expensive cruise missiles won't help.

But that alone doesn't feel right. Perhaps the Congress can do is approve conditional military action if we can prove there is another chemical attack. Because there are people in Damascus now who live in terror of another gas attack, and perhaps if the regime has that kind of threat hanging over it, it might make them pause. At least that would be a moral thread to grab at.

The Garbage Patch's pavilion at the Venice Biennale

A work by Maria Cristina Finnuci at the Ca' Foscari reminds us of the problem of stray plastic in the ecosystem. 

The broad, broad view of the Washington Post sale

When I worked at Newsweek, when it was a part of the Washington Post family, Donald Graham used to appear in the office every few weeks. Everything you hear about the guy seemed to be true. He had to be pointed out to me — a gangly, awkward, fellow in a terrible suit. He seemed shy, and smiled the same way to everyone he passed in the halls, from our big cheese world-beating editor in chief to me, a nobody on the absolute bottom of the corporate ladder.

Part of my job was to sit in on the editorial meetings and report on them for our far-flung foreign affiliates. This meant standing in the back of the room, and quietly taking notes. Sometimes I'd perch on the window sill, overlooking Eighth Avenue and Columbus Circle. A few times, Mr. Graham ended up perched next to me, just watching, deflecting whatever remarks or questions were aimed at him.

And I remember looking at the guy, amazed that he ran a global, powerful media empire, and was the steward of one of the most important institutions in American journalism. There was so much resting on his metaphorical shoulders, I thought, as I wondered if that was dandruff I spotted resting on his actual shoulders. It was amazing that so many vital human endeavors ultimately came down to one actual person. And thank goodness that at that time and place the guy who signed my checks was decent and dedicated to the same mission that I was.

And now he sold it. Instead of that one man, who was really part of a family, he sold the thing to another man, Jeff Bezos. It wasn't to a private equity firm, or any of the many bottom-feeder newspaper chains still sulking about, which is good (they've long since sold off Newsweek, whose sordid afterlife as an increasingly unloved old nag was shaping up to be the big media story this month before the sale).

The Post sale, along with the Globe being snatched up by John Henry, raises a ton of questions that high-flying media folk like to publicly mull over. The emerging consensus, I think, is that these are pretty awesome developments. At last, fabulously wealthy, smart business leaders realize the value of "old media." Don't dwell too long on the depressing fact that they were able to buy major metropolitan and national institutions with as much thought and sacrifice as most of us buy new iPods, and what that says about what we value. These guys are new, and they "get it." The can negotiate change, and aren't used to failing. And becoming beholden to a person, a personality, is way way better than the fate most newspapers face, in which some market buys the papers on leverage and cuts them to death. The nagging voices chime up that these men represent such vast bundles of conflicts of interest, that the basic mission of fair and honest reporting is doomed. There's the essential plot development of uncertainty.

But I would like to take the long view. The media-land conversation is fascinating in New York, Washington, Silicon Valley, and among the dwindling corners of the industry where people still make a decent living. In other words, this is the one percent talking to itself. In the broader view, this is a snapshot of life in our present plutocracy, in which most of us can only look on and shrug.

I'm going to wander around a moment, but bear with me. In college I had a close friend who was full of ridiculous ideas that were pretty funny at the time, but I keep thinking about. Both of us were English majors, and very interested in topics like the future of poetry and the role of the arts in society. Sometimes this friend was eerily prescient: he said it would be a good idea to write about vampires, which were an enduring human theme and destined for a comeback (at that moment Stephenie Meyer was still only a receptionist who had never written a word). He thought hip-hop and opera were destined to meet someday (and perhaps it did, if you think R. Kelly counts. We can argue about whether that's a good thing). But one of his sillier idea was that the less profitable arts, like poetry, would have to revert to a model you saw in Renaissance Italy, of finding patronage from powerful families or institutions. The bizarre example he gave was that Bill Gates and Microsoft could be talked into needing a court poet. This spawned a million jokes about Pindaric odes to celebrate the arrival of Windows 95.

What my friend grasped far earlier than I did, was the cynical reality of how we live. I was too busy being earnest and judgmental to see that things don't really change much. I was alive to the idea that the story changes, but didn't realize that it usually happened in ways that I was able to anticipate. I remember in one of my poetry classes talking to a senior who had just accepted a job at a company in Seattle that sold books over the internet. I was sure that was the stupidest idea on earth — who'd deal with that when there was a Borders or a Barnes & Noble on every block? I was just about to start a summer internship at my hometown newspaper — a family run, essential service for my community that was as permanent as the mountains. That was how I'd build a stable and reasonable future. Joke's on me (that college friend I mentioned, by the way, is a investment banker now. He's doing alright).

For all the talk of change, things aren't changing, and to take a much, much broader view, there is great peril lining our future. Consider Venice, which for hundreds of years was a true merchant republic, governed by an evolving and surprisingly fluid class of wealthy businessmen, with the occasional nudge or shove from an angry mob. Unlike the rest of Europe, where wealth and power and social order was determined by land and conquest, Venice was about commercial skill, political dexterity, and luck.

It worked for a long time, until the 13th century when the ruling class decided to pull the ladder up behind them. They restricted access to the circles of power to families that already had it, who over time became a formal self-perpetuating, autocratic nobility. That came with all the nonsense that entails — inbreeding, the creation of surplus offspring that loiter about at parties and in convents and waste resources, and an ossified, entitled, unimaginative ruling class that props itself up until something new and vibrant knocks it over.

Venice slammed shut the door just over 500 years into its existence. Our American republican experiment just hit year 237.

By any other name... still a bad idea

Croatia has a vibrant and diverse wine culture. Among my favorites from Istria is teran, a kind of red-to-black, dry wine that from the right vineyard is sublime.

But Croatians have this insane quirk, which I think is specific to them, of serving wine mixed with Coke, over ice. This summer, I learned that this madness has a name, "Bambus" (they also serve wine with Fanta, which is a "Miš-Maš"). 

I'm just, shaking my head.

The Berkshires to Istria, and back (2/2)

Rovinj, Croatia. Dawn, July 27.

I knew I was in for an interesting journey home from the start. I had bought the round-trip ferry ticket because it was cheaper, which meant I had to get to the dock very early — a lot of day-trippers get these tickets, so you have to present for boarding at 6 a.m. That makes for a sad night's sleep, but it's always rewarding to remind yourself what dawn looks like. That morning had a spectacular Mediterranean sunrise, with blues and pinks and golds like some Tiepolo absurdity.

I took a cab to the pier, and once there got into an argument with the driver. There was a dispute over the charge — 90 kunas (that's around $15) for a three minute ride, instead of the 60 kunas the meter read. This is apparently the official "shakedown tourists leaving town" rate, because it had been quoted to us the previous day when we called a different cab company. We had hung up on them.

There were a lot of people already milling about the good ship SS San Gwann, when a group of Venezia Lines officials appeared and set up a makeshift ticket counter. Then proceeded to inform us each that the boat was broken and couldn't sail, so we could take a refund or go on a chartered bus. The daytrippers left, but I figured I would get through it alright. But it wasn't easy. What would have been a three-hour trip turned into a six-hour one, thanks to traffic between Trieste and Venice. Even worse the air conditioner unit above me began leaking — not dripping really, leaking — on my head for the last hour of the trip. I made a makeshift tent out of the curtain and did my best to hide.

In Venice, I found my hotel very quickly — again without a map — and had a few days in the Serene Republic. I'll write more about that later. I continued on on Monday. There is a strange feeling the morning of a heavy day of travel, when you shower and put on your socks and realize the next time you are going to go through these motions it will be at your own home, on the other side of the planet, in about two days.

I had a few hours to kill before having to head to the airport, so I left my bags and hiked around the city. I stopped for lunch of cicchetti at a little place on Campo San Margherita, but I was so distracted by flipping through La Gazzetta dello Sport that I dropped a huge dollop of olive oil on my right knee. I thought despondently about how long I was going to have to look at that stain in the coming hours.

Marco Polo Airport is a remarkably undistinguished airport, not what you might expect from a place like Venice. Its best feature is the little food court on the north end of the departures area, which has a striking view over the lagoon toward the city, which looks remarkably large and close from there. I spent awhile there having a Peroni, watching a Carnival cruise ship maneuver away through the lagoon toward the sea like some kind of moving apartment block. Very strange.

I had to spend the night in Istanbul, which was a surprisingly easy. I wandered around a bit, hit the duty-free for some lokum, drank an Efes and watched things swirling around. I was in Istanbul for a few days a year ago, and I would have loved to get into the city for awhile. But it was the middle of the night, so I had to settle for the strange tableau of the globalized world you see at an international airport. In the dead of night in Istanbul there are a lot of flights to the former Soviet Union, to central Asia and the Gulf states. Lots of women in hijabs, tough-looking CIS dudes in track suits or polyester casualwear, guys that look they are going from one place to another and will never make it back. The thing about the people you observe in an airport is that you really can't match what they are going through the way you can in a place with the usual amount of gravity. You feel like you are in the background of what might be someone's very interesting movie.

Happily for my effort to not completely destroy my sleep schedule for a month, the airport is pretty spacious, and I didn't have trouble finding a pair of seats on which to stretch out. I'd brought along an eyeshade to block out the pervasive dull light, and was tired enough that I could tune out the occasional Turkish announcements over the PA system. Had to leave bright and early in the morning. Flying to America seems to now involve another layer of security theater, so we had to get our passports checked again at the gate, which was time-consuming and pointless. Then the long flight back.

Once again, the menace of getting the times to line up failed me. I had a few hours to get from JFK to Port Authority Bus Terminal, and a big suitcase, so I decided to hang out in the arrivals hall because at least there was coffee and a place to sit. Good choice. Port Authority seems to have been somewhat cleaned up since the last time I really saw it — they seem to have gotten the homeless problem under control. But it is still a profoundly dispiriting place, with its dark tiles, an absence of sunlight, and a general sense of dropping a few scales down the socioeconomic ladder. I would like to get into the minds of those designers who made this place, and see what it was like the first day it opened. Did it seem like a bracing peek into a bold and efficient future, or was it always a grim warning of an impending dystopia of ugly buildings and social freefall? And did they deliberately create this disorientating sensation around the place, is it some kind of brutalist prank? How come it looks so enormous when you see it from the outside, yet the inside feels like a rat tunnel? Is it supposed to be a vision of some alternate reality, a place that should have never happened? A cautionary, counterfactual lesson about where America's postwar obsessions with automotives and fossil fuels would lead?

And what is most striking is how inefficiently it handles the basic task of providing information to ensure travelers get to the right place. How can a place that purportedly handles nearly a quarter million people a day not have any timetables or information boards anywhere? To find my gate I had to wait in line at the ticket window to ask, because nothing else at all seemed trustworthy.

Anyway, my hatred of long-distance bus travel is deep. It reminds me of those desperate, poor days in college when I would have to stand for hours to get home for Thanksgiving (pleased to see that no less a lover of travel and the open road than Jack Kerouac was on my side about bus travel).

And the fact that there is just no need for it. There are functioning railroad tracks running all the way from Manhattan to the old Williamstown train station three blocks from my house. That this is how generations of people travelled from here to there. Instead, I was stuck on a belching, rattling emissions-spewing contraption, winding around the old state roads of far western Connecticut and Massachusetts. There were three of us left on the bus by the time we reached town.

I wasn't done yet though! I still had to walk from the Williams Inn across the center of town to my house, dragging the suitcase bravely along behind me. I was at the end of my street, across from my driveway, when the right wheel finally gave up and popped out. And that was that.

So I've spent two blog posts complaining about the details of modern travel. But I haven't offered a word about what I did in between. I haven't written about watching my daughter learn to snorkel in the Adriatic, the pleasantness of having a glass of Favorit beer watching the sun set into the sea, the taste of a big plate of spaghetti al nero di seppia, standing beneath Titian's Assumption at the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, sitting on the ledge of a canal at an enoteca in Cannaregio, with a glass of wine, watching people walk by.

I try always to remind myself of some of my summers in high school. I worked mornings and evenings, and would sometimes spend afternoons sitting in the backyard. Usually I'd read, sometimes I'd read travel books about Italy and France that I'd taken from the public library. I'd sometimes see a speck of silver from an airliner impossibly high up, and wonder if I'd ever be on one.

So, yes, I'd happily do it over again.

The Berkshires to Istria, and back (1/2)

Terminal San Basilio

If you travel with any degree of awareness, you realize how inconceivable many of the things we take for granted would have been not a generation ago. You can buy a ticket to pretty much get anywhere you want on earth, at a shockingly low price if you think about it. Then you are zipped around in the stratosphere over oceans that once took weeks to cross, and think so little of it you fall asleep. 

For my grandparents, Venice was a place where rich people sometimes saw, but was nothing more than a thing in books, movies and legends. Istria was completely off the map, a neglected, poor, sickly forgotten part of the socialist bloc.

I say all this as a preamble because what follows will look a lot like complaining, and I don't want to leave the impression that I don't appreciate being able to get around. I sure do.

Yet there are trade-offs. This was the first year of the four that I've gone to Croatia that I went from the U.S. and not from Russia and Croatia (I wrote about last year's trip here). And now I realize how vanishingly rare it is to see another American when I'm there. Getting there and back was something of an odyssey, especially coming from Williamstown. The first leg was a five-hour bus ride on Peter Pan from the center of town to Port Authority, then a night in New York. I was trying to do things in an affordable manner, which meant that none of the times lined up neatly, meaning a lot of dead time.

This year, I ended up with tickets on Turkish Airlines, which had by far the cheapest fares over the Atlantic this summer. It was a pretty grim year for ticket prices to Europe, and it took weeks of searching to find the right price. I'd heard on travel websites that Turkish was luring more North American business, trying to turn Istanbul into a hub, so that explains our brief burst of luck.

I first left the country in 1999, and have done so quite a few times since, and each time seems to usher in a new era of discomfort and nuisance. On the plus side, Turkish Airlines leaves JFK earlier than most other European flights, so you avoid the late afternoon / evening crush that makes getting through security an ordeal. But the planes keep getting more and more absurd. I realized this time with alarm that the exact distance from the back of your seat to the one in front of you is the same as the distance from my tailbone to my knee. So, for anyone an inch taller than me, you're talking about physical impossibilities. As it is, this distance is too small for what we remember as a standard tray table — now you have these bisected mini-ones, which are perfectly useless if the guy in front of you has his seat back. The one thing that has gotten better are the new entertainment systems newer planes have rigged up for each individual seat. These are pretty cool, and if you are lucky create a kind of cocoon experience that can make a long trip bearable.

I landed in Istanbul, and had a few hours in Ataturk International Airport, where I had coffee and read Jan Morris' The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage once again. Then a short flight up to Venice. Air travel is so cognitively disruptive if you graft it into a historical context. In Venice's best days, its wealth and fame and riches relied heavily on managing the treacherous trade from one city to the other. The republic was the direct product and inheritor of Byzantium's Roman heritage, its overseas empire was born by conquering the city in the Fourth Crusade, and after the Turkish Conquest, this was the epicenter of all sorts of existential terror. That's a lot of history flowing back and forth over that distance from point to point, and in 2013 I jumped from one to the other almost as an afterthought, in a two and a half hour flight over the once-formidable Balkan interior.

The one part of this whole voyage that made me nervous was finding my way from the airport in Venice to the ferry terminal. I know that the great fun of Venice is allowing yourself to wander and get lost amid the campi and the ponti. But getting from Point A to Point B with a big suitcase and a time limit made me nervous. I studied the route on the map ahead of time, and made my way along with lots of self-doubt from Piazzale Roma down Fondamenta Cazziola to Fondamenta Cereri Dorsoduro to Fondamenta Rossa to Fondamenta Briati to Fondamenta San Sebastiano to San Basilio. And I made it with time to have a sandwich and check my email.

The ferry trip was a product of the necessity of timing. The usual way to get over to Istria would be to take the train to Trieste, then catch a bus down the coast. But my flight arrived so late that I would miss the connections, meaning that I'd have to spend a night. It was cheaper to spring for the ferry. I secretly really wanted to do this, because it sounds so romantic and proper — one really should arrive and leave Venice by the sea. The reality of the modern voyage was not so charming. The ship was more like an airliner than I thought. The windows were filthy, so you couldn't really see out, and the air conditioner was blasting far more than necessary. But it gives you a sense of the scale, that it is three hours of motoring over the open sea before you reach what was the heartland of the Venetian overseas empire.

My wife was waiting at the pier, with the owner of the flat we rented who had driven to give me a ride. That was very welcome.

Is all the world Istanbul now?

Already ready for anything. Taksim Square, August 2012

There are few places that grew on me as fast as Istanbul, where I spent a few days last August when I had to leave the EU to clear my visa. It is an overwhelming place — massive, crowded, sprawling over water and hills, and heavy with layer upon layer of history. But I didn't anticipate how it is one of the most authentically friendly places I've ever been. I remember with bemusement the almost constant conversations I had with men trying to sell rugs to me, the unhurried way the shopkeepers in the Bazaar would chat away while trying to make a sale, the way the waiters at restaurants fussed over me (even though it was Ramadan and a very busy time for them), the way Olga's friend from grad school took a day off work to show me around.

So I was horrified that it came to this. The people of Turkey do not deserve the kind of government that shoots tear gas and water cannons at them for a perfectly reasonable protest against a perfectly stupid and tacky transfer of a public asset into a playground for the wealthy. As everyone makes clear, the recent protests are not just about Gezi Park, but about an arbitrary and authoritarian government that takes advantage of the shortcomings of the democratic process. It is an example of something that has been happening all over the world. And the world is not big enough that you can afford to believe this isn't about us.

Erdogan is just another case of the only "Third Way" that really exists in politics today: the election of servants of self-perpetuating oligarchs who run the businesses, an international ruling elite that successfully manipulates the rickety power of voting with softcore nationalism and full-blown, religious mind-fog.

I think the template for this comes from Russia, obviously, where Vladimir Putin has successfully coopted the once unruly post-Soviet business elites to get on board, powered by the strange, desperate voting power of superstitious old crones in dying villages. Another obvious emulator of this strategy was the Fidesz party in Hungary, who took advantage of their first supermajority in Parliament to write one of the dumber constitutions of any self-proclaimed democracy.

Of course, the model is beginning to fall apart. Hungary's economy is abject mess, and Prime Minister Viktor Orban's schizophrenic switching between constituencies makes one question his mental health. In Russia, the state if relying more and more on the tried and true means of coercion, like insane new laws that proscribe jail terms for hurting the feelings of the religious faithful. And in time-honored Stalinist tradition, it not only throws the book at opponents like punk bands and bloggers, but has begun purging alternate centers of power within itself. So the idea that peaceful protests in Istanbul would end in baton-wielding policemen and water cannons is part of a general human story.

Here in America, we briefly flirted with the idea of looking at the problem with the Occupy movement, which ran out of steam too fast. Thanks to our institutional two-party system, we cling to an illusion of difference when in fact, both parties work for the same wealthy elites — only Democrats are slightly more concerned about how unsightly it would be to have old people dying in the streets. The process was well on its way even before 2001, when we terrorized ourselves into giving everything away. Obama hasn't really changed anything but the details — we still have secret prisons, we murder people by executive fiat more than we did before, and of course, the massive spying apparatus we've allowed to be put in place. And his fundamental faith in compromise is looking more and more like a part of some Bilderburg scheme to maintain the status quo at all costs. Obama represents the absolute poverty of "hope" as a political end or means. And if you think Cory Booker is the answer, keep hoping.

That's the world we live in, and the most depressing part is how few options there are. The conflict in Syria is fascinating because it is a struggle between the most dynamic and active alternatives to the "Third Way." Choosing between Authoritarianism and Jihad is hardly how anyone hoped the 21st century would play out.

I think about the people of Istanbul in Gezi Park, who are aware of what their government is about, who are part of the modern global economy and know its tools and ideals, and who are still faced with a daunting opponent. It would be a wonderful world, if we could choose being something other than the bug or the windshield.

Pictures from a drive down South

Last month, I had the chance to drive from Florida back up to Massachusetts. I've never really been to the South — still haven't, but at least now I've gone through it. Here are a few snapshots of what I saw.

I flew from Albany to Orlando, leaving on a grey rainy day. We flew high over the overcast skies, and there is a moment when you pop down and Florida appears. There's the blue ocean, the perfectly flat land, the geometric patterns humans have carved on it. You see in an eyeful that it is a different place.

The first leg of the trip was on Route 301 in north Florida, one of those great old highways that predate the interstates and have a roadside culture that is rapidly fading away. It is hard today to imagine why a road stand that specialized in oranges and orange-related goods would convince someone to stop, but once upon a time this meant something. 

A real fault lines of American culture today, expressed in the arrangement of SEC paraphernalia at a truck stop near St. Mary's, Georgia.

Had never heard of Huddle House before, but there is something delusional and bold about the slogan "Best Food Yet."

The buffet at Duke's Barbecue in Walterboro, SC. It may not look like much, but it's one of my favorite restaurants.

All you can eat pork and fried stuff, with buckets of sweet tea. This is what makes America great.

What else makes America great: Fireworks!

 Wildflowers in North Carolina.

When I lived in Washington, I didn't have a car and lived a fairly happy pedestrian life. Everyone I knew with a car complained about it constantly — especially if they lived in Northern Virginia. Here's just your ordinary midday traffic on the Beltway.

The Tropicana Field Experience

As a fan of an American League East team, Tropicana Field has figured in my imagination for years, though before the Joe Madden era it was mostly as just that dump where the Sox could pick up a few wins — though I also seem to remember that something about the place made Pedro Martinez mental. It is the architectural odd-man out in our division, which includes old classics like Fenway and Yankee Stadium (the old one, that is), as well as new places like Camden Yards, which completely changed the way we think about new baseball stadiums, and the Skydome (or whatever they call it now), which everyone thought was really cool for a few years when it was new (until said Camden Yards revolution happened). 

Last week, on a quick trip to Florida, I had a chance to catch the Sox down there, and seeing a game there was just as weird as I always imagined it would be.

The strangeness begins on the interstate, as you head into St. Petersburg from Tampa and the stadium appears before you, like some kind of giant, lopsided wart. It is near the highway, which is good I guess, but apparently everyone is convinced it is too far from most of the population of the Tampa Bay region, which is bad. Its neighborhood feels very lonely — in one of those marginal neighborhoods Sun Belt cities seem to have with undesirable and possibly empty office buildings, lots of parking lots, multi-lane boulevards, and no sign of human life outside of vehicles except the guys waving stadium traffic to the lots.

As is critical in that part of the country, there is lots of parking. And since the weather is always nice, there was some actual tailgating going on when we arrived. But even for a parking lot, it's pretty bland, save for the tall palm trees and the long mosaic on the pavement that leads through the lots to the stadium entrance from... nowhere. 

There is a main entrance rotunda, which bizarrely lets you into the outfield seats (and which, more bizarrely, the team claims was inspired by Ebbets Field). The inside tunnels are fairly spacious, with creatively packed with ways to spend money. But the walls are all painted cinder block, and there is something temporary about it all. It feels like one of those semi-permanent structures you find at fairgrounds. 

We sat in the 200-level, just beside press box on the third base side. Since it is a rare case of a baseball-only indoor stadium, it feels about the right size. And the sight lines for baseball were great. But it was very hard to put out of your mind how strange it is to be watching a game indoors when the weather outside is so nice. Sure, there are lots of showers and storms in the summer, but it is still hard to make peace with having a roof over your head for baseball. Or the massive air conditioning ducts lining the upper level. The Trop makes it worse by having such a strange roof, with its concentric circles of catwalks that have occasionally gotten in the way of the game. I have no idea how fielders play there, because just watching, I lost every fly ball that went up. 

I imagine it is a little easier for Rays fans live with the place now that the team has some history to build on. All over you see lots of photos from those encouraging recent years, but I fear that winning hasn't translated into any greater passion for the team. Attendance was very poor when I was there, and there was a very strong presence of Sox fans. By that, I mean close to half the obvious fans I saw were supporting the visitors. My section got very loud when Stephen Drew's grand slam blew the game open in the third inning. 

There's been a lot of chatter down there about getting a new ballpark, preferably somewhere more central in Tampa, with a retractable roof. But thanks to the fiasco of the Marlins new stadium down in Miami, the team probably can't count on much taxpayer help. I think the Trop will be around for awhile. And since tickets are affordable, the place is comfortable, and the team is decent, that isn't a disaster.

A new new media

Being cynical about professional media and the State of Journalism means I'm almost never impressed by the things that I love. I realized how bad it was a few weeks ago when I tried to put into words why I was so grumpy that my wife and begun a subscription to The New York Times. I realized that it was because I subconsciously want newspapers to die so the deadwood and barnacles stuck in the field would drift away to sell cars or whatever, while the people really interested in reporting and writing would have to start anew and get on with it. 

These days I still read a lot, and almost exclusively online. There are old media outlets I follow now on computer screens, like the New Yorker, the Economist, the New York Review of Books, which I've kept an eye on since college. There are a few new media outlets I check everyday — The Awl is a favorite, and Grantland is an experiment I'm curious about. But I realize that all of them are alike in that they don't fundamentally challenge the same categories we've always had. They are all, basically, conservative. Text is text, images are images, videos are videos, audio is audio, and the idea of hyperlinking has been around long enough to have become perfectly conventional. But everywhere, the same tried and true cubbyholes are respected, kept a safe, respectable distance apart.

But does it need to be that way, and should it remain that way? I sort of had my mind blown a little the other day when I clicked on a link at Pitchfork to a feature about the new London-based poseur-core indie band Savages ("No Heroes," by Laura Snapes). At this point I have no opinion on the band at all, I'm not in awe of the quality of the writing, and the overall vibe of brooding intensity reeking off the band is perhaps a bit overmuch. In the details, it feels more like marketing or promotion material… but why? The piece is visually interesting, the different elements are seamlessly connected, it is clear that writers, editors, photographers, and designers all worked together on it. And I realized that on the web you can do things like this, so after all this, why doesn't anybody?

I've been endlessly amused at the way old media tries to adopt bits of new media. It never worked out the details in a creative way. I don't see much value in forcing already overworked reporters to tweet photos and create slideshows for the website of images they have to take themselves. I don't mean the big boys, who give a little space and funding for videographers to present different kinds of stories. And I don't mean the occasional fancy infographic with clickable data points to graft next to an enterprise story. I mean, why doesn't anybody try to put it all together? Reading this profile of Savages, at some point I stopped paying attention to the band, and began thinking how awesome it would be if someone gave this treatment to municipal water rates.

Each January I teach a course at Williams on long-form magazine reporting and writing. One of the recurring themes that comes up is that it is very hard to do this kind of stuff anymore, certainly not in the great age of the postwar magazines, larded with ads for cigarettes and booze and read by upwardly mobile folks. I got to thinking that I wanted to try to think about something else, and last winter hatched the idea of bugging a good friend who is an outstanding computer scientist into co-teaching a course about marrying old and new media. I figured we could create one big project about something related to the college — about the breakdown of admissions applications, or the college's investment portfolio. Something that would blend old fashioned reporting and writing with all the graphic wonders out there that no one thinks are relevant. I wanted to do this for myself as much as anything else.

Maybe someday.

Margaret on the bier

I am enough of an anglophile that I've been following the public conversation in the wake of Margaret Thatcher's death very closely. That is, I've been following the British conversation because the American one has been useless and shallow (credit to Alex Pareene, at Salon, for spelling it out real simple-like for the folks over here).

My first instinct was to keep quiet about it, mostly out of respect that if people had feelings that would inspire "Margaret on the Guillotine," then I wasn't fully engaged to have a right to speak up.

But when has that ever stopped anyone on the Internet, for heaven's sake.

One of the most interesting things I've read is this essay by comedian Russell Brand in this morning's Guardian. His disagreement with her is very kind and human, and allows him to see what really is the horror of her legacy:

All of us that grew up under Thatcher were taught that it is good to be selfish, that other people's pain is not your problem, that pain is in fact a weakness and suffering is deserved and shameful. Perhaps there is resentment because the clemency and respect that are being mawkishly displayed now by some and haughtily demanded of the rest of us at the impending, solemn ceremonial funeral, are values that her government and policies sought to annihilate.

A huge part of the revulsion against her is not so much what she did. Reading through the lefty papers it is clear that all but the most dogmatic Labourites have come around that much of what she did would have had to be done anyway (though, the success of economies like Germany and France that had no comparable Thatcher seems an important note).

What drove opponents nuts — and warmed the hearts of supporters — was the style, how mercilessly grim and angry her approach was. It wasn't enough to do these things, it was to create generations of mutual hate, creating a perfectly atomized little society — of which, she famously said, there was no such thing.

Here is where the comparisons to the American situation, and her obvious homologue, Ronald Reagan. Unlike Thatcher, who was a legitimate bully, I still against my best instincts have a hunch that Reagan was a legitimately decent human. This was the flashing genius of American conservatism, whose greatest successes in its modern form have been ruthlessly pragmatic criminals, like Nixon, or malleable half-wits, like Reagan and Bush Jr. Everything else is all rape philosophers and entitled phonies. For all the toxicity of our political system, a majority of us can't seem to bring ourselves — even in our worst moments — to elect unrepentant bullies to our highest office.

I want to think that this would be a good thing, except that the lesson has been absorbed a bit too well by my side. Thus, our alleged Democratic president has proposed an insane budget replete with "entitlement" cuts. This is an absolute failure of leadership, an f-you to the debt you owe the democratic process, as manifest in the very recent election won by a large margin.