The Towers of New York

'One57,' through the trees of a Central Park playground

The skyline of New York City is an ever-changing backdrop, and anytime you spend some time away you'll come back to a place very unlike what you remember. My personal map has been most rearranged around where I used to work, at 57th and Broadway, where the old Newsweek building is now wrapped in glass and in the shadow of the long-delayed Hearst skyscraper. 

But what stood out to me the most on our trip last weekend was this new obnoxious fad for incredibly high glass needles poking up all around Midtown. One in particular seems to be deliberately giving the finger to the rest of the city — the risible thing called "One57," where full-floor penthouses go for $90 million, and owners will have the cheap thrill of looking down on the Empire State Building, and pretty much everything else. 

Architecture reflects its time, and this skinny shard says quite a lot about overheated, plutocratic New York, with its top-heavy concentration of unearned wealth and rentier values. It is not a place where anyone will live, it will only be owned. The assembled neighborhood of billionaire plutocrats — Russian oligarchs, Middle Eastern oil royals, corrupt Chinese Communist officials, our own Wall Street "geniuses" — own too much to really settle down with any single thing, person, or space. One57 will remain unloved, wrapped in its cold self-absorption, a monument to the eternal value of selfishness. As an aesthetic object, it offers nothing to anyone who can't afford it. In the old days, the wealthy and powerful cared about creating stunning and beautiful structures. Of course it was for themselves foremost, but at least we peons and serfs got to look at the outside.

In terms of design, I'm sure our overheated real estate market can fund architectural raves about this thing, but it is all as meaningless and cynical as any commercial copy. To me, this thing recalls nothing but the medieval Towers of Bologna. In the middle ages there was a fad among the wealthiest families in the city to build ridiculously tall brick towers. Perhaps they were originally intended as "defensive" structures, but as is ever the case with any self-styled Master of the Universe (no matter how small), it became a visually striking way of just showing off. 

And of course, with time, most of them fell down.

The Assinelli Tower, one of the last of Bologna's famous medieval towers still standing (for now).

Anthony Lewis

One of the things you have to do as a journalist is field questions and complaints from your non-journalist friends about the common misbehavior, laziness, and ignorance of reporters. You hear stories about being misquoted, about some terrible moment in the coverage of a crime or a lawsuit or a tragedy that affected them, or questions about why one thing is covered and another thing isn't. They'll want to know why something can't be done about this. I try my best to patiently explain that restricting or regulating freedom of expression — even when it seems to be plain "common sense" — hurts all of us in ways we can't anticipate.

At those moments the voice in the back of my mind is Anthony Lewis, the long-time New York Times columnist who for years taught the Columbia Journalism School's required law class. Every Friday morning I would sit as he gently and eloquently explained to us the bracing, ennobling logic behind cases like Near vs. Minnesota and Times vs. Sullivan, about the peril of the Pentagon Papers and the foundational value of forbidding "prior restraint." He explained why the apparatus of First Amendment law and its protections is the delicate, beautiful, conscious construction of some of our nation's best and best intentioned minds. That it reflects and serves our civilization's highest values, and is perennially in danger of being taken for granted and picked apart by cheap, narrow-minded interests.

This class was one of the most important and lasting elements of my journalism education. I was sad to hear about his death last weekend, and am glad I had the chance to get that voice in my head.

One nice thing about a very long winter

Prospect Mountain, Vermont. March 19, 2013

Better than 'Urban IX'

Well, I was certainly wrong about the Italian part.

I was stunned by a lot of what happened. He's from Latin America! the first non-European pope, a true breakthrough for the Church. He's a Jesuit, which means he's not a dogmatic moron (I looked at some of the backgrounds of these guys, and most are more indoctrinated than educated). He took the name Francis, after one of the more likable saints, which suggests both humility and a willingness to set aside the doctrinaire schisms between sects within the Church (Franciscans and Jesuits have sort of different worldviews).

And it keeps going: he is a chemist, so he likes science (no coincidence that in Bill Maher's jeremiad of a documentary, Religulous, the two most sympathetic apologists for faith are Catholic priests. Give the Church credit for coming a long way on the role of science. No one learns about Adam and Eve eating brontosaurus burgers in parochial school). And bless him, his harsh words about neoliberal orthodoxy are very welcome. I hope Paul Ryan is listening (he may be, but lay Catholics always seem to ignore what the clerics say).

But... he's also said that gay people asking to be treated like humans is the work of Satan. He's said to be close to Benedict on most ideological points, so don't expect much actual progress on anything. And his role during Argentina's military dictatorship deserves very close scrutiny — at the moment, it appears unclear if he is an evildoer or just a coward. The questions are serious, and a cynic would wonder whether the gentle, carefully constructed public face will merely paper over more of the same. You can never be too cynical when thinking about the Church.

This is the frustrating thing about the Church. I know precisely his opinion on capital punishment, for example, and I know it is correct. And I can also guess what he thinks of contraception. It's a jumble of position, humanity at its most charitable and noble, and its most sick and depraved. It's best to just steer clear.

And yet, watching the hullabaloo from St. Peter's Square on the internet this afternoon. I found myself again wishing it meant something to me and mourning that it doesn't. Ah well, I should just get my melodramatic spectacle fix from opera or something.

"Popin' Ain't Easy"

Though the Catholic Church and I have resolutely parted ways, I can admit there's a Catholic shaped hole in my "soul." That's why when asked I'll still say I'm "ethnically Catholic." If it weren't for the monstrosity of its crimes — institutional complicity in the rape of children — I can imagine a world with a few different breaks in which I am a Liberation Theology-spouting, local pastor-bothering, Democratic-voting, member of the Roman Church's lefty fringe. Of course, the institution has also done everything possible since Second Vatican to drive folks like that away.

So I'm fascinated in what the Old Firm is up to as it picks a new CEO, and I've followed the coverage closely. I've found the tone a bit frustrating — in 2005, when it had been almost 30 years since the last time it happened, there was a need to go over the details. About locking up in the Sistine Chapel, voting in Latin, the threaded ballots, the chimney. And the searching coverage what may or may not be happening amongst the "Roman" and the "Reform" cardinals is also annoying, the same kind of horse race election coverage we have to put up with on election years.

The issue is that there is no actual information out there, but it still must be covered. But that doesn't mean you can't think beyond the obvious narratives, especially when it isn't working. We hear over and over how the Church is in "crisis." That would be a grant opportunity to really dig into how things are — all the "papabile" cardinals have positions on sex abuse and financial mismanagement and corruption within the Curia. Why not try to explain it? because that would be dull and depressing.

And the joke is on everyone because just like the previous conclave, this one will be anticlimactic. If you want to bet, just look at the record which, conveniently, goes back centuries. My grandmother used to say about things that are obvious, "Is the Pope Italian?" I grew up under John Paul II, so that didn't make sense to me. What she meant, of course, is that the Pope was always Italian, except for this strange 30-odd year omission that the Italians are probably sore about. So draw your own conclusions.

But the occasion of a conclave is a great chance to ask more questions, and I've been unimpressed with the ones Catholics seem to be having with themselves. There is a great urge to not ask too many questions. For example, I am personally outraged that Benedict XVI welshed on his deal. The reason John Paul II hung on for so long, and allowed his weak, drooling half-corpse to be dragged around the world was to make a very important Catholic point about the value of suffering and duty. It was "Christ-like." Of course, that's complete sado-masochistic medieval nonsense, but that's the Church's logic and good for him for sticking to it.

For Benedict to quit was cowardly and hypocritical. Should a frail old man be allowed to leave his demanding job for a quiet life of contemplation and prayer? Absolutely. But if you stubbornly cling to your dogmas, presume to push them on others, at least have the decency to be consistent. If you can't budge from your position that condoms cause AIDS, or tone down your hatred of gay people, or care a bit more for living humans rather than fetal tissue, then no, get back in the chair. Your worldly job ain't done yet.

No surprise that television in particular loves the pomp and ceremony of what going on. In all coverage of costumes and strange languages, it feels a little like the way they would cover a Unification Church mass wedding or some such. It is a weird exotic ritual that foreigners get up to. And many are bitching that it is a waste of time and resources on cable television that could be devoted to the next round of sequester posturing or musing over who will run in 2016.

Certainly you can dismiss and mock it, or you could consider that this is an unbroken tradition handed down for twenty centuries that has been a major underpinning of Western civilization (for better and for worse). Many critics, and many former Catholics, begrudge the church its opulence, the fancy costumes and the ceremony. But rubbish, that's what's great about it. This, by its own logic, again, is the Kingdom of God on earth. This represents some other plane of existence, it damned well better be fancy.

Last year around this time I was pottering around Italy, and of course spent many hours in churches in Venice and Florence. And the stirrings in my old Catholic soul were very great. What, I wonder, would my life have been like if my parish church was the Church of Madonna dell'Orto in the Cannaregio district of Venice rather than Sacred Heart of Jesus Church in the Polish neighborhood of Easthampton, Massachusetts. If I had grown up staring at Tintoretto's monumental "Last Judgment" rather than a dingy replica of Our Lady of Czestochowa, and some of those awful pastel-colored reproductions of the life of Christ. Even in elementary school I knew it was cheap. I realize that's not supposed to matter, but you know, it does. It seems like an accurate reflection of the scale of the matter that the cardinals are meeting beneath Michelangelo's "Last Judgment," a painting that many humans would recognize on sight.

Shipping out

Our ride

This was the year I "agreed" to let my mom take my daughter and I on a cruise. She's a travel agent and sells them, and for years I'd promised that one of these winters when we come down to Florida to visit we'd give it a shot. It's one of those things that never seemed really for me — they're over-programmed, they offer only a surface-level peak at interesting places, they suggest luxury as an end in itself, they're environmentally suspicious, they're popular with noroviruses. But I figured it would be nice to get out in to the sun for awhile, to see the sea, to turn the brain off for a few days.

I'd been thinking a lot about cruises because I had my students read David Foster Wallace's "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" (though I always have them read the "original" "Shipping Out," as it appeared in folio in Harpers. There are important reasons of intellectual honesty for this). This was the article, I explained to that, that really set us on fire when I was in J-school. Sure, you can admire Gay Talese and Joan Didion and Joseph Mitchell, but DFW seemed to capture, at that moment, the potential magic hiding in nonfiction. I'm happy to have noticed that my students still seem to respond to it all these years later.

Wallace describes the weird predicament of being "pampered" to death, and what it means that we find recreation in being entertained and distracted from the bleak awareness that we are floating around on an ocean of nothingness, and are small and insignificant and dooomed. "All of the Megalines offer the same basic product," Wallace writes. "Not a service or a set of services but more like a feeling: a blend of relaxation and stimulation, stressless indulgence and frantic tourism, that special mix of servility and condescension that's marketed under configurations of the verb 'to pamper.'" As with everything he wrote, it's impossible to avoid the heaviness underlying all this, which would lead to his ultimate sad end. You can't go back and reread it without seeing it through that lens. In fact, in the past few weeks I read DT Max's biography of Wallace, and realize how greatly the problems he was having at the time shaped his reporting — particularly the weirdly abrupt ending, which suggests he wasn't kidding and the agoraphobia was a bit more than "borderline."

I constantly compared our experience aboard the good old "Jewel of the Seas" to Wallace's, and spent a lot of time noting the differences. I didn't quite feel the level of luxuriousness he describes (because we were on a different cruise line?) and we weren't on a junket, so things had a certain value. Also, unlike DFW, I didn't find it too strenuous to occasionally turn my critical thinking faculties off, and enjoy getting a blotchy tan/sunburn with a melting pina colada within reaching distance.

So my complaints and observations are of a much more down-to-earth sort. Like: no matter how rich it was intended, nor how copiously it was presented, nor how pretentious it was described, the food always felt like it came from a freezer. Also: there is something very annoying for many of us about being kept on an insanely tight and mean schedule. Like in Key West, I'd spent awhile on the Hemingway House tour, had a Papa Doble at Sloppy Joe's, and was settling in at a bar near the seaport for a fish sandwich, watching the shadows lengthen and wondering who all these people were that seemed to have stepped out of a Jimmy Buffett B-side, when it was time to get back to the damned ship already. We could have used a few more hours on the beach in Cozumel but... damned ship.

The ship itself is so big that it doesn't feel crowded (unless you try to take an elevator), but the laws of herd dynamics dictate that there are times and places that are incredibly crowded. On the upper decks when the sun is out, morning in the gym, the first few minutes after the dining room opens, any buffet situation.

There were plenty of great things as well. Those same herd dynamics meant that if you had successfully broken away, some places would feel like a ghost ship. In the evening, for example, when everyone else was watching an embarrassing simulacrum of a Broadway review in the theater, or plugging away at the casino, you had the decks entirely to yourself. Just the open sea, the windswept deck, the moonlight glinting off into the distance. That would have to be my favorite part; that, and the fact that sleeping on a gently rocking ship is primordially relaxing.

There are a number of big issues about cruising which didn't come up, particularly the possibility of disaster. Hovering over everything like a ghost was the story of the Carnival Triumph, which was all over the news in the days before we sailed. There was everything you feared, being dead in the water with no power, with the plumbing failing, with little food or water. I'm sure everyone was aware of what happened, but no one mentioned it. And overall, everyone studiously avoids thinking about the constant reminders that you are on a self-contained vessel adrift in a hostile environment. The first thing you do when you get aboard is figure out where your lifeboat is and how to get there. You are always reminded how finicky the toilet and plumbing system is, and every public restroom advises you to open the door with a paper towel in your hand. You're always aware of how weird this is.