Dr. Stanley Burns is an ophthalmologist who lives and works in a big townhouse on E. 38th St. He’s also a world-renowned collector of historical photographs. When I last visited him, back in the summer of 1991, these photos–roughly half a million of them then–were literally all over the house. Stacked on the floors, piled on every available piece of furniture, spilling out of closets, making it difficult to use the stairs or the bathrooms. It looked like a hurricane had sucked up every photograph ever taken in the history of the world and dumped them all down his chimney.

He’s added maybe another 200,000 photos since then, and they’re still all over the place, but with the help of his wife Sara and his daughter Elizabeth, who has become his full-time collaborator, he’s gotten much more organized. The walls of the basement and first floor are still covered with photos; there are file cabinets full of them crammed into every available space. Shelves of the books he uses for research are everywhere as well. But at least it’s all segregated by category and topic now. There’s some sense of order to the overflow.

Stanley Burns keeps ferociously busy. A highly respected, non-academic historian of photography, he has authored or coauthored a dozen major books in about as many years–he routinely has six or seven books in the

works at once–and written numerous articles and papers. He gives lectures and seminars all over the place. In the past year alone he has curated or contributed to a dozen museum and gallery exhibits, from the Musee D’Orsay in Paris to the Metropolitan to the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Other historians and curators are constantly hitting up the Burns Archive (www.burnsarchive.com), as his collection is known, for source materials. So is Hollywood. In The Others, when Nicole Kidman finds the old photos of dead people? Burns provided them. His photos put him in the center of a controversy about Picasso and the development of modern art. He is just now opening the Burns Gallery, a private photo gallery in a front room of the townhouse. And he maintains his private medical practice. He is in perpetual motion. He speaks quickly and roams restlessly among his rooms, his attention caroming from one project to the next. When I ask him if he ever sleeps, he gives me a look and says, “No. You know that.”

But he’s not just keeping himself inhumanly occupied. The average Stanley Burns project is a thing of strange beauty, always thought-provoking and eye-opening, often startling, usually a revelation of some kind. Two of his earliest books remain triumphs of the instructively shocking: the sometimes gruesome Masterpieces of Medical Photography, coauthored with Joel-Peter Witkin, and Sleeping Beauty, his best-known, based on his huge collection of 19th-century post-mortem and memorial photos. The latter, with its antique portraits of dead babies and grieving parents that, nicely framed, were hung in Victorian parlors as mementos mori, presented a sadly eloquent argument for how much our view and experience of death shifted in the 20th century.

“I realized that there is a great void in our culture in dealing with topics of death,” Burns explains. “We live in a youth-oriented culture that does not deal with the realities of life. We want a big house, a big car, a big girlfriend or boyfriend. We avoid all the unpleasantries of life until the end of life.”

We can do that, he says, because of advances in medicine and the concomitant “decline of the place of the physician in society… We can live to be old and not have to deal with death… We removed death from everyday life.” In the 19th century death, doctors and deceased relatives and children were a much more constant presence. The parlors of our homes were the original “funeral parlors.” Death dropped by often.

Earlier this year, when Burns contributed a cache of Sleeping Beauty photos to “a spectacular exhibit” on post-mortem and memorial imagery–photos, paintings, sculptures–at the Musee D’Orsay, the museum asked him for copies of the book to sell. Originally published in 1990, Sleeping Beauty had long since gone out of print. Burns and his daughter, as the Burns Archive Press, quickly produced a revised and updated Sleeping Beauty II, in a French-English limited edition of 5000 copies. It’s available through his website, at $75. Like the original, it’s a thing of morbid beauty and fascination.

The WTC massacre happened as the Burnses were working on Sleeping Beauty II, so he quickly added material on the way WTC-related photos were being used last fall for “communal grieving.” His focus was those snapshot-bearing fliers of WTC missing persons that loved ones pasted all over various sections of New York City in the weeks after 9/11. In the original Sleeping Beauty, the most one could say was that there’d been a tiny resurgence of post-mortem photography in the country. But here suddenly were great numbers of people displaying photos of deceased loved ones as a public act of bereavement. (Like me, Burns got the sense very early on that few people thought their loved ones were “missing.”) Very much like 19th-century families, WTC victims’ families used photographs to keep the deceased’s memory alive.

“Remember,” Burns says of the 19th-century photos, “those pictures hung in the parlor. So people could come and say, ‘Here’s Fred, here’s Tom.’ They’re still members of the family. The photograph allows them to remain members of the family.” Similarly, the WTC victim in one of those fliers wasn’t just a name and number: he had a face.

Burns’ books become collectors’ items in themselves. Sleeping Beauty and Masterpieces of Medical Photography have enjoyed lively after-markets where copies sell for up to $700. Sleeping Beauty, he reports proudly, “has been stolen from most libraries.” When Burns had an exhibit of his own photographs (characteristically, he’s an avid, autodidactic photographer, and a damn good one) at the National Arts Club last December, a display copy of Sleeping Beauty was ripped off. At the National Arts Club. Some arty toff just had to have it. He thinks the appeal is because death is the last taboo. One librarian told him that “it’s worse than a sex book. You can go to the street corner and buy books about sex now, but you can’t buy books about death.”

Dr. Burns will sign copies of Sleeping Beauty II on Oct. 10, 6-8 p.m., at Ursus Books, 132 W. 21st St. (betw. 6th & 7th Aves.), 627-5370.

While Burns is the world’s best-known collector of early medical photography, with more than 50,000 images, the Burns Archive stretches to many other categories. He lists the other major ones for me: ethnology, crime, African-Americans, Asians, Native Americans, daguerreotypes and other similar “hard images,” fashion and theater, and war. (“I can supply pictures of most wars, whether it’s the Balkan War of 1911 or the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 or the Zulu War of 1879.” He’s putting together a book on one of his “favorite” wars, the Mexican Revolution. “I have the private photograph album of Pancho Villa’s doctor.”)

“We can put together important exhibitions in any of these fields in a short amount of time,” he declares, “with iconic pictures that have not been seen.”

That “not been seen” is critical to Burns. He professes bewilderment that so much history of photography is taught with such a limited palette of well-known images, when there’s such a galaxy of other photos out there to be seen. He puts it succinctly: “How many Walker Evanses do I need to see?… Every photography book that comes out has the same old pictures. I want to show you what you haven’t seen on a specific topic.”

He rebels against the way that limiting of the images that get shown and discussed presents a highly edited view of history. He speaks of “visual vigilance.” “We think in pictures… Usually we think best and remember things best as visual images.” New images on a topic promote new thinking about it, he argues. “I collect history, not heritage… Heritage is the daydream of history. It’s the parts you want to remember. History is the whole story. History is John Kennedy inviting women to the White House. Heritage is a hindsight philosophy. For instance, one of the things I write about in medicine is that there is no Darwinian progression in any history. In medicine, new ideas come out of leftfield, from people who aren’t even doctors. The x-ray, or radium, or anesthesia, which came from a dentist. There is no unbroken line. People make up an unbroken line of things they choose from the past. The books that I write, and the pictures that I show, are not the ‘achievements,’ but the reality–or as much as is left, photographically.”

For instance, his African-American collection focuses not on well-known slave imagery, but on “the hardworking African-American middle class–the people who have made something of themselves in spite of the system, the emerging African-American middle class–of the 19th century. We’re talking 1860s, 70s, 80s, 90s. Not 1940, ’50, ’60. And this is the first time there were exhibitions on that material.” Through Oct. 20, the Bronx Museum of the Arts is displaying photos from this collection. This fall, a museum in Haifa will host a similar exhibit, with Fulbright sponsorship. Burns has organized but not yet found a publisher for the book he wants to do on this topic, The Dream Deferred.

With his working-class Brooklyn background (his dad was a union organizer, his mom a chocolate-dipper), Burns also favors vernacular history. His 1995 Forgotten Marriage: The Painted Tintype & the Decorative Frame 1860-1910 documents the spread and democratization of painted portraits. With early photographic methods–tintypes, daguerreotypes, solar prints, etc.–it was suddenly possible for everybody, not just rich folks, to have a portrait taken. But these early photographic images were often small, dark and, of course, monotone. Yet when the photo was painted over and placed in a fancy if inexpensive frame, it looked a lot classier and more like rich folks’ traditional oil portraits. It was an ingenious–if sometimes clumsily executed–adaptation of a high art form for the masses, and Burns’ is the first book solely devoted to it.

As usual, Burns and Elizabeth are now working on some half-dozen books at the same time; which ones get into print first, he says, reflects market demand or opportunity. One they have ready to go is based on an exhibit Elizabeth organized for the National Arts Club. It’s on Lewis Hine, the turn-of-the-20th-century photographer best known for his tear-jerking portraits of poor immigrants at Ellis Island and dirty-faced urchins forced into child labor. Typically, the Burnses’ book, provisionally titled Children at Play, tells a different story, revealing Hines’ forgotten shots of those same kids happily romping in playgrounds and schoolyards. Also typically, the book has a medical-history aspect: it’s about the early 20th-century movement to get kids out of the slums and workshops and into fresh air as an anti-TB measure.

Then there’s Through Nazi Eyes, based on his absolutely startling collection of scrapbooks and snapshots taken by German soldiers. It’s a footsoldier’s view of the war, and a horribly incriminating one, showing Privates Hans and Dieter horsing around in a lake in one snapshot, then looking just as happy as they round up Jews for extermination in the next. Daniel Goldhagen would have a field day with this material.

They’re working on a book of crime photography. Here’s J. Edgar Hoover and his companion butching it up in front of Bonnie and Clyde’s bullet-riddled car; here an early experiment in the police lineup, when they didn’t have two-way mirrors–instead, the witnesses, standing right in front of the lined-up criminals, wore masks.

There’s another book of medical photography he calls Sea Surgeons, based on his collection of the original photos documenting the activities of the USS Solace, the only hospital ship operating in the Pacific at the start of World War II. He’s got a particular interest, having done air/sea rescue work during his time in the Coast Guard in the mid-60s. And Blue, Gray and Red, based on his collection of Civil War medical photos. And Strange Fruit, a book about lynchings.

May they all see print.

Meanwhile, the Burns Gallery will be open by appointment in a few weeks. He’s not selling off his collection, just doubles and multiples in a variety of genres. Images crowding the walls of the tiny front room include an Edward Weston study, a portrait of a 19th-century Japanese lady, a young John Glenn, a David Hamilton nude, a 1930s fashion shot and a very early panorama of Egyptian ruins. Depending on rarity, these photos may fetch anywhere from some few hundred dollars to some tens of thousands.

Afterwords

New York Press has sponsored rock nights and charity nights and movie nights, but I don’t believe we ever sponsored an artist to go hang around on Capri before. Nice work if you can get it. The artist is our friend Mimmo Sinisca, an Italian sculptor-painter-photographer who’s well enough respected over there that he was given a medieval tower in the uphill Umbrian town of Spello to use as a studio and, if I have it right, eventual museum of his works. Unfortunately, that was just before the big earthquake in Umbria that shook Assisi and nearby Spello, and his tower sort of fell down. But it’s been repaired and now houses Fondazione Sinisca.

Mimmo called me last spring and, between his bad English and my terrible Italian, and with our mutual friend Paula as interlocutor, we managed to jigger a deal whereby New York Press would be a sponsor (a patrocino)–along with NYU and a bunch of Italian organizations–for him to return to Capri and Anacapri 50 years after his first trip there as a young artist in 1952. The result is a lovely limited-edition book, Capri Anacapri: viste da Sinisca, which I don’t suppose you’ll ever see, full of his drawings and photomontages of the island.

Pretty soon we’ll be handing out Fulbrights to art history scholars to spend a summer in Tuscany studying the quality of light in the hilltowns.

nnn

When not
expounding at length on apparently mundane topics, Three Weeks tackles
political and social issues, juxtaposing the quaint style with current events.
A typical example was a piece called “Our Ongoing Indignation: The Intellectual
Left Underachieves: Why We Remain Petulant, and Why That is OK: And Why the
President’s Diction Matters.” For all their grand and fustian mannerisms,
Three Weeks‘ editors turn out to be political liberals; in this
particular piece, Swartwout takes his fellow liberals to task as “spineless
shills” for being such “Good Sports” about the election of George
W. Bush. Another issue featured an excellent, historically deep response to
the Pledge of Allegiance flap, pointing out that the intrusion of religion into
the secular workings of the federal state was not, as many ignorant people insist
on believing, built in by the Founding Fathers, but in the main really only
goes back to the Eisenhower era.

“One
of the editors’ complaints is that the left is misguided,” Swartwout
explains to me. “Most of the people who are on the left don’t even
know it, and are in fact completely apolitical. Too many of our friends and
acquaintances don’t have a political conscience, even though when asked
they’ll give you a liberal answer… We want to make it not an embarrassment
anymore to have organized, thought-out, thought-through humanist opinions.”

Despite
the current politics, however, everything else about Three Weeks is resolutely
antique. The price is “two cents, voluntary.” The meager illustrations
look like 19th-century clip art. Even the names on the attenuated masthead sound
like characters from Ethan Frome: there’s the editor, Henry William
Brownejohns, and his “associates” Swartwout, J. Ephrain Underhill
and Eliza Anne Bonney.

Wondering
who the hell these anachronisms were, I contacted Three Weeks and requested
an interview. Swartwout wrote back:

I figured
Swartwout would either be a small, baldheaded man in a mustache and tortoise-shell
spectacles, or a normal-looking young man who just happens to affect the high-collar
writing style. He turned out to be the latter.

On the record,
Swartwout declines to divulge much about the editors, their ages or backgrounds.
“Mr. Brownejohns comes from old money. Mr. Swartwout comes from newer money.
Mr. Underhill’s the family man. And Miss Bonney is the femme sole. She
does what she wants when she wants to.”

I tell him
he’s probably not what people expect when they meet a Three Weeks
editor. “Everybody has expectations of who we are,” he replies. “Most
people think we’re overweight, and we don’t dress fashionably, and
we’re old.” Then again, he sniffs, “People have accused
us of being graduate students. We deny it outright.”

When I note
the editors’ tendency to write at some great length about some very small
subjects, Swartwout declares, “As long as we’re publishing ourselves,
we have the right to finish a thought.” Asked why they chose to come out
every three weeks, he explains, “Three weeks is the only open space in
the media continuum. There are monthlies, who are too slow, and weeklies, who
are too fast–no offense to present company. Three weeks gives us enough
time to think through an issue without missing it. It’s also just the right
amount of time for readers to go into their coffee shop, pick up a copy, walk
away, do whatever they have to do, forget about us, and when they return in
three weeks there’s a new issue.”

About the
only contemporary periodical I can think of as a possible model for Three
Weeks‘ high-button tone is The Spectator. In New York, the last
similar ventures that come to mind are the short-lived Wig-Wag and the
white-gloved Podsnap’s Own, both early 90s. Not surprisingly, Swartwout
cites an older and more exalted model: Washington Irving, “who was both
a Knickerbocker and the granddaddy of American literature,” and his Salmagundi,
the literary and satirical journal he produced pseudonymously in 1807-08 with
the famous declaration, “Our intention is simply to instruct the young,
reform the old, correct the town, and castigate the age.” Swartwout says
he was very pleased to enter a public library and find Three Weeks shelved
next to Salmagundi.

Three
Weeks has a current circulation of 1000 copies. Asked how it’s circulated,
Swartwout replies, “Bicycle.” You may see small piles of it in various
bookstores and coffee shops around Manhattan and Brooklyn, including St. Mark’s
Books, Kim’s, Spoonbill’s in Williamsburg, the Community Bookstore
in Park Slope.

Three
Weeks is a finite exercise; Swartwout doesn’t see it surviving much
past the fall, unless some financial savior comes along to make it worth the
editors’ while to continue. “The idea was to do something well with
the possibly irrational faith that doing something well will be its own reward.”
Typically, people doing a project like this in media-enriched New York City
would hope to be noticed and perhaps employed by somebody in establishment publishing.
“It is an idiotic thing to expect to get noticed in New York with 1000
copies of anything,” Swartwout demurs, but they do mail Three Weeks
to “the cognoscenti,” and have gotten some positive private responses.

Just as
gratifying, he claims, has been the response from readers.

“The
response has been terrific. A lot of mail. Which, when it started out, wasn’t
a concern, and, as soon as it started coming in, we craved more and more.”

(Three
Weeks, P.O. Box 1784, Long Island City, NY, 11101.)

Afterwords

“In
and around the lake, marmots come out of the sky and they stand there…”
A friend of mine thought that’s what Yes was singing, well into his adult
years. For months I thought the refrain to “Doo Wop (That Thing)”
was “Cathleen.” That seemed so sweet, Lauryn Hill singing an ode to
a nice Irish-Catholic girlfriend of hers, that when I learned the real words
the song’s appeal was greatly diminished for me.

That’s
the thing about misheard lyrics: besides being so funny, they can be weirdly
more right than the right lyrics. I love the image of those marmots dropping
out of the sky and then standing around. Beats the hell out of the original’s
mushy symbolism.

New York
Press contributor and WFMU DJ Kenneth Goldsmith has put out a new little
book that weds his musical interests with his mania for oddball lists (in previous
books he’s listed every word he said in a week, every gesture he made in
a day, etc.). Head Citations (The Figures, 88 pages, $10) lists 800 misheard
lyrics he culled from various sources. He readily admits this has been done
before in books like He’s Got the Whole World in His Pants and When
a Man Loves a Walnut, as well as on websites like kissthisguy.com and amiright.com.
Still, it’s great to have so many funny lines in one handy pocket-size
book you can take into the subway or whip out when your stoner friends come
over. Here are a few samples:

“Oh,
we are sailing, yes, give Jesus pants.”
“No one knows
what it’s like to be the fat man.”
“Doughnuts make
my brown eyes blue.”
“Gimme the Beach
Boys and free my soul.”
“Like a Ken Doll
in the wind.”
“Hey you, get
off of my cow.”
“I fight with
Dorothy, and Dorothy always wins.”
“Hold me closer,
Tony Danza.”
“You can’t
always get a Chihuahua.”
“Pulling muscles
with Michelle.”
And, of course, “She’s
giving me head citations.”

(Available
only through Small Press Distribution, www.spdbooks.org.)

•

Another
New York Press contributor, another little book about music… Tim Hall’s
put out a chapbook novella, Club It Up (Digitante Communications, 40
pages). It tells the funny-sad tale of his brief career as a professional songwriter
for a skeevy outfit on Long Island, where his task was to crank out 300 new
tunes his boss could show his investors to keep them off his ass. The ruse didn’t
work and the studio got padlocked, but not before Hall had knocked out a bunch
of good, cheesy, really-early-90s dance tracks, a dozen of which you can hear
on the handily provided CD or download from www.tim-hall.com.
You can also comp yourself a free PDF copy of the book there. Or you can buy
the hard copy and CD from him for $6 by writing to yell@tim-hall.com.

Early in
December of last year, Tivo’s program listings and some local newspapers
around the country listed a show called Disinformation, to be aired late
that Saturday night on the Sci-Fi Channel. Some readers would have recognized
that this was the Disinformation people–disinfo.com, the books You Are
Being Lied To and Everything You Know Is Wrong, the Disinfo.Con of
2000–and thought
Disinformation on tv? On the Sci-Fi Channel? No way.

They would’ve
been correct. Disinformation never aired.

Last week
I sat with Disinformation’s founder Richard Metzger in the small apartment
he and his girlfriend share on Christopher St. (He also has a place in L.A.)
We were laughing at segments from his ill-fated tv enterprise. He calls Disinformation
"a punk rock 60 Minutes." It looks like a typical documentary
or "news magazine" program. It’s the subject matter that distinguishes
it. This is news from what used to be called "the fringe" and "the
underground": weird science, conspiracy theories, ufology, political and
sexual extremists, visionary artists, philosophers, psychos. Amok Books stuff.
Feral House stuff. The Alexandrian Library of high weirdness. On tv.

We watched
a segment of touching, fascinating interviews with she-males. There’s a
profile of performance artist/shock-rocker Kembra Pfahler (the Voluptuous Horror
of Karen Black), including some of Richard Kern’s footage of her having
her labia sewn shut. There’s artist Joe Coleman blowing himself up. Robots
fucking. A West Coast geek who calls himself "Rocketboy" (not to be
confused with New York’s "Rocketman") and insists he’s a
superhero from outer space. Interviews with outre intellectuals like Robert
Anton Wilson and Howard Bloom (The Lucifer Principle). Clips from the
lo-fi cable show Uncle Goddamn, in which fat old hillbillies mix it up
with semi-pro wrestlers, sort of a Hee-Haw meets Jackass. A segment
on extreme s&m porn. Marilyn Manson. Genesis P. Orridge. Kenneth Anger.
Artist and time machine inventor Paul Laffoley. Sculptor and weird science buff
Duncan Laurie. Conspiracy nut Brice Taylor, who, among other political-sexual
fantasies, accuses the senior George Bush of being a pedophile.

Not much
of this is new to me. I’ve interviewed or written about a lot of these
people over the years. (I still owe Laurie a videotape he loaned me a few years
ago of a rare appearance by weird scientist Andrej Puharich on the old tv show
One Step Beyond.) What was cracking me up was the idea of this stuff
being shown on the Sci-Fi Channel. As Metzger puts it to me, you have to wonder
who was smoking crack in the executive offices when they greenlighted this project.

•

When Metzger
launched Disinformation in 1996 it was as disinfo.com, a Drudge Report for the
fringe, with links, articles and interviews on an array of "alternative"
views and ideas. In less than a month it managed to lose the funding of its
corporate backer, Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI, later absorbed by AT&T).
Metzger and his business partner, a Brit named Gary Baddely, kept it afloat
as an independent affair.

The site’s
still there, though Metzger’s quick to admit it’s not quite as up
to date as it used to be, and he hasn’t paid it much mind over the last
couple of years. As a struggling little media concern, the Disinformation Company
has been chasing money in other ways. The two Disinformation books, You Are
Being Lied To and Everything You Know Is Wrong ($24.95 each), both
Adam Parfrey-style compendiums of the edge, have sold well in small-press terms.
Disinfo.con, depending on whom you talk to, was a moderate success or a countercultural
Star Trek convention.

And Metzger’s
been making tv. In the later 90s he had produced some video for the late Pseudo’s
online "network." In 1999, through his UK connections, he got funding
from Channel 4, England’s hipper network, to make what turned into 16 half-hour
episodes of a series called Disinformation.

"They
didn’t pay that much for it, so we ended up owning it," Metzger recalls.
"They just paid a licensing fee. It was cable access-level low. The reason
that this stuff looks good is that I and the editor, who also shot the second
season, Nimrod Erez…killed ourselves to make the thing look really good."

And in fact,
even with the outre subject matter, Disinformation looks as good as or
better than any documentaries you see on, say, the Discovery Channel. Metzger
makes a fine, professional stand-up host. The production values are bright,
kinetic, futuristic.

The first
episode aired in the UK in January 2000, running after Ally McBeal at
11:30, and the show became quite a success for late night. At the end of that
season, Metzger says, a Channel 4 executive told them, "‘I don’t
think you went far enough. If you’re not challenging the legal department
with every single minute of this show, it’s not the show that I want.’
And I’m thinking, ‘Pinch me. That is a license to drive.’"
So they went more extreme for the second season–Metzger remembers his prim
partner Baddely saying he felt "assaulted" by the she-males segment–"and
[the Channel 4 exec] didn’t stand behind it at all. He just freaked out
and buried this thing. He had constant battles with the legal department, which
we lost every time." The second season ran very late at night and didn’t
do nearly as well as the first had.

Meanwhile,
with 16 episodes in the can, they began shopping Disinformation around
to cable channels in the U.S. Their agent at the time was Ben Silverman, the
now immensely powerful personage who got Survivor and many other reality
tv shows on air. "Practically all of television in the last two years came
through his office at William Morris," Metzger says. Silverman pitched
an hour-long Disinformation demo to American cable channels "to
a resounding silence. Nobody but nobody responded to it," Metzger laughs.

Except for
Bonnie Hammer, president of the Sci-Fi Channel. The demo she was sent included
segments on the Montauk Project (ufology), clips from Uncle Goddamn and
the segments on she-males, Brice Taylor and Kembra Pfahler.

Astoundingly,
she greenlighted it. "Maybe she didn’t watch the whole thing,"
Metzger, who says he likes and admires Hammer, surmises. "Maybe she just
watched the first few minutes… This is not tame shit. It’s not a jack
that jumps back into the box."

Last August,
the Sci-Fi Channel budgeted $200,000 for Metzger and his crew to edit a series
of four one-hour best-of "specials" culled from the 16 half-hour episodes
that had run on Channel 4. The first installment was originally slated to air
around Thanksgiving, then pushed back to December. This was the one that got
some listings, then never appeared.

That’s
because when he delivered the first three of the four shows shortly before that
debut night, according to Metzger, Sci-Fi’s executives went ape. To him,
it was as though they were suddenly seeing the material–a lot of it the
same footage they’d supposedly watched and approved in the demo–for
the first time. At any rate, he says, they freaked.

"They
say no Brice Taylor, no way. They say no Uncle Goddamn. This she-males
thing, no way." And so on. Metzger says the list of things the channel
eventually asked him to cut or change ran to 400 items, from excising whole
segments to blurring the nipples on a nude in one of Coleman’s paintings.

"At
that point I was like this is never ever going to happen. This is a fucking
joke… This is not going to work." He remembers protesting, "You
bought Caligula. You did not buy Mary Poppins."

To no avail.
Clearly, we weren’t–aren’t–ever going to see Disinformation
on the Sci-Fi Channel. "They were very nice about it, and they paid out.
They were so upfront and cool about it, realizing that they made a mistake,
that they paid us the very next day."

Metzger
points out further ironies in this story. The Sci-Fi Channel is owned by USA.
The new head of USA Interactive, Michael Jackson, is a Brit. In fact, he was
the head of Channel 4 when it funded and ran those 16 episodes of Disinformation.
In effect, then, his new staff bought and then rejected one of his own shows.
Then again, Metzger will concede, the show did not do well in its second season
in the UK, and even in its very-late night spot, those raunchier second-season
shows did earn Channel 4 a lot of protest and complaints from parents.

Metzger
also likes to note that USA Interactive is owned by Vivendi-Universal. Maybe,
he suggests, this is a tiny example of why Vivendi’s in such financial
turmoil.

So what
to do with Disinformation now? Metzger’s pursuing a few options.
Though no longer associated with Silverman, he’s pitching it again to American
cable channels. With a little judicious editing, it would seem right for late
nights on one of the HBO channels, for instance.

Another
option is to edit a feature-length documentary film out of it, get some exposure
on the festival circuit and then go back to cable to try to get the whole series
aired. Either way, it will inevitably be sold on video and DVD at disinfo.com.
And in the meantime, Metzger has turned the transcripts from all those interviews
into a book, which Disinformation will publish in the near future.

Which
is just as well. Because this Thursday night he climbs into a boxing ring with
Gerry Cooney for what he hopes will be a four-round exhibition match. It will
be the main event of an extravaganza he calls Box Opera 3 (www.boxopera3.com).
In spirit it’ll be as much like professional wrestling as professional
boxing, with a lot of performance art (including lifesize Rock’em Sock’em
Robots and a reenactment of Lincoln’s assassination) and some topless women
thrown in.

David
Leslie is the "Impact Addict," a performance artist as stunt man.
His stunt career began in the mid-80s, when he was a sculptor approaching his
30s, doing odd pieces like a portrait of Johnny Unitas. He says he began to
feel like "I’m the guy at the Super Bowl souvenir stand selling the
little tchotchkes that reference the action on the field." He decided he
wanted to be the action. "My struggle was, I’m going into my
30s. I’m supposed to be acting like a grown man, and it’s like I’m
going back to Little League Football."

But
he went ahead anyway with his first stunt, an Evel Knievel-style "rocket
jump" over 1000 watermelons in ’86. "And then I was hooked."
Next, in one of his most visually stunning acts, he jumped off a three-story
building on Ave. B in a suit of bubble-wrap and lightbulbs, earning the title
"Impact Addict." In other shows he fought six kung-fu fighters simultaneously;
celebrated Chinese New Year by blowing himself up in a costume made of firecrackers;
fought an exhibition match with Riddick Bowe on the Staten Island ferry; and
in 1989 he threw himself off the roof of P.S. 122 in an 80-foot freefall dressed
up as Maria von Trapp.

He says
that was the closest he’s come to really hurting himself, when he went
through his landing gear and "my body punched a hole in the three-quarter-inch
plywood platform… I’ve always said Mark Russell, the director of P.S.
122, has got to be more crazy than I am" for letting him do it. After all,
if the stunt had gone really wrong, Russell could have gone to jail. Leslie
would simply have been dead. "Dead in drag," he jokes.

Why
did he do it? The adrenaline? Is he a masochist?

"I’m
a showman," he replies. On one level, the idea is to get hipster art audiences
to look at "lowbrow spectacle" like stunts or boxing in a new way.
Also, he says, "For me, there are two shows going on. There’s the
one that you guys in the audience are seeing, and the one that I’m seeing
when I’m on top of P.S. 122. I’ve got a whole other show. Nobody gets
to see that but me, and that blows my mind. That’s the addict part of me.
My addiction is not to have a bunch of people watch me do something. It’s
standing there going, ‘Fuck, I have to go. There’s 1000 people
down there and I’ve gotta go.’

"I
love being in a situation where I should be getting hurt, where I could certainly
die, and don’t get hurt," he elaborates. "If I get hurt, it’s
a failure. I’m embarrassed. I look like an idiot. And you feel stupid
because you watched it."

After
the P.S. 122 show Leslie was offered various showbiz opportunities: opening
for the Stones, an early version of MTV’s Jackass. Instead he retired
the Impact Addict and pursued a quieter, more grownup career for the next 11
years as the performance-art curator at the Kitchen, "where I was fairly
miserable for two years," and then as a casting director.

In 2000
he met then New York Press columnist Jonathan Ames and the two goaded
each other into the ring for the first Box Opera. The Impact Addict was
back. Older, but no less ballsy. Both guys trained seriously in the months leading
up to the fight, wherein Leslie pretty much kicked Ames’ ass. Leslie fought
another arty type in Box Opera 2, and then there was the knockout contest,
where he challenged all comers in the audience to deck him and win $1000. That
night ended in a small riot, with Leslie still standing and keeping his dough.
"I can take a hit," he says.

One
hopes so. For Cooney, this fight is a way to raise money and awareness for FIST,
the charity for current and retired boxers. For Leslie, it’s a way to kick
the Box Opera spectacle up to another level.

"I’ve
been to see Cooney fight four times in the past year, starting with an exhibition
fundraiser for the Twin Towers Fund. He’s only a year older than me–next
month I’ll be 45, he’ll be 46. He’s in great shape. Nobody could
touch him. He’s fast. You’ll be shocked at how quick his jab is. Very
smart, very fast, and doesn’t let people touch him. He’s like, ‘We’ll
go out there and I’ll beat you up and you’re not going to touch me.
And if you try to touch me, I’m gonna punish you.’

"I
don’t want to go out there with somebody who’s just going to toy around,"
he continues. "He could literally kill me if he wants. I’m gonna go
out there and piss him off, and he’s gonna punish me, and that’s what
the crowd is going to see. I’m going to be trying as hard as I can to get
under or around his incredibly fast jab and really rattle him, get him to where
he’s like, ‘I’ve got to get this asshole off of me.’"

A friend
recently told Leslie that Box Opera is "like an over-produced, very
public midlife crisis. That’s probably right. But I’m having a damn
good time doing it."

For
his next extravaganza, he’s plotting a return to his Knievel roots: he
wants to "jump a motorcycle from Brooklyn to Manhattan" across the
East River. He acknowledges the extreme potential for failure. "I’ll
put it this way," he grins. "There’ll be a receiving ramp on
one side, and a take-off ramp on the other, and I don’t know how much use
the receiving one will get."

Instead,
he’s extremely polite about the whole thing, a model of gentlemanly forbearance.
A couple of things occur to me.

(1) Jim
Goad knows a thing or two about terrible weeks.

(2) Jim
Goad may in fact be the bad man his wife, his girlfriend, the State of Oregon
and numerous others said he is, but he’s also a man of principle. You may
disagree with his ethics, they may even repulse you, but you can’t deny
that he’s thought them through, can articulate them with unusual clarity,
tries to live by them more faithfully than you live by yours and if you debated
him on them he’d probably kick your ass.

Figuratively
speaking, of course.

Yet Goad’s
most outrageous act, so far, had nothing to do with print. In 1998 he got into
a vicious fight with the girl he was fucking while his wife lay dying of cancer.
The girl pressed charges. She and Goad’s wife bonded, the wife claiming
that he’d been beating her for years. Faced with two angry women and over
25 years behind bars, Goad copped a plea for a three-year sentence. He served
2.5 and got out last year.

Even after
months on the outside, Goad, who just turned 41, still has the look of the recently
released felon. He’s jailhouse pale and prison-gym built, lean, with guarded
eyes in a narrow face. His hair is 50s redneck, as is his blue jeans-and-wifebeater
attire.

That wifebeater,
of course, is a visual pun. There’s something mildly, not at all off-puttingly,
theatrical about Goad’s entire affect. Like a lot of people with a rep,
he dresses for it. I sense this is Jim Goad playing Jim Goad. I’m not at
all startled to hear that as a young man in Philadelphia he wanted to come to
NYU to study acting under Stella Adler.

It didn’t
work out. “My parents decided they didn’t want their son to be a fag,”
he says with a tight, bitter grin. (According to the early chapters of Shit
Magnet, his parents didn’t want their son, period. Goad believes it’s
part of why he’s so fucked up.)

As it turns
out, Goad is playing Goad, more or less, while he’s in New York:
He’s acting in a low-budget film, The Suzy Evans Story, playing
a bad-lieutenant sort of detective who starts out protecting the battered Suzy
and ends up…battering her.

“Yeah,
I know,” he shrugs when I give him a look. “Typecasting.”

•••

Shit
Magnet is a relentlessly sad, ugly, hateful, raging, repellent, violent
and brutally candid memoir-manifesto. It’s as hard to put down as it is
to read. Think Celine, or Klaus Kinski’s rabid autobiography. Mostly it’s
about Goad working out a rationale not only for his own violence, but for a
generally violent world.

He believes
his own disposition toward violence began literally in the womb, when his drunken
father punched his pregnant mom in the hopes of inducing her to abort. He relates
a bleak and freakish childhood in Philadelphia, where he was always the smart,
big-headed weirdo kid, a loner, a misanthrope from very early on. Shrinks described
him as an adult’s brain in a child’s body; once, in his sleep, he
actually seemed possessed and spoke with a woman’s voice. School was torturous
boredom at the hands of the nuns; his early sexual experiences were dalliances
with other boys based on their reading of porn. Eventually, after getting beaten
often enough–by his dad, by bullies–he learned to use his fists and
fight back. He describes numerous fights in the book: some he won, some he got
his ass kicked; some with guys, some with women.

He met Debbie
at a Johnny Thunders concert in New York. She was 32, he was 24. He was a tormented
Catholic boy from Philly, she was a morose Brooklyn Jew. She wore a button that
said I HATE PEOPLE. “A girl who thinks like me,” he thought. He writes:

The Goads
were together for over a decade, a self-contained unit of misfits, making very
few friends. They fled New York when Goad beat up their Brighton Beach landlord
for, he says, calling Debbie “stupid.” Assault charges were later
dropped, but they still moved across the country, to L.A.–where, not surprisingly,
they felt even more out of place. He writes:

It was in
L.A. that they began to work on ANSWER Me!, earning undying fandom and/or
envy in the zine world, and much outrage elsewhere. Completely antisocial, often
revoltingly vicious, ANSWER Me! had repercussions far beyond its peak
circulation of 13,000. Goad reveled in upsetting the politically correct, especially
on issues of race and feminism. All it took was an essay like “Let’s
Hear It for Violence Toward Women!,” which began:

“Women
are only good for fucking and beating. When you get tired of fucking them, there’s
only one thing left to do.

“After
you fuck them, they start talking. That’s when you beat them. They all
talk too much, especially when you don’t want to hear it.

“And
what do they talk about? Violence toward women. But they fail to realize that
their whining is what provokes most of the violence…”

Copies of
ANSWER Me! were banned or seized by customs officials in several countries.
The final “Rape Issue”–one long, vehemently antifeminist rant
(Goad calls it their “malevolent Meisterwerk”) that argued rape is
a natural, not a political, act–made national news and raised an enormous,
often hilarious and usually idiotic maelstrom of protest; as Goad writes, “People
swiftly reacted as if an acutely unholy event had occurred.” Bookstore
owners rejected and, in at least one case, actually burned copies of the issue.
As ultimate (if possibly apocryphal) proof of its triumph, Richard “The
Night Stalker” Ramirez, a Goad prison pen-pal, supposedly remarked, “Don’t
you think that issue went a little too far?” In the state of Washington,
bookstore owners who’d displayed the issue were prosecuted on a pornography
charge and acquitted on a technicality.

The Goads
made the news again when a crazed gunman took 29 shots at the White House with
an assault rifle, and it was claimed that he’d been influenced at least
in part by ANSWER Me! And again in ’96, when a young British trio
with neo-Nazi leanings killed themselves, and the third (“Suicide”)
issue of ANSWER Me! was cited as a possible inspiration. It’s said
that Kurt Cobain also read that issue a few months before he offed himself.
It contained a photo of a man who’d blown his head off in a manner suspiciously
similar to what Cobain would do to himself.

With all
that press, even if it was almost uniformly bad, it was perhaps inevitable that
Goad would score a commercial book contract. But Simon & Schuster seemed
mortified by his Redneck Manifesto–which argued that poor whites
should be just as proud of their heritage as poor blacks–as soon as it
appeared and began to be called a “racist” or “white supremacist”
tract. A classically Goadian disclaimer–”I’m no fan of white
supremacy–everyone knows the Jews and chinks are superior”–didn’t
help. The publisher arranged exactly one public reading for the author. Though
a cause celebre in certain circles, the book barely dented the mainstream
mediascape.

And then
Goad got himself arrested.

•••

Misery only
loves company for so long. Goad claims that over time Debbie drove him to violent
rage with her depression, her constant complaining and her lack of intelligence.
Addressing her in the book, he writes:

The first
time he hit her, he slapped her. Later, he would punch her, blackening both
her eyes.

There were
other violent outbursts, forever marking him as a wife-beater. Debbie would
later claim the abuse became daily, which he has always strenuously denied.

I ask him:
“Is Jim Goad a wife-beater? And if not, what’s the difference between
Jim Goad and a wife-beater?” Prompting this exchange:

JG: “Okay,
define beating.”

JS: “Did
Jim Goad regularly beat on his wife?”

JG: “Define
beating. The dictionary defines beating as repeated striking.”

JS: “There
you go.”

JG: “Never
did that with my wife. Hit her maybe 10 to a dozen times over 10 to a dozen
years, and would gladly trade being hit as many times as I hit her with being
slogged with her neuroses. And you could hook me up to a lie detector test and
see if that’s true. I know what it’s like to be hit–big fucking
deal. A lot worse ways to suffer than being hit.”

He writes:

And then
Debbie was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. And Goad started cheating on her with
an ANSWER Me! groupie, Anne Ryan. Ryan put out her own misanthropic zines
and handed out personal business cards describing herself as a “Psychotic
Neo-Nazi Bitch With a Whip.” She turned out to be a lot worse than that
for Goad. Shit Magnet narrates–from Goad’s point of view, of
course–an intense, psycho affair in minute, painful, degraded detail. “Sweet
Dracula girl,” he calls her. “Fifteen years younger than me and a
thousand times more fucked-up.”

Goad admits
that he hit Ryan first, but claims that as their relationship deteriorated they
took to beating each other up pretty regularly. They fought in public, were
arrested and released. When she wouldn’t stop fighting and started threatening
to kill him, he took out a restraining order against her. He says she continued
to cling and “stalk” him anyway. They had their last, savage fight
in his car in the hills outside Portland, where he left her by the road.

Because
he’d had her in his car, Goad faced tough kidnapping as well as assault
charges, potentially topping out at over 25 years. After 7.5 months of pretrial
incarceration, during which Ryan and the dying Debbie formed their bond and
virtually all the media portrayed Goad as the blackest of woman-beating blackguards,
he copped his plea. (Ryan would later do a couple of months on an unrelated
assault charge of her own.)

Goad has
never expressed a scintilla of remorse. Asked if he’s sorry for beating
Ryan, he tells me, “Absolutely not. I enjoyed it.”

•••

But a guy
isn’t supposed to hit a woman, I say. “The guy’s
not supposed to hit a woman,” he counters, “but it’s okay for
a guy to hit a weaker guy. I mean, it has nothing to do with physical weakness.
Woman are ‘sacred’ [in this society]. This idea that they’re
second-class citizens is bullshit. They live longer, they don’t go to jail
for the same crimes, they don’t have to go to war. It’s bullshit.
They get better bathrooms. Anybody who says women are second-class citizens
should go into a male and female public bathroom, and come out and tell me with
a straight face that women are second-class citizens.”

Yeah, but
you’re still not supposed to hit a woman.

This belief
has “nothing to do with Strength v. Weakness,” Goad writes, “and
everything to do with Man v. Woman.”

Well, it
could be said that a gentleman hits neither a woman nor a smaller guy.

“H.L.
Mencken said a gentleman is a man who never hits a woman without provocation,”
Goad replies.

He utterly
rejects any argument that men are more prone to physical violence than women.

“Every
study of family violence that’s ever been done has seen it neck and neck–or
women committing more violence than males,” he argues. “Does
the justice system reflect that? Women do as much damage with a frying pan in
their hand, or a knife or a blunt instrument, as any man.” The lopsided
law “has nothing to do with relative physical strength, and everything
to do with female sanctity, and male scumminess, or males being subhuman compared
to females, and guys get blamed for it.”

He puts
it succinctly in Shit Magnet:

“I’ll
hit anyone who’s seriously threatening my life,” he tells me, “and
that’s what happened, and that’s what sent me to prison.”

•••

After the
county jail, Goad spent a year in a minimum security prison, a kind of dorm
he shared with 400 other inmates. He was later sent to a maximum security facility
for fighting with another inmate. There it was two guys in a cell 5.5 by 7.5
feet, with bunks less wide than the table in the diner where he and I sat having
lunch. It was small enough that he could easily stretch and touch all four walls.

“I
found the minimum security prison a lot worse than the maximum,” he says.
In his tiny cell in the maximum security prison, “at least there was some,
some semblance of privacy,” as opposed to the open dorm living.
“Dostoyevsky said the worst thing about prison was forced communal existence.
I mean I hate going out, I hate socializing. So when you’re forced to cohabitate
with a thousand other guys constantly… That was the worst part, just having
to constantly brush up against these imbeciles.” In Shit Magnet
he describes his fellow inmates as “Shockingly illiterate. One slow-lidded,
drooling troglodyte after the next. Men whose mental energy couldn’t power
a wristwatch. Ugly, stupid, belching, conscienceless, unfeeling, driven-by-instinct,
worthless turd dumplings whose only purpose in life is to remind us that forced
sterilization maybe wasn’t such a bad idea.”

Still, Goad
says that contrary to the Oz image of constant violence and sexual aggression,
being in prison is “like a monastery. At least in Oregon, and Oregon may
be an exception, but you don’t have the gang rape and the gang culture
and the air of hostility. Everyone really is miserable enough without having
to create more trauma. Everyone wants to be left alone. It’s the most respectful
place I’ve ever been in my life. People apologize when they bump into you.
Never happens out here.” He found the holding pens at the county jail “a
lot more stressful” than real prison. In the county lockup, “those
people are being dragged off the streets all dope-sick and they don’t know
if they’re getting out, if they’re ever getting out. In prison
people know how long they’re there, and everyone who was a junkie is cleaned
up at that point. People are cleaner and in better shape than they are in jail.”

In Oregon,
unlike some states, inmates are allowed to receive a variety of reading materials,
but still it’s “really difficult to get anything controversial. So
the big irony was that I wasn’t able to receive any of my own writing because
it might have a bad influence on me.”

Goad says
that black inmates preferred to be around the openly racist white ones, because
at least they knew where they were coming from. “One black inmate after
the next told me that the only whites they respected were the Nazis. Initially
I was totally shocked seeing these guys with White on one triceps and
Pride on the other sitting at tables playing cards with the blackest
of the black inmates. But the truth is, in prison non-racists don’t get
respect from anybody. They’re considered nerds or weaklings. It’s
considered a virtue to have esteem for your heritage in prison. I mean, you
have so very little else in there, you focus on those sort of tribal identities.”

•••

Since his
release last year Goad’s been back in Portland, where he got a job that,
compared to past escapades, sounds almost staid: He edits and writes for Exotic,
which he describes as “a free guide to the Northwest sex industry–you
know, escort girls and strip clubs.” Not a bad spot for a con. He’s
got a new young girlfriend and knows that in general he needs to stay out of
fights and out of trouble.

“What
do girls think of you now?” I ask him. “Jim Goad, the famous woman-beater?”

“Well,
it hasn’t detracted from my appeal,” he replies. “Numerically,
I’ve had more girls since I got out than I had in my entire life before.”

“But
you can’t be winning a lot of ladyfriends with your opinions.”

“You’d
be surprised,” he counters. “So many of them find it refreshing that
a guy’s not ashamed to be a fucking guy. I stayed with some friends the
first couple of days after I got out. We went to some little hipster restaurant/bar,
and all the men looked so severely fucking emasculated, just slump-shouldered–the
women seemed dominant and in control. I just remember being disgusted.

“Power
always fills a vacuum. It’s understandable that there’d be so many
lesbians and dominant women with these mealymouthed, self-hating, anti-male
guys. Of course that’s not gonna be appealing. I don’t mince words.
A lot of people find that incredibly refreshing, and–it’s a gay word–but
‘liberating’ almost. ‘Somebody’s finally saying what I’ve
been too terrified to say.’ Why are they terrified to say it? Because you
get demonized like Jim Goad got.”

“In
the end,” I ask him, “what did Debbie think of you?”

“I
think Debbie thought I was evil,” he replies. “She thought that Anton
LaVey, GG Allin and El Duce were her guardian angels in heaven, and that I was
going to hell. I wish I could view the world that simplistically. In the end,
how did I view her? As a fucked-up, sad person.”

“And
what if somebody says to you, ‘Jim Goad, you got all this stuff in here
about your terrible childhood, your horrible dad, your horrible mom, am I supposed
to take that as an excuse for your being a woman-hating fuckhead now?’”

“What
I say is, why do I need to give an excuse to anybody? I guess I just wrote a
whole book justifying myself, but it was to myself. It’s like I said at
the end, ‘You all need my forgiveness.’ I think I was imprinted
with some pretty wacky, heavy, hairy, violent situations when I was young, and
even when I was prenatal–it definitely had an effect. Excuse? No. All I’ve
ever said is things are complicated. The idea of this is good, this is bad,
you cut it right down the middle here–that’s retarded. It is a big
mess, but people can’t handle a big mess. I guess we have simple minds,
we can’t handle the utter horrifying complexity of everything, the fact
that there aren’t clear-cut good guys and bad guys. People suffer overload
from that. It’s all a big cesspool. The tide flushes this way and that
way, you squeeze the balloon on this end and it pops out that end. I think early
experiences had an effect on who I grew up to be and why I’m insanely driven
and insanely defensive of myself and my actions, ’cause I think I’ve
put a lot of thought into what I believe and who I am and the biggest lament
of my professional life is for all the shit people talk about me, I’ve
never had one fucking shit-talker ever agree to a public debate, ever,
or anything fucking near it. It’s like, if I’m so stupid, if I’m
so easily dismissed, if my ideas are so laughable, why don’t you just make
a mockery of me in public? It’s like foxhole syndrome, they’ll take
a shot and then hide.”

For someone
who says he rejects all moral systems, Goad has worked out for himself some
very well-articulated ethics. They’re not everybody’s ethics, but
he’s got them.

“You
know,” he says, “rare is the true sociopath. People laugh about honor
among thieves. But the convict code to me is an incredibly moral thing. Why
are rats and snitches hated in prison? ‘Cause every one of them is guilty
of something. They’re trying to get out of whatever they’re charged
with by pinning it on someone else. And to me, that’s the ultimate act
of immorality.”

Experience
and Its Decay

Lindgren’s
always figured out how to translate Wilson’s eccentric vision to achieve
that look of inevitability. She did his No One May Ever Have the Same Knowledge
Again, for example, a wonderful collection of letters to the astronomers
at Mount Wilson Observatory 1915-1935, and his The Eye of the Needle,
about the microminiature sculptor Hagop Sandaldjian. (Both are available from
the museum’s website, www.mjt.org.)

She’s
come up with the perfect design again for the new The Museum of Jurassic
Technology Jubilee Catalogue (120 pages, $16). Like the museum itself, it’s
both a loving homage to and a quiet, deadpan send-up of those old-fashioned,
plain-faced bound volumes small museums or private libraries or academic societies
put out. It could be the annual report of the Royal Society of Steam Engineers,
or the index to a volume of 14th-century Arabic sea voyages put out by the Hakluyt
Society or the catalog of some small private university library’s collection
of Piers Ploughman commentaries.

What it
is is a welcome overview of the Jurassic’s unique exhibitions, and a selection
of the brilliant texts that have accompanied and only sometimes explained those
exhibits. To recap: The Jurassic may be the most unusual little museum in the
world, and I’m including the Mütter in Philadelphia (for which Lindgren
has also worked), the marvelous sideshow gaffs of the American Dime Museum in
Baltimore, that sex museum in Amsterdam and that museum of parasites in Japan.
Founded in 1988 in a storefront on a shabby strip of Venice Blvd. better known
for its car lots than its cultural institutions, the Jurassic is Wilson’s
mysterious, fascinating and utterly charming version of a natural history museum,
as well as a modern equivalent of a 17th-century "cabinet of curiosities."
Some of the exhibits, like the one of Sandaldjian’s microscopic sculptures,
have been actual oddities; some, like the famous one about the "Deprong
Mori," a bat that can fly through solid matter, have been magnificent fictions;
and it’s always been a hallmark of Wilson’s poker-faced presentation
that the visitor can’t tell which is which and shouldn’t even think
about it too hard, but simply luxuriate in the feelings of awe, mystification
and/or amusement a trip to the museum (and by extension, any museum, though
most don’t do it on purpose) can generate.

Wilson’s
a filmmaker, a conceptual artist and a curator all at once, but I think in the
end he’s a poet, one who works not only in language–although, as the
catalog indisputably demonstrates, he’s great with words–but in material
objects and space and time and his audience’s perceptions and preconceptions.
A hint of melancholy hangs over all of it, even the funniest exhibits; as its
name suggests, the Jurassic evokes lost worlds, lost lives, lost minds, forgotten
knowledge, decaying memory. The stories it tells are often of eccentric scientists
and misunderstood visionaries, most likely driven somehow to ruin in their obsessive
pursuit of the arcane or the ineffable.

Wilson was
in New York a couple of weeks ago to speak at that NYU conference on Athanasius
Kircher, the 17th-century Jesuit polymathic scientist, inventor and curator
of curiosities who could serve as well as anyone as an historical model for
what Wilson’s up to at the Jurassic. It was honchoed by Lawrence Weschler,
who over the last few years has made himself Wilson’s most public fan and
cheerleader; he wrote the sometimes aggravating and somewhat misleading book
on the Jurassic, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder. Not so long ago,
as often as not when you told someone you thought Wilson was some kind of eccentric
genius, you’d get a bemused response. An oh that funny little guy with
the weird little museum shrug. Then he got a MacArthur "genius"
fellowship last year and suddenly it’s official and he’s being courted
by academic conclaves and museums all over the place. But isn’t that always
the way.

I asked
Wilson last week if he feels any smarter since he got the MacArthur. "Oh
no," he chuckled in his characteristically self-effacing way. "If
anything, I think I’m becoming less smart." He was speaking to me
on a cellphone inside an airliner about to take off for Germany, where he runs
a "tochter museum" (daughter museum) to the Jurassic in the
Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum in Westphalia. Makes sense that the land of Kircher
gets the Jurassic.

Divorced
from the exhibits, the entries in the Jubilee Catalogue shine as pure
literature. The text for one of my favorite exhibits, "Stink Ant of the
Cameroon (Megaloponera foetens)," is a classic demonstration of
how the average Jurassic display could be real, could be fake and is a great
Borgesian story either way:

"Our
planet’s rain forests–rich matrices of life existing primarily in
tropical regions–provide us with unique opportunity to observe life in
all of its manifold and perplexing beauty. Most rain forests date back some
two to three hundred million years. This extreme age has allowed many unusual
and complex relationships to develop among the inhabitants of these tropical
ecosystems.

"In
the rain forest of the Cameroon in central West Africa lives a floordwelling
ant known as Megaloponera foetens or, more commonly, the stink ant. This
large ant–one of the very few to produce a cry audible to the human ear–lives
by foraging for food among the fallen leaves and undergrowth of the extraordinarily
rich rain forest floor.

"On
occasion, one of these ants while looking for food is infected by inhaling a
microscopic spore from a fungus of the genus Tomentella. The spore seats
in the ant’s tiny brain and begins to grow, causing changes in the ant’s
patterns of behavior. The ant appears troubled and confused; for the first time
in its life the ant leaves the forest floor and begins to climb.

"Driven
on by the growth of the fungus, the ant embarks on a long and exhaustive climb.
Completely spent and having reached a prescribed height, the ant impales the
plant with its mandibles. Thus affixed, the ant waits to die. Ants that have
met their end in this fashion are quite common in some sections of the forest.

"The
fungus continues to consume first the nerve cells and finally all the soft tissue
that remains of the ant. After approximately two weeks a spike appears from
what had been the head of the ant. This spike is about an inch and a half in
length and has a bright orange tip heavy with spores that rain down onto the
rain forest floor for other unsuspecting ants to inhale."

The text
for the exhibit "Garden of Eden on Wheels: Selected Collections from Los
Angeles Area Mobile Home and Trailer Parks"–a kind of Christmas garden
featuring scale model trailer homes–hypnotically interweaves the invention
of the mobile home with the story of Noah’s Ark (a recurring motif) and
the fact that the universe is expanding (and thus, in a sense, all homes are
mobile homes). The story accompanying the well-loved "Delani/Sonnabend
Halls" is a fantastical romance novella with hints of Fitzcarraldo.
It relates the circumstantial intersection of two lives at the Iguassu Falls
in South America: Madalena Delani, a famous opera singer afflicted by bad memory,
and Geoffrey Sonnabend, a neurophysiologist who, through Delani’s music,
became obsessed with the nature and operation of memory.

"In
Obliscence: Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter, Geoffrey
Sonnabend departed from all previous memory research with the premise that memory
is an illusion. Forgetting, he believed, not remembering, is the inevitable
outcome of all experience. From this perspective,

"We,
amnesiacs all, condemned to live in an eternally fleeting present, have created
the most elaborate of human constructions, memory, to buffer ourselves against
the intolerable knowledge of the irreversible passage of time and the irretrievability
of its moments and events.

"…Sonnabend
believed that long-term or ‘distant’ memory was illusion, but similarly
he questioned short-term or ‘immediate’ memory. On a number of occasions
Sonnabend wrote, ‘there is only experience and its decay,’ by which
he meant to suggest that what we typically call short-term memory is, in fact,
our experiencing the decay of an experience…"

The Museum,
and the catalog, dutifully reproduce Sonnabend’s elaborately graphed "Model
of Obliscence (or model of forgetting) which, in its simplest form, can be seen
as the intersection of a plane and cone."

Wilson printed
5000 copies of the Jubilee Catalogue. It’ll be sold at the museum
and through the website, he says, but not available through conventional bookstores.

•

Lately Wilson has returned
to filmmaking, and created a remarkable short documentary shown in the museum:
Levsha, subtitled "The Tale of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the
Steel Flea." It was shot in Russia and is narrated in Russian, and shows
Wilson’s knack for genre mimicry: If you didn’t know better you’d
think it is in fact a Russian film, one of those arty things that’s gloriously
lensed, glacially paced and with a storyline that’s just a little off,
just a little alien to a Western viewer. (It’s also reminiscent of Herzog’s
poetic and allusive documentaries.) Once again, it involves the world of microminiatures–and
yet, in one of Wilson’s dreamlike associations, it also manages to be about
Russian rocket science: ingenuity, that is, on both the miniature and the monumental
scale.

The film’s
based on a Russian folktale about a tiny mechanical flea given to Czar Alexander
I by the English. The jealous Russians decide to recreate this marvelous toy,
to show that they can do it. They hand the task to a group of gunsmiths, including
Levsha, who produce their own microscopic flea. (Wait, now I see the connection:
those gunsmiths are historical antecedents to Russia’s rocket scientists.)
The Russian flea doesn’t dance like the English one does, but they’ve
done something even more astonishing: they’ve shod it with infinitesimal
shoes, and inscribed their names on them. All but Levsha’s; he claims to
have written his name "on the tiny nails that held together the flea’s
shoes. But even with [a] microscope, no one could see such a tiny thing to say
whether or not he was telling the truth."

That’s
so Jurassic. So is Levsha’s tragic end: like so many of Wilson’s eccentric
heroes, he dies impoverished, misunderstood and believed to be mad.

Nobody seems
to have reprinted the full text of Castro’s April 22 press release, and
with good reason: it’s 15 pages of epic Fidel rambling–roughly 8000
words of completely mad rant that reads very much like a Saturday Night Live
skit.

Mexico had
always maintained cordial relations with Castro until Fox, the conservative
businessman, was elected in 2000 and quickly became friendly with Castro’s
nemesis George W. Bush. Fox and his foreign minister Jorge Castaneda have been
putting distance between their country and Cuba ever since. A few days before
Castro’s press conference, Mexico reversed its traditional stand and voted
with other nations on a resolution by Geneva’s Human Rights Commission
to send observers to Cuba. Castro was still raving about this in a bitter May
Day speech last week. In the press release, he identifies Castaneda, a former
leftist gone neocon, as the primary snake in the grass who "had hatched
the recent conspiracy against Cuba in Geneva" and "had dragged President
Vicente Fox in his shameless adventure." (The press release also blames
something it calls "the Checkian government.")

Meanwhile,
there was the International Conference on Financing for Development, a UN summit,
convened in the Mexican city of Monterrey March 18-22. The UN invited Castro,
and he clearly wanted to go. Fox was just as clearly hoping he wouldn’t,
since Bush had threatened not to attend if Fidel did. For weeks, Fidel kept
Fox twisting, not saying officially whether or not he’d participate. In
an effort to achieve some clarity, Fox and Castaneda visited Cuba in February.
In Castro’s version:

"We
were perfectly aware that one of the purposes was to request that we did not
participate in the conference. They did not dare. The first hour, practically
the first minutes, of the meeting that began at 11:14 am, sufficed. I started
by reminding them of the invitation extended to our country by the United Nations
to take part in that Summit and went on to analyze in depth the perfidious and
hypocritical maneuvers against Cuba in Geneva."

Nevertheless,
Fidel says, the rest of the day went well. "We visited old Havana… Later,
and according to the itinerary, we had a dinner that developed in a friendly
atmosphere. The visit left us with a positive impression. We had many hours
of respectful and seemingly sincere exchanges.

"However,
that nice impression would not last long."

What Fidel
means is that soon after the Havana trip, Castaneda was warmly addressing an
audience of Cuban exiles in Miami, assuring them, as The Boston Globe
reported, "that Mexico’s doors were open to all Cubans, prompting
dozens of asylum-seekers to drive a truck through the gates of the Mexican Embassy
in Havana."

Now in full
pout, Castro waited until March 19 to write Fox confirming that he would be
attending the conference. This is where things get really funny. Again, in Fidel’s
version:

"At
the time our ambassador delivered the letter to the President’s personal
secretary, he was told that Fox would be leaving for Monterrey shortly. After
our representative had completed that mission, he went to the offices of the
Home Minister whom he informed of the same in order to make the necessary arrangements.
We would be arriving in Monterrey 24 hours later.

"Around
11:00 p.m. that night, Cuba time, a telephone call from Mexico was received
in my office. They said that President Fox wanted to talk to me as soon as possible.
As I was not there, they were asked to retry a little later. At 11:28 they were
calling back again. At that moment I was meeting with several comrades in a
room not far from my office. I instinctively felt something was wrong.

"It
was strange, I thought, because the President goes to bed early! The tone reeked
of an emergency. I had no further doubts. I left the room and headed for my
office. I asked to be put through with President Fox. An unusual dialogue would
follow whose transcription I offer, just as it was registered."

And he does:

Fidel.-
Yes, I do. [He was taping the conversation as he said this.] I hope you
have received my letter, haven’t you? I sent it

Fidel agrees,
and they proceed to discuss hotels and schedules in numbing detail, like they’re
planning a vacation in Cancun. Then:

Issues of
international diplomacy settled, they return to a weightier subject: lunch.

Fidel went,
presumably ate the goat, and left before Bush arrived. Everything appeared copacetic,
until that Human Rights Commission vote a month later. Castro held his press
conference and released the tape, accusing Fox of bum-rushing him off the stage
to curry favor with the U.S. president. Fox has apologized to the Mexican people
for appearing to be such a Bush bootlicker; Castaneda is fighting opposition
party calls for his resignation; and Fidel, to judge from that speech last week,
continues to pout.

We all know
that the bohemian neighborhood, where hipsters and artistes are ogled by the
requisite busloads of bourgeois voyeurs, was not created when The New
York Times discovered Bedford Ave. a couple of months ago. It didn’t
start with the hipster colonization of the Lower East Side in the 90s, or in
Soho in the 80s, or at the punk clubs, or the hippie East Village,
or in the abstract expressionists’ Cedar Tavern or the beatniks’ Greenwich
Village. All those boho locales–and the similar ones in cities around the
world–have a direct lineage back to the cabarets and cafes of 19th-century
Paris, where the poets mixed with the poseurs, the flaneurs with the voyeurs,
and the La Boheme lifestyle that’s still the model for arty poverty
was first valorized. It’s no accident that Television and Patti Smith evoked
Verlaine and Rimbaud. (Some of the original bohemians pushed the lineage much
further back, to the student drinking societies of the medieval cities, but
let’s not go there today.)

The history
of bohemia is in fact familiar to most of us, and its successive loci, from
the Left Bank and Montmartre through the Jazz Age to the present, have been
very well documented. But Bernard Gendron, a philosophy prof at the University
of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, has an agenda beyond just retelling boho history in
his new book with the cool title Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club
(University of Chicago Press, 388 pages, $20). Gendron wants to examine the
ways that successive bohemias have been the sites where what used to be called
High and Low culture met and interacted in the modern era, ultimately producing
our postmodern age where the very terms High and Low can seem so obsolete. He’s
specifically interested in the ways that hipsters and esthetes have interacted
with and appropriated popular musics, from the "vulgar" cabaret songs
of Paris through swing and bebop to the New York punk rock/new wave/no wave
of the 1970s. How did bebop and the Beatles and Patti Smith all come to be esteemed
as "art"? What role have the bohos played in creating our current
culture, where High and Low have actually changed places in prestige and influence,
so that popular music and pop culture generally have so trumped the old highbrow
art forms in what scholars call "cultural capital"?

It’s
an intriguing if not brand-new line of inquiry. Being a scholar, Gendron thinks
and argues it all through much more clearly than have some previous wayward
and gasbaggy attempts at developing similar theories by pseudo-scholars like
Greil Marcus. Then, too, if you’re not all that interested in the thesis,
you can fall back and just read this book as another handy and lively primer
on boho history.

Gendron
focuses on five points in the bohemian timeline to show how the interactions
of high and popular culture changed. At first, it was the esthetes glomming
onto popular/mass/folk arts and using them for their own ends. Classic examples
include Picasso’s discovery of African masks and Cocteau’s passionate
embrace of African-American jazz. Later, Gendron contends, the balance of power
shifted. Formerly "low" forms of expression no longer passively waited
for the arty types to appropriate and thus legitimize them. Postwar bebop was
the first time that what began as a popular art form aggressively asserted itself
as high, indeed avant-garde, culture. By the time of the Mudd Club, art, rock
and poetry were inextricably commingled in the coolest, most interesting and
prestigious cultural movement of its day.

Although
we tend to think that the eradication of the old High/Low hierarchy is recent,
Gendron argues that the seeds of this postmodernism were present at the very
start of the modern era in mid-1800s France, where the revolutionizing work
of the early modernists (Baudelaire, Flaubert, Corbet, et al.) serendipitously
came along at the same time as an explosive growth in French mass culture. It
took some time for the new esthetes and the new pop culture to interact. The
first bohemian cafes, generally accepted to have appeared in the 1840s, were
enclaves of high, albeit outre and antiestablishment, art. Despite all the flagrant
and scandalous antics of the Jeunes-France movement, the Societe des Buveurs
d’Eau (Society of Water Drinkers) and the like, these early bohos were
as standoffish about mass culture as their stuffy adversaries in the academy
and salons.

By the 1870s,
though, groups of young poets like the Club des Hydropathes were aching to reach
a wider audience beyond their own closed circles. On the Left Bank, something
rather like poetry slams, with longhaired poets leaping on tables to drunkenly
proclaim their work to shocked and titillated cafe patrons, were early forays
of the esthetes into the arena of public performance. This impulse flowered
with the arty colonization of working-class Montmartre, and its cafes and
cabarets, in the 1880s. At clubs like the Chat Noir, poets banged out their
appropriations of working-class street songs on the house piano, creating la
chanson a Montmartre, effectively the art-rock of its day. Drawing ever
larger crowds, the arty types (and the happy club owners making big bucks off
them) dove headlong into formerly despised forms of commercial entertainment,
culminating in full-fledged and wildly successful cabaret and music hall extravaganzas
at legendary hotspots like the Moulin Rouge. The enormous popular success of
these High/Low mergings even prompted a kind of punk-rock backlash, with angry
young poets giving themselves marvelously punky names like the Jemenfoutistes
(the I-Don’t-Give-a-Fuck-ists). And you thought the Sick F*cks were onto
something new.

Paris arty
types went through similar paroxysms of appropriation in the 1910s and 20s when
they discovered jazz and Negritude in general. Satie, Poulenc and Milhaud composed
jazz-influenced music, Picasso mutated the forms of African masks in Les
Demoiselles, Josephine Baker was made a French superstar and jamming with
"authentic" black jazz men imported from America became such a craze
at Parisian clubs like Le Boeuf sur le Toit that to this day "the expression
‘faire le boeuf’ is used to mean ‘have a jam session.’"

Here again,
the popular art form played the passive role in this relationship with boho
artistes. But the balance of power shifted after World War II, Gendron argues,
with the emergence of bebop. When it first appeared as a revolt against the
by-then clapped-out swing music, bop was resisted by the old guard (the "moldy
figs"), the highbrow critics and the general press. Ironically, it was
bebop’s revitalization of the New York jazz club scene in the late 40s
that eventually won over the Down Beat critics and the popular press.
Although bop’s limited commercial and critical success lasted only a couple
of years, Gendron contends its self-assertion and then wide acceptance as a
bona fide avant-garde art form hugely influenced the way American highbrows
finally came to canonize all of jazz as an authentic indigenous art in the 1950s–an
esteem it maintains, if only as an historical artifact, to this day.

Gendron
then moves to the curious way the Beatles went from being sniffed at as a bizarre
teenybopper phenomenon to being heralded as high art. Of course, to do this
they had to abandon their teen fans and move on to more "adult" and
"serious" music under the influences of Bob Dylan, George Martin and
LSD. Still, it’s another milepost in Gendron’s thesis, as a once vilified
and "vulgar" music asserted itself and became universally accepted
as both a commercial juggernaut and the defining cultural expression
of its epoch.

Which leads
Gendron to the Mudd Club. His last few chapters lay out a nice, concise history
of punk and new wave and their aftermath. Not incidentally, he reminds the Malcolm
McLaren-philes still among us that the term "punk rock" was coined
in Greg Shaw’s fanzine Who Put the Bomp in 1971, where it was used
for what we now call 60s garage rock. Gendron gives perhaps too much credit
to the writing of the Shaws and Lester Bangses and Dave Marshes for having spurred
the birth of punk rock itself; I’d argue the bands get a little
more credit than the critics. Still, he’s absolutely correct in siting
the birth of punk in America, and specifically in the early-70s New York City
of Television and the Ramones and CBGB, rather than in the Sex Pistols’
mid-70s London, as so many Brits and Britophiles still want to insist. ("New
wave" can legitimately be claimed by the British, and they can have it.)

Gendron
goes over familiar ground in discussing how art and pop came together in Television,
Patti Smith, Talking Heads, James Chance, even the Ramones. As the downtown
music scene spread out both geographically and demographically in the late 70s
and early 80s, it moved from the principally reactionary stance of the Ramones
into both avant-garde art circles (Sonic Youth, say) and commercial viability
(Blondie, B-52s, etc.). Old distinctions were blurred: the scene was rife with
poet-rockers, painter-rockers, hybrids of rock and symphonic minimalism like
the works of Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca, ironist meta-musical statements
like the Lounge Lizards. The Mudd Club, founded in ’78 as a "disco
for punks," developed into a nexus of everything that was hip and arty
and fashionable, an anti-Studio 54 where punk rock and Bowie and Warhol converged
to be ogled by a new generation of flaneurs and voyeurs. A punk esthetic spread
to performance, to the visual arts, to film, to literature.

In the 80s,
across many genres and media, the coolest art showed punk influences. What the
Lenny Kayes and Joey Ramones had started as a reductionist reaction to the bloated
arena rock of the early 70s grew up to be a monster that devoured the art world.
Rock ’n’ roll, which had begun as lowbrow teenage music, had risen
to highbrow dominance. It was a far cry from those early Parisian bohos assaying
lower-class street songs, but the family lineage, as Gendron makes quite clear,
is direct.

That may
sound like a bit much to claim for punk–and maybe in glossing Gendron’s
last few chapters I’m exaggerating his message. Also, as Gendron concedes
in a coda, much has changed since the early 1980s. The downtown scene is long
dead, no one speaks of rock as a dominant cultural force anymore and to a large
extent all those art forms and commercial influences that came together downtown
back then have since retreated to their own corners. It would be interesting
for others to continue his explorations into the present–the Soho art boom
and bust, the diaspora to Chelsea and Brooklyn, the rise of hiphop and rap as
the next populist music movement to metastasize into an all-pervasive cultural
force–and see how that all affects his thesis. I think his basic premises
would hold up well.

Tariq Ali
is editor of London’s New Left Review, a filmmaker and novelist,
and has written more than a dozen books on world history and politics, including
1968 and After: Inside the Revolution (1978) and the 1987 Street Fighting
Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties. He was prominently involved in 60s
antiwar and radical politics; Jagger, a personal friend, is said to have written
"Street Fighting
Man" in his honor.

Though he
was born a Muslim, in 1943, in what would soon become the separatist Islamic
state of Pakistan, Ali says he was never a believer–in fact, he describes
Islam as a stagnant, backward-looking and disastrously factionalized culture
badly in need of its own Reformation. By the time he went to study at Oxford,
he was well-primed to become a secular humanist, and a Trotskyist. This all
lends him a unique perspective on Islam in world politics, evidenced in his
provocative new book, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and
Modernity (Verso, 342 pages, $22). (Note: Verso published my most recent
book.)

By "fundamentalisms"
Ali means an arrogant, rigid, world-dominant American imperialism–"the
mother of all fundamentalisms"–on one side, and the equally rigid,
regressive Islamic fanaticism on the other. He depicts much of current world
events, including the attacks of Sept. 11 and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
as the American empire’s chickens come home to roost. He also, shockingly,
opines that because Sept. 11 did the Islamic fanatics no lasting good and caused
the U.S. no real systemic harm, the event will sink into "obscurity in
the future. It will be a footnote in the history of this century. Nothing more.
In political, economic or military terms it was barely a pinprick." He
also says that whether Americans care to know this or not, much of the world’s
peoples–including some recent immigrants right here in New York City–rejoiced
on Sept. 11.

He brings
this contentious message to NYC this week. I spoke to him last week by telephone
at his home in London.

Most people
you speak to say we’ve lost our sovereignty. And that we’ve become
a province of the Great Empire and they do what they want with us, and there’s
absolutely nothing we can do. When I talk to people who are not so passive,
they say Musharraf will pay a very hefty price for this. The Americans will
get bored with Pakistan, as they always do, and move on somewhere else, and
he’ll be killed. That’s a common view, that his days are numbered.

Yeah. And
his security is very, very heavy. He has three decoy cars. He never goes out
not very heavily protected. There are rumors, which I couldn’t confirm,
that there’s been one attempt on his life already. The fact that the fundamentalists
killed the brother of the Interior Minister who’s in charge of security
was an indication that they’re getting close… The big question arises,
how are they breaching security so easily? And the answer is that they’re
getting help from within.

Pretty sure
about that. Having failed to win the people, they then really did try to penetrate
the apparatus. No one knows their exact strength. If you ask secular military
officers, they say, "They’re there, but we don’t know."

The killing
of Danny Pearl, in my opinion, could not have been done without the knowledge
of the intelligence agencies. Any Western journalist, white-skinned journalist,
who arrives in that country–not even white-skinned, any foreign
journalist who arrives in that country and tries to investigate independently
of the Ministry of Information and state agencies–is followed nonstop.
They keep tabs on them. So the notion that they don’t know who kidnapped
Danny and killed him just beggars belief. It’s just not possible.

Other generals
will take over. What their orientation will be depends very much on what the
United States is prepared to pay. I’m afraid it’s the cash nexus which
now accounts for loyalty. Even the generals hostile to Musharraf say, "Leave
him alone. He’s bringing in money and weapons." But when the time
comes he’ll go or he’ll be got rid of. It’s a very grim situation.
The one thing the army has been able to do in the past is restore law and order
in the country. This guy has not been able to do that. And the reason is that
to do it means taking on the forces of religious fundamentalism inside the army,
and that’s a dangerous operation. The thing to do is to disarm these groups–which
were created by the military. They know who and where they are. Why in the hell
don’t they stop them? That’s the million-dollar question.

Totally.
The Taliban could not exist, and in fact ceased to exist, once the Pakistani
military withdrew their support.

This is
the story I think Danny was investigating… I have a feeling he got too close
to something. The story everyone wants to know is Al Qaeda’s links to Pakistani
military intelligence. Most people believe the links are there, and they were
there on Sept. 11. Whether [the military] knew about [bin Laden’s plans]
no one knows. People don’t even speculate–they don’t want to
know. But the links were definitely there. These people were going in and out
of Pakistan, landing in Pakistani airports. The circumstantial evidence is there
to suggest that Daniel Pearl had got close to this story, and that rogue elements
within the intelligence agencies laid a trap for him and he fell into it.

The thing
is, the United States must know this. This is the shocking thing. They must
know it. Whereas Colin Powell has gone out of his way to say, "We know
the Pakistan government was not involved." How do you know that? No one
in Pakistan believes that. General Musharraf himself described Daniel as "an
over-intrusive" journalist.

Totally.
Hamid Karzai–I honestly think his future is very limited. Either the poor
guy will be bumped off, or they’ll have to take him out and find him a
job as a fashion model in New York and Rome.

He could
walk the runway, show the latest shawls and caps. But I don’t think he’s
got a future in Afghanistan.

Well, they’re
feeling, "We told you so." They warned the Americans behind the scenes
what would happen if the Taliban was dislodged. This was a regime we could have
controlled. Now there’ll be Russian influence, Iranian influence, Indian
influence, no one power will be able to control the situation and it’s
going to lead to chaos and intra-fighting.

Basically,
the struggle–if one’s being utterly straightforward and cynical–has
been between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance regarding who runs the drug
trade through which part of the world. The Taliban–until the United States
paid them some hundreds of millions of dollars to stop in 2000–used to
smuggle drugs out of Pakistan, through Peshawar and Karachi to come to Europe.
The Northern Alliance drug trade came through the Russian mafia, Central Asia–Kosovo
was the big base, and from there it went all over Europe. With the defeat of
the Taliban, the Northern Alliance people are openly laughing. "We’ve
now got the monopoly on the drug trade." The Russian mafia will be having
a field day. Pakistani heroin traffickers are going to lose a lot of money now.

Absolutely.

My own feeling
is that the monarchy, this sort of Mafia-type family which the United States
gave the franchise to run that part of the world, their days are numbered. And
they know it. Which is why they’re squirming. If you ask which country
in the world was most seriously shaken by Sept. 11, the answer is Saudi Arabia.
The country supplied the bulk of the hijackers who carried out the hits. Osama
bin Laden had very close relations with the head of Saudi intelligence, Prince
Turki bin Faisal, who resigned as the head of intelligence in the last week
of August. Very close personal friend of Osama’s, responsible for sending
him to Afghanistan, kept very close contact throughout Osama’s exile…

So [after
Sept. 11] they were incredibly nervous, fearful that if Osama was caught and
killed there’d be mayhem in Saudi Arabia. But they were also very upset
at the open criticism of them being voiced in the American press, especially
The New Yorker, with its close links to the spooks. It was coming up
with lots of material that could only have been supplied by spooks, and the
Saudis knew that.

They can’t.
Who would then run that area? I mean, I’m sure there are think tanks considering
it. One possibility is to balkanize Saudi Arabia and give the franchise to the
holy cities [Mecca and Medina] to the King of Jordan’s family–who
technically should have them because they’re the direct descendants of
Mohammed–and give the oil wells to someone else.

Well, I
just thought that if we’re talking about an outlook of the world which
is incredibly rigid and refuses to see reason or think rationally, then, even
though it’s secular, the imperial outlook can be categorized as such. Also,
it was an attempt to rap Huntington on the knuckles. [Former LBJ counterinsurgency
expert Samuel P. Huntington, who argued in his much-discussed 1993 Foreign
Affairs article "The Clash of Civilizations?" that, pace
Francis Fukuyama, the fall of communism had ended the era of ideological dispute,
but also ushered in a new era of cultural clashes between the democratic West
and especially Islam and China.] This is not a civilizational clash.
This is a clash between an imperial power and religious fundamentalisms which
are nothing in terms of power compared to the imperial fundamentalists.

But while
it was founded on conquest, it’s Islam’s tragedy that it conquered
too much of the world too quickly. It had no time, like Christianity did, to
develop before it became a major religion. It had to develop an ideology on
the hoof. Within 100 years of Mohammed’s death it had reached the Atlantic
coast and the Chinese coast. Once it conquered, it became a very passive religion,
especially in the Arab world. So when the Crusaders hit it in the 12th century,
they were completely unprepared. It took them 100 years [to take back Jerusalem],
and the leader who organized them used to constantly say, "Look at the
Christians. They know how to wage holy war."

Then, in
the 20th century, the first person to use the term holy war was Zbigniew Brzezinski,
Carter’s national security adviser, who called the Afghan war [with the
Soviet Union] a holy war. He said [to the U.S.-backed mujahideen], "Go
back and build your mosques. This is a holy war against the infidel and God
is on your side." So the jihad of the 20th century was launched by the
State Dept. and the Pentagon!

But compared
to the power of the United States, Islam is nothing. This Al Qaeda group is
3000, 4000 people at most. The thing is how to cut off the flow of young, middle-class
professional kids to it. That requires a political solution.

Two things.
One, lay off Iraq. If they go after Iraq it’ll just exacerbate the situation.
I’m really frightened by that. Some group of martyrs will want revenge
and try to outdo the Sept. 11 people, and God knows what they’ll do.

But the
most important thing that’s driving people crazy is the Palestinian situation
and the fact that the United States is openly backing Israel. There I think
the only long-term solution is a sovereign Palestinian state. This is the last
colonial struggle of the 20th century, and the Israelis just have to bite the
bullet and move on.

When I go
to Pakistan, I meet quite a lot of people who are unbelievers, but would not
say so in public. I think the hardcore of young believers, curiously enough,
is in the West, in Europe and North America. I think one of the problems here
is that being a hardcore believer has become part of identity politics. "This
is our identity." With them I have arguments all the time… Some of them
are listening and talking, but they balk when I say bluntly, "Look, I am
an atheist. These are the reasons Islam has become totally atrophied as a religion.
It’s not had its Reformation. It’s just stuck now. Using its old texts
to move forward is not going to work."

…I hope
that they are listening. I know that the situation in Palestine [for example]
is awful. I have large numbers of Palestinian friends. But I do not like the
strategy of using suicide bombers to kill civilians. I think it is counterproductive.
I think that the only way the Palestinians can get somewhere is by winning over
a sizable core of Israelis to their cause. Which will happen. These killings
don’t help. You say that and they scream, "You don’t live here!
You don’t know what it’s like!" This is absolutely true. On the
other hand, I am not in favor of sending our young people to kill themselves.
"They want to do it! They’re despairing." I know, I know. It’s
an awful situation.

Well, I
know it’s difficult for people to accept that at the moment. But historically
it will be seen as such. In terms of punishing the military or economic power
of the United States it was barely a pinprick. Psychologically, and as a spectacle,
it was amazing. But what they actually achieved, apart from changing the landscape
of New York, was not very much in my opinion. The Muslims don’t like this
being said, either. They think it was a big hit.

But they’re
just using the events of Sept. 11 to remap the world.

But the
question is, were they doing this in any case, and did this just accelerate
the process. I believe that’s the case.