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September 29, 2014
American Authentic: Ben Bradlee is 93, ailing and irreplaceable.
You had a lot of Cuban or Spanish-speaking guys in masks and rubber gloves, with walkie-talkies, arrested in the Democratic National Committee Headquarters at 2:00 in the morning. What the hell were they in there for? What were they doing?
--Ben Bradlee
If you read this blog and don't know who Ben Bradlee is, you should, and so we are going pretend that you know anyway. Tons has been written about Bradlee (and will continue to be written about him) due to his colorful management style, years as a reporter, close friendship with President Kennedy and celebrated mentor-editor role in the two years of coverage of the Watergate break-in of June 1972. Patrician yet famously profane and often hilariously bawdy in his language around the newsroom, Bradlee as Managing Editor of the Washington Post (1968-1991) supported reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward in their reporting on Watergate which, with Bradlee playing stage manager at the Post, prematurely ended Richard Nixon's presidency. Nixon resigned in August of 1974. There are lots of interesting stories down through the years about Bradlee himself--but lately the news is sad. Based on a recent C-Span interview with Bradlee's wife, soulmate and fellow Post star Sally Quinn, Politico notes that Bradlee, now 93, is suffering from dementia, sleeping most days away in a hospice, and apparently steadily declining. When Bradlee does leave us, there will be no one left in American journalism or letters who is even remotely like him. We will start today rounding up a few of the better stories. Bradlee was a storyteller with a powerful intellect, and he was funny as hell.
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Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee, circa 1971
Posted by JD Hull at 05:50 AM | Comments (0)
September 28, 2014
Sunday: "There's a man down there. Might be your man..."
Ain't no way in the world I'm going out that front door.
--Sonny Boy Williamson, Marshall Sehorn and Elmore James
Posted by JD Hull at 04:39 AM | Comments (0)
September 26, 2014
America's Swan Song in South Vietnam: Don't miss Rory Kennedy's new documentary.
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Last Friday night I saw Rory Kennedy's documentary Last Days in Viet Nam at the E Street Cinema, in Northwest Washington, D.C. a few blocks from the White House. It combines new interviews with recently found film footage (for real, no hype) shot in Saigon in the spring of 1975 when U.S. military and civilian staff coped with a well-meaning but half delusional American ambassador and the wrenching question of who would/would not be evacuated out on U.S. flights as the North Vietnamese army moved triumphantly into the city. Nicely done, apolitical and poignant. Boomers--most of us were in our 20s at the time--will like it especially. I've met and spent a little time with the film's quiet, hardworking and unassuming director-producer. A full-time filmmaker with several fine documentaries under her belt, Kennedy, 45, is the youngest child of the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy (D-NY).
Posted by JD Hull at 06:53 PM | Comments (0)
September 18, 2014
UPDATE: Decision day in Scotland.
Update as of 10 pm Scottish time/5 pm EST: Most UK and American news sources have it that 5 hours after the Scottish polls closed, the vote is too close to call. Our prediction: the "No" vote (rejecting independence) will narrowly prevail.
Today, in an official referendum of the United Kingdom, 4 million residents of Scotland will decide whether or not to end Scotland's 307-year union with the United Kingdom. Scottish independence is the only item on the ballot. Only Scottish residents--and even most non-Scottish residents--can vote. The voting age in Scotland is 16. Polls close at 5 pm (12:00 noon EST in the U.S.). A true and correct copy of the ballot is below.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
September 16, 2014
Maryland Avenue and Hanover Streets, Annapolis, Maryland
United States Naval Academy, graduating class of 1894
Posted by JD Hull at 01:50 AM | Comments (0)
September 15, 2014
Only Rock 'n' Roll but it made you: Who could possibly care about which 10 books influenced lawyers and other white-collar generic dweebs the most?
People lie about the influence of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying; they never lie about the power of Shotgun by Junior Walker and the All Stars.
I feel like I died and went to Hallmark.
Some wonderful people and friends, many of them lawyers, are circulating the meme "what 10 books influenced me the most". A good thing. In arguably semi-literate America, it's pretty refreshing. And I, too, will chime in--although very reluctantly. Most us read pretty much the same Western left-brained literature in high school and college--if we really read this stuff--but whether you were influenced by Naked Lunch, Old Man and the Sea or Magic Mountain tells us nothing (zero, zilch) about what kind of human you are or about your soul or what moves you or makes you happy or angers you.
Instead why not the 10 rock 'n' roll tracks that have been the most influential (not favorite) in your life? That moves the ball more. It lifts back the veil each of us have over our self. We are are less likely to lie about it. People lie about the influence of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying; they never lie about the power of Shotgun by Junior Walker and the All-Stars. And if you're an American born after 1945, rock 'n' roll is the only true soundtrack any of us had (except sex). Anyway, I will publish mine soon. I promise.
In the meantime, you can show me yours, Jack. So go ahead. And there are no rules, except that anyone listing Zappa's "Help, I'm a Rock" gets a special commendation from this blog.
Oslo 1993
Posted by JD Hull at 06:17 PM | Comments (0)
September 09, 2014
Checking in with Maraym Montague: Marrakech, Morocco, Peacock Pavilions Design Hotel.
Over the past 8 years we've marveled at and fallen hopelessly in love with the peripatetic Ms. Montague, an American expat of French-Persian extraction, Smith grad (we're unashamedly elitist about education, and celebrate the few great women's colleges still on the planet), writer, photographer, award-winning blogger, new author, economic development government contractor and proprietor of the Peacock Pavilions Design Hotel which she runs with her husband Chris in Marrakech, Morocco. How did we find her? In the spring of 2006, one of our older, hopelessly romantic and famously exclusive (i.e., picky about people, especially women) editors discovered Maryam by accident in a photo of her inside a Parisian bistro he'd been in only a few weeks before. It took our normally workaholic nose-to-the-grindstone comrade an afternoon of scouring the Net to find out who she was, what she did and where she was living. Anyway, here's a post heralding the beginning of the 2014 fall season at the elegant Peacock Pavilions which European and American magazines discovered about the same time we discovered Maryam, her hotel and her world. See her post yesterday, Marrakech, Morocco: and a tale of Peacock Pavilions design hotel - Part 1.
Owners Maryam and Chris at Peacock Pavilions. Photo: Elle Magazine.
Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 09:00 PM | Comments (0)
September 06, 2014
The Blogspam Bombing of WAC/P: The 3 or 4 weekly comments at What About Clients/Paris. Where did they go?
We are still trying to fix this. Over the last 6 months we have been blogspam-bombed to the tune of nearly 1000 a day. Which means we finally stopped sifting through comments to find the 2 or 3 legit ones out of the same number. In the meantime, you have to register at our site to comment and hopefully that still works. Again, we are trying to fix this. Work keeps getting in the way. Besides, we're mostly Boomers here so we have our avoidance mechanism on for Anything Tech That Is Unpleasant. If we were any good at this sort of thing, we would have gone to medical school. But we are learning. We endure. We get better.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:13 PM | Comments (0)
Washingtonian: Photos of Depression-Era D.C.
Compliments of the Library of Congress and yeoman labors by the Yale University photo archive, there are over 170,000 pictures taken between 1935 and 1945.
Posted by JD Hull at 05:00 PM | Comments (0)
September 05, 2014
Harvard, Steven Pinker and Cultural Literacy: What should we all know something about?
Once again, Cultural Literacy, anyone? What should we all know about, anyway? What does it mean to be educated?
See in The New Republic "The Trouble with Harvard: The Ivy League Is Broken and Only Standardized Tests Can Fix It". Now forget this article's title, Harvard, standardized tests or the liberal reputation* of the magazine (TNR) publishing it. About halfway through, author Steven Pinker gives us a fine summary in two thoughtful paragraphs of What It Means to be Educated. We could not ask for more:
.... It seems to me that educated people should know something about the 13-billion-year prehistory of our species and the basic laws governing the physical and living world, including our bodies and brains. They should grasp the timeline of human history from the dawn of agriculture to the present. They should be exposed to the diversity of human cultures, and the major systems of belief and value with which they have made sense of their lives. They should know about the formative events in human history, including the blunders we can hope not to repeat. They should understand the principles behind democratic governance and the rule of law. They should know how to appreciate works of fiction and art as sources of aesthetic pleasure and as impetuses to reflect on the human condition.
On top of this knowledge, a liberal education should make certain habits of rationality second nature. Educated people should be able to express complex ideas in clear writing and speech. They should appreciate that objective knowledge is a precious commodity, and know how to distinguish vetted fact from superstition, rumor, and unexamined conventional wisdom. They should know how to reason logically and statistically, avoiding the fallacies and biases to which the untutored human mind is vulnerable. They should think causally rather than magically, and know what it takes to distinguish causation from correlation and coincidence. They should be acutely aware of human fallibility, most notably their own, and appreciate that people who disagree with them are not stupid or evil. Accordingly, they should appreciate the value of trying to change minds by persuasion rather than intimidation or demagoguery.
*Some conservatives wrongly believe there can be nothing worthwhile in The New Republic; likewise, many liberals have the same unintelligent knee-jerk reaction to the right-leaning (Bill Buckley's) The National Review. Both are fine--very fine--publications. It's time to grow up.
Posted by JD Hull at 08:54 PM | Comments (0)
September 04, 2014
Posted by JD Hull at 02:03 PM | Comments (0)
September 02, 2014
In Rolling Stone: "Last Tango in Kabul"
A current Rolling Stone feature by Matthieu Aikins covers the Kabul expat community from government contract boon days to the present, giving a vivid if troubling picture of increased danger to expats and contractors still in Afghanistan. It was originally published in mid-August. Excerpts:
It was so easy to make money in Kabul that it felt like we were all citizens of some Gulf oil state. If you could string a few coherent sentences together into a grant application, odds were that there was some contracting officer out there who was willing to give you money, no matter how vapid your idea. Want to put on a music festival in Kabul? Here's a few hundred thousand. Shoot a soap opera about heroic local cops? A million for you. Is your handicraft business empowering Afghan women? Name your bid.
The Kabubble economy was so hot that kids out of college were making six-figure salaries, and former midlevel paper pushers were clearing a thousand a day as consultants for places like the World Bank. "All of your expenses are paid for, you don't buy anything, you're getting this massive salary that you bank," Peter, the journalist, says. "Do that for a few years and you've saved half a million before you're 30. You could basically class-jump, by going to Kabul."******
These days, expatriate life in Kabul is a sad reflection of its former self. Diplomats and aid workers operate under drastic security restrictions that keep them from attending restaurants or private parties, a condition that has been prolonged by the drawn-out crisis over the presidential election and who will succeed Karzai. Several of the restaurants and guesthouses that sustained the expat scene here have closed down. "A lot of people reached the point where they were like, 'OK, I'm out, I'm done,'" says Luisa Walmsley, a media consultant living in Kabul. "You start realizing that you're really close to all this stuff and that it's just a matter of time that you're going to lose someone."
Posted by JD Hull at 12:20 AM | Comments (0)