The Newsstand Sophisticate

When I lived in Brooklyn, New York, I discovered an odd little publication called Three Weeks in a local bookstore (Spoonbill & Sugartown, if you’re interested) some time in the late summer of 2002. Three Weeks was laid out in an anachronistic, late-eighteenth- or early-nineteenth-century style and typeface, and printed on newsprint. It was an unusual format, too, printed on a paper about half the size of a tabloid sheet, and then folded in half so that it was taller than it was wide. The price was “two cents, voluntary.”

The writing was both topical and trivial (the back of each issue had an essay on “The Weather”) but arch and old-fashioned, like the publication’s appearance. I enjoyed it, sometimes in spite of its willful eccentricity, and dutifully picked it up every three weeks, until it stopped publication. I only have four or five copies, but they published eighteen in all, and thanks to an enterprising Three Weeks enthusiast and the power of the Internet, you can read them all online at the Henry William Brownejohns Appreciation Page. (Brownejohns was the name of one of the writers, all of whom, I’m guessing, used pseudonyms.)

It’s not for everybody, I’m afraid. I failed to convince any of my friends to read it even when it was being published. Here’s a typical title of a Three Weeks article:

Radiation

PALLOR VERSUS TAWN

WHITE FOLKS’ COCKAMAMIE PERCEPTION OF HEALTH, & COMMON SENSE

Also, On Shirts, and How We Feel People Ought to Wear Them

There’s also quite a bit of political writing, which despite, or perhaps because of, the archaic style, manages to be interesting and relevant. Three Weeks published from Oct. 15, 2001, till Oct. 19, 2002, and for me, at least, captured the mood of the great city (or at least my mood in the great city) after the calamity of Sept. 11, 2001, better than anything else: trying to make sense of what had happened while also trying to preserve your sense of humor and previous interests. Anyway, I’m very glad somebody’s chosen to preserve this bit of literary ephemera.

Via Butterflies and Wheels, a philosophy blog on the silliness (well, it’s a philosophy blog, so rather the unreasonableness) of imagining that being offended—even deeply offended—gives one the right to demand that offending statements cease:

The underlying problem, I suspect, is that our public culture has become so infected with subjectivist assumptions that people don’t realize that there’s a difference between desires and reasons. Sentiments are taken as given; no-one ever stops to question whether their reactive attitudes are warranted. Any kind of negative emotion is not just evidence, but constitutive, of suffering injustice. You’re offended, therefore they’re in the wrong.

A similar phenomenon, perhaps the flipside of this unquestioned subjectivism, is the way people seem to believe that their own anger about an issue is some sort of proof that they’re right about it. Very often among left-wing “viewers with alarm,” and probably among right-wingers, too, though I don’t pay as much attention, we hear that the country needs to see how angry they are. It’s summed up perfectly in the bumper sticker I’ve made fun of before: “If you’re not completely outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Those who are outraged are obviously the best informed, and if you’re not exploding with anger, well, you must not know what you’re talking about.

But isn’t anger generally an unreliable guide to what’s right? Certainly you can be outraged over true cases of injustice, but if I were to look over all the times I’ve been angry and the proximate causes thereof, I’m quite sure I’d find that often I was angry for no good reason at all. Anger and passion can certainly motivate (though they can also exhaust and depress), but they’re only worth celebrating if they’re motivating something worthwhile.

The Christopher Hitchens makeover continues in Vanity Fair, this time with some terrrifying photos of the Hitch’s recent dental work. (The main article by Hitchens is not online.) Don’t worry, there are waxing photos, too.

Incidentally, I hate to perpetuate a national cliché, but what is it with the British and their teeth? One of Hitchens’s (ex-?)friends, Martin Amis, goes into harrowing detail about his rotten teeth and their extraction and replacement in his memoir, Experience, and he, like Hitchens, grew up well-fed and well-educated. What went wrong? Do British water pipes have a sugary lining? Is the National Health Service really that bad? Or is it like obesity here in the U.S.: an obvious problem that most people are simply too lazy to do much about?

I’ve just been reading Robert Conquest’s Reflections on a Ravaged Century, and marvelling at his descriptions of intelligent people cozying up to and making apologies for Stalinism in the 1930s and beyond. The impulses that drive that sort of thing aren’t dead, even if nowadays they lead to vastly more ridiculous results, such as in Anne Applebaum’s Slate article about recent trips by “super” model Naomi Campbell and actor Sean Penn to chum around with Venezuelan nuevo-caudillo Hugo Chávez.

It’s yet another story of frivolous celebrities in search of “radical chic,” but it’s an especially disgusting one in light of recent student demonstrations protesting Chávez’s attempts to alter the constitution to allow him to be elected president indefinitely and to increase government control over universities, the media and other institutions. The changes are all part of implementing what Chávez calls “participatory democracy” (as opposed to “representative democracy”). I’m not sure quite what participatory democracy is, but it probably works along the lines suggested by the famous graffito of May 1968 Paris: “Je participe, tu participes, nous participons, ils décident.” (“I participate, you participate, we participate, they decide”).

Wouldn’t it be much more “radical” for a celebrity to go demonstrate in the streets with students than have a photo op with an authoritarian mountebank? Yes, but it would be considerably more dangerous. Recently, a student was shot and killed by unknown gunmen during a demonstration at an anti-Chávez demonstration at a university in Western Venezuela. Chávez’s reaction was to threaten to revoke permits for future demonstrations and to order immediate investigations . . . into the protests’ leaders! As Jeff Spicoli said to Mr. Hand, “You dick!”

I wonder if Penn is even aware of the protests. Campbell seems not to have learned anything about the country other than that it has stunning waterfalls. Applebaum is undoubtedly right:

As for Venezuelan politics, or the Venezuelan people, they don’t matter at all [to Campbell and Penn]. The country is simply playing a role filled in the past by Russia, Cuba, and Nicaragua—a role to which it is, at the moment, uniquely suited. Clearly, Venezuela is easier to idealize than Iran and North Korea, the former’s attitude to women being not conducive to fashion models, the latter being downright hostile to Hollywood. Venezuela is also warm, relatively close, and a country of beautiful waterfalls.

Update (Nov. 7): Gunmen have attacked another student demonstration, this time in Caracas, killing at least two students.

AT&T is discontinuing its free over-the-phone time service in California and Nevada on Sept. 19. When I was growing up near San Francisco I made a point of setting my watch a great deal more often than was strictly necessary by dialing POP-CORN and listening to—according to this L.A. Times article—the voice of Joanne Daniels. (This was before the days of the World Wide Web, or, in my house at least, the days of VCRs and cable television, so dialing POP-CORN was about the only “high-tech” I had access to.) I also found it somewhat hypnotic to listen to this voice do nothing but tell the time for as long as you wanted to listen. I think I imagined her recording it all in one sitting.

So if you grew up in Northern California, you only have 19 days left to hear Joanne Daniels’s dulcet tones before “the man” silences her: (415) POP-CORN.

Tony Wilson, founder of Factory Records, has died. I never knew much about Wilson when I was a teenager buying and listening avidly to any record with the Factory label, but since then I’ve come to appreciate what he did very much. Entrepreneurial talent and great taste are an unfortunately rare combination, but they were certainly combined in Wilson. I can’t think of another record label in which graphic design, production, and music are so perfectly put together, and which have aged so well. (Well, maybe Happy Mondays haven’t aged well, but the early Factory releases have.)

R.I.P, Tony.

The Wall Street Journal has an article about a possible uptick in religious observance in Europe as governments reduce their support of established churches. The idea is that “deregulating” churches, like deregulating any other industry, will boost competition, in this case for souls:

“The enemy of faith, say the supply-siders, is not modernity but state-regulated markets that shield big, established churches from competition. In America, where church and state stand apart, more than 50% of the population worships at least once a month. In Europe, where the state has often supported—but also controlled—the church with money and favors, the rate in many countries is 20% or less.”

I wish the activists hell-bent on making the U.S. government more “Christian” would read and absorb the lesson of this article. Trying to make the government more like Old Time Gospel Hour might be more likely to bring a little bit of the spirit of the Department of Motor Vehicles to the house of God. Conversely, really militant atheists might start supporting faith-based initiatives and vouchers for religious schools as a reliable way to reduce religiosity in the country.

The L.A. Times has an interesting article on population projections for my native state, California. (Any shocked Texans reading this will be relieved to know that though I was born in San Francisco, shortly before my birth my grandmother sent my parents a jar of dirt from her backyard in Dallas to place under the delivery bed so I could be born over Texas soil.)

In the article, Jack Kyser, the chief economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation, refers to California as “a country masquerading as a state.” By 2050 the state is expected to have 60 million people, the majority of whom will be Latinos. I’m sure the xenophobes are already panicking about the incomprehensible idea of people of Hispanic descent forming a majority in cities like San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles.

When I was in high school in Northern California in the late 1980s, it was obvious that the infrastructure of highways and the education system in the state were crumbling. I haven’t lived there since then, though I visit fairly often, and I’ve seen some improvement, but the challenges the state will face in coping with that kind of growth are formidable. The Los Angeles area in particular will have to figure out a way to encourage greater density and redo the strip mall and parking lot model that prevails in most of the area. Perhaps they can learn something from San Francisco, which after New York is the most densely populated city in the country.

California has, at least since the mid-twentieth century, been the state to look to for the earliest manifestations of trends that eventually hit the rest of the country, and I bet the way the state addresses this population boom will not prove an exception. I hope I am still alive in 2050 to see what happens.

David Thompson recently linked to a video site where you can view Vanessa Engle’s BBC documentary series, “Lefties.” The series profiles three radical projects in Margaret Thatcher-era Britain: the attempt to start a socialist newspaper, revolutionary feminists who declared that political commitment required women to become lesbians, and middle-class university graduates heralding “the revolution” by living as squatters in South London. It’s a fascinating documentary, and it’s hard not to feel a mirthful derision and contempt for many of the ideologues profiled—all the most unpleasant aspects of the self-righteously indignant and sanctimonious lefty are presented in vivid fashion.

Nevertheless, I found myself feeling something close to sympathy for a few of the folks in the series. Most of us want to change the world in certain ways and to be part of a community that shares that desire. We all face moments when our vision of the way the world is—often built up over long periods of time and through considerable effort of thought and debate—is eroded by the indifferent reality of the world as it actually is. When this happens, it can be very painful to do the right thing: to alter our even abandon our theory in the light of the facts.

In the battle between belief and reality, the lefties in “Lefties” almost all choose to preserve the purity of their vision no matter the complications, and even to goose themselves into ever greater heights of absurdity and dissonance with the world they live in. It’s an act of defiance, and somewhat admirable in the way bizarre feats of will power, like eating sixty-six hot dogs in twelve minutes, can sometimes be, but it’s also indistinguishable from the homesteaders in the loonier precincts of religious millennarianism. The squatters who insist on the imminent arrival of the revolution are not much different from the Seventh-Day Adventists that confidently predicted the exact date of the second coming only to push the day ahead just as confidently every time the Nazarene failed to return.

I wonder if there’s some retrospectively obvious turning point where each of these people could have chosen to alter their theory rather than wall themselves off from criticism or common sense. The difficulty lies in the fact that they may have started out trying to realize worthwhile things—sexual equality, poverty relief, a new newspaper. But they’ve convinced themselves that altering their mental edifice of political “certainties” would be to abandon those earlier idealistic commitments, which of course is not true.

Listening to them makes you realize how easily we deceive ourselves. Self-deception is the well-spring of both great tragedy and comedy, which is why this film is so funny and so mortifying at the same time.

It also has a great soundtrack, culled from the era: Joy Division, the Smiths, Magazine, and more.

A very close friend of my family, Patricia Walkup, died on June 9 of last year. She spent much of her last 15 years or so as an activist for improving her San Francisco neighborhood, Hayes Valley. Her (and her neighborhood’s) great triumph was the defeat of a plan to rebuild a Loma Prieta earthquake-damaged freeway overpass through Hayes Valley and instead create a beautiful, tree-lined street, Octavia Boulevard.

Patricia was one of the funniest, most joyful, and most irreverent people I’ve ever met, far from the stereotype of the tireless activist. Her activism was rooted in the simple idea that people should enjoy living in their neighborhood, as she did. I remember her giving my father and me an evening tour of her neighborhood once while assorted ruffians argued over drugs and broke 40-ounce malt liquor bottles in a nearby parking lot. Even then, she knew she could make her new home a better place as I wondered nervously if I would make it out alive.

Sometimes her efforts meant offending San Francisco leftists by demanding that police enforce laws against prostitution and drug use more vigorously. Sometimes it meant frustrating conservatives (or what passes for conservatives in San Francisco) by refusing to sacrifice the liveability of the neighborhood for the alleged economic benefits of a freeway overpass. She was happy to do both and as a result Hayes Valley is a much more enjoyable place to live now than it was when I first visited her in the late 1980s when she bought an apartment there.

Patricia’s brother, Lee, has commemorated his sister’s memory by moving a beautiful 1884 concert grand piano to the Cadillac Hotel, a non-profit single-room occupancy hotel in the Tenderloin where Patricia did volunteer work. You can read about it here. You can also watch local television news coverage (complete with corny news anchors) here.

Rest in peace, Patricia.