Silver Lining

I was out of town for Naomi Klein at the NYPL . I'd heard her on Brian Lehrer, and read the Harper's piece on the flight out. It's a smart if popular (or should I say, and popular?) analysis and I'm glad she has written it and that it is getting so much attention. One ominous-felicitous term she uses is 'disaster apartheid'. This is what happens to communities that lose their public services to private contractors, a phenomenon that is exacerbated in crisis or catastrophic situations (the US war in Iraq, for example). The reconstruction (I use the term advisedly) of public education in post- Hurricane Katrina New Orleans demonstrates how government and the private sector exploit emergencies to transfer the social contract to market, such that the citizen goes to bed with rights and responsibilities, and wakes the next day with a bill for services rendered.

Michael Ontdaatje (a few stanzas from Secular Love, replacing is with to as I recall a red moon)

I write about you
as if I own you
which I do not.
As you can say of nothing
this is mine.

When we rise
the last hug
no longer belongs,
to your fiction
or my story

Mulch for the future.

Whether we pass
through each other
like pure arrows
or fade into rumour
I write down now
a fiction of your arm

Playing with my food

As a child, I loved games of imagination, and was forever mapping new continents on the local rocks and trees and streams and populating them with hapless neighborhood children assigned to represent complex genealogies of colorful characters with multisyllabic names. In more recent years, my playground, like that of many urban Americans, has been restaurants. The venue, the menu, the lighting, the designers, the company, the relationships with chefs and suppliers and critics and diners are among the multiple variables in an improvisation in which everyone conspires to assist in and be promoted by a winning performance.

I have that in common with at least one other person I have known for whom a successful performance required props on the order of wagyu carpaccio, gold leafed sushi, and magna of Cristal. As tiresome and embarrassing as I found him and his insistence on misrecognizing my own epicureanism as equivalent to his own, there is no way around the fact that I enjoyed many of the benefits of his company and incidental largesse. I might buy local when no one is watching, where he would do so solely to burnish his image (actually this is not a good example, because buying local was not something that registered to him, or his people. That may have changed.), but the uncomfortable truth is that however much I might want to distinguish our values, interests, and styles, we weren't all that different either in our net impact or in our recognition that dining out was about so much more than just the food.

So anyway, this is partial context to how I came to frequent a particular Hollywood restaurant that caters to the self important. Once, Benicio del Toro reached across my table to introduce himself to Don Rickles, who introduced himself to me in turn. On another occasion, Ron Jeremy held court at an adjacent table with a number of very young female--colleagues. Once George Clooney was in the house, another time Robert Shapiro. There was a big menu, but only a few items worth ordering: the swordfish, the steak a la Dabney Coleman, the bouillabaisse, the caesar. And cocktails.

Occasionally it was really a lot of fun, late at night (and they are open late, so it was actually kind of a default or last resort) to show up and be recognized and get a table right away.

I've been away for several years now but ended up on the red vinyl banquette again the other night, for much the same prosaic reason--late hours--that often put me there in the past.

This time, it was no fun at all. The loud parties of tarted up women and botoxed men (some older ones with hennaed hair) and the waiters with their calibrated posture between abuse and subservience and especially the meat-- a steak that I'd enjoyed in the past was just so obscenely thick and fleshy, I might as well have torn into the haunch of a living beast. And then there was the feeling that my friend and I both felt nothing, except that the past truly was past.

One of my favorite LA restaurants was always Yongsusan. This time, the banchan included things like iceberg salad in mayonnaise dressing and dumplings (not mandoo). There was a mingy eun dae gu jorim with bizarrely tablet-shaped slices of turnip (2 of them, actually) and fried bits in the soup and other things tasted old or freezer burnt. The kimchee in cabbage leaf-- the piece de resistance, was soggy and poorly pickled. I even suspect this was frozen. I loved this place but I would now consider it one of the worst Korean restaurants. Barely even a Korean restaurant.

Craft LA was also a disappointment. I was prepared to allow that Century City might have been transformed but in fact it was troupes of conventioneers wearing name tags, and giant portions of food (peas & prosciutto and sweetbreads for me), rather than the small focussed plates that made me fall in love with Craft back in the 1990s. That said, I haven't been to Craft proper in a couple years and maybe they've changed too. Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson came and left and looked terrific actually. So what do I know.

Take 62

I live and work in the neighborhood, so for the past week have navigated barricades, stalled traffic, clusters of ill-assorted men in ill-fitting suits, and all the other annual inconveniences of the General Assembly. The protesters with bullhorns have been less in evidence and I'm trying to recall whether I've got my seasons confused and they really only appear in the spring and summer (I know they do show up then but I thought now too). At any rate, there is one group that has set up along the Second Avenue side of Dag Hammarskjold Plaza for the past week, protesting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presidency and his appearance before the UN. They have set up a barricade of lurid photographs depicting the executions over which he and his government have presided.

I am conditioned by the anti-abortion lobby and their crude intimidation tactics to disregard gruesome close-ups of aborted fetuses and other visual, visceral efforts to supplant reason and law with emotion and religion.

One photograph disturbs me terribly though. It's a woman in a white chador, facing the camera with an expression of extreme anguish. She is at a 30 degree angle, buried above her elbows, surrounded by men with shovels who are intent on completing the job.

It's incredibly ugly. But however righteous, indignation and outrage should not supplant discussion and debate.

The Good Society (part 2 of 2)

The philanthropy of the wealthy serves many purposes, but primarily it assists in the social reproduction of the upper classes.

So Teresa Odendahl concluded in Charity Begins at Home: Generosity and Self Interest Among the Philanthropic Elite. In addition to demonstrating that the primary beneficiaries of the philanthropy of wealthy individuals are wealthy individuals, Odendahl criticized the complicity of the US tax code in perpetuating this kind of self-dealing, through limitations on the threshhold for itemizing charitable deductions, for example, and an estate tax code that preserves the prerogative of the wealthy both to familial inheritance and institutional influence. Since charitable tax deductions are justified on the premise that the individual and the state are and should be partners in a trust for the public good,it's hardly surprising that Odendahl's book was received in 1990 with skepticism from parts of the non-profit and academic (ie university) communities that were implicated in its findings. (This is anecdotal; a google search turns up a lot of other more supportive academic responses as well).

I'm not a scholar in this area, and until Stephanie Strom's piece in the NYT (see part 1 of this 2-part post), I hadn't seen her analysis showing up in popular discourse on philanthropy, which has itself exploded thanks to the celebrity billionaires who realize that saving the planet is a good long-term (and short-term) business strategy, and the eager media who cover their missionary activities for the same reasons.

Not surprisingly, these increasingly prominent and influential donors are approaching their new philanthropic enterprises with the kind of entrepreneurial, often creative, sometimes speculative strategies and expectations that worked for them in the corporate world, and in the process they are reshaping the way traditional not-for-profit organizations do business.

For one thing, they are demanding unprecedented levels of organizational control in exchange for their 'gifts', and are succeeding in attaining this control in the name of 'accountability' and 'transparency'-- virtually unassailable pieties in this post-Enron era. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on the establishment of the lofty sounding Center for Excellence in Higher Education 'that will advise donors on how to attach legally enforceable conditions to their gifts'.

In other words, the difference between 'donors'[:a term that conventionally describes those who make 'gifts'(:a term that not only conventionally but legally describes payments made with no reciprocal exchange of goods or benefits)] and 'purchasers' (a term conventionally understood to describe those who are specifically and explicitly engaged in the reciprocal exchange of goods or benefits) is no longer meaningful.

I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that (and I would welcome legal opinion on whether) the IRS exceeds its mandate in granting 501(c)(3) status to an organization established to 'advise donors on how to attach legally enforceable conditions to their gifts'.(A relevant passage from the IRS web site on criteria for exempt status:The organization must not be organized or operated for the benefit of private interests.... No part of a section 501(c)(3) organization's net earnings may inure to the benefit of any private shareholder or individual. A private shareholder or individual is a person having a personal and private interest in the activities of the organization. If the organization engages in an excess benefit transaction with a person having substantial influence over the organization, an excise tax may be imposed on the person and any organization managers agreeing to the transaction).

All of these developments bespeak the increasing deference of the state to the market and its abdication of responsibility for the public good to those who have the least interest in pursuing it.

Major universities and other not-for-profit organizations could certainly benefit from external audits that might puncture some of the simultaneous hubris and false humility many regard as a badge of honor and service. (The classic equation is: we'll pay people badly, but reward loyalty, long hours and commitment to the cause and culture. Never mind performance. This plays well to boards comprised of wealthy people who serve in order to enhance their social positions and placate their consciences).

Today's capable and increasingly activist donors are rightly lauded for their commitment and worthy ambitions, but they also threaten the independence of not for profit entities and the public good and public trust they represent. It's been so long now, I'm trying to think of what you call the indigenous managers who implement colonial rule. That's what our American ngos risk becoming under the influence of high stakes, big money philanthropy, and that's what threatens the interests they are authorized and privileged to represent. It's odd that Americans are so quick to condemn and eager to regulate large contributions to individual public servants on the general assumption that big gifts obviously buy influence; and yet so indifferent to the growing influence of large donations to corporate public servants (ie, not for profit 501(c)(3)s) . Obviously individual and corporate interests are much more closely intertwined than this dichotomy suggests, but this is yet another instance where we Americans continue to demonstrate our willingness to sacrifice real individuals to our constitutional fetish of the individual.