miscellaneous

An Interview with Novelist Douglas Anthony Cooper in ARCHITECTURE Magazine

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The few architects we find in popular fiction are predictably likable. For an antidote to the fashionably sensitive, yet terminally bland architect, adventurous readers can turn to Douglas Anthony Cooper’s new novel, Delirium (Hyperion, 1998).

(Because I came clean regarding my fraudulence — a full disclosure, in their own magazine — Food & Wine decided they’d continue to let me write articles for them.)

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I have never cooked a meal in my apartment. Okay, let’s be frank: I have never cooked a meal in my life. I have fried the occasional egg, toasted the odd bagel, boiled random pots of water, but this is lilydipping relative to the great canoe trip that is true cuisine.

(THIS REPRESENTS rank consumerism, but also haute geekery; I’ve always been proud of it. It was long lost, until a discerning blogger/pirate posted it, and I stole it back. I no longer have the photos, which I was also proud of:  it was my first photo shoot with a large-format rig. The prices, I’m afraid, are wildly out of date. As is some of the advice — but not all of it.)

I admit to sneering when I first encountered the vast international community of flashlight addicts. Who are these losers, I generously wondered. These “flashaholics.” Perhaps the nerd equivalent of, say, those neurally healthy folk who have sex with plush toys? Only less interesting?

That was a month ago.

Since then, I have spent an absurd sum on exotic lights, complex chargers, volt-ohm meters, and — the seductive bit — batteries whose energy density

These are not the dim Boy Scout torches of your innocent youth.

DEMOCRATS HAVE been disgracefully uncharitable to Rush Limbaugh. He has apologized for calling a perfectly decent woman a slut and a prostitute; he deserves generosity in return. The man’s fickle sponsors have been departing all weekend, like ships from a sinking rat, so I propose that Democrats demonstrate bipartisan moral support, by sponsoring Mr.

The Maya never predicted that 2012 would be the Year of the Cigar Box Guitar. They missed the most important story. The end of the world, which ought to be in a couple of hours, is not this year’s crucial event.

Should the world end, it won’t be remembered as vividly as Paul McCartney’s appearance with the surviving members of Nirvana: an incident that produced indifferent music, but introduced the world to the Next Big Thing — an instrument that will change the face of rock and roll.

THE CAMPAIGN MANAGER of a congressional candidate in Arkansas returns home to find his children’s cat bludgeoned to death. The creature’s skull is caved in. The word “liberal” has been scrawled on the corpse. Why should you care?

It is easy to dismiss this as a small crime, relative to the atrocities we read about daily.

IN 1886, AN unpleasant man strapped to a bomb wandered into a novel; he had a detonator in his pocket. Thanks to him, we ended up with Hannibal Lecter. And the Unabomber. This was a new kind of human: the condescending scientist, with a peerless intellect and a slow athletic pulse, who is morally insane. (Bear with me — this is a review of the new Sherlock Holmes film, A Game of Shadows.)

I DISLIKED CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS. I’m fairly sure of this. So why did the news of his death affect me as it did? Even though many of my friends knew him personally, I knew him only through his writing, where he came across always as amiable, literate, shallow, and wrong. That made him a better man than most pundits — by two adjectives — but I never understood the adulation.

IF A THEORY is too ugly to float across the table at a dinner party, it probably doesn’t merit the cover of a respectable magazine. One of the low points in mainstream American journalism was October 31, 1994, when The New Republic decided that it would be a good idea to devote the journal briefly to the promotion of racism.

The decision was to feature a book called The Bell Curve. 

Now that candidates can run respectably on a platform of torture, how long before we see a frontrunner advocating slavery? Surely everything’s open for reconsideration. It’s time to retire an inconvenient prejudice: that America’s progress should be in a forward direction.

Of all the candidates at the Republican debates — including that putative beacon of sanity, Mitt Romney — only Jon Huntsman and Ron Paul had the base-level decency to renounce waterboarding: a practice that has been considered a particularly extreme form of torture since the Spanish Inquisition.

THE SANE BURKEAN impulse when it comes to the Occupy movement is nervousness (in anticipation of Terror). If there were the slightest possibility of these protests resulting in actual regime change, believe me: I would be standing at the barricades with the Tea Party, polishing my retro musket. The chances of this, however, are nil. Occupy Wall Street is not going to kindle a revolution.

There are so many reasons to criticize President Obama’s decision to allow his daughter to spend her spring break down Mexico way in the city of Oaxaca. Some of these reasons are depressingly ignorant, but others are refreshingly stupid. Not knowing anything about Oaxaca is a good place to start.

I’m afraid Malia Obama was just not having a Jenna Bush-style spring break.

Inquiring minds want to know precisely how much John Yoo was paid to offer his opinions to the Wall Street Journal. We can assume it was less than his rate at the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, where he produced among the most toxic professional opinions in American history.

It was John Yoo, of course, who opined that the President was perfectly within his rights to have a child’s testicles crushed in the presence of the father, depending — and here’s where lawyerly nuance comes in — depending upon what the President intended by this act.

An astonishing piece in the Wall Street Journal (subscription only), offers noted academic Harvey Mansfield casually rejecting — believe it or not — the rule of law. He’s not arguing that we should all be able to act in blissfully lawless ways, of course — simply that the laws of the nation should not be permitted to rule over (and occasionally over-rule) the president.

This is an open letter to Andrew Sullivan:

From the LA Times:

The wages of sin are Me. In general, I get too little credit for my contribution to the Fall of Man. Kids, I was there in the garden; I was a major voice in the conference preceding the Apple Incident; I’ve done most of the grunt work when it comes to postlapsarian retribution. Before you get damned, you generally have to die, right? So it should be no surprise to you, especially if you’ve studied depth psychology, that I pretty much came up with the concept of sex.

One of my favorite places in the second half of the twentieth century was a quaint, rustic torture complex in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh: Tuol Sleng Prison. Extinction without torture is like dessert without dinner (I am nothing if not an aesthete); death of the soul should precede – not accompany – death of the body. Let a man know that he is going to die, feel that state move in excruciating stages through his various gates of pain, experience the complete demise of happiness, hope, then dignity; and only then is his removal from this sphere a work of art.

They say that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. What this quip fails to acknowledge, however, is just what an achievement the camel is. No mean feat to design one.

Wikipedia is a camel.

I’ve always been a fan of Wikipedia. Detractors argue that you have to double-check everything you encounter there. I see this as an argument in its favor: you should double-check any fact, encountered anywhere, but only Wikipedia comes with this useful caveat branded on its communal forehead. Britannica’s

Alito is a menace. Friends, this is no time to invoke the Powell Doctrine. Sometimes you have to enter a battle without overwhelming force and without the assurance of victory: that’s what’s known as “courage.” Conservatives are salivating for a reason: Samuel Alito’s succession to the court would render the Bush era permanent.

If you’re not reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog, you’re not fully aware of what this administration’s doing to untried prisoners in the name of The War Against Other People’s Terrorism. Some technical details:
 
“TORTURE AND WATER: One of the experts on torture, especially that practised in Iran, professor Darius Rejali of Reed College, emails an exhaustive account of the various techniques involved, including their gruesome nuances:

This specific water torture, often called the “water cure,” admits of several variants:

(a) pumping: filling a stomach with water causes the organs to distend, a sensation compared often with having your organs set on fire from the inside.

“He’s a vile, detestable, moralistic person with no heart and no conscience who believes he’s been tapped by God to do very important things.”

No, that’s not an assessment of George W. Bush. It’s the beginning of the smear campaign against the prosecutor: the quotation is from a “White House ally… referring to special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald.”