Little clip, under three minutes, on the BBC website: It's the kind of "ain't-that-funny" thing that makes for newspaper column-fillers. Here, predictably, the Beeb does it to perfection.
The Eighth Avenue Subway, the A-C-E line, is one of the self-imposed tasks every tourist to New York undertakes, along with the Empire State and the Brooklyn Bridge. First timers inevitably get the express when they need the local. And why not? Take the rough with the very rough, even if it's only the well-worn section between Columbus Circle and Washington Square.
Would the train be so iconic without Billy Strayhorn's tune? Probably not. There's a decent history of the piece on wikipedia, allowing Malcolm to sit that one out.
Take the A Train ... became part of the national soundtrack, the sound of urbanity, of swing, Ellington's leitmotif.
So, as we force Malcolm back to his chores, back to the carpet-cleaning and furniture removal, let him relish the real thing. It works. It swings. It rocks. It doesn't matter if it's the trio:
Or the full shebang, with Ray Nance:
The Ella version is there, too (compiled by someone who knew more about music than the MTA: those locomotives are pretty heterodox):
For Gordon Lightfoot, all the way back to 1964, "big" was a 707:
The current Economist update reminds us that the 707's bigger, better successor, the 747 Jumbo, is itself now forty years old.
Malcolm recalls his first transAtlantic trip (on an aging, and ratty, Lockheed) and how the 747 experience was itself an up-grade.
Yet, as that Economist piece, reprinted from Jan 24th 1970 makes clear, the 747 was not without early problems:
When Pan American's jumbo 747 failed to take off on what should have been its first, regular passenger flight, the reputation of the American aircraft industry took a terrible knock. This was the second time within two weeks that an engine had failed at take-off. Pilots say the overheating that made it necessary to disembark all 362 passengers, unload 15 tons of freight and find a replacement aircraft on Wednesday is unimportant and occurs only during slow taxi runs and never in flight. But it is alarming enough for a very senior captain to turn back after starting his take-off run, on the first scheduled flight of the first basically new aircraft for more than 12 years and in the full light of all the publicity an event like this attracts.
That flight was New York to Heathrow, a PanAm flight. The aircraft, therefore, has outlived the air-line.
What follows (and it deserves reading) is a positive consumer report of the flying experience. Some things seem to have reverted to type:
... innovations in the cabin itself, broken up into a series of four rooms by kitchen units running a help-yourself buffet service, and eliminating the dreary dispensing of plastic meals from trolleys that block the aisles for hours on end. For the first time passengers are treated as customers, rather than chairbound invalids to be fed at times and with the foods on their diet sheets.
While others are definitively not experiments worth attempting:
Weight is also expected to be a safety factor in the sense that a crashing 747's tons of steel are more likely to streamline obstacles and less likely to crumple like kitchen foil. The outcome could be a tendency for the first time in decades for some passengers to survive a crash. This is not an aspect the airlines like to expand on but it is one more factor suggesting it will be difficult to get passengers out of jumbos once they get the taste for them.
The last laugh is neatly captured in the Economist's every-picture-tells-a-story graphic. This accompanies the parallel one-paragraph noting where we are today. Shamelessly, because he liked it and because he has lasting admiration and affection for the Economist, Malcolm reproduces it here:Sphere: Related Content
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Class and race in NYC
The graphics in the New York Times are, in a favoured word of Malcolm's Brooklyn-born son-in-law, "awesome".
So, today's effort, showing the distribution of votes in the City's Mayoral election, continues the standard of excellence. The legend to the piece reads:
The Vote for Mayor, Block by Block
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg won re-election Tuesday, but voters were less enthusiastic about him than the last time he ran in 2005. The mayor did well in high-income white areas of Manhattan and Queens, and also in election districts dominated by immigrants, like Flushing and Brighton Beach. But his vote fell sharply in black neighborhoods, especially southeast Queens, where the black middle class has been hard-hit by foreclosure.
The piece compares Burgess's efforts with the originals and contrasts them with Disney's parodies:
You could argue that Mark Burgess's drawings for the new Pooh book represent the closest thing to the truth, since they're a) not Disney, b) in colour, and c) not vomit-yellow and old.
Years back, as a reward for enduring MoMA, the aforementioned pert young piece (then younger, perter, but still a piece of work) was taken across 53rd to see Mary Poppins's umbrella and fulfil a promised engagement with five VIPs. Explanation follows:
These toys made a tour of the United States in 1947. Milne provided a 'birth certificate' to travel with the toys. Dutton Publishing, Milne's American publisher, insured the toys for $50,000, a vast amount of money in those days. They toured the U.S. for about ten years and ended up in the offices of Dutton. Dutton was able to convince Milne to let the toys remain in America, where they remained here until 1969. At this time, they made a short trip to England (flying as VIPs in a Concorde) for a Shepard exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
For many years, the original Pooh, Tigger, Piglet, Kanga and Eeyore were lovingly cared for by Elliott Graham at the offices of E.P. Dutton in New York. After reading a newspaper article reporting that Dutton had taken possession of the 'stuffed animals,' Elliott applied for and was given a job at the publisher, where he quickly became the official guardian to Pooh and his companions. On September 11th, 1987 the toys found a new home at the Central Children's Room at the Donnel Center, a branch of the New York City Library, where they are on display in a large glass case inside a room with a viewing window. The toys have been left uncleaned and unmended and look as if they are awaiting the return of Christopher Robin.
There then followed a moment of parental pride.
Unbidden, the pert young piece signed the visitors' book, with the addition:
Gwyneth Dunwoody, a British Member of Parliament, has started a campaign to bring back the original stuffed animals of Pooh, Tigger, Eeyore, Piglet and Kanga to England. These toys, originally belonging to Christopher Robin, were donated in 1987 by E.P. Dutton to the Central Children's Room at the Donnel Center, a branch of the New York City Library, where they are on display in a large glass case. Gwyneth Dunwoody visited the toys recently and concluded: "They look very unhappy. And that doesn't surprise me, if you realize they are captured all those years. They're a part of British inheritance and they want to come home!" Dunwoody will request the House of Commons to proceed a request of repatriation.
The doughty Dunwoody received a dusty response:
Rudolph Giuliani, Mayor of New York, is prepared to 'risk a war' with the British to keep the toys in the Library at West 53rd Street. "Like millions of other immigrants, Winnie the Pooh and his friends came to America to start a new life. They're a good example of a successful immigration".
Up early (Robbie the painter due before 8 a.m.) and on with the morning news.
We were expecting it; but it still shocked: the death of Mary. In the end, it seems, the leukemia didn't get her: it was the side-effects of the chemotherapy.
Perhaps, to aid the younger generation, the BBC now can be induced to dig out those original performances, and the documentary on the "folk revival":
Grossman's construct
The fourth original member of PP+M was Albert B. Grossman. Grossman saw the possibilities of commercializing "folk", opened up by the likes of Burl Ives, Harry Belafonte and the Kingston Trio.
This was the moment the baby-boomers hit town: college enrolments were booming -- a plurality of the white population in that key target age-group. This was their music. Joan Baez (another Grossman "asset") was already making a name. Bob Dylan (another one) was coming over the horizon. In creating PP+M Grossman inserted the tall, slender, photogenic blonde between two hirsute, but preppy, guitarists. Travis lived across Macdougal Street from Clarence Hood's Gaslight Cafe, a folk club where Noel [Paul] Stookey was the MC. Stookey, in his turn, had fallen in with the legendary Dave Van Ronk, the "Mayor of MacDougal Street", and traded in his electric guitar for an acoustic Martin. In another club, the Cafe Wha?, also on Macdougal Street, Grossman saw a singer-guitarist, Peter Yarrow, who had graduated from Cornell's psychology classes into a third-level course on English folksong and folklore (a.k.a. "Romp and Stomp"). Yarrow had adapted a lyric composed by Leonard Lipton, one his Cornell friends, and included it (and still does) in his regular songlists, a song everyone allegedly detested, a song no childhood should be without: Puff, the Magic Dragon.
Grossman now had his notion of a trio: an intellectual, a girl (to take the rôle patented by Ronnie Gilbert in The Weavers) and a humourist (as patented by Lou Gottlieb in The Limeliters). And then, after a successful preview when PP+M depped for solo Yarrow at Folk City, with supreme timing and placement, he launched them at the epicenter of cool that was Fred Weintraub's Bitter End in Greenwich Village.
On 29 January 1962, according to Billboard at the time, PP+M signed to the nascent Warner Bros (significantly not the "traditional folk music labels -- Vanguard or Folkways), for an advance of $30,000.
Grossman may have put together his idea of a pop-folk trio: what he bought were three hard-headed, highly-principled, committed liberals. The repertoire was collectively agreed: for example, when Stookey became a convinced Christian, Lemon Tree (their first single) was dropped. The first eponymous album [left] released on 1st March 1962, was the number 1 seller for seven weeks, and was in the charts for a total of 185 weeks. It has been calculated as the 36th top-seller of the all vinyl-mad 1960s.
Hammering out the message
If PP+M were meant to be a straight commercial act, they blew that with their follow-up single. The less-savvy college kids may not have noticed why: their elders certainly should have done.
Back in 1949 Pete Seeger and Lee Hays had come up with The Hammer Song for the "fellow-travelling" People's Songs. The target was the red-baiters, already developing into full MacCarthyites of the late 40s. It didn't help when the song was the cover for Sing Out! magazine's first edition [left]. Although the Weavers had recorded it, in 1949, for the minority Harmony label, it never appeared on any of the commercial recordings they did for Decca. Indeed, they were selective about when and where they performed it.
Largely because of PP+M, for whom it won a 1962 Grammy, If I Had a Hammer quickly became a musical cliché. Yet, as that Newport version above shows, PP+M made it, in live performance, a matter of anger and intent.
The March on Washington
Jumping over a fair bit of history, Blowin' in the Wind (apparently, PP+M's version remains the most commercially-successful of any Dylan song), Puff (which was quickly corrupted by the Vietnam War into one nick-name for a DC3 gunship), the 1963 Newport Festival, any of which could provide a blog entry, let's move on apace to the August, 1963, March on Washington, for which Yarrow was a co-organiser. The two songs the group sang were Hammer and Blowin' in the Wind. They would later also be alongside Martin Luther King at Selma; and remember him at the 1971 anti-war March:
Conclusion
This diatribe has gone on too long already.
A good woman, a true comrade has died. It would be gratifying, here, to throw in some palliative, to make a trite parallel between Garry Trudeau sending off Andy Lippincott to Pet Sounds:
and Mary Travis living to see a Black American President walk down the road, the white dove sleeping in the sand, the mountain washed to the sea ... all on just the spot they belted that song out in 1971 [see the YouTube video above].
And yet, she wouldn't see it that way. Her acerbic tongue (too long silenced on stage) would have snappily told us not to be ridiculous: this is just another cautious, underperforming President, failing to deliver on his mandate. Cue Noel Paul Stookey's tribute:
Witty, politically savvy, she was the master/mistress of the cutting exit line. Once I was attempting to defend Ronald Reagan's educational policy. She interrupted me with "Oh, for heaven's sake, do your homework", turned on her heel, and walked away. Need I say it turned out she was right?
Others, more learned and competent, will do the full obits. Today's Irish Times would be a good place to start reading.
All Malcolm can add is that McCourt gave a lot of people, in Ireland and around the world, a lot of plain delight. That, and a decent income from the royalties, is the best any writer can wish. On the other hand, he also suffered that bane of writers, from Horace, Cicero and Livy to the present day: becoming a school text in his own lifetime.
McCourt impacted on Malcolm in four ways:
He reinforced Malcolm's belief that Limerick is a place to be avoided.
He is in a portrait photograph in one of McCourt's (and Malcolm's) favoured Manhattan watering-holes, the Old Town Bar, 45 E 18th.
Malcolm's son-in-law went through "Stuy", where McCourt was his English Literature teacher. It seems not to have been an experience that benefited either party.
McCourt contributed one of the stock phrases and insults in use at Redfellow Hovel: "sticky-up Protestant hair".
Was it last night's overdose of Cabernet? Or just the idleness of a Bank Holiday morning?
So, what can we find to fight the ennui? Strong coffee helps ...
This ought to do it!
As Malcolm has admitted here and elsewhere, he is a fan of Billy Joel.
This double CD is a juicy relict of Joel's record tenancy at Madison Square Garden in 2006. That's one of the gigs Malcolm, equipped with his time-machine, would want to attend (another is Georges Brassens' final concert at Sète -- Malcolm left the town only that morning; and has regretted ever since).
What is remarkable is that Joel (or whoever guided his selection) largely ignored most of the output after 1986. Yes, there's The Night Is Still Young, The Great Wall of China, a full-blown The Downeaster 'Alexa' (which Malcolm relishes), The River of Dreams, A Matter of Trust, We Didn't Start the Fire, and, as the penultimate, an excellent And So It Goes. That leaves a full two dozen of the earlier classics.
A quick comparison suggests that Joel has dropped the pitch a notch or two: the matured voice is richer and rock-solid as a result.
Ah!, here comes Allentown. Sony have induced YouTube to block access to this from the UK, but it may show:
Well, we're waiting here in Allentown For the Pennsylvania we never found, For the promises our teachers gave If we worked hard, If we behaved. So the graduations hang on the wall, But they never really helped us at all. No; they never taught us what was real -- Iron and coke And chromium steel. And we're waiting here in Allentown. But they've taken all the coal from the ground, And the union people crawled away. Every child had a pretty good shot To get at least as far as their old man got; But something happened on the way to that place ...
It was that passing mention of Brassens, above, which supplied Malcolm with a satisfying explanation for his liking of Joel. At his best, Joel goes beyond song-writing, beyond being a modern balladeer, to providing narratives in song, as in his celebration of his return to New York:
As the hair and the higher pitch suggests, that's from 1978 (14th March: a Live at the BBC concert).
Or, in true chansonnière mode, Scenes from an Italian Restaurant and Piano Man, which both come towards the end of double CD (the lyrics mainly carried by active audience involvement).
Two items caught Malcolm's notice in another example of synchronicity:
The 11th annual Blessing of the Bikes will take place at New York's Cathedral Church of St John the Divine (a.k.a. "St John the Unfinished") this coming Sunday. This is an event which now seems current in cities and towns across the US.
Essex County Council (that's Essex, England, for the overseas reader) is finally getting round to filling in the pot-holes which have been used as a "traffic-calming measure". In doing so, the County authorities (who have responsibility for the highways) are over-ruling the local parish council of Navestock. Navestock has tolerated the holes because repairing them took "time and resources" and "If you fill them in, it just allows people to drive faster down these roads. If they're not filled, they have to slow down.".
This conjuncture provoked a Malcolmian moment of meditation.
Malcolm has always admired and envied those brave souls who venture onto the streets of New York above just the two wheels. He still quivers at recollection of a bicycle courier trying to beat the massed yellow-peril cabs away from the lights at 7th and 33rd -- particularly since the lone hero then swerved across several lines of traffic.
... for the 38 City Department of Transportation service inspectors who spend their days scanning New York City's 6,200 miles of streets for potholes, March brings days of almost constant discovery.
That is because the main cause of the pothole - defined as ''a break in the asphaltic surface down to the base'' - is spring's freeze-and-thaw cycle. Water runs into cracks in the pavement, freezes overnight and expands. A pothole eventually appears.
Nothing has changed very much since that New York Times report from 1987. It's become a topic of annual report:
The [NYC] Department of Transportation says they have fixed more than 200,000 potholes since July 2008.
Once a pothole is reported, the city claims it takes about three days for it to be fixed.
The City even publishes a handy illustrated guide, to show that not all pot-holes are pot-holes: they should, more properly be classified and reported as examples of:
Potholes, Cave-Ins, Hummocks, Ponding Conditions, Manhole Covers, Street Hardware, Failed Street Cut or Old Utility Cut, and Open Street Cut.
Strictly:
Potholes are characterized by a definable bottom surface such as dirt or gravel.
Note that carefully: in some cases, they are seemingly ... bottomless. As with:
Cave-ins generally look like depressions, with a jagged hole and a deep void beneath it.
The Transportation Department then, blithely undepressed, says "Phew!" and continues with other tasks for:
Repair of cave-ins is the responsibility of the Department of Environmental Protection. Call 311.
Some of these holes, however they are categorised, are ginormous, like the Maelstrom capable of swallowing a small warship, let alone a baby-buggy or a Vespa. They seem most frequent at intersections, convenient to pedestrian crossings. They fill with water. A car or truck corners. A spew of foul water drenches everyone nearby up to waist-level.
To cycle in such conditions needs courage of a new dimension, as well as wheels of some super-strength material.
Continuing with Malcolm's stop-gap postings, we are still stuck in the A's:
Annie Moore's An excellent place of decent refreshment, located in Manhattan's E 43rd Street, nicely adjacent to Grand Central Station.
It bears a name borrowed from the girl who, on 20th December, 1881, left Queenstown on the S.S.Nevada. On New Year's Day, 1882 -- supposedly her fifteenth birthday --, she was the first immigrant to be processed through the new Ellis Island centre. To mark this inauguration of a place of hope and misery she was presented with a $10 gold piece. She brought with her two brothers, and they joined her parents who had emigrated four years previously. It has now been established that she is buried in the Calvary cemetery, in Flushing, Queens. This was originally the burial place of the poor from the St Patrick's diocese. She shares the space with a slew of gangsters from Little Italy, but also luminaries such as Governor Alfred E. Smith, the 1928 Democratic Presidential candidate (the Irish connection is Smith's mother, Catherine Mulvihill, and his wife, Catherine Dunn), and Mayor Robert Wagner.
On the water's edge at Cobh there is a statue of the Moores. Annie is depicted as the only one looking back. It is matched by another, solo statue inside the main hall at Ellis Island. Malcolm has to admit, having stood by both, he found the connexion elegiac and emotive.
Anna Livia The personification of Abhainn na Life, the River Liffey, whose characteristic brown colour comes from the peat-water of the Wicklow mountains (and not, as the credulous tourist would still be told, from St James's Gate brewery). Joyce celebrated Anna Livia Plurabella, and in return the powers that be renamed Chapelizod bridge in her honour; but for Malcolm, for now, it's Eavan Boland every time:
Tell me, Anna Liffey, Spirit of water, Spirit of place, How is it on this Rainy Autumn night As the Irish sea takes The names you made, the names You bestowed, and gives you back Only wordlessness?
To celebrate Dublin's millennium year (1988) the magnate "Doctor" Michael Smurfit presented the City with a statue of Anna Livia, supine in a fountain. This allowed Dubliners to continue the long-standing tradition of awarding each new public artwork an alliterative address: she was the "Floozie in the Jacuzzi" when not the "Hoor in the Sewer". The authorities shifted Anna to make space for the Spike: she's supposed to be relocated at Croppy's Acre, before the old Collins Barracks. Meanwhile, her nickname lives on for the thing in Victoria Square, Birmingham.
Arthur Itis The bane of many an ageing Dubliner, who, in part thanks to a damp climate, complains loudly of suffering appallingly from Arthur Itis. Sphere: Related Content
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Malcolm gets lippy
This gorgeous thing has been illustrating reviews over the last few weeks:
The Wall Street Journal featured it, back on 5th January. It is here again in the 2nd March issue of Time magazine. It could have made in the ateliers of the early Twentieth Century, and be appearing in a Cubist exhibition. The shape is uncannily like a flamingo, especially John Tenniel's drawings for Alice in Wonderland.
In fact, it emerged from an archaeological excavation in Anatolia.
It is, incredibly, over three and a half millennia old.
She claims to be visiting one of the most secret, historic parts of the terminal.
Again, true, but with many question-marks around it.
Malcolm's main complaint here is the claim that the
secret rail platform under Grand Central Station - Track 61 ... does not appear on any station maps or plans and was built specially for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to use in the 1930s.
The impression is given that it was constructed largely to protect FDR's vanity about his incapacity, the consequence of polio, his wheel-chair and leg-braces.
The truth about Track 61
This story crops up, as do so many, with monotonous regularity. Why does nobody (Malcolm notably excepts himself) undertake some basic research?
Track 61 is explained by numerous websites, not omitting Columbia University.
Start from the days when railroads had money.
At the start of the twentieth century, the New York Central Railroad electrified. It no longer needed direct access to the atmosphere. So it dug a vast hole between 42nd and 50th Streets, between Lexington and Madison Avenues. Into this pit, thirty feet below street level, the tracks were dropped. In modern terms, it cost something in excess of $2 billion. The "air rights" (building on stilts over the tracks) were then up for offer.
One of the last erections over the tracks and marshalling space was the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, completed in 1931. The Waldorf traded on exclusivity. What better than a private rail siding for those private rail cars? With a lift directly into the hotel!
So a platform and lift were constructed. Stand on platform 24, and look north: up there is the "secret" platform 61, up by 50th Street.
First to avail of this facility was General Pershing, in 1938.
Then it became associated with FDR. He could arrive from Hyde Park, via the Hudson Line, be decanted and removed to the Presidential Suite, out of sight and (in wartime conditions) under complete security.
The coincidence of the "secret" platform, the conveniently-parked armoured railcar, and the number of times this story re-appears suggests that someone, somewhere has the notion of a future tourist attraction.
Back in free-and-easy 1946, the New York Central Railroad held its “Debut at the Waldorf,” showing off its new diesel locomotive.
In 1965, "Dick Ekstract" rented the platform and hosted The Underground Party, in honour of the birthday boy, Andy Warhol. Fitting, if nothing else.
Julia Solis (inNew York Underground) has given a pretty comprehensive account of this "mystery".
So: ya wanna "inter-react" wi' Track 61, huh?
You walk past the awning of the Waldorf-Astoria, down to the corner of 50th. That's St Barts over there, OK? Swing right. Make three or four strides. Look over your shoulder. See those metal doors, telling you this is the Metro North emergency exit? You're thirty feet above that "secret" Platform 61.
Brooklyn Lager ("wonderfully flavorful ... smooth, refreshing and very versatile")?
Either brew, fortunately, is substantially stronger than the noctural diet of Ptilocercus lowii (pictured, right) or the norm of US beers, both of which seems suspiciously like making love in a canoe (oh! the old ones are the best ones!):
Nectar from the flower buds of the bertam palm is fermented to a maximum alcohol content of up to 3.8%.
Each bud is a miniature brewery, containing a yeast community that turns the nectar into a frothy beer-like beverage.
And why the Brooklyn Brewery matters: All true believers should be rooting for Steve Hindy, the Brooklyn Brewery's president. Hindy, a former AP reporter in Beirut correspondent for AP in the early 1980s, and his partner, Tom Potter, a senior executive with Chemical Bank, wrote a book, Beer School, on their success in developing the Brooklyn brand from scratch. It's a good read.
As the New York Timesarticle of 20th July identified, all Hindy's attempts to relocate and expand have been frustrated. The firm has outgrown (and been gentrified out of) its present location at North 11th Street in Williamsburg. There are implications which go beyond the world of brewing, and apply far beyond of New York:
The number of manufacturing jobs in the city, which once exceeded 850,000, fell below 100,000 in recent months, according to statistics compiled by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Manufacturing now accounts for about one of every 40 jobs in the city, down from almost a quarter of all jobs in the mid-1960s.
“These manufacturing jobs are worth preserving because they’re excellent, high-wage jobs that don’t require English as a first language or a high level of education,” Ms. Archibald ["executive director of the East Williamsburg Valley Industrial Development Corporation, a Brooklyn business coalition"] said. “They pay way better than retail.”
This same story has now been picked up by other New York publications, as well as the alternative press and, inevitably, the blogosphere.
Hindy knows his beer. His brewery has created an iconic product line. He also has hot links to Mayor Bloomberg (who wrote a foreword to Beer School).
Hindy, a knowing old journo, cooked the perfect punchline for that Times piece.The credited writer, Patrick McGeehan, could not have asked for a better:
“Once you name your company Brooklyn Brewery, you kind of take away the threat of moving to New Jersey,” Mr. Hindy said.
Woke up, it was a Jersey morning, and the first thing that I saw... Was the sun through yellow curtains, and a rainbow on the wall: Blue, red, green and gold to welcome you, crimson crystal beads to beckon.
Oh, wont you stay? We'll put on the day, There's a sun show every second.
New dawn, new melodrama: Alexander Cockburn has a whole cast of new villains. Even the basic plot-line has changed.
Until now the official version had been that Spitzer's $10,000 cheque had raised curiosity at an unnamed bank, who had passed the tip to the Treasury Department, under the rules for copping money-launderers.
This is the line still being peddled, not least by today's Wall Street Journal:
The genesis of the Spitzer investigation remains hazy, but the reports on his banking transactions seem to have emerged from the financial surveillance system in an ordinary manner. Banks routinely file Suspicious Activity Reports, or SARs, when bank systems point out unusual transactions. Every SAR filed by banks in the New York metropolitan area is read by agents of the Internal Revenue Service's Criminal Division, federal regulators and money-laundering experts say. "So if someone mentions a prominent official in a SAR, it is going to be noticed," said bank-compliance expert Charles Grice of the New York firm CRI Compliance.
That raises an eyebrow or two, if only because:
Even the WSJ admits the origins of the investigation are "hazy" (which is often journo code for "Don't believe it");
Spitzer must have known those rules; and was effectively setting himself up to be caught; and
it is curious that Spitzer's, and only Spitzer's name came to the fore.
Version 2.0 is different; and it starts a long way back.
Spitzer's previous office had been, for eight years, New York's Attorney General. In that time he had taken $13 billion, yes -- billion -- in settlements prosecuting company crime. The fleeced included the former Chairman of the NYSE, Richard Grasso, for gross over-remuneration: that charge also named the NYSE Board members who authorised those payments, who included the in-coming Chairman, one Ken Langone. New York Magazine had an article with Langone shouting his intentions:
Gesticulating with his big hands, he looks at me and says pointedly, “One way or another, Spitzer is going to pay for what he’s done to me and the havoc he’s caused in the New York business climate.”
A lot of people say things like that when they’re angry, but most of them are not billionaires... Langone is launching a counteroffensive that could cost tens of millions. His plan, he says, is “to make sure everyone knows that Eliot Spitzer isn’t fit to be governor of New York State or any other office, for that matter.”
So Ken Langone is quite explicitly a long-time enemy of Spitzer, not even bothering to disguise full-blooded hatred. He has wealth beyond the dreams of Arfer Rice:he once attempted to buy out the New York Stock Exchange. Phew!
Last summer the New York Times went looking for vox pop, and Langone's voice was loud and first in the field:
“Mr. Spitzer has been manipulating the press and the law to disparage decent people for years, and it’s about time that he’s been held accountable,” said Kenneth G. Langone, a billionaire founder of Home Depot whom Mr. Spitzer accused of misleading fellow Stock Exchange members about the exchange’s rich compensation.
Cockburn sniffs a smoking gun. It seems he takes most of his story from The Huffington Post, which has the CNBC transcript from which Cockburn quotes, together with a video from Red Lasso. So Langone's gloat is already on the CNBC record:
Few have bayed for Eliot L. Spitzer’s blood more loudly than Kenneth Langone. The former New York Stock Exchange director, who battled the former New York attorney general over Richard Grasso’s pay, gloated over Mr. Spitzer’s fall to CNBC Monday night.
Among his choice quotes: “I hope his private hell is hotter than anyone else’s.”
CNBC: "Would you say that you were surprised by this news?" Langone: "Not at all... I know for sure he went himself to a post office and bought $2,800 worth of mail orders to send to the hooker... I know somebody who was standing in back of him in line..."
Cockburn suggests that this can only mean that Langone and/or others had gumshoes snooping on Spitzer.
It also means that
the original suspicion did not come from an anonymous bank; and
Langone wants the world to know who was behind the hit.
Malcolm has only done it the once, about a dozen years ago: made it to the top of the Empire State Building, that is. But, on the flight into Newark, he chooses the port side, expecting to see its iconic shape as G-VHOT (or G-VBIG) comes in. During his visit, he commutes in on the Midtown Direct: it's the first and last view of Manhattan.
By comparison, he has done the London Eye three times, but excuses that on the basis of showing relatives the sights.
Neither is as scary as the CN Tower, with its glass floor and 1,122 feet of nothing, straight down (Malcolm is acrophobic ever since). Nor possessed of quite the view from Seattle's Space Needle: Mount Rainier across Downtown, the Cascades, and the sublimity of the Olympic range across Puget Sound. That has to be the prize winner. Whereas Mr Eiffel's erection always looks better from below.
Malcolm suggests there's no need to leave your seats: most of that is available by the wonders of webcam.
So what's your point, Malcolm?
Well, it's an article Malcolm almost missed, on the Cityroom blogs site of the New York Times. Jake Mooney did a nice little piece to note that:
As anybody with a weakness for weepy film romanticism knows, closing time at the Empire State Building’s observation deck was always the stroke of midnight — right? Cary Grant waited up there for Deborah Kerr until the clock struck 12 in An Affair to Remember (1957), and Meg Ryan had to talk her way past a security guard to meet Tom Hanks there at night in Sleepless in Seattle(1993).
But if Mr. Grant was searching the observation deck for true love today, he would have another two hours to cool his heels in the rain: The deck has been open until 2 a.m., seven nights a week, since March 1.
That's it, really. Except that:
Wil Greenstreet, a jazz saxophonist, has been providing high-altitude mood music Thursdays through Saturdays from 10 p.m. until 1 a.m., and Mr. Greenstreet’s gig, which began as a summer engagement, was recently extended through September.
Malcolm learned from the article that there are now 4m visitors a year, up from
about a million people to visit in that first year [1931] ... two million for the first time in 1987. They reached three million for the first time in 1995 and steadily increased, but dropped below that mark in 2001, after the World Trade Center attacks. By 2002, though, attendance was back to 3.3 million people, and then the rise started again.
He also learned that Scott Fitzgerald, who went up in that first year, was disappointed because of:
the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe.
Malcolm barely regrets never having managed the World Trade Center ("2000 — a record year for visitors at the time — it drew about 2.2 million people"). It didn't draw Malcolm in late August, 2001, though. He looked up; pondered; said "Next time"; and went in search of an afternoon beer. The irony for Malcolm lies in something else: the best thing to see from the Empire State Building's observation deck is William Van Alen's Chrysler Building, especially as the stainless steel catches a golden sun-set.
One of his enduring disappointments is that he has never managed to photograph that moment. When MoMA was decanted out to Queen's, he took the trip and tried to get a decent image from the 7 Line (or wherever). Didn't quite work. An unfinished task, then.
And, as the sun slowly sinks in the West, Malcolm heads off, humming to himself Brooklyn-boy Billy Joel's epitaph on Manhattan:
I've seen the lights go out on Broadway. I saw the Empire State lay low. Life went on beyond the Palisades: They all bought Cadillacs and left there long ago.
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Malcolm featured in the columns of "Trinity News", the student weekly of Trinity College, Dublin, in the early 1960s.
He worked in public education. He was a borough councillor and parliamentary candidate. He retired. He was bored. He blogged.
Take the A
It's the kind of "ain't-that-funny" thing that makes for newspaper column-fillers. Here, predictably, the Beeb does it to perfection.
