The Year That Was. . .

Another small piece of the harmonic good cheer of '63.

Joe

The greatest Heavyweight of all time, used up and spit out by the sports media now celebrating him. Anti-Jordan, Anti-Tiger, R.I.P.

Boo!

"I Wanted To Be With You Much Longer"

The ending of Haibane Renmei, "Prayer"

The previous twelve episodes.

Penultimate

The next-to-last episode of Haibane Renmei, "Reconciliation"

The previous eleven.

Purple Haze

What the heck happened to the Los Angeles Lakers?

In a season of irregular menstrual cycles (no offense to Pau Gasol) -- starting the year 8-0, losing four-in-a-row, winning seven-in-a-row, losing four-in-a-row, losing to the Cleveland Cavaliers, winning seventeen-of-eighteen, then going on a five-game-losing streak toward the end of the regular season, struggling distractedly against a mediocre New Orleans Hornets club in round one of the playoffs -- the Lakers ended 2010-11 not only being swept by Mark Cuban's Mavericks (losing the final "win or go home" game by 36 points) but also by becoming a group of guys who would clearly rather go on vacation than spend another second in each other's presence. Or with their (now gone) head coach.

As a Lakers fan since before they had Magic, I've never felt the emotional attachment to the post-Shaq "Kobe Lakers" I had with the Showtime teams of the 80s (not even close) or the Shaq Threepeaters of 2000 - 2002 (or the goofy Nick Van Excel clubs of the 1990s). The problem is Bryant. His spirit has dominated the team since 2004, even with the chastening of Phil Jackson's return in 2006. There is no joy in Kobeville. Whether L.A. is on a five-game losing streak or repeating as NBA champions, with Kobe is it always grim, grim, grim. While absolutely one of the greatest players (and winners) of his time, Kobe Bryant is a tight-ass bore. Not someone easy to like in the way we like our athletes, sometimes close to a crush. When the 80s Lakers would lose to the Celtics or Sixers or Pistons, I would feel bad as a fan but even worse for Michael Cooper, Mychal Thompson, and James Worthy. It's impossible for me to feel bad for Kobe Bryant.

Many of the current Lakers perhaps feel the same way. The club became wholly unglued toward the end. Imagine. Two-time defending champs. Three-time defending Western Conference champs. The last run for your 11-titles-winning head coach. One-game -- win it or not only go home but send Phil Jackson on his way in the most embarrassing manner possible. And the team -- with the exception of a first-half Kobe Bryant, who then also seems to pack it in -- shows up sullen, petulant, in a snit. And quits.

Obviously a team with a very delicate sense of purpose and togetherness. Maybe Gasol just got sick of playing with Bryant. Or Odom with Gasol. Or Gasol with Andrew Bynum. Gasol, of course, has taken the most heat from the sports media, as well he should. Something funky was happening with him and the league must have smelled it. Beginning in early April, when the Lakers were still playing their best basketball, several players around the NBA, from separate teams and divisions, began to whisper (publicly) about Pau Gasol's manhood -- the manhood of the starting center on the NBA's two-time defending champions. First, Kendrick Perkins of OKC said something. Then A'mare Stoudemire of the Knicks. Other players went with it, off the record. What was going on here? The Lakers were playing great and there weren't any "Pau Gasoft" cracks since L.A. lost to Boston in the '08 Finals. Gasol himself won the championship last year by his very tough and focused Game 7 performance (while Kobe was melting) against the Celtics. So what were the April remarks all about?

Somebody knew something, because beginning with those remarks the team went into emotional free-fall, and Gasol became punked. He became scared and confused on defense, passive and hesitant with the ball. Perhaps he announced to the team he was coming out. Another rumor has Kobe's wife saying something to Gasol's steady girlfriend which caused Gasol to be dumped. (Yet, how does this compare to Steve Nash in December witnessing the birth of a black baby to his white wife? These guys are human. . .) How does the Gasol situation explain the clear separation taken from his teammates by Lamar Odom? By Andrew Bynum? The aghast frustrations of veteran Derek Fisher?

What happened this spring could very well have happened the two previous springs. A few more timely Houston Rockets baskets in '09 would have knocked the would-be champs out in the opening round. A couple Laker misses in 2010 would've sent Phoenix ahead to the Finals instead of L.A. So let us all now send a red-hot poker to GM Mitch Kupchak's house, the man who sat on an aging and very charmed team when so much movement was happening around the league, except for helping to create a bench dominated by the "Killer Bs" -- Barnes, Brown, and Blake -- standing for very BBBAD and beyond them the likes of Luke Walton, the 62-year-old Joe Smith, and Phil Jackson's pot-dealer. And dear old Derek Fisher, still starting at point guard. . . a wonderful guy, a fine union leader, and currently worth less than zero as a basketball player. Why didn't Kupchak pick up O.J. Mayo or Corey Brewer (or Ronnie Brewer) for chump change? Or Stojakovic? Or Tony Allen? Perhaps Kurt Thomas would've slowed down Nowitzki or Jason Terry. . .

Phil Jackson must also take his medicine, along with his peyote. His inflexibility must have stoked the fires of dissension. Why did he refuse, since the Fisher situation was not going away, to play Kobe and Artest together more in the backcourt? Why wasn't Odom, Bynum, and Gasol on the court more often? Artest, Bryant, Gasol, Odom, and Bynum for 34-38 playoff minutes per game seems pretty unbeatable to me. And the terrible misuse/underuse of Andrew Bynum. . . After the Carmelo-for-Bynum rumors went away in January, Bynum was the best player on the Lakers and the best center in the league aside from Dwight Howard. Yet the offense never went through him. No offensive adjustments were made. He continued to sit out the last six minutes of each game. Why, Phil?

The worst part of the collapse is Jackson going out this way. I'll miss him very much. The easy thing about being a Lakers fan, aside from all the winning, is that it's an organization of class, wit, and intelligence. Unlike the Yankees, Red Sox, and Dallas Cowboys, there's nothing piggish or underhanded or cynical in how the Lakers win titles. Phil Jackson embodies these good qualities (as Kobe does not) in ways which are true and unique. (The Laker teams between Jackson's two coaching reigns were drab and grim -- they took on Bryant's aura instead of their head coaches'.) While Game Two of the Mavs series was coming to its dispiriting close, the fans at Staples Center booed, left, yelled bad words. And no one acknowledged they may have been seeing Phil Jackson for the last time.

And they were.

Parting

Part 11, Haibane Renmei.

Previous episode links.

Ruby

Happy 100th Birthday, Jack!

Smoke

The classic 50s brunette. R.I.P.

Yet, what has she left us? With the exception of Minnelli in the two Father of the Bride movies (and doing very well for him), she never worked with a great director. There is that magnificent game room scene with Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun (1951), but that's more Clift than Taylor. And she is an angel adolescent in her child movies of the middle-1940s.

Not much.

Still, try as they may, who else in the world looks like this?

And speaking of cigarettes, the great Lewis Lapham on the evil of banning them.

Rules of the Game

Written, produced, and directed by Mr. Charles Ferguson.

What has Mr. Ferguson done with all this control? Well, we get about 2,000 helicopter shots of Manhattan island. Another couple thousand low angle/high angle views of New York's postmodern monstrosities. And a bunch of hooker/cocaine/Bentley montages straight out of a 1986 Miami Vice episode. (And like those montages, how can we feel anything but envy?) The whole movie is clean and well-scrubbed.

So we are left with the faces and voices of the gangster class. This is the tribe that intentionally crushed the world's economy, stole $20,000,000,000,000 (and counting) from U.S. taxpayers, thereby crippling (also intentional) all public functions of the United States government? These are the Masters of the Universe, so brilliant and driven and complex their work is beyond mere human ken? These pinched, cheeseball faces? These stunted, third-rate minds? My, how the game has been fixed. To quote Mr. Ferguson's kinsman Michael Collins on the Brits: "How did these people ever get to run an empire?"

A very poor documentary on the subject of our time, yet a large helping of proof that the last thing 21st Century U.S.A. resembles is a "meritocratic" society. (Unless merit has been reduced to nothing beyond being a weasel fixer. I guess it has.)

And speaking of weasels . . . Barack Obama, the planet's currently most famous weasel, is not mentioned in this movie about Wall Street power until minute 98 of 102 (sans end credits). The word capitalism not at all.

2010's Inside Job.

On the same subject (actually I'm not sure what Ferguson's subject is), only much better.

Hina

On this Happy Girls Day, Part 10 of Haibane Renmei, "Abandoned Castle"

The rest.

Executioner

The corporatist defaming and destruction of feminism could not be better embodied than in the personhood of Cathleen Punty Black: Cathie Black. (And woe to those who misspelled her first name! One Hearstian I know was dismissed for repeatedly addressing Black in emails as "Dear CATHY.") Several months back, MIZZZ Black was appointed New York City Schools Chancellor by Pimp of the Oligarchs Michael R. Bloomberg. This shocked many New Yorkers, for Black had zero experience with public education -- not as student, teacher, or administrator. She wound up requiring a waiver from the NYC Commissioner of Education in order to take office. In the face of a heartfelt and growing waiver-denial movement against her ("Black is wack!"), the waiver was issued. It made sense. After all, did not Bloomberg announce Black's appointment at the same time he announced his intention to use his illegal third-term as Mayor to destroy New York City's public school system? It made perfect sense.

And yesterday, my daughter's elementary school announced the termination of their free breakfast program. . .

*

I began work at Hearst Magazines about a year before Black was named Magazine Division President. Clinton's New Economy had passed the company by, ad revenue was plummeting, Claeys Bahrenburg (Black's predecessor) -- in a brave attempt to hold off fanatical bottom-liners -- was caught imposing strange new formulas on how ad rates would be calculated (remarkably similar to what Clinton would do to "lower" announced national unemployment and poverty rates), and the decision was made to break what remained of Hearst's still classical approach to a dying medium. That one pre-Black year was a wonderful gift, a treasure. Randolph Hearst (the Founder's last surviving son) was still Chairman of the Board and the Family still retained real power. The Magazine Division was still a collection of competing duchies. Every editor-in-chief and publisher, however much at odds with each other, ran their turfs independently, so the titles looked and read and felt (and occasionally smelled) different: different paper stock, issue length, size, history, cover-design, traditions, revenue expectations, readership. The old wall between Church (editorial) and State (advertising) stood strong. And the company itself was like a college campus, housed in half-a-dozen buildings around 57th Street and Broadway. My favorite was 959 Eighth Avenue, the six-story Deco landmark intended to be forty-stories high when the Great Depression smothered that intention. Compared to other Deco remains across Manhattan, the outsides of 959 were nothing special, a drab sort of yellow granite with silly Romanesque statues at the front's four corners. But the insides of 959 had golden cages for elevators, the opal glimmer of marmoreal lobbies and discreet mahogany-lined walls in offices secured against the outside world by blinds, shutters, heavy drapes.

The eight non-Family trustees decided to destroy all that. CEO Frank Bennack saw the anti-print wave coming: Bahrenburg was fired, Black brought in. (At the time, Black was President of USA Today, where she successfully changed a fun and poppy newspaper into a colorless advertiser-drenched comic sheet.) With Bennack's full support, she went to work right away. She organized a coup against the Chairmanship of the kind and gentle Randy Hearst. (Spreading nasty rumors about Mr. Hearst's wife Veronica's untoward influence over the "old man," to get him out.) Bennack became both CEO and Chairman of the Board. Beginning with the honorable Ed Kosner at Esquire, all editors who resisted Black's blatant removal of the wall between editorial and advertising were dismissed one-by-one. (The last straw for Kosner was his refusal to bow to the Chrysler account in its threat to end all Hearst advertising if Kosner did not kill a sexually explicit short fiction piece about a gay couple. More than half of Esquire's editors resigned in protest of Kosner's firing. David Granger of GQ was brought over and Esquire as we knew it was dead.) (Granger would later stand up against Black for the cover-publication of a story by journalists Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss, about something called "Operation Tiger Force": a U.S. Vietnam death-squad which committed My Lai-level massacres on a weekly-basis. A story eventually published by the Toledo Blade and one that would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize. Dozens of advertisers threatened termination. Granger folded, but at gunpoint.) Same with the publishers: Valerie Salembier, Patricia Haegele, Jane Jamison, Susan Plagemann, Donna Kalajian -- the Black Hand as they were known -- Cathie's Girls from her days at USA Today(mostly) and all enforcers of the new creed: nothing would be allowed in editorial which could possibly offend any actual (or potential) advertiser.

Within five years, everything changed. The magazines now all looked the same, had the same size, emphasized sleaze on every cover, embodied the cheapest paper quality. Gone was Redbook fiction, gone was Esquire's Dubious Achievements (it came back, in retarded format), the award-winning boutique men's titles -- Sports Afield, Motor Boating and Sailing -- dumped. So were the elegant and beautifully written Connoisseur and Victoria. And the little things: the magical Christmas party at Tavern on the Green, the midsummer night's party on Long Beach. And you know what? None of it worked. Cathie Black's Magazine Division was bleeding money. (The common joke was: She should change her name to Cathie Red.) Claes Bahrenburg's profits murdered Black's. Practically every title went on the block. There was serious talk of Hearst selling the division off to Disney. Then came the division's "savior": Oprah Winfrey. "O" the Magazine did save the division, from going bankrupt. Most Hearst titles now seem to take their cue from its treacly and self-important tone, the tone of its namesake. Funny thing is, Cathie Black fought against the acquisition of "O". Just as she fought against the virtualization of the magazines as we passed the Millennium. (When she left last year, Hearst web departments were smaller than they were in 1998.) She fought tool-and-nail for the creation of Tina Brown's idiotic (and very short-lived) Talk Magazine, launching it with an East River yacht party costing more than the yearly operating expenses of most Hearst titles, combined. She lost brilliant Cosmo editor-in-chief Bonnie Fuller in a catfight. Lost the very gutsy Anne Fuchs as Fashion Group Publisher right after that. (Anne was the Ida Lupino of Hearst.) Refused to accept Anna Wintour as Harper's Bazaar EiC after the passing of Liz Tilberis, instead shoe-horning in the inexperienced Kate Betts, another short-lived disaster with Harper's losing most of its editorial staff in a mass resignation and almost half its advertisers.

Then came the Tower and the Book. In the same way that Richard Nixon could never get over his jealousy of Jack Kennedy (even after Kennedy's execution), small town girl Cathie Black could never get over her envy of Condé Nast Magazines. Condé began to have monthly EiC confabs at Le Cirque -- so did Hearst. Condé started to have seasonal junkets at places like Cancun, Harbour Island, and St. Thomas. Hearst too. (Black's rejection of Anna Wintour as Liz Tilberis's replacement was her version of Nixon backhanding Ted Kennedy's '71 deal on what would've been genuine national healthcare, instead of Obama's corporate sell-out.) In 2002 CN announced its decision to build the 48-story Condé Nast Building, just off Times Square. It would be the greenest building in New York City and would look like a thunderous electronic headache -- just the style to appeal to the ever-tasteless Ms. Black.

Her campaign began. Bennack would not sign on to a Hearst Tower, but he was retiring, and new CEO-to-be (though not for long as he would shockingly -- and mysteriously -- be fired only a few years in) Victor Ganzi liked the idea. Unlike her campaigning in the NY media press to be Frank Bennack's successor as CEO (and failing), and unlike her campaigning within Hearst for a Trusteeship whenever one of the Trustees-for-Life died (and failing) -- here she succeeded. The ground for the new Hearst Tower was broken by Ganzi in April 2003, and four years later we got this:

959 was gone. Since it was already a declared New York City landmark, Hearst had to pay-off quite a few Bloomberg bagmen to get over that precious difficulty. (Another waiver.) So Hearst agreed to redo the subway station below 959. And to retain the original six-story face. Which is like agreeing to throw away all of Robert Mitchum's career except for this:

(Go here for a sample of genuine insanity.)

A $15,000,000,000 Tower, with a $10,000,000 always-breaking-down waterfall in the lobby. As many NYers asked when Black was appointed Schools Chancellor: how was this possible? The Magazine Division had been in the red for almost a decade, with no turn-around in view (or likely). Hearst had been selling off newspapers for years. As well as radio and TV affiliates. Were the Entertainment / Cable properties that flush? Maybe it was the real estate. Well, there it was (and is) -- all $15BN of it. A building with the odor of plastic cement, awash in the High-Technology of the Self-Flattered, looking like it will live for ten years; then crack in two. The perfect monument to Cathie Black's Hearst tenure.

Or maybe it's the book: Basic Black: The Essential Guide for Getting Ahead at Work (and in Life). (Really, that's the title.) As my old Hearst pal Marcia Jones would say: "It's beyond beyondo." Basic Black is basically illiterate (one would think a publishing president could hire better ghostwriters), and one of the most unintentionally funny books one could find. It can also be described as one of the most accurate autobiographies one can find, for it is a touchstone in social chi-chi, a book describing an author of undue ambition and impotent imagination, one invariably more interested in being part of an elite machination than in any creative act itself. The question (and answer) is there on every page: whether it is better to trust the individual who travels through desolations before passing sentence; or a poseur who has a good meal, a romp with her hired stud, a fine night of sleep, and a penalty of death in the morning for the culture. For an ex-Hearstian like myself, reading it was to be reminded of the constant sore in one's heart as the blood pumps through to be cleared of love.

*

Cathie Black is now New York City Schools Chancellor. Since her appointment, this is what's happened to my daughter's P.S. 139:

-- Four 1st-grade classes (Saya's grade) reduced to three.

-- A dozen teachers fired, including my daughter's original 1st-grade teacher, someone she liked very much.

-- Many traditional school parties, dances, and festivals canceled.

-- Once-a-week school assemblies reduced to once-a-month.

-- The 6th-grade eliminated (with discussion of the elimination of the 5th-grade for next school year).

-- A reduction in the school lunch program, and an increase in cost.

-- A reduction of ESL instruction.

-- Elimination of after-school care.

-- Reduction of extended-day instruction for struggling students from five days per week to three.

And yesterday they cut the breakfast program. Cathie Black is more than just Schools Chancellor -- she is the face of 21st-Century Manhattan, a face Knowing and corrupt and ruthless, dead to all experience it does not already comprehend, closed to any face not near to its own, as selfish and stingy as it is ingrown, and squeezed together with the ferocity of the timid, with a glisten of stupidity in the gleam of the eye -- that particular stupidity which reflects all of moral damage, living in the dread of the undeserving. A face that takes food out of the mouths of children.

Rebirth

Number 9 of Haibane Renmei.

The previous 8 episodes.