Review: Jel / Soft Money (Anticon)

The Sunday South China Morning Post, March 25, 2006

“Don’t buy this product, you don’t need it,” is a curious way to start rapping on your solo debut album. As Soft Money opens with To Buy a Car, Jel, nee Jeffrey Logan, is soberly imagining the click-y, breakbeat advertising jingle he’d write for a fleet of “street legal war vehicles.” But he’s also winking at the doting avant garde hip hop heads who just purchased—or more likely downloaded—his album.

The Chicago-born producer/MC doesn’t need such slogans to prove his anti-corporate mettle. As one of the founding members of hip hop’s best known underground collective, the Oakland, Calif.-based Anticon, he shaped the intricate musical bedrock for the lyrical acrobatics of groups like Themselves and Deep Puddle Dynamics. Fortunately, after the early proselytizing on that first track, Jel jumps off his soap box to grab a drink and slide back behind his old samplers to kick off this chill-out session.

What pretensions he may betray in his self-righteous lyrics—on a later track the war on terror becomes his easy target—he often abandons in an unusually accessible hip hop orchestration. The quick beat changes, strange syncopations, blurred samples and sheer noise that have lately become the heavy grist of “nerd rap” millers like Prefuse 73 are all but absent; in their place are spacious beats, cinematic cellos, twinkling Rhodes pianos and processed vocal snatches that make tracks like No Solution and Nice Last sound like the soundtrack to a gritty sci-fi movie, or to a pre-dawn repose after a night at the club.

It’s a testament to Jel’s talent as a producer that these songs aren’t merely background music. On top of his facility with samples and beats, Jel proves he’s more than capable of mixing in hip-hop’s most exciting ingredient: collaboration. To wit, All Around, relying on the ethereal vocals of electronica chartreuse Jessie Bohm, is the album’s hypnotic pop pinnacle.

Though Jel’s worn critique of the war on terror threatens to ruin the party on Soft Money, Dry Bones, rapper Wise Intelligent’s take on a corporate accession to war machines on WMD is as good music as it is protest. Such things don’t always go well together, but like many moments on the rest of the album—a mixture of dark electronics, pop, and mostly lyric-less hip hop—sometimes they can, well, gel.

The Harvard Amateur

by alex pasternack

(I am told that I delivered this to the class of 2005 and others in Tercentary Theater on the 8th of July 2005, the day before graduation.)

Family, friends, teachers, and all those people who asked me to mention them—good afternoon.

Soon-to-be graduates of the Class of 2005—you’re all a bunch of amateurs.

That doesn’t sound right I know. Something about the word amateur doesn’t really seem to describe what happens every day in seminars, or on Soldiers Field, at model UNs, or on the pages of thousands of essays.

It’s not a professional school, but our college is made up of some of the most professional people anywhere. Unlike some of our class, you may not be headed for the NFL, or for a dance company, or medical school, you may have never started your own company, and you may have never even been in a boy band, but you’re among the brightest, most responsible, and most industrious people I’ve ever met. We are professional students now facing a professional life.

But professionalism and expertise, as important as these things seem at Harvard, ought not to be the only qualities we carry with us into the world, any more than they have marked our time at college.

As we leave, we will be fortunate if we can remember everything we’ve gained in these four years. Not just the classes or the awards, the performances or the games, the projects that we thought would never end. I don’t even mean the other stuff, the crazy parties and the conversations and the friends. I mean everything.

We’ll be better off if we can remember that at Harvard we weren’t professionals at all: we were amateurs. We are amateurs.

Now I’m no etymologist, so I googled it. Before it was a French word, amateur, or amateur originally came from Latin where it meant “lover, devoted friend, enthusiastic pursuer of an objective.” Today, being an amateur is seen as a bad thing—a novice, a dabbler—but a few centuries ago, it meant someone who did something for no reason but love, and as a result often did it better than the pros.

Can there be a better description of those of us who wake in the morning cold while others are asleep, to train, or compete, or put up posters in the Yard. We who in recent years have helped campaign for campus workers or political leaders, for fair trade foods in our dining halls, for renewable energy, for cheaper AIDS medicines or divestment from the Sudanese government. Those of us who can’t pull themselves away from our friends or our work, whether it be at a homeless shelter or in a text book, because that’s where our love lies. I think we all know what it’s like to stay up late to do something for no good reason.
You don’t need a reason when you’re in love.

Of course, as students here, we’ve learned that careful reasoning is the key to good grades or good jobs. Love isn’t necessarily something that can be communicated on a resume. So sometimes we sacrifice our passions in the name of achievement. Sometimes we’ll miss a good opportunity because we were so absorbed in a passionate pursuit. At times, each of us fails.

But our greatest successes only come when we’re doing what we care about. Earlier this year, a math professor wrote a particularly urgent email to my roommate and other concentrators that struck a chord with me. It didn’t say much, but it did say this: “THE ONLY PREREQUISITE FOR SUCCESS IN MATHEMATICS IS LOVING TO DO MATHEMATICS.”

He’s so right. In fact, his statement may even be read as circular. Success isn’t just about grades, or money or tangible achievements. Ultimately, we succeed as soon as we do what we love and love what we do.


If we don’t have them already, we’ll seek jobs and schools, we’ll seek places to live, just as we sought grades and accolades. But it’s that quest to discover what we love that makes us who we are. It’s the truth about us, our very own veritas.

And this is the greatest part about college. It’s shown all of us that inspiration, new love, can arise at any moment. It’s taught us to be on the look out for it.

It occurs to me that at college we aren’t just amateurs but amateurs, we aren’t just passionate but non-professional too. Amateur: “One who engages in an activity as a pastime, rather than as a profession.” A dabbler, an experimenter.

As a place of unending discovery where we’ve all branched out, put ourselves out on those limbs, Harvard has allowed us to be amateurs. Even if we fancy ourselves economists, or literary critics, rowers or future doctors, even if we’re attached to a particular cultural background, we’ve dipped into new languages, into the other side of the course catalog, the other side of the dining hall, the other side of campus. Sometimes we’ve come out scathed, sometimes absolutely delighted—but in the end, we always benefited, learning more about ourselves and others.

Being an amateur then isn't just about doing WHAT YOU KNOW and LOVE. It’s about DOING WHAT YOU DON'T YET KNOW YOU LOVE. It’s about not knowing where you’re going, and once there, rising to great heights. It’s about dabbling out of pure interest, playing around, failing and succeeding in spectacular fashion, and always searching for value in the new.

Let’s not forsake all that we’ve done here by letting graduation be the end of college—by letting our first dance concerts and IM games, our first protests and poems, our first videos and volunteer work, our first late-night bull sessions, be our lasts. Like every great moment in college, tomorrow, Commencement, is another new beginning.

We’re going to go soon and some of us will go very far away from this place. We may specialize, we may go into careers. But the trick is to find ways to live in the world that can make us new and make it new; to forget about straight paths, but think of our life as an ever expanding circle. As another graduate and another amateur, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about 150 years ago, the “one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety…to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle.”

One amateur known for drawing new circles was Nick Copernicus. He studied law and mathematics, worked for the church, took up medicine, was a famous translator and a policy wonk and a governor in Poland, and after hearing some lectures at his university, started teaching astronomy on the side. Perhaps it was a combination of his curiosity and his search for new perspectives that led him to the revolutionary theory that the earth was after all not the center of the universe. Copernicus did not go to Harvard—and he probably wouldn’t have wanted to, if only because sometimes we tend to think that we’re the center of the universe.

Recognizing that that there is no center, that there’s so much to learn and know and fall in love with, is what College has been about. Our curiosities, our desires to find new loves, is what makes college and life exciting and what makes the amateur the catalyst of real change.

Let’s change how we think of what it means to be amateur, what it means to be a professional, let’s keep questioning how we think of everything. Let’s make big circles. Let’s go out there with care but abandonment, with attention to others and the world, humble but passionate.

Let’s be graduates of Harvard but freshmen in the world.

We can be professional. I hope we’ll remain amateurs too.

Thank you.

Open Spaces

June 8, 2005 edition of the Harvard Crimson

“This place is so much nicer without those banners,” a friend said the other day as we walked through the Law School yard, articulating something simple but insightful about Harvard. When graduation rolls around, every yard around campus undergoes a sudden makeover. Tailored by teams of landscapers and decked out in tents and stages and banners, they become the centerpieces of the school’s famed pomp and circumstance, the sacrosanct, stately grounds of the old academy where Latinate phrases and laminate cards, heartfelt hugs and Kleenex, and clicking cameras abound. Of course, the glut of decoration aside, the scenes those cameras capture seem more real, painfully, bittersweetly real, than anything else that happens at Harvard. But what those graduation photos miss is a piece of reality underneath it all, the beautiful truth of Harvard beneath all the chairs and the caps and gowns and the crimson: the open spaces themselves.

Like anyone else who’s ever come to Harvard, the Yard was firmly planted in my brain as the sole symbol of the school long before I had even stepped foot in Memorial Hall, or knew about The Crimson, or what HUPD stood for, or how to get inside Widener, or where Hollis was (still not sure of that). My earliest memories of the Yard jibe with the way I sometimes see it in old woodcuts: quiet, orderly, stately in its serenity—with the modern addition of the tourists who come to admire the red brick and gather around John Harvard’s foot. I bet this official version of the Yard is the one that sticks in the minds of most visitors. But it’s not the version of the Yard I’ll remember.

I prefer the Yard where one night freshman year some friends and I began a makeshift Primal Scream, half-naked, more drunk on life than on someone’s moonshine, gleefully befriending everyone we traipsed past; the one where earlier this year I and others made fruit juice atop a wooden press that my friend had constructed beneath the oak trees; the Yard where one night this year a dance party paraded, fueled by hundreds of portable radios; or the Yard through which a ragtag bunch marched with a bizarre, colorful, 10-foot fabric cube in the first snowfall of the year—for no good reason, but for every great reason.

So it went for most open spaces at the college. Any time the weather would allow, and even sometimes not, we transformed our yards. Whether it was sharing poems and bread under the crabapple trees near Houghton library or having a picnic in Quincy courtyard or stretching out at the Business School or gathering in the Sunken Garden at Radcliffe, 50 strong, armed with makeshift instruments, art supplies and bottles of wine, reveling in the spring grass and the serendipitous sprinklers, my friends and I managed to forge our own little commencement events where frivolity replaced ceremony. These yards, where we’ve lounged or played ball, or caught a precious glimpse of nature, are just as much, if not more, a part of Harvard than the libraries, the dorms, and the classrooms.

I’m not sure exactly what draws us to the Yard—by which I mean all yards: perhaps it’s a craving for our own temporary Waldens, or perhaps it’s just our need for communal space (something the College otherwise sorely lacks). Whatever it is, I’ve come to appreciate the place of the Yard in Harvard’s mythos. Combining secluded tranquility with a sense of openness and accessibility, the Yard aptly signifies the central paradox of the public-minded university. If ivy-covered walls forbid the curious from peeking in on the cloistered life of the academy, open gates and sumptuous lawns beckon with a spirit of public generosity.

Meandering between the undeniable exclusivity of our Harvard experience and our necessary places in the outside world, we stand at this divide whether we like it or not. As we prepare to make the leap from one side of the gates to the other, the message left for us on one of those gates by a much older class of Harvard sharpens the difference between where we are and where we’re going: “Enter to Grow in Wisdom,” commands the entrance, and “Depart to Serve Better Thy Country and Thy Kind,” says the exit. But don’t we already strive to do both at once? Aren’t the boundaries of the Yard—the space and the College itself—more porous than ever before? Indeed, is that old motto, explicating the separation between Harvard and the world, any more necessary nowadays than the old gate and the wall on which it’s written?

Despite Harvard’s emphasis on open space—arguably the signature element of the campus—walls tend to crop up around here, not only outside the College but within it as well. If they aren’t made of brick, the walls are more insidious, held up by elitism, prejudice, or just plain reluctance. While most groups are open to anyone on campus, sometimes they can become overly self-selective. The sad result can be a set of firm boundaries with little interaction between people that might have interests in common. Meanwhile, final clubs and art groups tend to restrict their membership along lines that often seem arbitrary, turning community- and art-making into a competitive social sport. But campus groups and Harvard itself need not give up their high standards to give up elitism or unnecessary selectivity. All we need to do is consider how high our standards can go without a good dose of openness—open-mindedness, accessibility, and inclusion of others not like us.

We need even more healthy open spaces, literally and figuratively. The former may be coming in the form of Harvard’s Allston campus, for which planners have promised to turn unused asphalt lots into green spaces, while ensuring that new buildings are environmentally friendly. But keeping Harvard’s figurative spaces open requires attention too. Some years back the real estate office published an obsessively researched tome called “Harvard Patterns,” which refers to the Yard’s “loose geometrical rigor,” and deduces that the “movement between spaces rarely occurs on-axis, but instead requires a shift onto a sub-axis, which itself usually organizes a subsidiary space in the composition.” In other words, moving through Harvard’s fluid open spaces leads to even more open spaces. We don’t need geometry to know that this is the way the Yard was designed and the way that Harvard and the world on the whole operates best: open to new ideas, people, places, and new ways of seeing the same old thing. The spaces we pass through in our caps and gowns have been transformed, but not for good. Only Harvard students can really transform them.

An Opt-Out Wind Energy Fee

By ALEX L. PASTERNACK and MATTHEW W. MAHAN

Last year, a group of students at Harvard’s Kennedy School got wind of what millions of students, consumers, businesses, governments and various organizations had been doing for years: paying a little extra money to get some clean, renewable energy. They lobbied the student government and the administration and encouraged their peers to vote on a referendum that would add a small fee to students’ term bills. The reasons for doing so were clear enough to the majority of the school’s public policy students: the planet’s energy supply, weakened by the bombing of oil pipelines and the explosive jitters of investors, seemed as unstable as the planet’s environment and health. Today, all of the Kennedy School’s energy comes from the wind.

This week, Harvard undergraduates have an opportunity that students at hundreds of schools, including the Kennedy School, Duke, the University of North Carolina and the University of Pennsylvania, have already taken: the chance to bring healthy, clean renewable energy to the College.

At particular issue is whether a $10 fee to pay the premium for such energy—mandatory or optional—should be placed on students’ term bills, and whether, if optional, such a fee should be one that students pay only by checking a box on their bill (“opt-in”), or pay by default with the opportunity not to pay, again by checking a box (“opt-out”).

Of course, some wonder why students, and not Harvard, should foot the bill for renewable energy. The answer is two-fold. First, the administration isn’t prepared to do so at this point, so it’s up to the students to get started, with the expectation that the administration will recognize how important this is to students. Second, we students are the ones using energy in the dorms, the ones whose energy use impacts the environment for better or worse. An optional fee isn’t a burden on students, but an opportunity.

If you’re in support of optional renewable energy, an “opt-out” fee is superior to an “opt-in” fee: it avoids the problem of having to “revote” when you (or your parents) pay the term bill, and it ensures that enough money will be secured for a renewable energy purchase even if people forget to tick a box on their term bill. Since students, and not parents, are the ones using energy in the dorms, making the fee “opt-out” will extend the power of students’ decision from the ballot to the term bill, while still allowing for the veto power of students and parents at the time of payment.

The money collected would be handled by a new committee of students and faculty who will be dedicated to making the best purchasing decision at the time and to deciding what portion of the money, if any, should go toward on-campus renewable energy projects. The idea comes with the endorsement of a bevy of student groups, including this newspaper, and all of the candidates for Undergraduate Council president. And a little over a year ago, when undergraduates were polled about paying an extra $25 per year for renewable energy, 69 percent of respondents said they would (17 percent said they weren’t sure). Those results and a wealth of other information can be found at www.greencrimson.com/energy.

Currently, each Harvard undergrad produces roughly 3,340 lbs. of pollutants per year; if each student were to pay $10 to purchase 25 percent of our dorms’ energy from a regional wind farm, the improvement would be equivalent to taking 2,200 cars off the road every year, or planting 260,000 trees.

At a time when the school’s greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 40 percent over the past 12 years, a vote for a small optional renewable energy fee offers us Harvard students the opportunity to play a greater role in an environment each of us already affect. Think of a fee as paying a premium cost for a better product, or investing in an economically and politically stable resource that will lead to a healthier environment, all at the cost of a movie ticket. Ben Affleck movies never looked so bad.

The reasons for paying an extra $10 are blowing in the wind. Today scientists—most recently an eight nation group called the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment—mostly agree that the release of carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the atmosphere has caused a greenhouse effect like never before, resulting in not only increased temperatures, but also in increased frequency of extreme weather events, such as floods and droughts.

But whether or not one believes that our current energy supply is detrimental to the weather, the effects of burning coal and oil are felt at home, and in our lungs, every day. The stuff that comes out of power plant smokestacks has contributed to make asthma one of the fastest growing childhood ailments in industrial and developing countries alike, and has also recently been linked to lung cancer. Here in Massachusetts, where five power plants burn thousands of tons of coal every year, the effects on surrounding communities are significant. A 2000 study by the Harvard School of Public Health Professors Jack Spengler and Jonathan Levy concluded that two local coal-fired power plants, one in Salem and one in Somerset, led directly to a combined 1,710 emergency room visits, 43,300 asthma attacks, and 298,000 daily incidents of upper respiratory symptoms per year.

Harvard’s purchase of wind energy will not only fuel interest in renewable energy by invigorating its ever-growing market, thus making coal plants increasingly obsolete: a purchase will also send a strong message that the thoughtful, intelligent students of the best school in the world understand and care about the impact we as Harvard students have on the local and global environments about which we spend our days learning.

Importantly, that influential message will be felt not just far and wide, but around the Yard—to the administrators and trustees who decide how to lead Harvard—and to the current and future students—who decide how to lead the world.

We think a small step like this is commensurate with the kind of world-shaping Harvard students hope to do when they leave the gates: that is, work not just for oneself, or for a particular cause, or even for one’s school, but for the greater good—to actually make a world of difference.

Alex L. Pasternack ’05 is a history and literature concentrator in Winthrop House, and is also a Crimson editor. Matthew W. Mahan ’05 is a social studies concentrator in Kirkland House. He is also the president of the Undergraduate Council.

Sufjan Stevens Profile

Published on Friday, November 19, 2004
Biblically minded folkie shares faith in song—just don’t call it Christian rock



By ALEX L. PASTERNACK
Crimson Staff Writer Even if your only religion involves band t-shirts and b-side vinyl, consider for a moment an afternoon organ recital at your local cathedral as a perfect, albeit unlikely, refuge from today’s folk-pop play list: a salvation, if not from evil, then from present day independent music’s fuzzy instruments, vague lyrics and disaffected warbles, so often praised by the disaffected critics at that God of indie webzines, known, perhaps fittingly, as Pitchforkmedia.com.

Listening to Sufjan Stevens, 29-year-old songwriter and rising folk darling (even Pitchfork loves him), is one such sanctuary, a slightly dark, unabashedly earnest and hopeful experience. With the delicate voice of a young man who’s just losing his world-weary reticence, Sufjan (pronounced SOOF-yan), whether in conversation or in song, perpetually sounds as if he’s making his transcendent re-entrance to a simpler place with a sweet, happy calmness.

If the sight of the cherub-faced troubadour serenely strumming alongside his troupe of happy horn players, bell-ringers and la-la-laaing singers (all of them friends, and all of them shockingly gorgeous) isn’t one of the most convincing displays of transcendence-by-banjo, just check out the congregation. At the Middle East club last Sunday, there was none of that self-conscious swaying-and-chanting stuff, but there was ample staring and a lot of smiling. The cynical, pierced ears of all the emo kids were melting.

That feat is even more impressive considering his favorite topics of late. First, there is his home state of Michigan, to which his 2003 album Greetings from Michigan: The Great Lakes State is a tribute (he has a plan to do the other 49 too, and will continue with Illinois—“I’ve been reading a lot about Lincoln, poetry by Carl Sandberg, doing research,” he says). And then there’s his other favorite topic: his Father.

Yep, that Father.

You can call Sufjan good—he is very, very good, in a few senses of the word—but don’t call him a Christian musician. “My music is just about story telling,” he offers. “I don’t have much to say, and I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind.” On the phone from California, where he’s rehearsing for indie-rock’s prestigious All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, Sufjan sounds just as polite and delicate as he does on record. “I’m just singing through conviction about what I love and what I care about, starting with the very small.”

Sufjan’s interest in the small carries over into a perfectionist precision in his music and voice. His poetry grows universal through its vivid specificity and his concerns, whether bathed in joy or pathos, are important to us because every syllable and every note is important to him, a result of years pouring over the ornaments of Bach, the flourishes of Debussey, and the complexities of Philip Glass—“Although I’m not going to pretend I’m on that level of sophistication.”

But both technically and emotionally, it’s hard not to be love-struck by the dancing patterns, shimmering percussive explosions and pin-pricked arpeggios that animate his vivid meditations, which may be on fraying familial relationships, the unemployed of Flint, Michigan, or, to take an example from his latest album, the story of Abraham.

Of course, singing about things like that in the world of popular music verges on the sacrilegious. Despite being the bedrock for much of our civilization’s greatest artists, from Michelangelo to Joyce, God hasn’t fared too well on stereos in recent decades. Like protest or political anthems, “praise” songs are relegated to the farthest possible margins of coolness, not just because of their pedantic (and un-cosmopolitan) message, but because their preaching and passion doesn’t make for very good music. In the case of the ever-demonized field of Christian rock, top-40-hood isn’t totally out of the question—that is, until listeners realize what over-the-top trash they’re singing along to.

There are of course notable exceptions: Kanye West has brought God back to mainstream rap (“Well if this take away from my spins / which will probably take away from my ends / then I hope it take away from my sins” is his approach to the popular/religious music divide) while good singer-songwriters like Joseph Arthur and Pedro the Lion have been doing the same in indie music. If the folk and emo sensibilities of rap and indie-pop make these genres friendlier to religion than usual, these genres also tend to be more self-conscious, making the music itself better but making the audience harder to please at the same time.

If Sufjan is pleasing them it is not just despite of, but also because of his particular spin on praising the Lord. While his Christian leanings remained largely invisible for last year’s folk-rock revelation, Greetings from Michigan, they aren’t hiding at all on his newest and just-as-lovely record, Seven Swans. But forget the apparent flag-waving of titles like “Abraham,” or “The Transfiguration” or “In the Devil’s Territory;” Sufjan never eats the apple of triteness, excess, or pedantry. He always dignifies his audience and his subject matter by directing his adoration into an occasionally unearthly music that nonetheless never leaves human ground, never falling into the preachy.

This is how Sufjan can get even the most secular of listeners not only to appreciate his tributes to his One Love but also to partake in their beauty too. In the album’s title song, when he sings, atop a melodious mountain of voices and bells and old piano, “He will take you / If you run / He will chase you / ’Cause he is the Lord!” his most potentially melodramatic moment becomes his most transporting.

Among his audience, it is debatable whether beautiful love songs like “To Be Alone With You,” which could as easily be addressed to a “she” as to a “He,” deserve to be pigeonholed as “Christian music” at all. Sufjan certainly doesn’t think so. His only interest is making songs about his own private love, and hopes that people can remember to love, something, anyone, in the midst of a troubled world.

Speaking of which—and considering his obsessions with the fifty states and God Himself—not asking Sufjan about America’s peculiar mixture of religion and politics is like not asking John Kerry if he supported the war in Iraq.

“Christianity is a faith that has no interest in power or no meaning in an environment of power or wealth,” he explains, his lilt turning slightly urgent but remaining delicate. “The moral imperative is a delusion, and [in terms of the election] I think it’s a distraction; [Christianity] is not a faith of morals or principles; it’s about a relationship, service in love to God and other people. If it were about morals and virtues, I don’t think Jesus would have pissed off so many Jews; he was doing things that were considered obscene. He was doing work on the Sabbath, he was a messy angry person. He definitely wasn’t guided by principles.”

Sufjan’s religious upbringing, he says, was a mix of untraditional Midwestern beliefs encouraged by his hippie parents: “Amway, self-realization training, methods camp, Catholic school, macrobiotic diets, yoga—we jumped from thing to thing.” He landed on protestant Christianity because he found it grounding, “so simple and stable.”

What he sees in the Christianity of “red state” American politics however, of the moral standards of “the religious right” and the Christian Coalition, is something else entirely, amounting to nothing more than “a political lobbying group.”

“Morals, principles and laws are when faith is reduced to standards and those standards basically just bind us, and we become prejudicial, racist, self-serving when we’re guided by these laws... When a developed country uses Christianity in its policies, in government, in maintaining corporate wealth, that’s a bastardized rendering of a faith.”

For his part, Sufjan is keeping the faith by remaining faithful to the music he’s been making since the oboe in middle school, since the dog days of “Readers Digest renderings of famous classical works.” If he’s not writing arrangements for his new album on the piano, he’s tuning his banjo or tapping a beat on the computer, an instrument he learned could be “really musical.” Evidence can be found on his electro-acoustic opus, “Enjoy Your Rabbit,” which he recorded while getting his masters in writing at the New School of Social Research in New York. And like most artists who live in Brooklyn, he practices freelance graphic design on the side.

And then there’s Sufjan’s new record label, called Asthmatic Kitty. While he’s doing “a lot right now” for the label, he’s definitely looking forward to doing less organizational work and more finding new bands with his friends. “It’s not quite a cooperative situation, but everyone has a certain stock in the label. It’s a very social thing.”

The social aspect is part of his whole vision too, what gives his music humanity—and humaneness. Despite the size of his ideas or his concerns or his devotion, Sufjan always wanders back to the local level.

“This election was about big issues which have no impact on our day-to-day lives,” he says on Nov. 5, “but we’re about the small things. We should care about caring for each other; TV is ruining us; sometimes I get depressed and feel like this is the decline of civilization. Politicians aren’t interested in what the people want: they’re interested in their careers.”

Even though Sufjan’s own career is pretty well established, you’d be hard pressed to say that’s all he was interested in, if he is at all. “If there’s anything to say, if there’s anything to do,” he sings on the Michigan album, “If there’s any other way, I’ll do anything for you.” His real interest is in what his God wants, and what a lot of people in Michigan and all the other states want too: some beautiful home-grown harmonious love.

—Staff writer Alex L. Pasternack can be reached at apastern@fas.harvard.edu.

Matt and Ben at Winthrop House (my house!)

Originally published on Monday, November 01, 2004 in the News section of The Harvard Crimson.


Theater Review: Dynamic Duo Humors with Past
By ALEXANDER L. PASTERNACK
On Theater


Writing a hit script is about as hard as finding a parking space in the Square (or so goes one playwright’s saying, I think). When the producers of the hit play Matt and Ben couldn’t find a venue in the area that would suit their playful fiction-based-on-fact one-act about the younger travails of Messrs. Damon and Affleck, they opted for a space as unlikely, and as good, as any: the Winthrop House Junior Common Room. This is where, Harvardwood lore has it, the illustrious Mr. Damon emoted his last emotion as a babyfaced undergrad actor, just before leaving to begin a now fabled campaign to write and sell Good Will Hunting, a script he began in an English department playwriting class (reportedly).
That stage (which is actually a temporary assemblage of whatever plywood happens to be on hand), and its set, a straightforward gathering of dorm room furniture and the staple Red Sox banners and Rock Bottom beer handles, may be the only piece of vérité (or Veritas, if you will) the play has in common with its historical inspiration: how in 1995, the Harvard perfectionist and his fun-loving high school buddy wrote the screenplay that launched a thousand People magazine covers. Indeed, the folklore that surrounds these two Cantabridgians is the subtext for Matt and Ben, which, with a bevy of gossipy pop-cultured winks, doesn’t even aim for accuracy. One of the play’s biggest jokes is clear as soon as the lights go up: not only do the actors bear no resemblance to their real-life counterparts, but neither are men, and the one playing Ben Affleck is black. If we did not know this trick ahead of time, not even the J.Lo-Affleck phenomenon commonly known as Bennifer (defined at urbandictionary.com as “A horrible combination that may ultimately bring about the apocalypse”) could prepare us for this surprise.

In any other play, this conceit could be part of the message that our beloved famous people aren’t actually who they appear to be, or something about identity construction etc., but fortunately Matt and Ben has lighter interests. In a turn of meta-theatrical cheekiness—and out of economic necessity—playwrights and Dartmouth grads Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers took up the acting ropes when the play first opened at P.S. 122 in New York, to rave reviews that culminated in top honors at the city’s Fringe Festival in 2002. The actor-character gimmick, embodied in the current production by the very talented Quincy Tyler Bernstine as Ben and Jennifer R. Morris as Matt, might have more to say about how scripts are turned into full-on productions, or how stars are born, than anything else. As the play tells us, accurately I should add, the real Matt and Ben demanded that their movie would not be made unless they had featured roles in it.

The single-minded drive of these two characters is evident from the start, as they flounder around Ben’s Somerville apartment trying mindlessly to adapt J.D. Salinger’s A Catcher in the Rye for the big screen. Bernstine’s knuckleheaded take on Affleck as a needy and whiny dilettante who can’t get an audition, complements Morris’s nerdy portrayal of the bossy, perfectionist Damon, edging both into the pathetic—if only we can forget the Academy Award and subsequent millions of dollars. Thankfully, we can. That these wimpy characters are both totally absurd and credible is a testament to the comic virtuosity of the writers and actors, and the lively but un-adorned direction of David Warren. The performance plays on the audience’s pre-established relationship with the real life Matt and Ben, dropping references to their past, contemporary and future lives, while managing to suspend the disbelief that comes with watching their over-the-top stage versions (not to mention their real-life “versions”). The impersonations—including additional riotous send-ups of Salinger and Gwyneth Paltrow—rely only partly on an impressionistic array of Matt and Ben-esque gestures, mannerisms and speech rhythms: hence the characters’ delightful confusion over which is the highest form of flattery, “imitation” or “adaptation.”

The other big joke is also dropped on our heads, and on Ben’s coffee table, as the lights go up: the script for Good Will Hunting was not the product of late-night improv sessions but a gift from the heavens. As much as this confirms our most delectable suspicion that even the real Matt and Ben can’t be for real (ok, I’m speaking for myself here), it is also the deus ex machina that sets in motion a test of friendship that jumps from one joke to the next, happily with little room for sentimentality.

Watching the two fret like babies over the script miracle is as funny as watching them fret like babies over who gets more credit, over whether Catcher in the Rye is a better idea, over whether to work together. The friendship’s defining moment is a talent show in high school (Cambridge’s Ringe and Latin) when Ben’s goofy dancing turns Matt’s serious Simon and Garfunkel rendition into a shtick. The incident defines the characters too, who haven’t much outlived that immaturity, and the play itself, whose humor could be likened to that of a very good TV sitcom: not brilliant, not incredibly sophisticated, but—considering the big gimmicks here, this is significant—not the kind that depends on cheap tricks either. And, Matt and Ben aside, perhaps the same should be said for the real Matt and Ben too.

But, then again, where’s the fun in that?

Review: Hellboy, Special Edition DVD

The Harvard Crimson, October 29, 2004

Directed by Guilermo Del Toro

Columbia Pictures



If, to the purist, movie adaptations of novels are the equivalent of glorified book jackets, adaptations of comic books might be no-brainers: with the visuals already on paper, Hollywood writers and directors get to bypass the harder and, often, more imaginative steps of screen translation. But shortcutting is too often to the detriment of the films, not to mention unfair to their parent comics—the X-Men and Spiderman movies being among the rare exceptions. Hellboy, is another dark horse in this inked-up Hollywood universe, a steam-train of an adaptation that stays vividly faithful to the comic book engine underneath, even as it accommodates those whose only experience with a “graphic novel” film is Dangerous Liaisons.

The ways Hellboy manages to balance these audiences, like its special effects, are a sight to behold. Director and writer Guillermo Del Toro takes Mike Mignola’s cult-fave comic to new depths, adding meat to the hero and villains, expanding the back-story, and throwing in a crucial monster-human love story that the books lacked. But Del Toro’s adoration for the off-kilter miasma of Mignola’s world and the monster-fighting monster is also evident in his attention to the bizarre detail and playful spirit of the comic.

Everything from the gothic scenery to the story’s vaudevillian tone seeps through Guillermo Navarro’s vibrant photography and Del Toro’s script, as full of thrills as it is of an anti-formulaic, self-aware logic. Ron Perlman, of TV’s Beauty and the Beast fame, has the chops (and the eyebrows and the jawbones) to deliver Hellboy’s throwaway one-liners and punches with the appropriate devil-may-care élan: he’s Dirty Harry with a penchant for beer and pancakes, a superhero-everyman less detached than Batman and much cooler than Spiderman.

And, with a bad temper, a troubled relationship with a sultry firestarter (Selma Blair), and dark beginnings (some Nazis and Rasputin—stay with me here—invited him over from Hell through an inter-dimensional portal, before he was raised by the U.S. government), he makes Superman look like Al Gore. If that makes the tempestuous and down-to-earth Hellboy a more popular superhero version of our president, well, some may not argue with that. (Just as an FBI agent wonders if “we should go back and request a special permit, type 2—,” Hellboy punches through the brick wall. BRRRAM! “You guys comin’ or what?” he asks with a wink.)

Considering Del Toro’s deft exposition of the backstory, deepening Hellboy’s craggy recesses is probably unnecessary; but, in an era when films are shot with the DVD in mind, necessity takes a back-seat to the three disc special edition, complete with collector’s booklet of arcane diagrams and vulgar Latin. Character bios, conceptual art and hours of behind-the-scenes commentary abound; one feature even allows the viewer to jump from the movie into comic book expositions at crucial moments. The trigger-happy viewer will quickly dissolve into Hellboy nerd-dom, muttering “I did not know that” as he is apprised of the items on Hellboy’s utility belt.

While such extras may verge on the excessive, having background footage and extra features is far nicer than just silly screen-saver animations, especially when DVDs have so much space for extras anyway, and when the films themselves are as fun as Hellboy. Only a few recent DVDs, including the special editions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, can, with justification, rival Hellboy’s encyclopedic treatment of the imaginaries and pools of ink that gave rise to its film version. Of course, only the devil knows what kind of tome we’ll get after the inevitable Hellboy sequels.

—Alex L. Pasternack

Sounds of Silence: New albums that know when to shut up

Review: Adem, Homesongs, and Kings of Convenience, Riot on an Empty Street

Harvard Independent, October 21, 2004

By Alex Pasternack

These days it’s hard to find records, even “folk” ones, that aren’t laced up with some slick production team, some ambient hum, or even the thick click of a drum machine somewhere in the background, lest there be a moment of silence. The slight twinkle that opens Adem Ilhan’s debut, Homesongs, could easily signal another attempt at folk-tronica, but it’s actually a sendoff. As his wistful, distortionless voice and guitar spread over the song, accompanied by a rattling autoharp, Mr. Ilhan reveals the song’s most important feature: a ponderous quiet. “Let this be a moment that you won’t forget,” he sings delicately.

This is no minor feat, but it seems even grander, in its own understated way, after a glance at his resume. Since high school he’s been the bassist and guitarist for a post-rock outfit called Fridge, which weaned him on the 1s and 0s, bleeps and pedals that bandmate Kieran Hebden skillfully wields in his own electronic solo act as Four Tet.

Instead of relying on laptop accoutrements however, Mr. Ilhan determinedly stuck with his trusty six-string and, over a few years of bedroom recording sessions, discovered he had another old-fashioned instrument lying around: a dark, personable tenor that can ably wind through hymns (“Long Drive Home”) and unlikely pop songs (“These Are Your Friends”), without losing its valuable sense of wobbliness, an uncertainty that floats between desperation and distance. When he sings, almost moaning, “It’s alright, everything will be alright,” on “Gone Away,” he is talking to himself as much as to a former lover.

But his intimacy doesn’t prevent an occasional intensity, appearing in the album’s warmer, more symphonic moments and pieced together from instruments exotic and accidental. Amidst the lonesome harmony of glockenspiel or harmonium, Adem allows the spindly rattle of guitar strings, the sound of lips opening and the sprinkle of indistinct background noises to spill in, creating a soundscape that is sparse but still expansive and inviting. That combination is fitting for an album of heartsick lost-love letters that relish the quiet of loneliness while still reaching out to the listener with compassion. “There will always be room at my table for you,” is his last beautiful refrain.

The divide between happy isolation and lovelorn wistfulness also drives a set of even quieter ballads on Riot on an Empty Street, the new album by the Norwegian duo of Erlend Oye and Eirik Glambek Boe, who go by the moniker Kings of Convenience. While the disquiet of that title—and that of their debut, Quiet is the New Loud, and Mr. Oye’s solo album, Unrest—is hardly evident in the Kings’ placid tenors, their lyrics capture the contradiction of moving forward while looking back. “Stay out of trouble, stay in touch / Try not to think about me too much,” is their mantra on one song, sounding as effortless as it is heartbreaking.

As with their lyricism, the Kings are firmly stuck in the past, not so much the founders of a “New Acoustic movement,” as the British press once dubbed it, as they are the inheritors of a pop-folk crown. Alongside lonely British troubadours like Damien Gough (Badly Drawn Boy) and Andy Votel, the Kings hardly stray far from the meandering footsteps of Elliot Smith, Nick Drake, and especially Simon and Garfunkel. But unlike their 60’s counterparts (of whom they do as impressive an imitation in their harmonies as on their cover photography), the Kings don’t want to be alone. On both Kings covers, a girl sits coyly in between them, a symbol of reticent sexuality that Simon and Garfunkel all but abandoned for the solitude of “I Am A Rock.”

The Kings attempt to step out of their progenitors’ shadow with the cutesy, upbeat, “I’d Rather Dance With You,” won’t rouse many listeners out of their hammocks. But the bossa-nova experiments on some songs (the guitar and trombone song “Live Long,” and the lovely, piano-sprinkled “Misread”) along with the introduction of a female vocalist, the tidal-voiced Leslie Feist, signals a still-growing, promising sound, with a lyricism less cloying and twee than before. Any lingering doubts about their preciousness are washed away in “Gold in the Air of Summer,” the Kings’ best song to date, in which guitar, piano and an effulgent, swelling trombone give way to a hard-won but decisive dismissal of what’s come before: “I’ve brought everything we need/ don’t look back, don’t think of the/ other places you should have been/ It’s a good thing you came along with me.” Yes, it is.

I Don’t Heart Huckabees

Review: I Heart Huckabees, opens October 1
Appeared in The Harvard Independent

There’s a lot of sizing-up staring in I Heart Huckabees. You know, a slightly turned head with narrow eyes looking warily at someone who, in this case, is usually doing likewise. The existential detectives Bernard and Vivian Jaffe (played exhaustively by Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman) do it with a feverish intensity, perhaps because this is the only way they can size up their inscrutable subjects, like the protagonist and environmental activist Albert Markovski (Rushmore’s Jason Schwartzman). He is prone to fits of cosmic frustration over the true relevance of saving trees or how best to organize against the corporate conglomerate Huckabees, which is threatening to build on a precious swamp. But his real problem, naturally, is the gangly seven-foot Sudanese refugee he keeps encountering around town.

To the detectives, this is no mere coincidence. “Everything is connected and everything matters,” is Dustin Hoffman’s mantra, (or at other times, “everything is the same even if it’s different”, etc.) ideas he forces on his subjects through repetition, meditation sessions in a body bag, demonstrations with a white blanket. In writer-director David O. Russell’s logic, the sophistry is meant to be funny, but Mr. Hoffman’s quirky, happy-go-lucky idealism, like the nihilism of his sultry Sartreist archrival Caterine Vauban (Isabelle Huppert), manages to imbue them with some profundity too.

Russell has already proved capable of combining the heavy and light, the intelligent and the playful, to create films that fudge the line between surreal and documentary. 1996’s semi-slapstick Flirting with Disaster, which channeled Woody Allen through acid, is the finest and most thoughtful of those Ben Stiller “oh my god, why is this happening to me!?” movies. And then there’s Russell’s inspired and beautiful 1999 buddy action-comedy Three Kings turned the wasteland of post-Desert Storm Iraq into a fiery playground for meditations on American cultural influence, foreign policy, and an oil-seeped, image-driven war machine. Any questions about Russell’s commitment to the serious might be settled by his forthcoming documentary, Soldiers Pay, culled from a series of provocative interviews with American soldiers and some of the actors from Three Kings, who are actual Iraqi refugees.

Global concerns underlie I Heart Huckabees too: corporate conglomeration, the environment, personal responsibility, the aftermath of 9/11, marriage and family are all given shout-outs here. But amidst the film’s simultaneous spiritual obsessions and quirky situation comedy, shout-outs are all these topics get. Russell’s approach is surrealist, calling the viewer’s attention to unlikely combinations of thoughts and images that do not match and can just barely be sustained. But here the effect is only amusing for so long; unlike the Magritte painting that hangs in Albert’s office, the more you stare at the mix, the more exhausting it becomes. In the movie’s flawed surreality, hilarious one-liners, smart philosophical questions and powerful performances (especially from Jude Law and Naomi Watts, who play the golden boy Huckabees executive and his model girlfriend) might give us a refreshing Hollywood product, but they don’t add up to anything very emotional or intelligent. And in the case of a recent screening at the Museum of Fine Arts, they do add up to more than a few audience goers stumbling for the exit, a near-sacrilege at preview screenings, especially when the director and star are present (they were).

Decoding what a clever movie is trying to do and how it does it is always part of the fun, but with a movie only half-clever it’s more often a waste of time, a job we ought to leave to movie critics if they are so bored. My idea: the movie about the absurdity and enormity of life, but also about the absurdity of trying to make sense of that absurdity, and also about the absurdity of trying not to care about that absurdity too. With such scattered intent, scenes can be both protracted and empty, and the film isn’t quite sure not to know how to be serious when it is trying to be, or how to be very funny either. Ultimately, it feels like one of those overly drawn out jokes, almost funnier for its persistence and tedium than its content, and even then not that funny. The movie’s ultimate irony of course is that life itself is the joke, but that perhaps by telling the joke we can assert some order over life’s absurdity.

In a sense then, the movie operates the way some modernist poets wrote: in a world in which subjectivity is washed over by industrialization, corporations, and environmental destruction, the poem balances ideals with cynicism and, in so doing, leaves the audience both stunned and lost, searching for more personal meanings if any can be found at all. But it’s the postmodern influence—the non-reaction reaction to the hypnotic power of globalization and contemporary affairs, (a time in which “everything’s the same even if its different”)—that’s ultimately louder amidst all the philosophical bricolage and surrealist imagery. In the film’s self-canceling metaphysical calculus, the only thing lamentable about life is lament itself. The rest of living, like I Heart Huckabees, is a lot of confusion that, after we’re done staring at, trying to size up and figure out, we might simply, somehow, find a way to enjoy. Or at least ignore, and go back to our own more compelling, more surreal lives.

PROFILE: ZARA KOZLOV

Young and Republican — and Proud of It

By ALEX PASTERNACK 


    Zara Kozlov, a sprightly 24-yearold from New Jersey, cuts an image of suburban wholesomeness, rounded out with old-fashioned manners. At 5’4”, wearing a pink tank top and waves of short brunette hair, she meets her interviewer exactly when she says she will (“I can guarantee 2:15”) — not a minute later or earlier.
    She’s been diligently preparing for her final year Cordoza School of Law in the Village, where she helps edit its law journal. Yet, when classes start, she’ll be playing hooky — opting to attend one big party. Ms. Kozlov is New Jersey’s youngest delegate to the Republican National Convention, and one of the youngest in the country.
    “The phone’s been ringing off the hook,” she said, standing amidst the bustle outside Madison Square Garden. “I’m so not used to being the center of attention.”
    At a time when the youngest political participants in the upcoming election are expected to be rallying behind barricades, Ms. Kozlov is a rare example of the Republican party brushing off its sometimes stodgy image. Spokesmen tout this convention’s delegates as the Party’s most diverse, with 17% representing ethnic minorities, and 44% women.
    Ms. Kozlov is another exception to the Republican stereotype: a young Jewish twenty-something who reads William Bennett and lights up at the mention of RNC chairman Ed Gillespie’s name (“He’s great!”).
    Ms. Kozlov sat in a café in Penn Station, beneath the floor where she’ll stand next week, describing her role in the convention with carefully chosen words.
    “Being a young, Jewish adult is kind of an anomaly for the Republicans,” she says, “but I think it’s a good one because it allows people to see that Republican politics in 2004 isn’t as one-dimensional as people think it is. That’s what I’m here to say.”
    Being a delegate is a kind of activism in itself, she suggests, an opportunity to debate with those who would pigeonhole conservative ideals, or think Republicans are “a small group of people…Christian fundamentalists or wealthy, non-Jewish 45-year-old men.”
    “If anything that” — the Republican stereotype — “would propel me to get involved more rather than dissuade me from getting involved.”
    Ms. Kozlov was raised in a happy reform Jewish household in Cherry Hill, N.J., with weekends at their beach house in Longport. She says she loves to party; but Jenna Bush she is not. “I never did anything that my parents would yell at me for; the most I ever did was push to see how far I could go.”
    Her first foray into politics came when she was a college junior, during an internship on Capitol Hill for her congressman, Republican representative James Saxton. She says she first recognized her Republican leanings at the end of President Clinton’s first term. “It was a gradual, evolving perspective that I gained, listening to candidates and balancing their views.”
    She describes her opinion-making as well considered. She rarely needed to convince conservative classmates at her alma mater, Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, or at the family dinner table — her father, attorney Hersh Kozlov, is one of the president’s big fund-raisers. But most of her friends are liberal.
    “It compels me to get involved more,” she says of her casual debates with classmates at law school. “I don’t stand up on a platform and state my views, but,” she says excitedly, “I’ll go at it with my roommate quite often.”
    And then there is her new fiance, Evan, a registered Democrat who she’s hoping to convert by Election Day. “We don’t agree on most political issues…but I don’t think he’s made up his mind yet on who he’s gonna vote for,” she says with a slightly devious smile.
    Her views on women’s reproductive rights and civil unions are moderate — though “marriage in the eyes of the law is more an issue of religion” she says after much internal deliberation.
    Still, the war and the economy are no-brainers for Ms. Kozlov, and so is her biggest issue: restoring dignity and unity to America.
    “Sandy Berger was caught stuffing confidential documents into his socks, and not one Democrat could stand up and denounce what he had done. I think that 20 years ago you wouldn’t have found that,” she says disdainfully. Her fervent defense of President Bush ultimately hinges on the fact that he has managed to keep the White House free of Whitewaters and Lewinskys. “Whether you agree with his politics or not…he’s been on the whole a tremendous example for the United States, especially for young people.”
    Still, Mr. Bush can’t elicit the kind of smile from Ms. Kozlov that her hero, President Reagan, can. “I think he was very fair in his ability to see both sides. He wasn’t too left or too right, and I think he did a fantastic job of bringing Americans together.”
    Clearly, Ms. Kozlov won’t be completely satisfied with just a symbolic role for the party. Probed for information about her own future, she mentions a law firm, legal aid work, and the standard response about her definite political plans: “I don’t know in what capacity. I haven’t ruled anything out yet.”
    For now though, it’s banner-waving and schmoozing, and excitement at the prospect of shaking hands with Mayor Giuliani and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (a cocktail hour with Mr. Bush is already on her schedule).
    “Actually, as excited as I am,” she says of her turn at the convention, “I don’t want to consider this a once-ina-lifetime opportunity. Because I hope it’s not.”

U.S. Open Draws an Apolitical Crowd

By ALEX PASTERNACK Special to The Sun


    As activists and conventioneers from around the country converged at Madison Square Garden, another excited — though more reserved — group of outof-towners assembled in Flushing. The only rally they were interested in was a quiet one between players on a court at the USTA National Tennis Center, where the U.S. Open tournament starts today.
    Hundreds of tourists trickled onto the grounds in Flushing to watch players practice free of charge — a tradition for tennis enthusiasts and a reminder that the convention isn’t the only big show in town.
    While the Brazilian champion Gustavo Kuerten warmed up with his coach in the Louis Armstrong stadium, Steven Echsner of Gulf Breeze, Fla., said he and his wife came to the Open despite some concerns about security and inconvenience. But, sounding like a seasoned New Yorker, Mr. Echsner said they weren’t about to change their schedules just because of possible dangers — or even 500,000 delegates, guests, and protesters, who would be amassing not far from their (heavily protected) Rockefeller Center hotel.
    “The president’s security might be jeopardized but we don’t feel any more or less of a threat than we did when we were here last year or the year before,” he said. “If you analyze it too much you get this analysis paralysis. It’s the 21stcentury challenge: You have to be aware of these problems but you can’t alter your life.”
    “If something had happened we probably wouldn’t have come,” his wife, Rebecca added from her courtside seat. But we wanted to be here, at least for the qualifiers.”
    She said that coming the day before the tournament “gives you more of an opportunity to see everybody; if you go later in the week, during the semifinals and finals, you miss people, plus the crowds get worse.”
    Overcrowding, considering the amount of people in town, was a concern on the minds of others in Flushing yesterday. Charles Waters, who drove from Philadelphia with friends, said he was thankful that Manhattan was not on their route to the tournament. They drove through Staten Island.
    “It’s scary. Having the U.S. Open, the Republican convention, the protestors all at the same time, it’s too many people in one area,” he said.“If we had had to come through Manhattan, we might not have come.”
    But Mr. Waters was focused more on tennis than terrorism. He agreed that the free practice-watching was one of the city’s best bargains. “Problem is you have to ask people to find out who’s practicing. If they had their names up, it would be more fun.”
    Among those spotted hitting balls yesterday were Mary Pierce, Gustavo Kuerten, and the Bryan brothers, who played a small rock concert before conducting a tennis clinic.
    Terry Marquardt, a guest of delegates at the convention, came to Flushing for a Mets game and decided to stop by the Open. He and his boss, Michigan state Senator Judd Gilbert, happened upon a practice match between Jennifer Capriati and Wimbleon winner Maria Sharapova. “It was kinda neat. We walked in and they were hitting back and forth,” he said.
    What will they be doing for the rest of the week?
    “We’ll be going to a lot of the receptions and the convention sessions.” He added with a satisfied chuckle,“I think we’re going to a Yankees game later in the week.”

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Miramax Rejects RNC Anti-Kerry Film

By ALEX PASTERNACK Special to the Sun

A proposal by the Republican National Committee to put a short documentary attacking John Kerry in theaters around the country was rejected by film distributor Miramax, RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie said yesterday.
   The film, a bare-bones collection of video clips of Senator Kerry making apparently contradictory statements on Iraq and entitled “Kerry Iraq Documentary,” was released at the end of July and has since been distributed on the Internet, by mail, at state fairs, and during Republican events.
   In a press conference yesterday, following a speech by Senator Kerry at Cooper Union, Mr. Gillespie acknowledged that he had asked Miramax,“the folks that distributed ‘Fahrenheit 9/11,’” to distribute the film, but “they denied that request.”
   “We’ll continue to find other creative ways to make sure that the public gets a chance to see this,” he told reporters gathered at RNC headquarters near Madison Square Garden.
   Mr. Gillespie seems to be promoting the film as the Republican answer to the successful “Fahrenheit 9/11.”
   Mr. Gillespie said the Web site that offers free downloads of the RNC film, www.kerryoniraq.com, has received 5 million hits and had more viewers “in its first week online than ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ had in its opening weekend.”
   After debuting “Kerry Iraq Documentary ” in Boston during the Democratic convention to acclaim from Republicans like Mayor Giuliani and Governor Huckabee of Arizona, Mr. Gillespie reportedly tried to contact Miramax’s chairman, Harvey Weinstein, to propose that his company distribute the film.
   Days later, Miramax rejected the request in a letter. Instead, the company offered to arrange a screening for delegates to the Republican National Convention of “Paper Clips,” its new documentary about Tennessee middle school students who learn about the Holocaust.
   “We thanked Mr.Gillespie for his submission,” said a Miramax spokesman, Matthew Hiltzik. “But we’re not doing any political films for either side now.”
   Mr. Hiltzik pointed out that Mr. Weinstein, and not Miramax itself, distributed “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

Scarcity of Anti-Kerry Book on Shelves Raises Questions

Some Posit That Liberal Conspiracy Keeps It Out of Stores
By ALEX PASTERNACK Special to the Sun

While a best-selling book has brought questions about Senator Kerry’sVietnam record to the front burner, some New Yorkers are asking another question: Where is the book?
“Unfit for Command,” the centerpiece of the critique of the Democratic presidential candidate’s war experience that has played out in the press recently, rose to the top of best-seller lists this week, but shoppers say they have had a hard time finding it at New York bookstores, where it’s either sold out or given minimal promotion.
Some wonder if booksellers around this heavily Democrat city are choosing not to carry it at all,as supporters of Mr. Kerry have attempted to pull the book from shelves.
“When any political book by a celebrity author has appeared, Borders, particularly, provides prominent displays,” said Bob D’Agostino, a teacher in the Bronx who has been unable to find the book at his local bookstores.
Borders and a competitor chain, Barnes & Noble, along with a number of independent bookshops, have denied any political bias, blaming high demand and a limited first pressing of the book by its publisher, Regnery, for the book’s absence from store shelves.
The publisher “couldn’t keep up with public demand for the title. The demand was not anticipated by the publisher nor the retailers,” said a Barnes & Noble spokeswoman, Mary Ellen Keating.
At least one local bookstore, Book-Court in Cobble Hill, was reluctant to carry “Unfit for Command,” ordering the book only after some customers demanded it.
“I definitely don’t want to sell it,” one of the store’s owners, Henry Zook, said. “From an objective, business point of view, we should have one or two copies just because some inquiring minds might be interested in it, or, for instance, if somebody wants to examine it for flaws.”
Chris Finan, a spokesman for the American Booksellers Association for Free Expression, an anti-censorship group, said it was uncommon for booksellers to choose not to carry books for political reasons, adding that it was unlikely that many were refusing to carry “Unfit for Command.”
“There are probably some booksellers who aren’t selling it on principle, and they have that right by the First Amendment,” he said. “From time to time, booksellers make decisions on what they’re going to sell, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.”
Since Regnery pushed up the book’s release date, to mid-August from September 1, political talk shows and Web logs have been buzzing with fervent debate about the claims made by authors John O’Neil and Jerome Corsi, who challenge the validity of Mr. Kerry’s war medals. But discussions by TV and armchair pundits have also veered to the difficulty of finding the book, with some crying liberal conspiracy.
On Friday, for instance, conservative radio talk show host Kevin McCullough reported on his Web site that Borders was “undergoing a ‘recall’ of the book and stopping sales.”
But at Borders and most other city booksellers, managers say that business trumps politics and that they would eagerly sell the book if only they could get their hands on it.
Peggy Zieran, the manager at a Borders store on Long Island, said many would-be customers suspected the store of suppressing the book.
“We are a retailer, we don’t censor,” she said. “If we had that book we’d be making a lot of money.”
While most bookstores await new shipments from the publisher, which will have printed half a million copies of the book by next week, visits to a number of local Barnes & Noble stores found the book in ample supply and selling well.
Nonetheless, a handful of store managers say they are still receiving complaints that the book has not been given the same prominent display as bestselling books by liberal authors like filmmaker Michael Moore and columnist Maureen Dowd.
“A few weeks ago we heard people complaining about our displays of left-wing books, and now people are upset that we’re not promoting this book enough,” said an employee at the Barnes & Noble on West 66th Street.
Only three of the store’s two-dozen copies of the book were on display on the first floor, next to a large stack of copies of President Clinton’s biography, “My Life.”

New Collegians Prepare for Convention Clogging

By ALEX PASTERNACK

On top of the usual uncertainties that surround the first week of college — roommates, classes, and how to find the dining hall — the thousands of freshmen arriving in New York at the end of August are facing an additional unknown: sharing their new hometown with a 300,000-person political convention.
“I’m actually really frustrated about it. It’s really hard going away to college anyway; it’s going to be so busy, and this just makes things more difficult,” said Gillian Berrow, an 18-year-old from Concord, Calif., and incoming freshman at NYU. Like most new college students around the city, Ms. Berrow’s orientation program happens to fall on the same week as the Republican National Convention.
“Everybody I’ve talked to is pretty stressed out about it,” she said.
When her parents tried to book a room at the nearby Gramercy Park hotel, where they stayed on their first visit to the college, she said they found only “astronomical” rates. “We couldn’t afford that, and it was really hard to find another hotel room.”
Parents “are finding it very, very difficult” to find accommodations, said Carol Merles, a Long Island travel agent who typically helps NYU parents book hotels. Unless they opt to stay in Westchester or New Jersey, she said, “they’re paying a lot of money for a dump in the city.”
    Ms. Berrow’s family eventually found cheap beds at the school’s student-run hotel, but concerns still remained, fueled in part by chatter on online bulletin boards for new students. “I’ve heard cabs are going to charge people more because there are so many people coming in,” Ms. Berrow said.
    In recent weeks, administrators at colleges such as NYU and Columbia  have begun planning for convention-week headaches by inviting students to move in a day earlier than usual,sending letters home warning about delays, and setting up telephone hotlines for worried parents — all the while reiterating the famous post-9/11 New York mantra: “business as usual.”
    But such provisions are doing little to shift students’ and parents’ feelings about the potential convention chaos, feelings that range from concern to excitement to ambivalence.
    Among the many parents not looking forward to the move-in is Kim Fogarty of Bay Shore, who will be helping her son Ryan move in to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts on the Saturday before the convention. The ongoing threat of terrorism is not a major concern, she said, but the inevitable traffic congestion, parking regulations, and security stops are.
    “Moving somebody into college, you know what our truck will look like,”Ms.Fogarty said.“If they try to inspect us,I’m going to make them pack us back up.”
    Instead of taking the Holland Tunnel, she and her husband will drive through Brooklyn to get to NYU.“Very honestly it’s a nightmare. I wish I could do it another weekend, but what are you gonna do?”
    Kathleen Kan, an incoming freshman at Columbia  who will be driving in with her parents from Connecticut, said she was mostly unconcerned about interruptions due to the convention, especially since her school is located 100 blocks from the convention.
    “Actually, I am excited the more I think about it.At least I’ll be there and I can actually go,” she said, expressing an interest in joining anti-GOP demonstrations. Protest organizers from other schools had invited her and other incoming freshmen by e-mail to join anti-GOP demonstrations, she said.
    Students hoping to take part in the convention will also be juggling a busy schedule of unpacking and orienteering. “During orientation we have them fully booked, 9 to 5,” said Jason Caroll, an orientation organizer at NYU. “We won’t be encouraging [protesting] or telling them about protests, so it’s up to the students to find out about them.”
    As usual, some orientation programs will be geared toward making out-of-town students feel comfortable in the city, especially during the convention. “We want to make sure they’re advised, informed, and given the proper information, that they are aware of the neighborhoods,” said NYU spokesperson Richard Pierce of the students who will be exploring the city during the week of the Convention.
    Nonetheless, the convention and its protests promise to provide ample distraction from schools’ orientation programs.The protests,including the largest one, are planned for the Sunday before the convention, when many schools begin their orientations.
    But “in a place like Columbia  you kind of feel like you should be involved in the protest,” Atossa Abrahamian, a new Columbia  freshman, wrote in an e-mail.
    Despite students’ desires to acclimate to college life in the big city, Michael Gould-Wartofsky, a student organizer for the National Youth and Student Peace Coalition, an activist group, said he expected many students to rally.“From what I’ve been hearing, a lot of freshmen would rather miss a few days of orientation to take part in protests,” he said
    He said he also knew of freshmen and other early-arrival students who would be offering valuable dorm room floor space to out-of-town protestors looking for a place to unroll their sleeping bags.
    While most schools aren’t near the convention site at Madison Square Garden, Yeshiva University’s Beren women’s campus and CUNY’s Graduate Center are both located two blocks to the east of the Garden. Spokesmen said that despite high security precautions, both buildings will remain open.
    Peter Ferrara, a spokesman for Yeshiva, said that moving in would be a challenge for the 1,000 women moving into the dorms that week.“Orientation and registration is already fairly challenging for students and parents; this ramps it up,” he said. The school’s orientation program of baseball games and city tours will go ahead, with an expectation for delays. “It will be a bit more challenging,” he said.
    A spokesman from the NYC Host Committee said: “The city has a plan to ensure that businesses, residents, commuters, students, and visitors can go about their lives during the convention.”
    Emma Poltrack, an incoming NYU freshman, said she didn’t think the convention would affect her week significantly, but was still nervous about the possibility of terrorism.
    “It’s silly to change your actions because of some unfounded idea of a threat, but on the other hand, if anything were to happen, it makes sense that it would happen that week/weekend,” Ms. Poltrack wrote in an e-mail.
    Meanwhile,Michael Arena,a CUNY spokesman,said that the CUNY system has planned no changes to its routine, and that the most common concern he’s heard from the largely commuter student body was over subway delays.
    “Believe me, we’re used to it,” he said.“Those kinds of things people live with day in and day out in this city.”

In Brief: DEALERS SELLING CIGARETTES WITHOUT TAX LICENSES, HEVESI AUDIT REPORTS

As many as 875 New York City retailers have been selling cigarettes without licenses, according to an audit report released yesterday by State Comptroller Alan Hevesi’s office, which pushes for improved coordination of tobacco licensing by state and city agencies.

Cigarette vendors and wholesalers in New York City must obtain licenses from the state and city. The Comptroller’s audit, conducted between January 2001 and October 2003, found little coordination between the two city agencies and the state agency over the licensing of cigarette sellers, even though more than half of the state’s retailers and wholesalers are located in the city.

The state’s finance department and the Department of Consumer Affairs “do not compare their records to ensure that retailers applying for a NYC license have the required [state license] and that the information for all retailers is correctly entered in each database,” the report concludes.

Comparing state and city records, auditors discovered 3,583 retailers with a state license but no city license. After investigating a random sampling of 85 of these resellers, they estimated that between 8 and 20 percent of retailers were selling cigarettes without a city license. Auditors also discovered that as many as 148 of the 764 retailers with a revoked or suspended NYC license were selling cigarettes.

A spokesperson for the state tax department, Tom Bergin, said the problems are significant. “It’s a very important issue, and we’re concerned about it,” he said. “We have to make sure we capture the revenue we’re losing,

To Flee or Not To Flee Is N.Y. Question

By ALEX PASTERNACK Special to the Sun

Conventional city wisdom dictates there is no better time to flee the city than the last week in August — especially when that happens to be the week of the Republican National Convention.
On top of terror concerns, add some of New Yorkers’ biggest nuisances to this year’s end-of-summer boil — Republicans (roughly 30,000), journalists (15,000), protesters (500,000), and street closings (more than 30 blocks), and the notion of staying in the city seems ridiculous.
But then there’s the other branch of New York wisdom that says life goes on. For every resident leaving the city because of the convention, scores of others are shrugging their shoulders and staying put, either to work or because they see no reason to go.
“I think many people will view it as another work week,”said Neil Kleiman, the director of the Center for an Urban Future, a local think tank, who plans to stay in town.“There’s more of a sense in New York that people want to put their head down, do their work, and wait until this blows over.”
Unlike the mayor of Boston, who encouraged people around his commuter city to leave during the Democratic convention, Mayor Bloomberg has urged residents to stick around, highlighting ways to avoid inconvenience, and singing his now-famous mantra: Go about your daily business.
Ed Koch, the former Democrat mayor and supporter of President Bush, even tells New Yorkers in a TV spot to help the delegates “find shopping, a schmeer, a schwarma, a shoe shine, a shuttle, a show,” a tall order for a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans 5 to 1.
But while New Yorkers may not roll out the red carpet for conventioneers, they’re not skipping town on them, either.
Carlynn Houghton, 27, a Democrat who works as an assistant at an Upper East Side girls school, recently backed off the idea of going to Canada during the convention. “If you just up and go then you’re giving up and you’re saying,‘You can have this.’ No political party can have the place you live, certainly if its not my political party.”
It turns out that even among the scores of New Yorkers scrambling to rent out their apartments during the convention, worry is not much of a motivating factor, either.
“I’m just trying to sneak in a side pocket and make some extra cash,” said Michael Weiner, an actor who advertised his Murray Hill apartment on the online bulletin board Craigslist as suited to “both conventioneers and protesters.”
Those here for the convention will be giving city tourism a healthy shot in the arm during its slowest week of the year, at the end of what Cristyne L. Nicholas, the president of visitor bureau NYC and Company, said was a “recordbreaking summer” for tourism.
As for tourism unconnected to the convention, Ms. Nicholas said she did not expect it to drop, and said it might even rise.“Even those hotels [not housing delegates] are seeing the same type of business as they have in the past.”
A spokesman for the U.S. Open, which starts on the same day as the convention, said attendance was expected to be higher than last year, with 40% of the attendees to come from out of town.
Aside from the tennis tournament, which will draw 30,000 spectators a day, the Mets and Yankees are both expecting high attendance for their home games throughout Convention Week.
“Also, Restaurant Week will be extended, sales are going on, and Tax Free Week is happening, too,” Ms. Nicholas added. “And there will be real live Republicans walking around, which should be kind of fun.”

KEYES ENTERS ILLINOIS SENATE RACE AGAINST DEMOCRAT OBAMA

Conservative Will Need To Establish Residency

By ALEX PASTERNACK Special to the Sun


    A two-time presidential candidate and black conservative commentator, Alan Keyes, entered the campaign fray in Illinois yesterday, ending a month of Republican anxiety over who would face rising star Barack Obama in an uphill battle for the state’s Republican Senate seat.
    State GOP leaders last week asked Mr. Keyes, who has a handful of failed campaigns behind him, to run for office, and yesterday he formally accepted the nomination.Although Mr. Keyes is a Maryland resident with no Illinois ties, state law allows candidates to run for public office as long as they live in the state by Election Day.
    Six months ago, Jack Ryan dropped out of the race following embarrassing sex allegations that emerged from his divorce papers.
    The election will be the first Senate race to feature two blacks from major parties, and it means Illinois will produce the fifth black senator in American history.
    At his acceptance speech yesterday, Mr. Keyes promised a fight but not necessarily a victory against favored Democratic state Senator Obama. He also discussed his decision to run after other high-profile state Republicans declined, including a former Chicago Bears football coach, Mike Ditka.
    “I will spend a good deal of my time listening to the people of this state,” he told cheering supporters in a Chicago suburb. “I might not know the streets yet and the neighborhoods and all the things that go to make up the everyday life of the people.…but if in fact the people of Illinois still stand together on the American creed, still assert their right of self-government, still have the sense of responsible citizenship, then I believe I know their spirit and their conscience and their heart.”
    Mr. Keyes, 54, who last week questioned the notion of running for office in a state he had never lived in, joins the ranks of two other famous “carpetbaggers:” Robert Kennedy and Senator Clinton, who Mr. Keyes once criticized for moving to New York to win her Senate seat.
    To the local political establishment, the issue of Mr. Keyes’ parachuting in on the Illinois race,not to mention questions about debts and taxes owed, will be the least of the candidate’s worries. Some say Mr. Keyes’s staunch conservatism will prove hard to swallow in a state that has a long history of centrism and a strong fan base for Mr. Obama, who has achieved celebrity status since his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention.
    Widely considered to be the nation’s most prominent black conservative,Mr. Keyes opposes abortion and gay rights, has proposed replacing the income tax with a national sales tax, and calls affirmative action a “government patronage program.”
    The interim director of the Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University and a moderate Republican, Mike Lawrence, said Mr. Keyes’s political stance and his previous failures to capture the Senate seat in Maryland could mean more frustration and division for local Republican officials.
    “I think his candidacy will generate enthusiasm among the most conservative elements of the Republican Party here, but I don’t think he’s going to do well in Illinois,” Mr. Lawrence said. “The moderates of both parties are the ones who’ve tended to be successful on a statewide basis.”
    Mr. Keyes’s supporters are banking on the candidate’s strengths to burnish the party’s image: name recognition, a compelling speaking style, and a mastery of issues honed on the campaign trail, in the state department and at his alma mater, Harvard.
    After learning of his opponent in the Senate race, Mr. Obama said: “Illinoisans want a Senate candidate who will attack the problems they and their families face rather than spending time attacking each other.”
    The co-chairman of the Illinois Republican State Central Committee, Stephen McGlynn, said the eloquent Mr.Keyes would pose a challenge to Mr. Obama in debates, where the up-andcomer might be pushed to shed his friendly, centrist image for a harder, more liberal stance.
    “We think voters will say, ‘We didn’t know this about Barack,we thought that he was a rock star, but he’s extreme,’” Mr. McGlynn said. “He’s going to have a tough time defending his record. He has to hope that this race doesn’t turn into a contest of ideas.We can win that.”

xiu xiu, knitting factory, 8/7/04

HE takes many minutes to set up his instruments. To tune. To tinker with knobs that are only innocent-looking. Lately I've been thinking that musicians ought to do more setting up during their sets instead of beforehand, a way to add some aural spice to the set, some instrument groaning in the throes of birth and making the too long time between sets shorter.
This is not what he is doing. He is preparing himself for the song, the song which could end all songs. The song that soars and thumps and screams and runs and points fingers and kills itself in the most pathetic and dramatic electocution method: third rail, when the train is coming in. Fine, he is setting up, he is tuning. But he is taking a breath, and in so doing, in being completely silent, while his friend stands by blithely looking over the percussion she will bang, he allows the audience some respite, some time to digest, some time to get ready for whatever the hell will be thrown at it next, not knowing, a bit nervous, but eager like a nymphomaniacal sex torture victim but with drum machines and gamelans in place of whips and knives. And whips and knives.

Sole Example of Architect’s Work in America Is Destroyed

By ALEX PASTERNACK Special to the Sun


A death knell is clanging for an Upper East Side townhouse considered to be one of New York’s finest Modernist buildings, as its new owner finishes extensive changes to its façade despite protests from neighbors and preservation groups.
Since early June some of the building’s major elements, including its iconic stainless steel column, have disappeared amidst the stir of local irritation and underneath a shroud of black scaffolding. The revered two-story townhouse at 27 E. 79th St. is the only building in the United States designed by the acclaimed Viennese architect Hans Hollein.
Located across the street from Mayor Bloomberg’s townhouse, the building had been under informal protection since high-powered art dealer Richard Feigen, who once used it as his gallery, sold it to fashion designer Hanae Mori in 1973.
Following the bankruptcy of her store, Ms. Mori sold the building to Thomas Reynolds in 2002 without making a similar agreement, according to a representative for Ms. Mori who participated in the sale.
“I was absolutely astonished that this architectural landmark, which many have called the finest ’60s modernist building in New York by a great architect, could be altered like this,” said Mr. Feigen, who lobbied the owner and notified local groups after noticing construction in April.“Now it’s too late; they’ve ruined the façade.”
While architectural groups say they informally brought the building to the attention of the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1999 — the earliest the building could have been designated as a landmark — the groups did not petition to protect it until June, said Landmarks officials, when renovation had already begun.
The formal petition came days after Mr. Feigen first noticed construction work on the building. He enlisted the help of a local preservation group, the Friends of the Upper East Side Historical District, and the architectural consortium Docomomo to help him certify the building as a landmark, and attempted to make an agreement with the new owner, to no avail.
Mr. Hollein told The New York Sun he was devastated at the alteration of one of his early works, what architect Robert AM Stern once called “one of the pioneering gestures…that would characterize architecture in the 1970s and 1980s.”
“I considered it a very important small building, important in the development at that time for architecture in the U.S. and New York,” Mr. Hollein said. “It was a new approach to the relation between art and architecture. I felt terrible when I heard about it.”
Mr. Hollein and Mr. Feigen said they were most concerned by the removal of the building’s signature double-barreled stainless steel column, which was fashioned using steel originally intended for the World Trade Center. Positioned in the middle of the façade and rising up two stories, the shiny column has lately given way to its structural pier, a tower of roughshod red-brick.
Because the building was not given landmark status and lies just outside the Upper East Side Historic District, any renovations are legal, said a spokesperson at the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission,Diane Jackier.
Though the agency will occasionally expedite the lengthy landmark certification process for endangered buildings, a petition to protect the Feigen Gallery arrived months after a building permit had been issued in April.
“Sometimes things happen unexpectedly and in a faster time frame, and we react as quickly as we can,” Ms. Jackier said. “In this case, there was nothing we could do. The landmarks commission designation would not override a validly issued Department of Buildings permit.”
While Mr. Reynolds and his lawyers did not return repeated calls for comment about the purpose of the renovations, workers at the site said that the new building was being renovated for future gallery use. They said construction, mostly the replacement of the exterior slab with a tiled design, along with minor alterations to the chrometrimmed interior, is scheduled to be done next week.
Preservationists said the situation bespeaks a common threat to modern architecture in the city, where older buildings tend to monopolize the attention of the public and often fall outside the purview of an overburdened Landmarks Commission.
A co-chairwoman of the preservation group Docomomo, Nina Rappaport, said the responsibility to protect modern buildings in the city lies with groups like hers, and especially with the Landmarks Commission.
“We need to have the commission really pay attention to more recent buildings,” she said. “One idea is to do more surveys, to identify where these buildings are, at least to say in some way, if they review a building, ‘we’ve looked at this building, we don’t like it, and here’s why.’”
She added that the destruction of the Hollein building was “in a way faultless.” By the time they tried to negotiate the building’s protection with the owner, “it was just too late, and the owner wasn’t interested at all.”