W.P. NORTON

WORSHIP THIS, BITCHES

2012-03-04T20:18:00.050-06:00

I love Lucy!

If I had to pinpoint the time when it was okay to say “bitch,” it would have to be May 2008.

George W. Bush was in the White House, I was working for the world's evilest corporation and “Ugly Betty” was on my television. This would not have been my first entertainment choice but for the pair of 15- and 17-year-old teen girls now known as my former daughters who put me up to it. Their mother said it was okay.

“Worship me, bitches,” said the diminutive, vaguely sinister fashion designer Christian Siriano in a bananas-flambé version of himself visiting the headquarters of the fictional New York-based fashion magazine where the title character Betty was living her dream. (Not that there's anything wrong with that. Sometimes a banana is just a banana.)

The B-word spilled into our living room, my mouth flew open and a feeling of shock went through me like a lightning bolt. The linguistic commandments of the feminist republic of Madison, Wisconsin—our hometown until we came to Chicago in 1999—had been drilled into me like a military code. One did not say “bitch” unless the object of the hate-speech in question was a dog. One did not say “girl” of a female who had passed the age of majority. God forbid they ever caught you calling anyone a “woman” in print—unless you used approved spelling handed down by the new order: w-o-m-y-n, for example, or g-r-r-l-s.

All that changed with the utterance of those three little words one bright May night in 2008. Instead of gasps, I heard giggles; the only hair out of place was mine. The bitch, as it were, was out of the bag.

Today, with all our computers and smartphones pouring out porn in every flavor of perversion possible to imagine, the word “bitch” has lost much of its power. But as with the dreaded N-word, it depends on who's doing the talking.

I recall how proud I felt the first time a person of African-American descent called me the N-word. “You my niggah,” she said. It goes without saying that I did not reply in kind. White people with enough sense to pour piss out of their own boots know how much trouble we'd be looking down the barrel of. Eminem can get away with it, but he's got more money than god.

It's much the same with Chris Rock. He's one of my favorite living celebrities, a comic genius who can make audiences laugh their collective asses off for hours at a time. Audiences in New York, London and Johannesburg went nearly hysterical with laughter at a Rock routine centered on the concept of “pussy” being a medium of exchange more valuable than credit cards or gold.

Rock has made a fortune talking that way, but I can scarcely even think the word without feeling immediately flooded by enough complex feelings to keep a hundred graduate students busy at their laptops for a year. Unless I'm introducing you to one of the housecats who live with my bestest bitch of all: Lucy, a two-year-old Beagle I adopted with my fiancée Jenny.

Likewise, if I wanted to say the B-word, I'd have to think hard about who was listening.

Where does this leave a white writer like me whose favorite blogger is a female African-American humorist who has garnered more than half a million “likes” from facebook fans of her blog, which happens to be entitled “Bitches Gotta Eat”?

For fuck’s sake, none other than Tina Fey said “hot bitches” on the “Leap Day” episode of 30 Rock. On the same episode, the poster on character Tracy Jordan's dressing-room wall advertises the fictional Jordan film vehicle “Fat Bitch.”

Now I read in the New Urban Dictionary where “bitch” can be used gender-neutrally, as in, "u guys r bitches" or just “wutup bitches!” Even as this is being written, I can sense Jenny in the next room, counting down the minutes to the primetime premier of “Good Christian Bitches,” dumbed down by ABC at the last minute, I gather, to “GCB.”

Go ahead, call me a bitch for scurrying under the skirts of hit TV shows and Beverly Hills masters of laughter. English-speakers `round the world are more than happy to laugh at the funky truth as dispensed by reality-TV fashionista divas and bloggers with tats. This dying white male needs all the cover he can get, if only to recover from 15 years of writing corporate gibberish to save you time and money.

Word up, bitches: this bitch is back.

All best,

—W.P. Norton

Losing Anthony Shadid

2012-02-19T21:37:00.135-06:00

DAILY CARDINAL DAYS:

"The Cardinal days seem like

so long ago, but they really

were the place we all became

who we are.”

—Anthony Shadid, right,

pictured with the author

in 1987. (c) Peter Barreras.

Anthony Shadid was a whirling dervish of a writer as far back as 1987, when he presented himself for duty at the Daily Cardinal, the student-run newspaper where we served 40,000-something readers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Anthony (always Anthony, never “Tony”) swirled through our newsroom with the untamed force of a funnel cloud smashing through the storied Tornado Alley landscape of his native Oklahoma.

Anthony’s preternatural reporting powers made me feel the bitterest kind of professional jealousy in the years that followed his flight from the Cardinal nest. The ill feelings vanished on Feb. 14, 2011, when he emailed me a far more courteous note than I expected in answer to a question I’d posed about the so-called Arab Spring. In March of that same year, Anthony and three New York Times colleagues were taken by forces loyal to Libya’s then dictator.

Though dogged by degradation and threats of death, events would prove kinder to the Times quartet than to their driver, who was immediately subject to summary execution on day one of the ordeal. With wide eyes and gritted teeth, several dozen of Anthony’s former Cardinal colleagues and I came together on Facebook and other social media, following the six-day drama to its last act, when the Libyan dictatorship freed Shadid plus three.

There was no theoretical limit to what he might achieve in years to come, I emailed Anthony then. Further Pulitzers (he’d already earned two) would be child's play, I said; even a Nobel Prize. High political office was in his future, I gushed; perhaps the presidency of a university, if he ever wanted to take things a little easier. Before his death, reportedly of asthma, at age 43 while on assignment in Syria this past Thursday, February 16th, the Times put him up for a third Pulitzer — a rare trifecta in the history of journalism.

One can only guess how absurd he may have found the many effusions of my message to Shadid. He was the Mozart of modern journalism, I said. Exposing himself further to such extreme risks as a desert combat situation would be incredibly selfish of him, and an unforgivable loss of a voice that the world badly needed to hear.

PLAYING FOR HISTORY: Anthony Shadid (right front) runs the scoreboard as Daily Cardinal staffers cheer the home team to victory in a 1987 basketball grudge-match against opposition paper the Badger Herald. (Left to right): Christina Pretto, Rob Gebeloff, Jon Coifman, Sarah Kershaw, Tom Vanderbilt, Renee Botta, Jim Foti, and the author. (c) Peter Barreras.

Pride trumped envy as I recalled to him how I’d handed him my New York Times campus stringer gig some 24 years before and strongly endorsed his candidacy for the internship he earned at Madison’s powerhouse of an alternative weekly newspaper, Isthmus. I stressed that it had never once occurred to me that my helping him would make a whit of difference to his career, because I saw his rise to superlative achievement as inevitable even then.

I hope to be committing no violation of privacy in quoting Anthony’s reply, time-stamped with the date of March 29, 2011: “I read your note twice, and I'm going to keep it, even if it is far too kind. The Cardinal days seem like so long ago, but they really were the place we all became who we are.”

Handing off these minor boons to Anthony was something I saw as a matter of public service — the right thing to do for those publications in particular, and for the institution of journalism writ large.

He would have gotten where he did if I had never existed. But I do treasure the fact of having had the chance to know him once. The sorrow of the moment is eased however slightly by the knowledge that I told him so before that chance was taken from us all.

Morris Philipson, 1926-2011

2011-11-03T10:36:00.003-05:00

Morris Philipson, 1926-2011

Nov. 3, 2011—So it's goodbye to Morris Harris Philipson, age 85, man of letters, bon vivant, head of the University of Chicago Press from 1967 until 2000, quietly, this morning, surrounded by a number of his loved ones and a far greater number of his books—many of them written, edited, or published by his own hand.
Morris Philipson Morris Philipson Morris Philipson

Fitting for a man who said “li-chra-chure” without affectation, a man who built a career in the serious publishing world of the latter half of the 20^th century as a writer, an editor and the longest-serving director of the University of Chicago Press—where, I'm told, was hung a banner that proclaimed a single word: Courage.

Just look at some of the serious books he worked on!

Leonardo da Vinci (1966)
The Count Who Wished he were a Peasant: A Life of Leo Tolstoy (1967)
An Outline of a Jungian Aesthetics (1990)
Foundations of Western Thought: Six Major Philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, Kant (1964)

Cover art (c) Schocken Books, 1983. (First edition
published in 1964 by Vanguard Press, New York.)

Then there were the novels—Bourgeois Anonymous (1964), The Wallpaper Fox (1976), A Man in Charge (1979), Secret Understandings (1983), and Somebody Else’s Life (1987). Don’t forget Everything Changes (1972), a children’s book.

In the last two years or so I worked sporadically with Morris on putting together his last project, a remembrance of past things that included what seems to have been the intellectual idyll of boarding-school life at the now-defunct Cherry Lawn School in Darien, Conn. He was in the class of 1944. It was at Cherry Lawn where he roomed with Emil Oberholzer Jr., the son of a European doctor who had administered Rorschach ink-blot tests to many of the leading minds of that earlier time (perhaps 50 in all, Philipson recalled, including Dr. Sigmund Freud himself) only to die before ever publishing a single word on his findings.

There was a feeling of loss that circled around and around the story of Oberholzer's lost Rorschach studies, much like the shadow of the absence of things Jewish that falls across certain pages of Philipson's novels, most of whose central characters happen to be WASPS or secular Jews. However, I've had the privilege to have him share with me as-yet unpublished works concerning his New England youth and post-retirement ruminations on the Jewish-American experience that pick up the thread.

Our first task was for me to finish taking the dictation of a memoir, “Conclusions,” that he hoped to have “paged out” to 232 pages by June of this year. At the heart of “Conclusions” was the conceit that no actual book need be composed, just one perfect review that explained the essence of the original; had it in fact existed; but which, of course, there was no need to publish because the review would summarize it all so sublimely. If only we'd made it that far.

Cheers, M.P. And Courage. Morris Philipson Morris Philipson Morris Philipson Morris Philipson Morris Philipson

The Lost Morris Philipson, 1926-2011

2011-11-03T10:30:00.000-05:00

Nobody worked closer with MorrisPhilipson, Director Emeritus, University of Chicago Press, in the last twoyears of his life, than me on his final writing project. When I met Morris forthe first time, in 2009, I asked him what book or author he was most proud tohave published as head of the University of Chicago Press. (“Morris Philipson, 1926-2011.”)

I found his answer to beastonishingly humbling and deflating: Of infinitely greater importance thanwhat he had accomplished, he said, were the works he had not been able topublish—the ones that got away. I asked, but he would not name a singleexample.

During the time I knew him,virtually the only thing that he cared about in terms of his own writing wasthe book I discuss in my blog, with the working title of “Conclusions.”

It is an unfathomable irony that atthe end of a life of so much accomplishment and recognition, it was theunfinished things, the work left undone, that appeared to concern Morris themost.

In the last two years or so Iworked sporadically with Morris on putting together his last project, aremembrance of past things that included what seems to have been theintellectual idyll of boarding-school life at the now-defunct Cherry LawnSchool in Darien, Conn. He was in the class of 1944. It was at Cherry Lawnwhere he roomed with Emil Oberholzer Jr., the son of a European doctor who hadadministered Rorschach ink-blot tests to many of the leading minds of thatearlier time (perhaps 50 in all, Philipson recalled, including Dr. SigmundFreud himself) only to die before ever publishing a single word on hisfindings.

Alexey Navalny: Privatization no “magic pill” to cure corruption

2011-10-04T03:32:00.000-05:00

Privatization seems to be back on the front burner in Russia, since President Dimity Medvedev’s approval this past August of a new plan requiring the government to sell off many of its ownership stakes in Russian businesses by 2017. (According to the latest figures from Standard & Poor’s, state ownership of shares in Russian companies accounts for 53% of market capitalization in Russia.) However, firebrand Moscow attorney, investors’-rights activist and political blogger Alexey Navalny criticizes the increasingly popular idea that privatization could be a “magic pill” for curing the corruption that plagues Russia’s still-developing economy.

The anti-corruption crusader likewise professed himself skeptical of privatization’s power to fully break the grip of state control over a private sector that still needs modernizing today, some 20 years after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Navalny broke the sobering news during a jam-packed panel session at the midpoint of “Russia on the cusp,” the U.S.-Russia Business Council’s 19th annual meeting, held Oct. 3–5 this year in Chicago.

Navalny’s bold topic, “Restructuring Russia’s Economy,” as well as his only listed public affiliation — “member of the Moscow Bar Association” — marked him as unique among an all-Russian panel of five English-speakers distinguished notably for hefty-sounding titles evoking the high-mightiness of Russian officialdom and the sleek gleam of international corporate aspiration.

The private sector players were well-represented by moderator Nataly Nikolaeva, Director of Government Affairs at Citibank Russia. True to form, Nikolaeva pitched a series of merely moderately informative comments right down the middle, cleaving hermetically close to the conversational contours that traced the helix shape of any discussion by experts on the tangled web of conflicting interests that define the shifting landscape of private finance and state power in Russia now.

Batting for the government side were Alexander Voloshin, chair of a presidential committee creating an International Financial Center in Russia; Oleg Fomichev, deputy minister with the Ministry of Economic Development; and Andrei Sharonov, deputy Moscow mayor for economic issues.

Navalny reserved his first case in point for Surgutneftegaz, which he dubbed the “most untransparent” oil company in all the Russias. Surgutneftegaz is “totally private, but we don’t know even who owns” it, Navalny said. Nor, he said, is it a matter of public record why Surgutneftegaz collects the enormous amounts of cash that it does. Information is just as scant, he said, when it comes to the “very suspicious” cooperation of Surgutneftegaz with other businesses. ”So we see that the formal private status of the company means nothing in terms of suspicious cooperation between companies and officials,” Navalny said.

Navalny’s second case in point pertained to a “noisy example of privatization” involving the Bank of Moscow. The bank (Russia’s fifth largest) was owned mostly by the Moscow city government. When the bank’s many problems started coming to light after the 2010 dismissal of Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, officials decided to sell the institution to VTB, another state-controlled bank, in a “very unusual, and, I would say, inappropriate way,” Navalny said.

After acquiring possession of the Bank of Moscow and its manifold problems, VTB engineered a $14 billion state-financed buyback. Ironically, it was only on the morning of his Oct. 4 appearance at the USRBC panel when Navalny read an interview with Andrei Kostin, VTB chairman and CEO. Kostin declared it would not be revealed how the money from the buyback would be spent.

“So we can see that as a result of privatization, we have even more problems with transparency” in corporate governance, Navalny said. The lesson, he said, “is that privatization doesn’t work without proactive position of the investor and of the shareholder. And without using tools — very simple tools — which already exist.”

For example, in every discussion about corporate governance in Russia, foreign institutional investors complain that independent directors are not really independent. The real question, he said, is whether such investors have even tried to nominate independent directors. Navalny said that under Russian law, shareholders with a 2 percent stake may nominate company directors. Nevertheless, this legal opportunity is being totally ignored by American, European, British and other foreign institutional investors, he said.

“I’m here at the URBC for the third time,” he said. “Two years ago, when I answered the question about independent directors, I said in Russia maybe there is just one real independent director: Sergei Guriev, who’s sitting on the board of Sberbank. So, now, after two years, the answer is the same: I would say that in Russia we have just one real independent director. And we never saw even the attempt to nominate independent directors from the institutional investors who are all the time complaining about the quality of independent directors.”

Navalny said he is absolutely sure that a small pool of institutional investors like BlackRock Inc. or Vanguard Group Inc. could start “a revolution in Russian corporate governance without any privatization” simply by starting to nominate company directors.

Addressing the routine corruption and official indifference to the legal rights of minority shareholders, Navalny said that Russian law offers a powerful remedy: managers whose corrupt practices do damage to their own companies can be sued. But this lever is simply never used, he said.

Navalny pointed to the scandal that ensued several months ago when Russia’s largest natural-gas company, Gazprom, unloaded a number of its shares in Novatek at a discount of 34 percent, resulting in more than $1 million in damages to Gazprom. Analysts from investment banks sent furious memos to various sides declaring “inappropriate” and “unacceptable” Gazprom’s loss-making sell-off of the Novatek shares.

Despite all the sound and fury that circulated in the aforementioned memos, the net result was nothing, Navalny said, because the criticism remained hidden from the public eye until Gazprom cinched its sale of Novatek shares. If those same institutional investors had publicly declared unacceptable the sale of Novatek shares by Gazprom while the deal was still being prepared, and if they had further announced their intent to sue Gazprom management in Russia and abroad, Navalny is “totally sure” Gazprom would have pulled the plug on the loss-making sell-off before it ever got finalized.

Navalny’s next cautionary tale was a vignette from his own Moscow law practice. In 2010, Navalny had exposed a $4 billion managerial embezzlement scheme involving Transneft, the Russian oil transportation monopoly. He recalled addressing the matter with two private investors holding substantial Transneft investments.

“And I asked them, Guys, just give me power of attorney and for 1 percent of the shares I will sue managers,” according to Navalny’s account. “We will fight them to account for this money, and anyway, it will be a very good, positive result.”

Their answer: “Alexei, we appreciate your work and we are really fed up with the corruption in Transneft. We are really angry, but we will never give you power of attorney because we are afraid. Because we don’t believe that this level of embezzlement could be committed without the involvement of top brass officials.”

Even if their fears were not entirely unfounded, Navalny said, the question remains just what there was to be afraid of. If it was being stuck, for example, by FSB agents with poisoned umbrellas, there was little cause for worry.

That’s because it’s no longer true that being in conflict with a Russian company will automatically cause an investor to come in conflict with the Russian state, with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, or with any member of his circle, Navalny said. On the contrary, he said he was certain that the state would be happy if investors sued Russian companies. Besides helping to separate honest officials from corrupt ones, such a wave of litigation could serve to wash away some of those elements who still find profit in the dark corners of at the corrupt nexus of Russian businesses activity and the state. All of this could lend a certain legitimacy to the state’s much publicized effort to draw foreign investors.

Navalny wound down his remarks with a description of a “very happy” event, held two weeks before the USRBC’s Chicago meeting, marking the opening by Russia’s state-owned VTB bank of its own U.S. branch.

“And I, as a shareholder of VTB, am happy because now I have the jurisdiction to sue them here in the U.S.,” Navalny said. “I do believe that one good litigation is much better than privatization. And I want to address all of you to cooperate with me before the court.”

The main problem of Russia’s state economy is not that everything is owned by the state, but that companies are run by officials on a “very informal” basis. Officials can afford to be so informal, he said, because shareholders and investors are ignoring the official legal tools available to investors right now.

Even in “this very difficult political situation in Russia — and I am opposing the current political regime very hard” — Navalny encouraged USRBC members to take a “very proactive” approach to investing in Russian companies.

Being a proactive investor “is not just a question of corporate responsibility, of private or corporate charity,” he said. “It’s a question of the profit, it’s a question of the dividends, and it’s a question of the capitalization.”

Navalny took his first follow-up question from Bruce Marks of Marks & Sokolov, a law firm with offices in Philadelphia, Moscow and Kiev. Marks said it seemed to him that Navalny wants foreign investors to give him their proxy so he can attack corporate corruption on the legal front in Russia. Marks asked what chance Navalny had of winning his crusades, especially in light of such well-known problems as those suffered by entities ranging from the BP oil company’s Russian operation to Bill Browder’s Hermitage Capital Management investment fund.

Browder is the Hermitage CEO and co-founder who fled Russia for the West after a relentless drumbeat of harassment targeting Hermitage. The pressure culminated in tragedy with the 2009 death of Hermitage attorney Sergei Magnitsky while in Russian police custody.

Aspects of such matters as the death of Magnitsky raise foundational questions in the minds of foreigners who want to do business in Russia. Such questions are seldom raised publicly, but in the event, it was Bruce Marks who settled on Chicago’s Swissotel as being as a good place as any to receive the proffered microphone, look Navalny point-blank in the eyes, and ask the question, “Why would you seriously think that you would be successful if we give you our proxy? Do you really think that if we gave you our proxy that you would be successful in that litigation?”

Navalny termed the persecution that prompted Browder to flee Russia as “a very sad example” of the worst challenges being faced by foreign investors there. But he added that Russia needs “100 Bill Browders” to create an environment where corrupt corporate officials can be freely challenged by institutional investors taking proactive positions in the fight for universal enforcement of shareholders’ rights. And he expressed certainty that his approach will succeed — that Russia has the “political will” to make it so — and that institutional investors would be doing Russian officials a favor by pressing them in that direction.

Rick Johnson of Citibank asked Navalny to assess whether Russia’s courts are well on their way to recognizing and enforcing the rulings of international arbitration bodies on cases in favor of foreign investors’ rights. The answer was less than encouraging.

No good has come from previous efforts aimed at mobilizing international arbitration bodies to protect investors’ rights in Russia, Navalny said. That is despite many attempts — most of which were related to the Yukos case, he said.

But even though Russian judges are under strict political control, litigators have proven they can prevail, so long as their case lacks a major political dimension, he said, citing his own successful lawsuit to compel Transneft’s disclosure of information about the Rosneft transaction.

“In theory, we have a lot of tools” that may be used for the securing of investors’ rights, but too few attempts to practice using those tools, Navalny said.

This report was published by the Institute of Modern Russia on Nov. 1, 2011. You can click to the Institute’s version here. Navalny was in Chicago for the U.S.-Russia Business Council’s 19th annual meeting on October 4, 2011.

Alexey Navalny in Chicago

2011-10-04T03:31:00.000-05:00

Being in conflict with a Russian company does not automatically bring investors into conflict with the Russian state, firebrand Moscow attorney, investors’-rights activist and political blogger Alexey Navalny told the US-Russia Business Council in Chicago.

Alexey Navalny

“One good litigation is better than privatization” in Russia, where the government still owns 53 percent of businesses as measured by market capitalization, Navalny said. Read the article by W.P. Norton for the Institute for Modern Russia — “Alexey Navalny: Privatization is no "magic pill" to solve corruption” — here.

Index to “Alexey Navalny: Privatization is no "magic pill" to solve corruption”

Browder, Bill: Hermitage Capital Management

Fomichev, Oleg: deputy minister, Russian Ministry of Economic Development;

Guriev, Sergei: Sberbank board of directors

Johnson, Rick: Citibank

Kostin, Andrei: VTB chairman and CEO

Luzhkov, Yuri: former Moscow mayor

Magnitsky, Sergei: Hermitage Capital Management attorney

Marks, Bruce: Marks & Sokolov, a law firm with offices in Philadelphia, Moscow and Kiev

Navalny, Alexey: Moscow attorney, investors’-rights activist and political blogger

Nikolaeva, Nataly: Director of Government Affairs at Citibank Russia

Sharonov, Andrei: deputy Moscow mayor for economic issues

Voloshin, Alexander: chair of a Russian presidential committee creating an International Financial Center in Russia

30-ROCK JACK SPEAKS FOR ALL OF US NOW

2011-07-31T15:05:00.001-05:00

Alec Baldwin, co-star of 30 Rock.

We're up on the roof of NBC's New York City headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, also known as 30 Rock. Jack's talking Tracy Jordan out of shooting Kenneth. That is, we think he's talking to Tracy but he's really talking about the might-have-beens and missed chances that defined the career of the great Alec Baldwin.

"Tracy, you wanna destroy the goodwill you have, so you can go back to your easy TV job? Do TV. No one will ever take you seriously again. It doesn't matter how big a movie star you are. Even if you had the kind of career where you walked away from a blockbuster franchise or, worked with Meryl Streep or Anthony Hopkins, made important movies about things like civil rights or Pearl Harbor. Stole films with supporting roles and then turned around and blew them away on Broadway. None of that will matter once you do television. You could win every award in sight. But be the biggest thing on the small screen, and you'll still get laughed out of the Vanity Fair Oscar party by Greg Kinnear."

That was author Tom Clancy's "Jack Ryan" franchise, of course -- the role that got hijacked by Harrison Ford after "Hunt For Red October." And if it seems like just yesterday that Baldwin was in that romcom with Streep -- something about "Complicated" -- that's because it was almost yesterday. The Hopkins vehicle was called "The Edge." (Full disclosure, I had to look that one up.) And a gold star to anybody who can figure out the Kinnear/Vanity Fair/Oscar Party reference.

W.P. Norton, co-star of nothing.

At any rate, my point is that Alec Baldwin has really become a modern-day Antonio Salieri (you know, from "Amadeus"; you can look that one up yourself) -- a stand-in and a symbol for the mediocrities many of us think, or fear, or know we've become. That means he's speaking for all of us now. I'll be 46 next month, and I think it's time for a long think about whatever may be possible to salvage from the better part of the rest of my life.

For starters, I think I'll try to be a little more like Jack when it's possible. No drinking for me, of course. I'll just have to stare out my office window holding a glass of Zevia on the rocks. But it won't be the same.

Here's to all of us also-rans, might-have-beens and probably-never-will-be's. Alec Baldwin and the gang at 30 Rock just made me feel a little less desperate about it all. Come over to my windowless office one of these days. We can step out to the parking lot, crack a couple ice-cold Zevias, and have a few laughs about how it was never going to work out anyway. In the words of Maestro Salieri, "Te absolvo, te absolvo, te absolvo."

Now put the gun down, Tracy. We're all going to have to come down off this roof someday.

UPDATED: Tony Jarvis, my old pal since high school and now a regular on HBO's "Treme," could not be considered to number among the mediocrities in Jack's flock at 30 Rock. These pictures from my and Tony's early friendship capture something of Tony's daring, inexhaustible spirit and drive toward greatness.

THE BOURNE IDENTITY BLOGS “Nobody does the right thing.”

2011-07-13T13:11:00.018-05:00

Mid-afternoon, and the police-sirens of Paris wail louder by the moment as all-American Jason and German gal-pal Marie sit parked in her beat-up old Trabant car.

Jason’s in the driver’s seat and things are going to get ugly fast. He knows, even we know, but Marie doesn’t know. Nearing desperation, Jason begs Marie to get out while she can, but sparks only the white-hot angry burst of her demand he tell her what the hell this is all about.

He’s only trying to do the right thing, he nearly screams. She locks eyes with his, passing judgment with calm conviction.

“Nobody does the right thing.”

Like a car door slamming shut, something clicks for these two. Which is good, because Matt Damon and Franka Potente don't necessarily look like a couple with chemistry.

If you know Potente (what a great name!), it's probably from her starmaking turn as the title character in the nervousmaking, amphetamine-soaked "Run Lola Run," a German import from way back in 1999. Which is just about the only thing she did in that movie: run the streets of Europe to the pulsebeat of a high-octane, punked-out soundtrack and a shocking-orange `fro that may well have given rise to a catchphrase of that era, "in your face." Three years after "Lola," she's managed to keep that edge, even if they've sexed her up for the part, dressing her a little more prim, trim and girly than Lola.

“Last chance, Marie,” warns Jason as she buckles in for the death-defying car-chase that is sure to come. Safety first, folks: a nice touch!

54 minutes into it now, and that car-chase is made all the more agitated by those backwards police-car sirens the French always play to remind us we’re not in Kansas anymore.

Speeding through milk-truck alleys, driving down stone stairways, brakes squealing: this is fun! Jason behind the wheel of Marie’s little red Trabant car, speeding down the sidewalk now. An old couple jumps comically toward the street, both flopping backwards like fish onto the hood of a car, escaping being run over by a whisker.

They’re speeding along a riverbank road at this point ... daytime ... but grey, windshield wipers. Cops with little white helmets on little white motorbikes. Smash the Trabi through a plate glass window; nice stunt! Marie seems to be digging it now; clearly she hasn’t gotten laid in a while.

They pull into the garage, safe for the moment, but there's no time to mess around.

“We can never come back to this car,” Jason says, giving voice to a feeling we've all felt at least once.

She nods matter-of-factly, as if she’s been hearing comments like this all her life. But her eyes are shining and she looks kind of turned on.

58 minutes now, and here’s a wild-eyed African dictator guy, Wombosi, in the basement of some morgue.

No military uniform, just a blue, vaguely Maoist oxford buttoned up to the neck. Kinda looks like Eddie Murphy. Couple white people in white coats, body bag on cart.

Not-Eddie-Murphy reaches inside the bag without us seeing what he’s doing. Gross! He pulls his hand back out, pronouncing, “It’s not him.”

Too many questions. We’re going to have to track this thing live, as it happens, moment-to-moment. Try to dope out what the movie wants to say.

Get a clue in BI–2: “Sir, what do you want to do!”

THE BOURNE IDENTITY BLOGS–2 “Sir, what do you want to do!”

2011-07-13T13:10:00.020-05:00

Minute 59: Night. The angry CIA guy, calling from Langley. “Where’s Wombosi?”

Julia Stiles in Paris: “They were leaving the morgue. They just left.”

CIA flunky back at Langley: “Sir, what do you want to do!”

Cut to Jason and Marie in the bathroom. He’s helping her get the red out of her hair. Got his wife-beater shirt on. Looking nice and trim there, Matt, good for you.

Wonder what it’s all about? Get a head-start at BI–1: "Nobody does he right thing!"

Run-Lola-Run is digging it. He’s trimming her hair now. Some fast editing here, a touch of awkwardness in this tight bathroom with the lichen-green walls. Here comes the big kiss.

Very tender. Starting out that way, anyway. Yikes, what’re those red mottles on his naked, rippling back?

No sex scene, though, good move, very tasteful. Camera pulls back out of the garret or whatever it is to the sidewalk. Ah, Paris at night. Smooth Predator Drone/skycam shot across the sparkling city, the tower looking like that bridge in Apocalypse Now!

What can happen next?

All is revealed in BI–3: “To show them what kind of war we are fighting!”

THE BOURNE IDENTITY BLOGS–3 “To show them what kind of war we are fighting!”

2011-07-13T13:09:00.025-05:00

Minute 104. Morning in Paris. Marie’s got that happy kitten smile that we all know can only mean one thing. There are some light jokes about fingerprints, footprints and not leaving any traces.

Somewhere else in Paris is Wombosi, who, it must be said, is played to awe-inspiring perfection by the equally awesomely named Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje.

The fulminating dictator strides angrily down a staircase, getting all Supreme Dictator on his nervous aides, expounding on the public-relations benefits of decapitating a certain enemy and hanging his head on the front of the building “to show them what kind of war we are fighting!”

Wonder what it’s all about? Click BI–1: "Nobody does the right thing!"

Then—shattering glass, blood, the despot in exile is felled; jump-cut to a rooftop, a lone gunman, a rifle scope. Why does it always have to come to this?

Okay, 1:06 mins. now, they’re making some kind of move at the Hotel Regina. Think fast: Regina!—reminds you of a different word, right?

Anyway Marie’s inside. Heavy pink and black heavy woolen scarf, that cute pixie hair. Damon’s voice inside her head, dream/memory style, providing instruction: get the headcount, fix the layout in your head. He tries to call from a payphone outside, calls the hotel.

Ring, ring—what now? Suddenly, surprise! She’s behind Jason, she got the papers from a flirtatious desk clerk. Anyway they’re on the move. Nice day, though, only partly cloudy

1:07 mins. now. The angry spook in the lime-green shirt is telling his boss Jason will check back in.

“When?” Demands the older, angrier, white-guy boss.

Flunky boy with child athlete buzz cut says 24 hours. Angry spook takes sip of coffee.

Call comes in, they’ve found the vehicle. Now here’s a shot of that Brit. What’s his name, who’s so dark and angry-looking? Right, Clive Owen!

Bourne, wearing all black, calling himself “Mr. Kane,” is in some office building. Chipper secretary recognizes him and leads him to an office. Middle-aged bald guy behind a desk says he assumes Jason is still in the market. Sure, Bourne says. Or rather, Kane.

Now he and she at a cafe. Am I Kane? Am I Bourne? She says she heard a report about Kane’s body being located at some morgue.

1:12, Jason bribes his way past the bored-looking white-coat guy who opens one of the blue-metal lockers where they keep the dead. So where’s the body? Here’s another Frenchie, bringing rapid, nervous dialogue with subtitles.

Enter yet another white coat, older, and angry: you can’t just barge in here without an appointment. You’re right, says Jason. He tears a page from the appointment book, shoves the white coat aside and they split.

Where do Jason and Marie end up? Find out in BI–4 “Look at what they make you give.”

THE BOURNE IDENTITY BLOGS–4 “Look at what they make you give.”

2011-07-13T13:08:00.016-05:00

Back on the street a newspaper says Jason’s an assassin. He’s mixed up in the killing of the ex-dictator, Wombosi. Yikes!

They jump in a cab. It’s night. Half the Paris police department is in front of the fleabag hotel they were at; they take a powder. Jumpy minor-key synthpop telling us the pulse is about to quicken.

Wonder what it’s all about? Click BI–1: "Nobody does the right thing!"

1:16, Jason and Marie walking fast away from all the action at their place, and Clive Owen is standing in the crowd. Could he have seen them?

118 mins. Still night. Marie crumples up the wanted poster with her face and his on it. She starts running away. He runs after her, isn’t that every woman’s dream?

“Stay calm! Whatever we do, have to do it together!” he pleads.

“We? The only thing we have in common is that neither one of us knew who you were. We are past that now.” I can see why Potente must have really liked this role: her character gets the best zingers.

Jason: “If we stay here, we die.” I guess that settles that. They start walking fast again; see, it’s not all car chases.

Quick-cut back to Langley: Chris Cooper yelling at his staff, looks like he’s ready to throw some furniture. Yelling stuff like “what’s the French word for stakeout?” At least the blonde is doing her job, monitoring the Parisian police-radio frequencies. Shitty furniture, too, spindly desk legs and tacky tan sideboarding. All the shiny computers add a neat gloss, though.

None of that matters now, however. Because here’s the boss, Ward Abbot, an older, white-haired guy with a trenchcoat, always a bad sign. Jason’s been “off the reservation” for more than 24 hours, Abbot intones scarily to Cooper and his crew. You said you’d have him back by now. Scary!

Back to Europe, and here lies Clive Owen, gut-shot and sitting upright in a German winter farmfield of snow and scattered amber clumps of grain. He’s only got maybe a dozen heartbeats left in him, so you know he’s thought a lot about how to make every line count, and this one does:

“Look at what they make you give.”

He reads the line just this side of melodrama, lets nary a trace of Spielbergian schmaltz slip through the intonation, and the effect is nothing less than to make us feel he’s speaking for us all.

Watch Jason crack in
BI–5: “I’m on my own side now.”

THE BOURNE IDENTITY BLOGS–5 “I’m on my own side now.”

2011-07-13T13:05:00.013-05:00

So Marie's safe in hiding, and that's always good for a cathartic recovery of lost memory. Holy shit, it was Jason's conscience that made everything go wrong. Jason was on the boat with the cartoon-evil-African-despot Wombosi, pointing his gun at the top of the man’s skull as the cabin rocked with the rhythm of the storm-tossed waters.

You could see the helplessness in Wombosi’s wide open eyes, looking up at Jason. All he had to do was pull the trigger, but he saw a little child, presumably the strongman’s, all helpless and innocent. And he faltered.

Wonder what it’s all about? Click BBI–1: "Nobody does he right thing!"

He glanced around the room and saw a couple of other kids, too—cute black kids, not quite sure what was going on but scared and pliant in a subdued sort of way.

Something seemed to short-circuit in Jason’s head. You can’t hear his inside thoughts, but the face tells the whole story: How does killing harmless children make my country safe?

The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t. And wouldn’t it be nice if more of our NATO allies and Americans in uniform abroad paid greater heed to that same consideration.

Not writing this blog from Afghanistan but rather from Evanston, Ill., it’s hard for me to see how the nine children gathering wood a couple of days could have been mistook for enemy fighters by our own forces—possibly the best-trained professional military personnel on the planet.

All hell breaks loose for Jason when he rejects the acceptability of “collateral damage.”

Facing down Chris Cooper’s character in the darkened Paris hotel room, in a position to terminate with extreme prejudice, he instead splits, making his own personal declaration of independence with the proclamation, “I’m on my own side now.”

Has Jason lost Marie forever?
Find out in BI–6: “Got any ID?”

THE BOURNE IDENTITY BLOGS–6 “Got any ID?”

2011-07-13T13:04:00.010-05:00

So just 11 minutes to go and a bunch of burly goons fail to whack Jason after he washes his hands of Chris Cooper. There’s a lot of shooting, and in one of the bizarrest sequences, Jason surfs the corpse of one of the ugly assassins straight down many, many flights of circular, Hitchcockian stairs, squeezing off a couple rounds at one last assailant before making a very hard landing on the ground floor.

The embryonic face and prim ripeness of the Julia Stiles characters fades into the shadows without exchanging so much of a word with Jason, although you can feel the sexual energy they’ve exchanged in their parting glance, much as Marie’s highly charged gaze did earlier, in the Paris parking garage after their getaway.

We could get something going in a sequel, Stiles’ eyes seem to say. Have your people call my people is his unspoken reply.

Wonder what it’s all about? Click BBI–1: "Nobody does he right thing!"

Beaten but not ready to pack it in, the angry, sidearm-toting CIA director plaid by Chris Cooper gets shot dead by another one of his killer drones from the super-secret Treadstone program that set this terrible chain of events in motion.

Meanwhile, back at CIA in Virginia, old Chief Whitehair tells the flunkies with all the jock haircuts to shut it down. Then comes the dying of the lights and the winking out of the many monitors connecting that ultra-classified room to the global grid that knows how to find us all. When the humming and buzzing of the computers and the glowing and the flickering of the monitors fade all to black and silence in that room, it’s the first time in a movie that’s jumps from one violent death only to land on another, like Jason surfing that corpse to the bottom of the stairwell, that we feel anything approximating the emotions of watching somebody die.

Good for Jason and Marie, though: he finds her on that Mediterranean beach, far off the grid, renting motor-scooters to itinerant eurotrash. Best dialogue in the movie, for my money, is when Marie asks Jason, deadpan: “Got any ID?” Jason shrugs one shoulder, does his best aw-shucks, flashes a farm-boy smile of pure Americanness and utters what amounts to the movie’s manifesto: “Not really.”

Their smiles are understated and their embrace is something on the closer side of human and it’s enough to make you want to stand up and cheer.

Ode to Guitar George...NEW MATERIAL & VIDEO/see below

2011-07-02T14:58:00.000-05:00

I happened to be in NYC when George Harrison died in 2001. At dusk I gathered amongst the many hundreds at Strawberry Fields, singing along with the throng while two brave buskers strummed every number in the Fab Four catalog on acoustics. I don't recall a single mic or amp being used: just the two steel-strings. It was a joyful thing, much in contrast to Dec. 8, 1980.)

When I was 15—before Russia, before Obama, before hotmail and facebook.com, before Bush v. Gore and Iraq, before the Daily Cardinal and Nicaragua, before Isthmus, before Chapman and the Dakota, before the son of Victor Louis,—when I was 15 me and my father, G.M. Norton, lived for a while in a factory in Madison, Wis.

They’d long since stopped making whatever it was they’d made there. And it would be a while before the property would be transformed into the condominiums of the Johnson Building that stands there now on East Washington avenue next to the car wash with the big Octopus head. But it was a building with a couple of floors and the kind of elevator with a heavy mesh cage that you fling open or shut with a crash, and we were there for a couple of strange months around late 1979 or early 1980, and so was George for part of that time. George Farrens, that is.

Guitar George Farrens

And it came to pass that on certain weekend nights, there we’d be at a table in the former break room of the factory under the fluorescent lights, George and me. There were Hubers, and Camel filters and a guitar, and warm-hearted hours of instruction in the classics: the warm, curvaceous and supple notes of the beginning of “Norwegian Wood.” The breathless dextrousness of the rapid-fire blues plunked out of the little finger on “I Feel Fine.”

It seems I played in 15 bands after that, and mainly the bass, because there were many better guitarists in the vicinity at the time. But in that Madison factory on a cold winter’s night, with Huber and Camels and a beat-up old accoustic held together with duct tape, Guitar George sat across the table and taught me how to coax more than notes from a piece of wood and catgut strings.

So thanks Uncle George, and cheers to you for those times you made the factory feel almost like home.

--W.P.N.

Postscript: Even earlier than the events described, the three of us shared a house, I think on First Street in Madison. I had come from California to settle, and the first few nights spent listening to records in George's collection nearly saved my 14-year old life. What I know about rock I learned much of from George's record collection, which knocked me out--especially "Revolver," several cuts of which I've remixed in this first video I've decided to attach here. Headphones or desktop speakers are recommended; no computer speaker does them justice.

In dedication to Guitar George

Watchdog: Shirley Abrahamson through Chris Deisinger

2011-03-28T00:05:00.005-05:00

Shirley Abrahmson

Abrahamson, Shirley:	Supreme Shift
Abramoff, Jack:	Wisconsin's Ethical Crisis
Adelman, Lynn:	Snuff Out the Collusion
African-American boy, age 12:	Madison’s Grand Illusion
Allen, Woody:	The H-Bomb Case Revisited
Amesqua, Debra:	Madison’s Grand Illusion
Amin, Idi:	The H-Bomb Case Revisited
Anders, Robert:	Madison R.F.D.
Anderson, Karen:	The Trial of Gordy Sussman
Andres, Tom:	Free at Last
Armey, Dick:	Supreme Shift
Armstrong, Dale:	Fighting Bronson
Armstrong, Karl:	Radicalism and Regret
Armstrong, Ralph:	Supreme Shift
Ashenfelter, Barry:	The Undoing of Brian Burke
Avery, Steven:	Supreme Shift
Bablitch, Bill:	Supreme Shift
Bailey, Kathy:	Skydive!
Baker, Dave:	Election Night with the Dane County GOP
Baldwin, Gordon:	Fighting Bronson
Barlow, Earl:	Indian Takers
Bates, Tom:	Radicalism and Regret
Bauman, Sue:	Take a Stand Against Bad Cops
Beech, Howard:	Sizing Up Supermax
Beech, Michelle:	Sizing Up Supermax
Beechy, Elmer:	To Kill a Turkey
Bell, Griffin:	The H-Bomb Case Revisited
Bellecourt, Clyde:	Indian Takers
Ben Elson, Eddie:	Why People Hate Madison
Benson, Glenis:	Scouting for Bigotry
Berge, Gerard:	Sizing Up Supermax
Bernal, Bernardo:	Obsession
Besley, Walter H.:	Shedding Light on Records
Beyer, Marty:	Free at Last
Bhat, Girish:	Obsession
Bichler, Howard:	Indian Takers
Biskupic, Steven:	Wisconsin's Ethical Crisis
Bjork, Tanya:	The Undoing of Brian Burke
Black, Spencer:	The Undoing of Brian Burke
Blanchard, Brian:	The Trial of Gordy Sussman
Blaska, David:	Election Night with the Dane County GOP
Boettcher, Mike:	What happened in Florence County?
Bogle, Rick:	My Monkey
Boles, Diane:	The Trial of Gordy Sussman
Born, Gerald:	What Happened in Florence County?
Boullion, James:	Fighting Bronson
Boyer, Dennis:	Fighting Bronson
Bradley, Mark:	Take a Stand Against Bad Cops
Breen, Bob:	How I Helped Kill The Crazy Shepherd
Brennan, Bob:	Why People Hate Madison
Brophy, Brian:	The Undoing of Brian Burke
Brown, Harold:	The H-Bomb Case Revisited
Brown, Ron:	Indian Takers
Browne, Jackson:	Farewell to Dear Old Dad
Buhle, Paul:	Radicalism and Regret
Burger, Warren:	The H-Bomb Case Revisited
Burgess, Jim:	High Pressure, Low Pay
Burke, Brian:	Wisconsin's Ethical Crisis
Buss, Kurt:	How I Helped Kill The Crazy Shepherd
Caldwell, Michael:	Free at Last
Capuano, Saverio “Buddy”:	My Monkey
Carbon, Ron:	The H-Bomb Case Revisited
Carlson, Rick:	Skydive!
Carter, Jimmy:	The H-Bomb Case Revisited
Champion, Tom:	Cruel Zealotry
Charles, Ray:	America the Beautiful. No, Really
Chvala, Chuck:	My Free Lunch with Tommy
Clarenbach, David:	A Nation of Cowards
Clausius, Bill:	Indian Takers
Clemens, Roger:	An Excruciating Visit to the Dentist
Clinton, Bill:	Snuff Out the Collusion
Cockburn, Alexander:	The Media’s Acid Test
Coffin, Margarette:	What Happened in Florence County?
Cohen, Jeff:	The Media’s Acid Test
Cook, Mary Ann:	What Happened in Florence County?
Corrie, Glenn:	Indian Takers
Corso, Gregory:	A Howl for Allen Ginsberg
Cottingham, Gretchen:	Indian Takers
Crooks, Patrick:	Supreme Shift
Currie, George:	Supreme Shift
Cyr, Suzette:	The Trial of Gordy Sussman
Dahmer, Jeffrey:	Sizing Up Supermax, Take a Stand Against Bad Cops
Dalland, Jim:	What Happened in Florence County?
Danny Hartman:	What happened in Florence County?
Davis, Karen:	To Kill a Turkey
Davis, Patricia L.:	Without a Remedy
Day, Sam:	Radicalism and Regret, A Font of Moral Courage, The H-Bomb Case Revisited
Deer, Ada:	Indian Takers
DeGrave, Mark:	What Happened in Florence County?
Deisinger, Chris:	How I Helped Kill The Crazy Shepherd

Watchdog: the last list/Tom Delay through Richard Kimball

Watchdog: Tom Delay through Richard Kimball

2011-03-28T00:04:00.002-05:00

Delay, Tom:	Wisconsin's Ethical Crisis
DeMaio, Jerry:	Sizing Up Supermax
Denton, Frank:	High Pressure, Low Pay, Protecting Readers from Ideas
Devaguptapu, Raghu:	The Undoing of Brian Burke
Dibble, Mary:	What Happened in Florence County?
Dickey, Walter:	Sizing Up Supermax
Docken, Will:	The Trial of Gordy Sussman
Doyle, Jim:	Free at Last, Why Hate Shouldn’t Be Illegal, It's Time to Panic; Taxes:
Draeger, Linda:	Take a Stand Against Bad Cops
Dreckmann, George:	Waiting for Wood
Dreps, Bob:	Shedding Light on Records
Dreyfus, Lee Sherman:	Wisconsin’s Ethical Crisis
Earl, Tony:	My Free Lunch with Tommy
Emerson, Eddie:	How I Helped Kill The Crazy Shepherd
Erhardt, Fred:	Obsession
Evans, Sue:	Obsession
Farrow, Mia:	For the Love of Newspapers
Fassnacht, Robert:	Radicalism and Regret
Feagles, Elizabeth:	A Reasonable Doubt
Fiedler, Patrick:	Supreme Shift
Flea (Red Hot Chili Peppers):	Madison’s Grand Illusion
Fleischer, Ari:	Surviving the new McCarthyism
Flynn, Matt:	The Undoing of Brian Burke
Folz, Duane A.:	What happened in Florence County?
Foti, Steve:	The Undoing of Brian Burke
Franklin, Ben:	To Kill a Turkey
Frederickson, John:	Skydive!
Frey, Bruce:	The Trial of Gordy Sussman
Friebert, Robert:	The Undoing of Brian Burke
Gapen, Kaye D.:	A Reasonable Doubt
Gard, John:	Supreme Shift
Garlewski, Ted:	Sizing Up Supermax
Garvey, Ed:	Sizing Up Supermax
Gebler, Lou:	Obsession
Gerrity, Karen:	How I Helped Kill The Crazy Shepherd
Ghere, Robbin:	What Happened in Florence County?
Gilbert, Charles:	The H-Bomb Case Revisited
Ginsberg, Allen:	A Howl for Allen Ginsberg, How I Helped Kill The Crazy Shepherd
Glenn, John:	The H-Bomb Case Revisited
Grabski, Charles:
Grassian, Stuart:	Sizing Up Supermax
Gray, Dorian:	The Undoing of Brian Burke
Green, Mark:	Wisconsin's Ethical Crisis
Guenther, Erik:	The Trial of Gordy Sussman
Guevara, Che:	Radicalism and Regret
Gundrum, Mark:	Supreme Shift
Guthrie, Arlo:	My Monkey
Habush, Bob:	Supreme Shift
Haegerl, Karen:	How I Helped Kill The Crazy Shepherd
Hainstock, Eric:	Free at Last
Hainstock, Shawn:	Free at Last
Hall, Glenn:	Indian Takers
Hanaway, Donald:	Fighting Bronson
Hancock, Jerry:	Free at Last
Hansen, Chuck:	The H-Bomb Case Revisited
Hansen, Mo:	The Undoing of Brian Burke
Harlowe, Hal:	Madison R.F.D.
Hatch, David:	Sizing Up Supermax
Hatch, Fred:	What Happened in Florence County?
Hatley, Joanne (not her real name):	Obsession
Heck, Jay:	The Undoing of Brian Burke
Heitz, Jac:	The Trial of Gordy Sussman
Hellekant, Goran:	Let’s Talk About the Animals
Hentoff, Nat:	Why Hate Shouldn’t Be Illegal
Hissom, Doug:	The Media’s Acid Test
Hitler, Adolf:	Election Night with the Dane County GOP
Hollingsworth, Deanise:	Without a Remedy
Hope, Anthony:	Indian Takers
Hope, Bob:	Indian Takers
Huckabee, Mike:	An Excruciating Visit to the Dentist
Hunt, Joseph:	Indian Takers
Hurley, Stephen:	The Trial of Gordy Sussman
Hussein, Saddam:	Remembering Whom to Thank
Ishikawa, Jesse:	The Scourge of Ethics
Jackson, Michael:	The Trial of Gordy Sussman
Jensen, Scott:	Supreme Shift
"Jew girl":	Why Hate Shouldn’t Be Illegal
Kaiser, Robert:	Cruel Zealotry
Kallman, Rich:	What Happened in Florence County?
Kandathil, Sonia:	Obsession
Kasten, Bobby:	How I Helped Kill The Crazy Shepherd
Keane, Kevin:	My Free Lunch with Tommy
Kelly, John:	Take a Stand Against Bad Cops
Kelly, Walt:	Supreme Shift
Kemnitz, Joe:	Let’s Talk About the Animals, My Monkey
Kennedy-Steffen, Kathy:	Scouting for Bigotry
Kerwin, Amy:	My Monkey
Kessler, Fred:	Sizing Up Supermax
Khan, Genghis:	My Free Lunch with Tommy
Kimball, Richard:	Obsession

Watchdog: Elaine Pulver through Bert Zipperer

2011-03-28T00:00:00.021-05:00

Bert Zipperer

Pulver, Elaine:

My Free Lunch with Tommy

R04040:

My Monkey

Reddick, Greg:

Why Hate Shouldn’t Be Illegal

Reilly, Deborah:

A Reasonable Doubt

Reivitz, Linda:

What Happened in Florence County?

Rendall, Judy:

Madison R.F.D.

Reno, Janet:

Indian Takers

Reuter, Bob:

It’s Time to Panic

Reynolds, Bob:

Indian Takers

Ricciardi, Rhoda:

Free at Last

Richardson, Bill:

Election Night with the Dane County GOP

Gov. Richardson, Bill:

An Excruciating Visit to the Dentist

Rifken, Marty:

The Scourge of Ethics

Robson, Judy:

Sizing Up Supermax

Rogers, Kenny:

Where the Winners Aren’t

Roggensack, Pat:

Supreme Shift

Rotow, Dimitri:

Manning, Joe

Rowe, Andrea:

The Undoing of Brian Burke

Ryan, George:

Wisconsin's Ethical Crisis

Salatin, Joel:

To Kill a Turkey

Salter, Anna:

The Trial of Gordy Sussman

Sandgren, Eric:

Let’s Talk About the Animals

Sayles, Ann:

Without a Remedy

Scarver, Christopher:

Sizing Up Supermax

Schmucker, Harvey:

My Cabin in the Woods

Schneider, Don:

The Undoing of Brian Burke

Schneider, Marlin:

Indian Takers

Schnitzer, Diane:

Scouting for Bigotry

Schulz, Charles:

How I Helped Kill The Crazy Shepherd

Schumacher, Michael:

A Howl for Allen Ginsberg

Schwartzkopf, Norman:

Remembering Whom to Thank

Sensenbrenner, Joe:

A Time for Anger

Shakur, Shaka:

Sizing Up Supermax

Shalala, Donna:

A Reasonable Doubt

Shapiro, Catherine:

A Reasonable Doubt

Sharenow, Ira:

Snuff Out the Collusion

Sheets, Steve:

Take a Stand Against Bad Cops

Shomberg, Forest:

Supreme Shift

Skalitzke, Carl:

Election Night with the Dane County GOP

Skornicka, Carol:

My Free Lunch with Tommy

Smith, Matthew:

To Kill a Turkey

Smith, Napoleon:

King Soglin

Soglin, Paul:

Why People Hate Madison, Nation of Cowards

Sondreal, Jerry:

Indian Takers

Steele, John:

Take a Stand Against Bad Cops

Steffen, Gary:

Scouting for Bigotry

Stein, Dan:

Without a Remedy

Steinbeck, John:

Farley and Me

Steingass, Susan:

Supreme Shift

Stephens, Marla:

The Undoing of Brian Burke

Stewart, Jon:

America the Beautiful. No, Really

Still, Tom:

Kill the Poor

Stockwell, Richard:

A Reasonable Doubt

Stolz, Jan:

Scouting for Bigotry

Stone, Oliver:

The H-Bomb Case Revisited

Stower, Harvey:

Indian Takers

Strohl, Joe:

Kill the Poor

Sullivan, Michael:

Sizing Up Supermax

Sykes, Charlie:

My Free Lunch with Tommy

Szwaja, Joe:

A Time for Anger

Taff, Jerry:

How I Helped Kill The Crazy Shepherd

Taffora, Ray:

Indian Takers

Taggart, Patrick:

Free at Last

Tallman, John:

A Reasonable Doubt

Taylor, Lewis:

Indian Takers

Temin, Howard:

Obsession

Thomas, Victoria:

Obsession

Thompson, Tommy:

Kill the Poor, My Free Lunch with Tommy

Thoreau, Henry David:

A Nation of Cowards

Tidd, Barbara:

Indian Takers

Tinker, Steven:

A Reasonable Doubt

Torricelli, Robert:

Indian Takers

Tries, John:

Indian Takers

Van Wagner, Chris:

Take a Stand Against Bad Cops

Varian, Kim:

The Trial of Gordy Sussman

Veloon, Elnora:

Obsession

Veloon, Melvin:

Obsession

Wagner, Dave:

Radicalism and Regret

Warren, Robert W.:

The H-Bomb Case Revisited

Washington, Mary:

Indian Takers

Webster, John:

Let’s Talk About the Animals

Wheeler, Claire:

Farley and Me

Wilcox, Jon:

Supreme Shift

Wiley, John:

Let’s Talk About the Animals

Williams, Richard:

Take a Stand Against Bad Cops

Williamson, Brady:

The H-Bomb Case Revisited

Willis, Ruth:

Free at Last

Wineke, Joe:

Wisconsin's Ethical Crisis

Worman, Jeff:

How I Helped Kill The Crazy Shepherd

Wright, Frank Lloyd:

King Soglin

Wulf, Ken:

To Kill a Turkey

Yovovich, Michael:

Supreme Shift

Zellmer, Barbara:

What Happened in Florence County?

Zipperer, Bert:

The Scourge of Ethics

Watchdog: Lloyd Kincaid through Jim Pugh

2011-03-28T00:00:00.020-05:00

Jim Pugh

Kincaid, Lloyd:

What happened in Florence County?

King, Douglas:

Wisconsin’s Ethical Crisis

King, James:

Farley and Me

Kinsley, Michael:

Snuff Out the Collusion

Kirwan, Laurie:

Indian Takers

Klang, John:

Free at Last

Klang, Sue:

Free at Last

Knoll, Erwin:

In Remembrance of Erwin Knoll, The H-Bomb Case Revisited

Kotz, Petr:

How I Helped Kill The Crazy Shepherd

Krakauer, Jon:

Farley and Me

Kreisler, Marcy:

Scouting for Bigotry

Krueger, Moria:

Obsession

La Follette, Bob:

Fighting Bronson

Lacey, Ernest:

Take a Stand Against Bad Cops

Ladwig, Bonnie:

The Undoing of Brian Burke

Lasker, David:

Take a Stand Against Bad Cops

Lehnherr, Jerry:

Skydive!

Lengfeld, Jay:

Just Say No, Stupid

Levitan, Stu:

Madison R.F.D.

Leyden, Tom:

The Media’s Acid Test

Liedl, Mark:

My Free Lunch with Tommy

Liethen, Michael:

Indian Takers

Lipton, Patricia:

Snuff Out the Collusion

Loftus, Tom:

Kill the Poor

Longworth, Gail:

Scouting for Bigotry

Lueders, Lorenz Frederick:

Getting Personal

Luedke, Kenneth:

Election Night with the Dane County GOP

Maloney, John:

Supreme Shift

Manning, Joe:

The H-Bomb Case Revisited

Marefke, James:

What happened in Florence County?

Marolt, Rick:

My Monkey

Martin, James:

The Trial of Gordy Sussman

Matthews, John:

My Free Lunch with Tommy

McBride, Jessica:

Wisconsin's Ethical Crisis

McCabe, Mike:

Supreme Shift

McCain, John:

Election Night with the Dane County GOP

McCallum, Scott:

Like Father, Like Son; The Undoing of Brian Burke

McCallum, Zachary:

Like Father, Like Son

McCarter, Jim:

How I Helped Kill The Crazy Shepherd

McCrea, Ron:

The H-Bomb Case Revisited

McNally, Joel:

A Howl for Allen Ginsberg

Meesouk, Vairin:

The End of Mercy

Mengesha, Tad:

What Happened in Florence County?

Merrill, Louis:

Indian Takers

Meseberg, Sue:

Skydive!

Milfred, Terry:

Free at Last

Miller, John:

To Kill a Turkey

Minardi, Tony:

Obsession

Minz, Morton:

The H-Bomb Case Revisited

Mitchell, John:

The H-Bomb Case Revisited

Mitchell, Todd:

Why Hate Shouldn’t Be Illegal

Moakley, Joe:

Radicalism and Regret

Moon, Rev.:

How I Helped Kill The Crazy Shepherd

Moore, Gary:

Obsession

Moore, Gwendolynne:

Sizing Up Supermax

Moore, Michael:

My Free Lunch with Tommy; How I Helped Kill The Crazy Shepherd

Morland, Howard:

The H-Bomb Case Revisited

Mosay, Archie:

Mosay, Archie

Mosay, Kenny:

Indian Takers

Mowat, Farley:

Farley and Me

Murphy, Michael:

The Undoing of Brian Burke

Nader, Ralph:

A Font of Moral Courage

Nerison, Karen:

Indian Takers

Newby, Melany:

A Reasonable Doubt

Nicks, Diane:

Without a Remedy

Ninneman, Margot:

Obsession

Ninneman, Michelle:

Obsession

Ninneman, Terry:

Obsession

Nixon, Richard:

Radicalism and Regret; The H-Bomb Case Revisited

Norquist, John:

The Undoing of Brian Burke

North, Oliver:

Radicalism and Regret

Norton, W.P.:

Obsession

Nugent, Ted:

My Free Lunch with Tommy

Obama, Barack:

An Excruciating Visit to the Dentist, Election Night with the Dane County GOP

Olson, Larry:

Madison R.F.D.

Palin, Sarah:

Election Night with the Dane County GOP

Palmer, Roy:

Indian Takers

Pastis, Stephan:

Protecting Readers from Ideas

Paul, Ron:

An Excruciating Visit to the Dentist

Payne, Bob “Goldie”:

Skydive!

Percy, Charles:

The H-Bomb Case Revisited

Peterson, Dennis:

What happened in Florence County?

Phelps, Rick:

A Nation of Cowards

Pines, Lester:

The Undoing of Brian Burke

Pollan, Michael:

Farley and Me, To Kill a Turkey

Pollard, Bill:

Free at Last

Prisk, Brannon:

Free at Last

Procell, Adam:

Sizing Up Supermax

Prohaska, Frederick (Rick):

What Happened in Florence County?

Prosser, David:

Supreme Shift

Pugh, Jim:

Supreme Shift

UPDATE: The death of Christopher Hitchens, Opus 125.3 Cancer Elite

2011-03-21T15:02:00.000-05:00

Not much of a saint after all.

"I'm a member of a cancer elite," quoth Christopher Hitchens on the March 6th broadcast of 60 Minutes.

Well isn't that a jolly clever way to say it! But that's the sort of English spin we expect Hitchens to serve us. "Cancer elite" sounds a damnedsight more poetic, at least, than either cancer of the gullet or "esophageal cancer," which is what the white-coats call it.

However you call it, it's the same kind of cancer that took down my old man, G.M. Norton -- Emperor Norton II to his many loyalists. He liked his drink, same as Hitch, and turned his final days into something like a passage into grace. So I'm okay with the slogan, "cancer elite."

No rage, rage against the dying of the light for either of those fellows.

--------

Catch part one of my ongoing series, The Death of Christopher Hitchens, here

--------

Hitchens has given much offense to many people in books, lectures and debates, and no small amount of comfort to many others -- such as me -- with the fearlessness he's shown in butchering a mighty herd of sacred cows (the dubiously sainted Mother Teresa, for example, about which more here later).

We'll be monitoring Hitchens' progress closely here over the course of the time that he has left. And doing our best to stear clear of those nasty habits (no pun intended, Mother) that are the price of admission to that elite club.

The Emperor Project

2011-03-21T15:01:00.000-05:00

Emperor G.M. Norton II, Supreme Leader of the Whelmed, Lord High Reprobate, Grand Ogle of Fredonia, Sun Vizer of Plymouth, Marquis du Bijou, Earl of Bedlam, Fifth of Bourbon and Zircon of Primordia, Ottoman of Futonia, Light of Entropy, Widget of God

"Death comes for some of us like a chill desert wind. Others imagine boney fingers curled around the handle of a scythe. My father saw the blond, beautiful Jessica Lange in "All That Jazz." He was determined to meet the end with as much style as he could muster—preferably on a frozen Madison lake, in the middle of the night, with an Army .45 calibre handgun. The image would be completed by a white scarf, a split of champagne, a tattered copy of Rilke's verse and a single red rose ..."

THE CALL CAME late one weekday night. It was Todd Moore with another one of his crazy schemes. He called it ''The Emperor Project,” and my father was the centerpiece of it.

The first Emperor Norton was an Englishman named Joshua Norton who came to gold-rush San Francisco in hopes of striking it rich. He made a fortune but soon lost everything speculating on rice. Norton's mind snapped. He declared himself Emperor of America and Protector of Mexico, got a bicycle, and started pedaling around the streets of San Francisco demanding tribute. People bowed, scraped and offered free meals to their mad monarch. He died convinced of his regality.

My father never dabbled in any commodities outside a barroom or donut shop. But he was possessed of a certain sovereign scowl, accented by an imperious Beethoven brow. Throw in the salt-and-pepper hair, Yukon Jack mustache and slightly crooked 6'1'' frame and you had the perfect candidate to restore the monarchy.

''The basic gestalt will be Bukowsky meets the Hapsburgs, with a healthy dose of Farouk thrown in,” Moore said. ''Rather than play against type, we'll just toss any notions of benevolence right at the start. His Mendacity will issue his own money and stamps. He will sell deeds and titles. He will have a Web site, the better to foist other merchandise on his followers. They will be known collectively as The Whelmed.''

The longer my friend went on, the more confident I became. The coin of Norton II's realm would be called the Bunion. Upon high-denomination Bunions would be inscribed various Latin phrases: Porcus En Volatu (When Pigs Fly), and whatever the translation is for Oh, My Aching Dogs. The Emperor would issue proclamations and offer to settle disputes between tiny Third World nations.

Then there were the titles: Supreme Leader of the Whelmed, Lord High Reprobate, Grand Ogle of Fredonia, Sun Vizer of Plymouth, Marquis du Bijou, Earl of Bedlam, Fifth of Bourbon and Zircon of Primordia, Ottoman of Futonia, Light of Entropy, Widget of God, etc., etc.

Moore had worked a lot of jobs—teenage garbage man in Chicago, restaurant worker and performance artist in Seattle, small-town underground newsweekly publisher in Galesburg, Illinois. Now he was sliding into his mid-forties and an unprecedented second year as director of the Fort Atkinson, Wis., animal shelter. But it had already become clear that his biggest talent of all was for creating situations.

click to next part: The Emperor Project/Two: Lutheran grit and amazing grace

Naomi Campbell slipped a nip at Paul Tatum's hotel. Sharon Stone did some laps in the pool. Each woman was linked with a leading man in the unsolved murder mystery of Tatum in Russia. One of those men is still alive now

2011-03-21T15:00:00.000-05:00

I remember when I saw Naomi Campbell slip a nip at the Radisson-Slavjanskaya Hotel in Moscow. It was a hot summer day in 1995 when the ebony breasts of the British supermodel burst from her spaghetti-strap top.

Around 100 Russian reporters, photographers and I captured the moment in a stuffy conference room of the hotel affectionately known to many of us as “the Slav.”

Sharon Stone made her own sojurn to the Slav a year later. The American movie goddess got far more press attention for taking some laps in the hotel swimming pool.

UNSOLVED MOSCOW MURDER MYSTERY OF PAUL TATUM: MORE!

Naomi Campbell slipped a nip there. Sharon Stone did some laps in the pool. Each woman was linked with a leading man in the murder mystery of Paul Tatum in Russia. One of those men is dead today

Paul Tatum's unsolved murder in Moscow

Paul Tatum v. Radisson-Slavjanskaya

Paul Tatum lies buried outside Moscow under the Russian double cross.There's no better symbol for the story of Tatum in Russia

Wrong date. Wrong age.

When will the Times correct the record?

Jack Kelley's shame

Polite like a prison bitch

Russian tombstone for Paul Tatum

$60 million now for Moscow share of Slav?

Hotel founder Paul Tatum died broke.

Paul Tatum murder still a mystery after 15 years

The Emperor Project Two: Lutheran grit and amazing grace

2011-03-21T14:55:00.003-05:00

continued from The Emperor Project

His latest handiwork was a classic case in point: the presidential campaign of his white bulldog Louis. The gambit generated thousands of dollars for the shelter and got hits on CNN, USA TODAY and Australian radio. But Moore promised the emperor gig would leave Louis le Pooch for President in the shade. By the time he got to the climax—a coronation on a shoe-shine stand in San Francisco—I was sold.

''This thing has legs,'' I said. Best of all, my father wouldn't have to do anything: just supply a photograph for the Internet page where we'd sell the ancillary product line, show up for the coronation, and start raking in the dough. But a funny thing happened on the way to that shoe-shine stand.

It was the merry month of May. Norton II was winding down his second year substitute teaching at high schools in his hometown of Pocatello, Idaho. Mormonism and survivalist ideology had long replaced the potato as the chief export in the land of Mickey Militia and Trailer Tricia. Norton hated it.

Still, he felt some kind of duty to spend time with his mother, grandma Laverne Norton, a kind and bookish woman who weathered the shortcomings of those around her with equal portions of Lutheran grit and amazing grace. She had three brothers, my aged grand uncles Luke, Luther and Lyman. The rest of the family rounded out the cast like a country-western Norman Rockwell painting on acid: my 23-year-old cousin Rachel, with her high-piled honky-tonk hair and newborn baby. Rachel's sweet sister Katie, wise far beyond her ten years.

Their mother, my forty-something aunt Crystal, a hard-partying country woman who grinds up pills and potions for the prisoners in the county hoosegow when she's not standing behind a bar or in front of one.

Decades ago, Glen Michael Norton had prepared for his great escape by turning inwards and away from the hardscrabble crucible of his depression-era childhood. First it was books—H.L. Mencken, Erich Maria Remarque, Joseph Conrad. Then came radio, and the blue ribbon in a high school contest for best W.C. Fields impersonation. At 20 he signed up for the Army and shipped off for West Germany, where he drove an armored personnel carrier, machine-gunned spiders, lost his virginity and got drunk for the next three years. After his discharge in 1959, my father came back to the states, took the wet tour through Chicago and Milwaukee and finally found himself attending Idaho State University in Pokey on the G.I. Bill teat.

1965 was a good year for music; for my father, who graduated and won the Idaho Writer's League first prize for fiction; and for me, who was born. Things seemed to go downhill from there. While my mother went to Berkeley, he held a post-office job in Haight-Ashbury in '67. They left so he could take a high school teaching job in a one-horse Wisconsin town called Tomahawk in '68. He lost it a year later and they split up. Then came life with a gaggle of bearded Jewish radicals at a farm commune outside Madison. He passed the '70s in a blur of beer and business, running a gypsy furniture moving company out of the back of a '57 Chevy pickup.

next: The Emperor Project/Three: All that jazz

The Emperor Project Three: All that jazz

2011-03-21T14:55:00.001-05:00

continued from The Emperor Project/Two: Lutheran grit and amazing grace

Before you could blink, it was Morning in Ronald Reagan's America, and the future emperor's chariot was a donut van. He spent the next decade behind the wheel. Somewhere in there he found the time to earn a second degree, this one in teaching. He spent most of the early '90s substituting in the inner-city schools of Milwaukee, away from the yuppie smugness of Madison. When the spirit moved he would circle back to Pocatello and live there until the Mormons and militias became too much to bear. Then it was back to Madison for the summer before another Milwaukee school year. He was going to do it all over again one last time before he retired next year. Too bad Death had other plans.

The view from his room at William S. Middleton Memorial Veteran's Administration hospital included a sparkling view of Lake Mendota, the lush greenery of Picnic Point, and an American flag snapping in the wind. I figured they gave the good rooms to the hardest cases, and it turns out I was right: the cancer had spread so far from his esophagus that his blood had deposited the stuff everywhere.

Swimming slowly through an intravenous sea of morphine, my father got ready for his last trip. One of the first letters was to a former student from Tomahawk High School.

"Terminal with extreme prejudice,'' he wrote.

One day a Medflight chopper landed on the bay outside his window.

"Black helicopter,'' he murmured, looking skywards with his clear blue eyes. Visitors kept him amused, and a fast-talking, flashing-eyed Austro-Hungarian horsewoman friend of mine named Patrice brought flowers from her garden.

A week after admission the emperor got himself discharged against medical advice. Not only was the news bad, but he had lost the room with the good view. Relocated to my apartment, he began the countdown.

Death comes for some of us like a chill desert wind. Others imagine boney fingers gripping the handle of a scythe. My father saw the blond, beautiful Jessica Lange in "All That Jazz." He was determined to meet the end with as much style as he could muster—preferably on a frozen Madison lake, in the middle of the night, with an Army .45 calibre handgun. The image would be completed by a white scarf, a split of champagne, a tattered copy of Rilke's verse and a single red rose. Patrice promised to handle the floral arrangement.

Black overcoat, white snow, red blood, steam rising over the body on the frozen ice—it sounded beautiful as the vision was spun out over a bottle of Korbel extra dry at a dinner graced by our equestrienne colleague. They raised their glasses and he made the final toast: "Vive la morte.'' He had seven days to live.

next: The Emperor Project/Four: Last words

The Emperor Project Four: Last words

2011-03-21T14:55:00.000-05:00

continued from The Emperor Project/Three: All that jazz

Moore called again several nights later. Watching people's parents die had developed into a kind of sideline, he explained, his Midwestern twang burbling up slowly from the bottom of a whiskey-and-water ocean. The Emperor Project was history, of course. But even this final wrinkle confirmed the essential rightness of the concept, Moore figured.

"Most people who know they're going to die turn into wining lumps of protoplasm and primal fear,'' he said. "But Norton's going out with real courage. He's got a ton of class. And it makes perfect sense, considering the life he led. The guy spent his life with a phenomenal amount of courage. He was a kind of POW of corporate America. He never caved. And the thing is, I'm on the same curve.'' The donut curve, I said to myself.

The big plan hit a snag. This being liberal Madison, it was impossible to buy a.45 within city limits. And there was the mess to consider. Besides, the lakes wouldn't freeze for another six months. With some reluctance, the emperor settled on an alternative to the Rommel option.

Doctor Lisa Moody of the VA was a brunette and no Jessica Lange, but she was pretty enough, and she had prescribed a sufficient quantity of sublingual morphine capsules to either keep a man in dreamland for three months or kill ten in a night.

Next weekend was Friday the 13th, followed by Flag Day on Saturday and Father's Day on Sunday. So he had his pick of ironic dates to do the deed. In the event, fate had the last word. That Saturday afternoon he walked wrong, hurt his right leg and lay in bed suffused under a sweaty panic, tormented by the vision of being strapped to a hospital bed for half a year while he watched his body turn to dog food.

I helped him get ready: pint of Absolut vodka, drinking glass, bottle of morphine, Dramamine to settle the stomach. It was around 6 p.m. We exchanged last words.

"I love you,'' he said. It was the first time he'd ever said the words to me. I went to spend the night at Patrice's country dacha.

As he worked on the vodka and the 125 remaining capsules, the phone rang. It was a former student from the Tomahawk days.

"Funny you should call,'' my father said. They talked for around half an hour.

next: "A pleasant evening, all in all."

The Emperor Project Five: "A pleasant evening, all in all.''

2011-03-21T14:54:00.000-05:00

continued from The Emperor Project/Four: Last words

Around midnight I had the feeling that it was over.

Moore met the cops the next morning at my place. They found three notes. The first one was in the mailbox with the front door key. "Todd, enter with care; keys are expensive! Sorry about brunch. N.''

The second was an admonition: "I am not ending my own life out of despondency over ill health, but rather taking advantage of an incredible piece of good fortune in the form of all those dreamy little pills, in the more than hospitable setting provided by my son and his and my friends. All of these are a fat wallet found on the sidewalk with no ID in it.''

The third recorded the phone call, time of ingestion—8:15 p.m.—and some last words: "This should do it. A pleasant evening, all in all.'' On this note was a drawing of a heart in the form of skull and crossbones torn into lower and upper halves.

The grizzled police sergeant nodded as Moore told the story of the Idaho fiction prize, the emperor project, the diagnosis. When he came to the donut-delivery years in Madison, the sergeant paused and looked thoughtful: “You know, I probably knew him.''

The morgue boys came and went. The deputy coroner—a sweet-voiced blonde named Kristi—took the pills and notes for evidence. I never had to see the body.

Two weeks later I wrote the obituary, which they published along with the tiny logo of an American flag. The text swooped over the highlights, avoiding too much detail and skirting the ragged edges. After all, these things are for the living, and there was always the folks back in Pocatello to consider. Besides, we Nortons always did look better on paper anyway.

(Author's note: I wrote this in 1997, a couple of months after the events described.)

Russian Criminal Tattoo archives

2011-03-20T00:29:00.001-05:00

Back to Paul Tatum in Wikipedia

The hitmen who stalk Russia (c) BBC, 2006

2011-03-20T00:14:00.001-05:00

Last Updated: Sunday, 8 October 2006, 15:57 GMT 16:57 UK

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Printable version

The hitmen who stalk Russia

By Patrick Jackson
BBC News

The killing of journalist Anna Politkovskaya bore the hallmarks of a contract killing, according to anonymous police sources interviewed by Russian media.

Russian films like Zhmurki have captured the world of the hitmen

The hitman or killer(pronounced "keeler" in Russian) is a phenomenon of the country's shock transition from communism to a market economy.
You would use the Russian verb zakazat' to order a pizza or a plane ticket but when you "order someone", in the popular parlance, it means you want them killed by one of these hired hitmen.
If Russian media accounts are to be believed, his wages can range from a modest $100 to sums running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on the target.
When Ms Politkovskaya was shot at her home, there did not appear to be any attempt at robbery and the presumed weapon, a Makarov pistol, was left at the scene together with its used cartridges.
When Russian television broadcast CCTV footage from the apartment block entrance, it showed the chief suspect to be a thin man in a baseball cap, his face a blur.
If this was a contract killing, identifying the perpetrator - and those behind him - will be difficult.
Open season
One of my memories of Moscow in the winter of 1996 was passing a set of bullet-holes in a subway on my way to work.

SUSPECTED CONTRACT KILLINGS

October 2006 - campaigning Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya shot dead in Moscow

Sept 2006 - first deputy chairman of Russia's central bank Andrei Kozlov shot dead in Moscow

Oct 2005 - former bank head Alexander Slesarev gunned down near Moscow

July 2004 - US editor of Forbes' Russian edition Paul Klebnikov shot dead in Moscow

Oct 2002 - Magadan governor Valentin Tsvetkov killed in Moscow

Nov 1998 - liberal MP Galina Starovoitova killed in St Petersburg

March 1995 - leading journalist Vladislav Listyev shot dead in Moscow

Nobody seemed in a rush to fix the chipped tiles, just a short distance from a luxury hotel.
For those who knew, the holes marked the spot where US businessman Paul Tatum was machine-gunned to death.
The chief lesson from his unsolved death appeared to be that prominent foreigners could be targets too.
The death of much-loved TV anchorman Vlad Listyev the previous year had already established that fame was no protection from the hired guns.
A wave of contract killings washed through Russia in the 1990s, sweeping away new bankers and businessmen.
With the security apparatus in freefall and war raging in the Caucasus, the country seemed awash with guns. Another memory for me is descending an empty escalator in a metro station beside Red Square one night and seeing one "wide boy" slapping another on his knees as he held a pistol to his head.
By the early years of this century - with Vladimir Putin in power - the wave seemed to be receding.
And then came the murder of another American, Forbes journalist Paul Klebnikov, in 2004 and, this September, deputy head of the Central Bank Andrei Kozlov.
Both were shot dead - Klebnikov outside his office, Kozlov in his car.
Nobody has ever been convicted of their murders despite hopes for a while that the Klebnikov case would be solved.
But while "unsolved" is a word you associate almost automatically with contract killings in Russia, occasionally a killer is caught.
1990s survivors
Alexander Solonik, aka Alexander The Great, aka superkiller, confessed to assassinating a string of Moscow underworld figures in the early 1990s without, it is said, revealing his paymasters.

The killer of Politkovskaya appears to have been caught on CCTV

He also cut a bloody swathe through the capital's police force before his arrest in 1994.
Solonik's main "qualifications" for the work of a hired killer appear to have been a period of military service, an early spell in prison, good physical fitness and a reputed ability to shoot with both hands.
Escaping from Moscow's famous Matrosskaya Tishina (Sailor's Rest) prison in 1995, he fled abroad only to be murdered along with his girl-friend in Greece a couple of years later.

Russian film director Alexei Balabanov's 2005 black comedy Zhmurki (Blind Man's Buff), about hitmen, begins in a morgue where some fresh corpses are soon added to the display.
Sub-titled "For those who survived the '90s", it struck a popular chord, capturing a grotesque world of casual killers, rapacious New Russians and cowed police.
There may be fewer raspberry-red blazers and long leather jackets in Moscow today, and the city now teems with hard-faced police, but it seems the phenomenon of the killer survived the '90s too.

Moscow murder-mystery a thought-free, fact-erasing, race-based, fumbling, shiftless, blood-labeling gibberish of a history

2011-03-19T15:20:00.097-05:00

Paul Tatum (1955-1996) was an American businessman who was killed on November 3, 1996, in a Moscow metro station close to his hotel. Tatum was operating a Hotel Joint Venture with a Chechen businessman named Umar Dzhabrailov. Tatum founded the American Business Centre and became part-owner of the Radisson Slavyankaya Hotel, an upscale hotel in Moscow, which catered to foreign businessmen and high-end guests.

Go ahead. Cut and paste those 63 words into that part of your homework assignment, blogpost, or self-published memoir that may pertain to the first known contract killing of an American in Russia. Unless, of course, you have an issue with passing off others' words as your own.

Apart from the whole plagiarism thing, you'd seem to be standing on solid factual ground. Because anybody who bothered to check would find verification in those same 63 words in paragraph one of the sole section on the Tatum killing to be found in the planet's most-popular free online website.

Pathetic is what you'd call a missing hyphen and a string of burned-out bulbs behind the "z" on the sign out front of the Ritz-Carlton. Well, it's no less pathetic to take away the same punctuation while also dropping the final "s" from "Radisson Slavyan_kaya." The effect is one of seediness and degeneration, a breakdown of the once-great name of a once-grand dame who knew how to keep her hyphens close and her consonants closer. A matriarch who was not known to be forgiving at the skimming of an extra letter off her back end.

Forget the namby pamby passive wording ("he was killed") that quietly subtracts from the crime scene the gunman who fired the AK-74 assault rifle that killed Paul Tatum.

Nevermind the laziness that puts Tatum "in a Moscow metro station" instead of showing his actual position when 11 of the 20 shots fired tore into the base of his skull and upper back while Tatum was walking down and off the stairwell from the street to the underground turnstile that opens onto Moscow's cavernous, ornately decorated Metro Kievskaya.

Ignore the utter randomness of the majuscule "H" in "Hotel Joint Venture." Set aside the stink of the race-based blood label embedded in the placement of "Chechen" before "businessman." Dismiss from your thoughts the immediate guilty verdict that's doubtless been delivered by the placement of a sentence about a dead man before a sentence about a live one who stood to gain from the death.

Absolve the arbitrary absence of Radisson Hotels International, the third point in the triangle that ran the joint venture. Get over the clumsy misnaming ("American") of Tatum's company Americom, likewise the pointless anglicization ("Centre") of his Business Centers — to say nothing of their mysterious mutation from the original plural to the incorrect singular, all in the same breath.

Ask not the intent of cutting Tatum down to mere "part-owner" of the hotel JV, when in fact Tatum held no less than 80 percent of the U.S.'s half of the pie. Overlook the hyphen that has no place coming between "part" and "owner." The pesky little backsliding punctuator seems to have slipped from its rightful place between "Radisson" and "Slavyankaya" (sic).

Pathetic is what you'd call a missing hyphen and a string of burned-out bulbs behind the "z" on the sign out front of the Ritz-Carlton. Well, it's no less pathetic to take away the same punctuation while also dropping the final "s" from "Radisson Slavyan_kaya." The effect is one of seediness and degeneration, a breakdown of the once-great name of a once-grand dame who knew how to keep her hyphens close and her consonants closer. A matriarch who was not known to be forgiving at the skimming of an extra letter off her back end.

Let all these things go. God knows it's such a bother to look things up anyway. And it's so much less hassle to calmly receive any grab-bag of shiftless, fumbling, thought-free, fact-erasing, race-based, blood-labeling, randomized gibberish of a history that leaves you far worse informed about the assassination of Paul Tatum than if you never saw it at all.

In general, though, be of good cheer: only 193 words of further enlightenment remain to be examined. See them in the special section on the restoration of factual history to the story of Paul Tatum in Wikipedia.

W.P. NORTON

WORSHIP THIS, BITCHES

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Morris Philipson, 1926­-2011

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30-ROCK JACK SPEAKS FOR ALL OF US NOW

THE BOURNE IDENTITY BLOGS “Nobody does the right thing.”

THE BOURNE IDENTITY BLOGS–2 “Sir, what do you want to do!”

All is revealed in BI–3: “To show them what kind of war we are fighting!”

THE BOURNE IDENTITY BLOGS–3 “To show them what kind of war we are fighting!”

THE BOURNE IDENTITY BLOGS–4 “Look at what they make you give.”

THE BOURNE IDENTITY BLOGS–5 “I’m on my own side now.”

THE BOURNE IDENTITY BLOGS–6 “Got any ID?”

Ode to Guitar George...NEW MATERIAL & VIDEO/see below

Watchdog: Shirley Abrahamson through Chris Deisinger

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UPDATE: The death of Christopher Hitchens, Opus 125.3 Cancer Elite

The Emperor Project

Naomi Campbell slipped a nip at Paul Tatum's hotel. Sharon Stone did some laps in the pool. Each woman was linked with a leading man in the unsolved murder mystery of Tatum in Russia. One of those men is still alive now

The Emperor Project Two: Lutheran grit and amazing grace

The Emperor Project Three: All that jazz

The Emperor Project Four: Last words

The Emperor Project Five: "A pleasant evening, all in all.''

Russian Criminal Tattoo archives

The hitmen who stalk Russia (c) BBC, 2006

Moscow murder-mystery a thought-free, fact-erasing, race-based, fumbling, shiftless, blood-labeling gibberish of a history

Morris Philipson, 1926-2011