Ruminatrix
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Saturday, May 10, 2003
Baghdad bank job
A lot of money went missing in the last days of the ancien regime in Baghdad. Tuesday's NYT reported that Qusay Hussein and Abid al Hasmid Masood -- assistant to the Iraqi president -- made a large withdrawal around 4 am on March 18th, hours before the first bombs struck Baghdad.
That's $900 million, plus Euros 100m -- or $1bn in cash.
So why was there so much specie floating around the Central Bank? Part of the answer is the Kirkuk-Banias pipeline. Re-opened in 1997, this conduit from the Northern Iraq fields to the Syrian port of Banias (or Baniyas) was used by Iraq to smuggle between 100,000 and 200,000 barrels of oil per day in circumvention of the UN oil-for-food program. Syria pretended the oil was from its own fields and paid the Iraqis off in cash to the tune of $6.6bn between 1997 and 2001. Its existence is not exactly secret: Google turns up 60-odd hits for "Kirkuk-Banias," mostly in oil-industry sources.
The best-known spigot suspected of filling Mr. Hussein's personal coffers was Iraq's oldest oil pipeline, from the northern oil fields around Kirkuk to Syria's Mediterranean port, Baniyas.Question: Why did it take the American press until 2003 to find out about the smuggling? This smuggling can't exactly have been a secret to US intelligence agencies, can it?
The pipeline pumped oil that was sold at cut-rate prices to Syria in return for kickbacks to the Hussein government, according to oil analysts and American officials.
Although American officials complained that the pipeline circumvented economic sanctions, it remained open until United States forces closed it last month.
"Syria continually denied doing it, they said they were testing the line," said James Placke, an oil analyst with Cambridge Energy Research Associates. "Well, they tested the line for two and a half years at the rate of about 150,000 to 200,000 barrels a day."
Since 1996, the United Nations has had official control of all Iraqi oil profits, which were to be used to purchase food and other relief supplies for Iraqi civilians.
While the United Nations has defended its oversight of the program, the General Accounting Office estimated last year that oil smuggling and other kickbacks linked to the United Nations program allowed Mr. Hussein to steal about $6.6 billion between 1997 and 2001.
Diving for dollars
So early last night I serve two groups at the bar. They're asking for wines-by-the-glass suggestions and it goes really well. I'm batting 100% -- in both cases they love the wines I'm steering them towards. They're not connoisseurs, but not total novices either. The labels aren't what's important here -- it's just fun when you see the "I really like this glass" light go on in someone's eyes. Or when they write down the name so they can look for it at the store.
Anyway, both parties ask for their checks at the same time, we do the credit card thing and I hand off the slips to the other bartender at the service station to ring in the charge tips. It's getting busy, so maybe ten or fifteen minutes go by before I think to look at those charge slips. There's only one slip -- we can't find the other. Without the slip we won't get the tip -- we don't know how much they left, but I'm guessing it was pretty decent.
I know I can't stop the show to hunt down a piece of paper. Patience is required -- several hours' worth. But for about five hours I'm pissed off at myself for not putting the slip in a safe place. (One of us probably threw it away the slip, figuring it was a duplicate copy of the other check). Still, eventually we isolate the trash can at his station and set it aside.
Five hours later, well after midnight, I take the can back to the kitchen, take off my dress shirt -- no sense in getting that dirty -- and start trash-diving in my undershirt. The Senegalese dishwasher, gives me some rubber gloves to wear, bless him. Now it's good old-fashioned up-to-the-forearms diving for a couple of three-inch slips among a midden of coffee-grounds and lemon wedges and other food-industry sludge, bulked up with maybe a hundred time-printed of paper slips -- drink and coffee orders and all the rest. Watch out for broken glass on the way down. It's like an archaeological dig: in each stratum the printout times get earlier. Look, here are some handwritten notes on the chef's cheese selections of the day, there are the little cans of juice we opened near the start of the shift. We're back in the right epoch, circa 7pm, let's see what we've got.
After ten minutes I retrieve two scrunched bits of espresso-tanned and wine-stained paper and yes, I feel like Schliemann at Troy. As I wave them in triumph, the sommelier walks into the kitchen --impeccably dressed as usual -- and looks at me like I've lost my mind. Here's $28 more for the tip pool. I'll get about three of those dolllars, but it's the finding the damn thing that makes my day -- because I knew those people had had a good time...Another day, another dollar.
Friday, May 09, 2003
Having a Google moment
So the other day I'm looking online for more about the artist Noritoshi Hirakawa, who was mentioned here. There's not a whole lot out there about him. One review of his work published in World Art (Melbourne 1996), by the theorist Catherine Lumby, is entitled "Pubic Image". Quite clever, as one of Hirakawa's shows involved photographs of women he met in Tokyo's streets squatting knickerless in public parks and squares.
But I couldn't find the Lumby article, so I Googled
"pubic+image", kinda wondering what rich mix I'd haul in over the transom.
All but three of the first 50-odd results for that search were typos for "public image" (a few about the band PIL, but most not). It doesn't mean anything, but it's not what I would have expected. Maybe this relates to Jim's open question on the way Google will likely change language. Humor is so un-XML-friendly. Or maybe web-searching is so weirdly literal that we'll just see all our typos immortalized like the strange Cambrian forms of the Burgess Shale.
Lapse
I ask J if she can remember the name of the guys who do our vaccuum cleaner's annual service/HEPA filter fix. She too draws a blank, replying: "But if you hadn't asked me, I could have told you." And she would have, too.
Thursday, May 08, 2003
Exterminate All the Brutes
The New York artist Catherine Chalmer's work involves photographing animals eating each other and large prints of cockroaches. In the latest work cockroaches are shown "executed" in a number of ways -- hanged with thread, electrocuted in a tiny wooden chair, burned at the stake. There's a short intro (groan, NYTimes link).
Behind her animal-scene pieces are two opposed impulses: earlier works de-sentimentalized the natural world, showed its inherent eat-and-be-eaten violence; this is about how humans project their fantasies and fears onto species, a project that had its most notable used in the Nazi cinema -- but is also present in American movies (Them, The Fly) or Paul Verhoeven's kinky Riefensthal-inspired Starship Troopers:
In 2001 an Artnews feature about Ms. Chalmers said she was planning some cockroach executions. Irate letters poured in. A few years before that, during a book signing for "Food Chain," which includes pictures of a snake strangling a rat and a mantis chewing off its mate's head, an angry vegetarian came up to Ms. Chalmers and called her a Nazi.Aha, history rears its ugly head! On a personal note, I never saw a cockroach until I moved to America. So while I don't like them exactly, I just don't feel the visceral hatred of them that Chalmers is invoking in this work. Also, thinking about this as a parent reminds me of how much we anthropomorphize animals when talking with children and how the categories into which we divide them -- pets, zoo and farm animals, "food", vermin, etc, inevitably shape our interactions with them.
The upshot, Ms. Chalmers said, was, "I bent over backwards not to hurt anything." With Hollywood movies no one wonders whether people are actually being killed, she noted. But with video, people expect honesty.
That did not stop her from making a video of roaches in a gas chamber. As the video begins, you see the misty gray air inside the chamber. The roaches are dead on their backs. Then a few legs twitch. Soon the air begins to clear. You can see the bricks of the gas chamber and the little pipe through which the gas came in. More and more roach legs and antennae wiggle. The sounds of whispers, giggling and breathing fill the air. Soon the roaches are crawling everywhere. It is the cockroach equivalent of Martin Amis's Holocaust novel, "Time's Arrow," in which time runs backward.
While making this video, Ms. Chalmers said, she got very upset, not because of the Holocaust parallel but because she thought she had actually put the roaches through an agonizing death. Previously she had always knocked her roaches out by chilling them. But Betty Faber, an entomologist, told her to try carbon dioxide. So she put the roaches in the chamber and with a pipe pumped in the gas from dry ice, which is frozen carbon dioxide. The roaches went into "dramatic convulsions," she said. "They tossed themselves all over the place, threw themselves against the walls. Then they all fell on their backs."
She thought: "I can't show this. It's visually too disturbing." But then, as the videotape kept rolling and the dry ice cleared, the cockroaches rose from the dead. Their legs started kicking. "The most beautiful part is their getting up," Ms. Chalmers said. She decided to show the uncut video from this point on. It shows the cockroaches as survivors. "I wanted to show their character," Ms. Chalmers says. "They keep coming back."
You might think that Ms. Chalmers would have been upset because she had, by effectively reversing the gassing process, given her Holocaust a happy ending. Or you might think that she would have worried that she had compared vermin and Jews, which is what the Nazis did. (Her photographs of lynchings bring up the same problem. She seems to be comparing African-Americans and insects.)
Wednesday, May 07, 2003
Hide and Seek
A former high-lelvel intelleguince official told me that American Special Forces units had been set into Iraq in mid-March, before the start of the air and ground war, to investigate sites suspected of being missile or chemical- and biological-weapon storage depots. "They came up with nothing," the official said. "Never found a single Scud."Here are more leaks from disgruntled spooks to Seymour Hersh on the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, which created the Saddam-Qaeda nexus.
Meanwhile, it appears that at least some of the art in Iraq's National Museum was indeed stashed for safe-keeping before the looters broke in. Stuff was looted, maybe a lot, but not everything.
...When U.S. forces -- and journalists -- first visited the museum after days of looting, they saw hundreds of empty display cases. Iraqi antiquities officials called the theft the ``crime of the century,'' and questioned why American troops hadn't moved quicker to safeguard the collection.Lastly, if an American mobile exploitation team's "hunters" do indeed locate a seventh-century Babylonian Talmud said to be in a Baghdad basement, where does the scroll belong? Is it an Iraqi antiquity, and therefore part of of that nation's cultural heritage? Or do we draw the line against the plunder of Iraqi antiquities in some other way? If so, why?
Upon closer inspection, however, American investigators and museum officials found that only 17 cases had been broken into. Thirty-eight items have now been confirmed missing and 22 damaged in the main gallery -- far less than originally feared, Bogdanos said.
But no one knows the status of tens of thousands of antiquities kept at storage sites across the city, or an untold number of smaller, portable items that museum officials removed for safekeeping months before the war.
Museum officials are trying to draw up inventories of these sites, but film negatives and files were destroyed when administrative offices were trashed. The museum used antiquated, unstandardized pen-and-ink records, and some inventories are years out of date.
Despite the frustrations, at least 671 items have been returned to the museum since officials began broadcasting appeals over the coalition's Information Radio.
Hundreds of them were laid out Tuesday on a table in the reading room of the museum library, where officials had separated genuine artifacts from fakes -- many of which were collected by the institution to keep them off the black market.
Tuesday, May 06, 2003
Lilya & Lucia
Saw Lilya 4 Ever after seeing several disparate reviewers praise it highly. It is very powerful, with a go-for-broke performance by Oksana Akinshina in the title role of a Russian teen in a dead-end city (filmed in Tallinn, Estonia). Lilya, left behind by her mother who's chasing the American dream and an aunt who just wants her apartment, first gets involved in prostitution to survive, then is lured to Sweden by traffickers. Not to give too much away, it's a pretty tough story, with feral adults preying on teens. The children of the projects see no future in Russia and believe that "life is elsewhere", across the sea. But if Malmo, the Swedish city in which Lilya becomes trapped, is slightly cleaner than Tallinn, it's no less hellish for being free of weeds and broken windows.
Comparisons to Bresson, Lars Von Trier, Wenders and others have been made, but at the end the film feels somewhat one-dimensional. There's no letup, no love -- only sexual exploitation and violence. More important, no laughter or hope -- only glue-sniffing and vodka binges. Soundtrack: Rammstein meets Tatu. Still, it does make me want to see the director Lukas Moodysson's earler film Together, a comedy about commune-dwellers in seventies Sweden. At least, I think so.
Several women at one of my workplaces recommended Lucia y el Sexo (Sex and Lucia), now out on DVD/video. The title is misleading (Lucia isn't as central a character as Lilya, and although there is quite a bit of carnality (both "real" and in the imaginations of all the characters -- they are Spanish, after all), Lucia is also about story-telling, parenthood, time, chance and destiny, the restorative power of sea. It features circular plotlines, Oedipal moments and a pinch of magical realism -- as in Lilya the dead are a continuing presence to the living.
So Julio Medem's Lucia is as different in temperature from Lilya as the Baltic from the Balearics. Women are their own agents of desire here, unlike in Lilya's world of relentless exploitation. This makes for a much richer movie -- I thought of Kieslowski's Red, of Y Tu Mama Tambien and a wonderful flick from Macedonia Before the Rain. As in the movies of Almodovar -- one of the actors plays the crazy nurse Benigno in Talk to Her -- tragedy and comedy are never far apart. Worth a look.
Monday, May 05, 2003
Cow-Tipping, Anyone?
"We are at the tipping point with spam. But with the bills before us now, I fear we will be on the wrong side of the cow."d
-- David Sorkin, Associate Professor at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago, quoted in NYT story "Finding a Solution to the Secret World of Spam". (05/05/2003)
Got the Gladwell regerence, but what's the cow thing? Inquiring Ruminatrices want to know......
Urformen (1928) and Kunstformen (1899-1904)
Saw these plant plates the other day -- I can't recall where -- and bookmarked'em. Then Cory posted a link. So I wasn't going to. But I changed ny mind, perhaps because there's a kinship with these Haeckel plates -- from which the image at the head of this page comes.
Saturday, May 03, 2003
The letters of the alphabet give birth to man and woman
Francois Bizot's memoir The Gate tells of the author's life as a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge during 1971. Fluent in Khmer and married to a local woman, Bizot was doing ethnographic research on Cambodian Buddhism when he was captured in an ambush and held under suspicion of being a spy. Striking details -- the beauty of the peasant girls who come to spit on the freakishly tall farang, the feeling of the stocks being shut on his ankles in the evening, personal hygiene, his emotional breakdowns -- are interspersed (intertwingled?) with wry observations on the all parties to the conflict. He's arrogant but very lucid:
I could not bear to be taken for an American... Not because of the events in Vietnam; for many of the local peasantry, attached to their traditions and resistant to the new ideologies, the Communist revolution was a disruption of their age-old way of life.But that's nothing compared to his observation of the KR themselves. When a group of prisoners from the Lon Nol army arrive in the camp, one tries to give Bizot a prayer-cloth covered with magical letters and diagrams -- an amulet for his protection. A KR guard takes it away, telling him that such counter-revolutionary materials are being confiscated and remade into underwear "before the material could get bloodstained." Bizot drily notes:
Rather it was the Americans' uncouth methods, their crass ignorance of the milieu in which they had intervened, their clumsy demagogy, their misplaced clear conscience, and that easy-going childlike sincerity that bordered on foolishness. They were total strangers in the area, driven by cliches about Asia worthy of the flimsiest tourist guides, and they behaved accordingly.
[This] shows just how far the KR revolution was willing to go to debase a traditional system of values.To place letters of Buddhist doctrine in contact with regions of the body considered "impure" was an absolute sacrilege, one no peasant would risk commiting. Only town dwellers would be capable of such iconoclastic radicalism.Then Bizot's chief KR interrogator engages him in a series of long conversations...It's a stunning, deeply humane work and beautifully written.
The majority [of the KR] were poorly integrated Sino-Khmer, the sons of shopkeepers or frustrated employees. Having replaced the traditional village structure with the fraternal solidarity of the resistance, motivated by sincere idealism, and appalled by the gap between rich and poor, they had shared an existence outside of the rural world, which they knew nothing about. None of them had ever tended rice fields. The way they roamed through the countryside proved they had no respect for crops, gardens, trees or pathways....
Paradoxically, these city folk, who loathed the plow, the soil, the palm groves and domestic animals, who disliked the open, rustic life of the villagers, idealized the Khmer peasants as a stereotype of perpetual revolution: a model of simplicity, endurance, and patriotism, the standard against which the new man would be measured, liberated from religious taboos. In this contradictory scenario, Buddhism was to be replaced by objectives dear to the Angkar [i.e. the Organization] in order to ensure the triumph of equality and justice. The Khmer theorists had substitiued the Angkar for Dhamma, the personification of Teaching, the Primordial Being at the beginning of the world, whose body, composed of the letters of the alphabet, gave birth to the first man and woman.