Nancy Rommelmann

No New York: Adventures in the Town of Empty

Go pledge. Adele's the bomb.

 

No New York: Adventures in the Town of Empty

Go pledge. Adele's the bomb.

 

Bad Girls of LA Literature Redux

Sex! Drugs! Rock 'n' Roll! (as well as bioidenticals, schvitzing and cat care--we won't be restrained!)

It's time again for the (now annual)...

BAD GIRLS OF LA LITERATURE party!

Samantha Dunn

Annabelle Gurwitch

Hillary Johnson

Sandra Tsing Loh

Nancy Rommelmann

Erika Schickel

 

5 p.m. Sunday, May 27th

3380 Ley Drive
Los Angeles , CA 90027

(at the home of Annabelle Gurwitch in lovely Los Feliz)

See ya!

Remembering Cathy Seipp Redux

Our brilliant and generous and irascible friend Cathy Seipp died five years ago today. We still miss her, for the small kindnesses and the big voice, the brunches and the opinions, and for her inimitable skill at bringing together what Matt Welch called, "the unlike-minded weirdos." Thank you, Cathy.

A group of us are tweeting #MissSeipp and Facebooking and blogging today, March 21, about Cathy. Join in, will you?

Below is a remembrance of Our MissSeipp, published in 2008 at LA Observed.

Today is the one-year anniversary of the death of our friend Cathy Seipp. I say "our" because she so impacted her core group of friends, of which Matt Welch wrote on this date last year, "[Cathy] deserves all the credit in the world for creating this community of unlike-minded weirdoes around her." Indeed, Cathy had put me in touch with Matt and his wife Emmanuelle Richard three years earlier, when I had some questions about health insurance. Cathy radically disagreed with Matt and Emmanuelle's semi-positive position on socialized medicine (Emmanuelle is from France), a view I shared, and I think she threw us together with the idea that we might talk some sense into each other; that, or give her the opportunity to sit us down as a group and scold us, something we all would have thoroughly enjoyed. Cathy also was my initial liaison to Jackie Danicki; they'd met through blogging; had some face-time in London, face-time I admired and wanted to emulate, and did.

I'd actually met Cathy many years earlier, when I was still reading scripts for a living. I desperately wanted to be a journalist, and so, would type out articles at home, and fax them cold to publications around LA. No one ever answered me, but one.

"This is Catherine Seipp," the woman on the phone said. "I got your article. It's good. Now, what do you want me to do with it?"

Cathy was at Buzz at the time, and I told her, I wanted her to publish it, whereupon she gently but pointedly told me, that's not the way it worked; you sell the idea, and then write it. "This way, you get paid -- or at least get a kill fee."

I didn't know what a kill fee was, but she'd given me a strategy.

Within the year, I was a columnist at Buzz, where Cathy was both a columnist and a contributing writer. She also scared the hell out of me. She had an opinion about everything: the LA Times (which she notoriously skewered each month, under the byline Margo Magee); writing for Hustler (yay); same-sex marriage (nay); the texture of the chicken at our monthly contributers' lunches at Maple Drive. I remember mentioning at one such lunch in 1995 that the magazine was sending Hillary Johnson and me and our two small children to Las Vegas, to write about how the city was becoming kid-friendly.

"That's a sin," Cathy said from across the table. I thought she was kidding. When she repeated it, I knew she was not.

During the next five years, Cathy and I became friends, then good friends. We met for monthly breakfasts at Kokomo at the Farmers Market, a group that included Hillary, Cathy, Amy Alkon, Jill Stewart, Sandra Tsing Loh, Denise Hamilton, Monica Corcoran, Kerry Madden, Emmanuelle, other writers in town for a reading or a story. We called it the Writer Girls breakfast, though I don't think there was any edict about men coming or not coming; I do recall seeing Ross Johnson there once; also, David Rensin and Luke Ford. Though perhaps there was an edict, as I can't imagine Cathy not having one.

To say Cathy was the center of this group is to state the obvious; she was the one who sent the email invites, to which she expected an RSVP. I remember more than once someone showing up who had not, and Cathy disapprovingly raising her eyebrows, and then gently if pointedly remarking that it really is better if you RSVP, so that we know how many tables we need. Really, it's out of courtesy for the servers.

Cathy and I knew each other as colleagues, as friends; as mothers. We both had daughters born in 1989, and before I met my husband in 1997, had for the most part raised them ourselves, on what we earned as freelancers. We didn't need to beat this point, but a point it was. I don't know if it contributed to my being one of the handful of writer girls whom Amy called, in June of 2002, to say Cathy had lung cancer.

"She only wants a few people to know," Amy told me, and that the surgery would be at Cedars. I called Cathy. She told me, she'd found out really as a fluke: she had asthma, and had not been able to shake a cough, and the doctor had decided to do a chest x-ray, which he looked at and then, promptly walked her down the hall to oncology. I do recall Cathy telling me, "The doctor said, if the surgery takes 30 minutes, it means he couldn't get it. If it takes an hour, he could."

Cathy said that when she came out of the anesthesia, she'd asked the nurse, "How long did it take?"

"Forty-five minutes," the nurse told her.

"Which you can imagine, was very frustrating." This was Cathy, the day after surgery, in her hospital bed, surrounded by her family. I'd walked into the room holding a poundcake, whereupon Cathy said, "That's so kind of you, and Nancy, do you remember my mother?"

Picture this scene: a room full of shellshocked people who know the surgeon could not get the cancer; that the prognosis is bad. And Cathy, making introductions, making sure the older folks have seats, sending someone down the hall for ice. Her composure was surreal. I think of it often, especially when I am being a weakling. I think of Hillary walking in with the gift of a peignoir, so that Cathy might look beautiful as she convelesced, and Cathy -- still covered in mecurichrome or whatever that yellow stuff is they paint on you during surgery -- holding it up to her chest, commenting on how pretty it was, and how thoughtful. I think of Jill Stewart, with Cathy when she was wheeled to her room post-surgery, telling the nurse, "You need to get her some painkillers," and when the nurses dillydallied, Jill charging after them down the hall, saying, "YOU NEED TO GET HER PAINKILLERS, NOW!"

And how do I know this story? Because Cathy told it to me; she told all the cancer stories; the funny ones, the terrible ones. Cancer was now part of the narrative, and we were not going to be namby-pamby about it; we were not going to wear pink ribbons and tiptoe around. As she famously announced at a party, "I just want to let everyone know having cancer hasn't made me a better person."

I have written previously about this woman's courage.

I think of her rather as a dance mistress in this. Her friends who knew about the cancer reacted with varying degrees of emotional spasticity: to ask or not to ask about the new chemo? Is bringing over more food annoying or nice? Oh my god, Maia? How much crying is not okay? But whether in person or psychically, one sensed Cathy clapping her hands, and saying, "None of this. We are not going to freak out; we are not going to lie on the floor and throw a tantrum. We are going to do this dance this way."

And we did. We nearly always did what Cathy wanted us to do.

This became a difficult toward the end of her life. She was very sick; some of us questioned the rationality of continuing treatment -- she was on her third round of chemo, plus radiation to shrink the tumors simply so she would not be in such unbearable pain. Maybe we should look into a visiting nurse? Hospice? But Cathy did not want that, and as Sandra so wisely said, who were we to question Cathy on decisions concerning Cathy? And so Amy took her to chemo, as did Emmanuelle, who also created a Google schedule called Team Cathy, so that people could drive, bring food, pick up Maia from the train. If you die in your 40s, and if you were, as Cathy was, the centerpiece of your group, you are surrounded by robust, capable people who are going to do everything they can to save your life, though we all knew, there would be no saving. There would only be attempts at comfort. I flew in from Portland for a week last Feburary to be with Cathy, to basically drink milkshakes with her and dish the dirt and take naps. Jackie came from London the following week and did the same.

In the weeks leading to Cathy's death, it was as though we -- the weirdoes, the writer girls, Cathy's myriad other friends, and the masses teeming over at Cathy's World, a veritable clusterfuck of folks posting 200, 300, 968 comments on whatever Mistress Cathy wrote -- became a buzzing hive. Thouands of phone calls and emails and blog posts passed in the days leading up to her death. Maybe this is the way it always is, but I -- and many of Cathy's friends, most of us in our 30s and 40s -- had not experienced the protracted death of a friend; we did not know how to sit on our hands; we had to keep trying, just as Cathy was.

On March 21 2007, just after 2 pm, I was at the public library when my cell phone rang. It was Emmanuelle, the third time we'd spoken that day, this time to tell me, Cathy had died. I sank down in a nook between the wall and a bookcase; asked Emmanuelle if she were okay; she said yes, but there were still things that needed to be done. Of course.

These things included to continue talking about Cathy, a conversation that reached such a din by the next day, Technorati listed "Cathy Seipp" as its #1 search, a fact we cheered and which certainly Cathy would have loved, though I also imagine her saying, "Well, yes."

Sandra was recently in Portland, and we spent time together, including a few hours at Ristretto talking about work, kids, and of course, Cathy. Sandra was at the hospital during the days preceding Cathy's death, a time that was -- no surprise -- attended, with various degrees of decorum, by the unlike-minded weirdoes and others. There are few people in the world who can tell a story like Sandra; the grand accents; the sweeping mannerisms; the spot-on caricatures were all there, and as I sat there listening, I realized, I had cried, but I was also laughing. And you might think, what a terrible thing, laughing at the narrative of your friend's death. And maybe it is a terrible thing, but it didn't feel terrible; it felt like a continuation of Cathy, and in truth I think she would only want; would most certainly demand that we continue the narration of her life, which includes her death.

I spoke yesterday to Amy, who said, "I find myself mentioning her as often as I can. I just want her here, and for people to know about her." Me, too.

 

Michael Totten, Libya, and "The Road to Fatima Gate"

When I moved to Portland from Los Angeles, in 2004, I knew no other writers here. I had, however, been given an introduction, by Matt Welch, to Michael Totten, a blogger writing about the Middle East. Michael and I were not covering the same terrain, but nevertheless, met for a coffee at the then-rather wonderful Gotham Building Tavern, and made what might be considered small shop-talk. It was not until we were walking to our respective cars that we really got going, about how serious each of us was about the work we do; about sharing opportunities, and about what it was like to be a very ambitious journalist in a town that preferred its news within a 20-mile radius (or from wire service). A friendship was born.

Over the years, I have watched, in awe, Michael make his career: beholden to no one, on his own terms, and on his own dime, often with money donated by his loyal, many-thousands fan-base. We have, at least a half-dozen times, spoken of the books we are working on, how we want to publish them, how we don't, and when the hell was all this going to happen?

It is happening in March 2011, for each of us. My novel, The Bad Mother, is being released March 1. Michael's book, The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel, is now available for pre-order. You can read a sample chapter here.

Or, you can read one of the very finest pieces of journalism you will encounter, "In the Land of the Brother Leader," a piece Michael orginally wrote for the LA Weekly, about his time in Libya, a piece with special resonance right now.

Congratulations, Michael x 

Back to the Future

Another must-see photo project: Back to the Future, by Irina Werning. We are glad you became a little obsessed! So good, SO good. The power of art.

 

Five Cool Things

Sunday morning, one of the best times of the week. Have my coffee, the New York Times... but lately, before either of these, I find myself scrolling through Five Cool Things, put together each week by Richard Pelletier at Lucid Content, which lands in my email around 7. Reading what Richard has gathered each week is like sitting at the breakfast table with a friend, a friend who doesn't care if your hair is rumpled and you're still in your jammies, who with humor and enthusiasm has to tell you about the cool art and architecture and music and letterpresss and food he's found this week, and created links to, so that even before eight o'clock in the morning, you are checking out photos of Mamikia the Superhero and listening to Donny Hathaway sing A Song for You, and thinking  about what this song means, in relation to everyone's life as well as your own, and especially in regard to your husband, who has just brought you coffee in bed because your foot is in a cast, but you're cruising the world anyway.

You can get Five Cool Things, too xx

Andrew Sullivan's Best Practices for Bloggers: Honesty, Integrity, Corrections, the F-Word

via Thompson on Hollywood

Quote of the Day

From a defense attorney I am writing about. Rereading it, I am struck by the similarities of what he and I do, or try to.

“If I had to do wills and deeds and corporate minutes I would have retired ten years ago. They’re just not very interesting, not very sexy. [What] we’re working, in these cases, it’s tough and it’s torturous but it is interesting; it’s fascinating. You read the newspaper, and I have to laugh sometimes; they are so far off from what the case is really about, or the things they try to make up, or they think they know. There’s a certain high from it all, I guess, when you know you’re working on something that you’re going to help bring out the truth."

The N Word as "Speed Bump"

Hear hear for rationality in 2010: the best assessement of Dr. Laura's use of the N word that I've heard, from John Ridley. Two points I particularly like: I can make fun of my sister, but you can't, and the spot-on assertion that Dr. Laura (who I sometimes get a kick out of listening to on long car drives; her common-sense-by-cudgel delivery system never fails to fascinate/repel) is now painting herself as a victim, the role she constantly berates her listeners for playing. Bonus points to Ridley for pointing out her reductive thinking, of which she is clearly unaware, or perhaps simply proud of.

"And it Made a Lovely Light": Christopher Hitchens

Indeed xx

Kim Boyce Bakes

We are ga-ga thrilled to have Kim Boyce, former pastry chef at Campanile and Spago, baking for Ristretto Roasters. In a post today on Portland Food and Drink, Kim tells Food Dude:

I was sitting on a bench eating bagels with my kids and Nancy [Rommelmann] walked by... I introduced myself and asked if she needed pastries for Ristretto.

Kim and I first played the LA name-game, and then I said, I'd love to try her stuff. I asked her to do some baking for Ristretto based on her fantastic pastry, and her gorgeous book, Good to the Grain: Baking with Whole-Grain Flours. I was leafing through it one Sunday at the Williams cafe and happened to read her bio... which was when I learned she'd been at Spago and Campanile (the latter, my very favorite restaurant ever). I had had no idea; she'd never made a peep about this. I called Din and said, "This is like having Frank Sinatra ask if he can sing us a few songs."

Kim will be doing all the baking at both cafes, beginning this Saturday. She will be adding lots of items, depending on what she seasonal ingredients strike her fancy and what she wants to create. She pretty much has free reign, and right now, to me, the pastry cases look like jewel boxes. Come by often to see what she's making, and in the meantime, I have three words for you: apricot crumble bars

Genesis Biopod

If you ask people what they’d like done with their bodies after their deaths, here are the answers you’ll receive, or the answers I received, in order of preference: cremation, put in a pine box, buried at sea, eaten by animals, and “set out with the recycling.”

 

The last is from my dad. I told him, we might do a little better than that...

 

I wrote a piece about a very cool alternative, the Genesis Biopod, which ran in today's Oregonian, lead story in the Business section, a section in which I have never before appeared -- tah dah!

 

If I can get it together time-wise before we head out of town tomorrow, for the Outstanding in the Field dinner at Cameron Winery (we'll be spending the night in the vineyard), I have an essay percolating that I will try to get posted.

"Mid-Life: Notes from the Halway Mark"

Various quotes wind up on my bulletin board, at eye level. They come and they go. This one has stayed longer than most. It's from Elizabeth Kaye's "Mid-Life." I usually just glance at the last line; the rest I know from practice.

And while I have always assumed that when I reached mid-life, I would not want to think about my own mortality, I find I want to think about it now. I want to because I'm one more person who elevated procrastination and sloth into an art by sheer dint of practice. Yet these days I have no patience with sloth, and I don't procrastinate much, and I try not to waste time. My life has improved accordingly. I'm not surprised. I've always been one of those people who does better on a deadline.

And though I still make mistakes, I am less inclinded to delude myself about their cost. I no longer expect things to make sense. But that does not mean there is no magic. It does not mean there is no hope.

It simply means that each of us has reason to be wishful and frightened, aspiring and flawed.

And it means that to the degree that we are lost, it is on the same ocean, in the same night.

Choking and Funk

When my daughter was little, I had a paralyzing fear of her choking, particularly on hot dogs. I was so worried that, when she was two and spent a month with my mother in New York, I would daily call my mom, "No hot dogs, or if you do, slice them lengthwise." This, because I knew of two toddlers that had choked to death eating hot dogs cut into little barrels. My mother thought I was overprotective, she took to answering the phone, "Oscar Meyer."

Today's New York Times has a story about the very worst choking hazard foods for very young children. Here's the story, and here's the list:

Hot dogs, peanuts, carrots, boned chicken, candy, meat, popcorn, fish with bones, sunflower seeds and apples.

Dr. Gary Smith warns the following foods should not be given to children under 4 or 5: raw carrots, marshmallows, peanuts, popcorn, hard candies and gumballs. Which makes perfect sense: while babies and toddlers can bite food, they cannot chew it. Further, their throats "narrow to the size of a drinking straw." I have to tell you, I feel a flutter of terror just writing this.

Okay, enough. Watch your children, and then this video, especially Flea, who is - tah dah! -- one of the professors at Bootsy Collins's new Funk University - F.U. f0r short -- where, per his mission statement, Professor Bootsy explains "how you gotta 'bring some funk...to get some funk.'"

NB: I AM throwing a goddamn dance party this summer, and yes, I will be wearing my platform shoes, and yes, this song will be playing, and I hereby invite you to tell me what ELSE I must have in rotation, and of course you're invited

Draw Mohammed Day

Getting on a plane so this will be briefer and shorter than I want it to be: today, Reason magazine is sponsoring Draw Mohammed Day, for all the right reasons. Reason's Nick Gillespie explains:

It's worth meditating on the whys and wherefores of the contest, which was inspired by a jihadist death threat against the creators of South Park and was originally suggested by Seattle artist Molly Norris.

...There comes a point in any society's existence where it must ultimately, to paraphrase Martin Luther (who himself was more than happy to see opponents put to death), dig in its heels and say here we stand, we will do no other. We don't need to be perfectly consistent philosophically or historically or theologically to assert what is special and unique not just about the United States, with its bizarre and wonderful articulation of the First Amendment, but the greater classical liberal project comprising not just the "West" (whatever that is) but human beings in whatever town, country, or planet they inhabit. And at the heart of the liberal project is ultimately a recognition that individuals, for no other reason than that they exist, have rights to continue to exist. Embedded in all that is the right to expression. No one has a right to an audience or even to a sympathetic hearing, much less an engaged audience. But no one should be beaten or killed or imprisoned simply for speaking their mind or praying to one god as opposed to the other or none at all or getting on with the small business of living their life in peaceful fashion. If we cannot or will not defend that principle with a full throat, then we deserve to choke on whatever jihadists of all stripes can force down our throats.

...Our Draw Mohammed contest is not a frivolous exercise of hip, ironic, hoolarious sacrilege toward a minority religion in the United States (though even that deserves all the protection that the most serioso political commentary commands). It's a defense of what is at the core of a society that is painfully incompetent at delivering on its promise of freedom, tolerance, and equal rights. It's a rebuttal to the notion that we should go limp in the clinches precisely because bullies and bastards can punch or blow us up.

Here's my pal Amy Alkon's contribution. Where's yours?

The Flight of the Intellectuals

Great Michael Totten interview with journalist and author Paul Berman, on the release of his latest book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, which I cannot wait to read. A clip:

MJT: You provided some examples in your book, and I've some experience with this myself. I was in Beirut when the Syrian military was finally thrown out by a million citizens taking to the streets, and the whole thing was dismissed by some people in the West as a right-wing Christian Gucci revolution.

Paul Berman: Yes.

MJT: It was absolutely appalling, and I will never forget it. To this day I get hate mail from these kinds of people when I write about Lebanon.

Paul Berman: It really is something remarkable. I can understand it intellectually, but not emotionally. It comes from some old and very unattractive currents in Western thought that we can see over the course of the 20th century.

Remember, a lot of people despised the Soviet dissidents, too.

MJT: Right. What do you think causes this? I think I have it mostly figured out, but I still feel like I'm missing something.

Paul Berman: Well, I don't have it entirely figured out either. [Laughs.] But I note it. In regard to the Soviet dissidents of the past, at least nowadays there is a consensus of opinion that, yes, the dissidents were correct and we should have listened to them. So why didn't we? When I say "we," I mean the intellectual community as a whole in the Western countries. And it's for a whole set of reasons.

An outright sympathy for communism and the Soviet Union itself was only one of those reasons. This only accounted for one set of people.

There were other people who dismissed the dissidents for what you might call conservative reasons. They wanted to assume the Slavic world was hopelessly steeped in traditions of autocracy and ignorance and habits of obedience and deference -- the traditions of tsarism. They could see very well that communism in the Soviet Union had replicated the whole tsarist system, in a new version. There was a leader at the top whose rule was uncontestable. There were the masses at the bottom who had to proclaim the wisdom of the leader at the top. And a lot of people looked at this and said, yes, this is what the Slavic world is supposed to be. This is the authentic thing. Slavs are inherently inferior to Westerners. They aren't capable of being free people. They aren't capable of thinking for themselves.

So when the dissidents rushed out and told us that the Soviet Union is crushing individual liberty or doing other oppressive things, our response to them was to pat them on the head and say, well, it's nice that you got out, and you are welcome to say, but you're not talking about the real world. The real world is one where Slavs are destined to remain forever victims of oppressive tyrants, and this is because Slavs enjoy being victims, so we're not going to take people like you, the dissidents, all that seriously.

The logic behind that kind of thinking is very appealing, to some people. It pictures a world that is dominated by cultures that we like to regard as authentic -- cultures with unchanging deep qualities that go back thousands of years, and may be rich with cultural jewels, but will never produce anything more progressive and will certainly never embrace the kinds of freedoms and advantages and dynamism that we celebrate in our own culture. So that's one idea.

Then there's another idea that appeals to many people, which is based not on our own feeling of superiority, but on our own inferiority. We look at ourselves in the Western countries and we say that, if we are rich, relatively speaking, as a society, it is because we have plundered our wealth from other people. Our wealth is a sign of our guilt. If we are powerful, compared with the rest of the world, it is because we treat people in other parts of the world in oppressive and morally objectionable ways. Our privileged position in the world is actually a sign of how racist we are and how imperialistic and exploitative we are. All the wonderful successes of our society are actually the signs of how morally inferior we are, and we have much to regret and feel guilty about. So when we look at the world, we should look at it in a spirit of humility and remorse, and we should recognize that other people have been unfairly treated.

We should recognize the superiority of those other people over ourselves. Money-wise, we may be richer. But, morally, the other people are richer. And so, we should despise ourselves, and we should love the other people -- the people who possess qualities so superior to our own as barely to be human. And then, filled with those very peculiar ideas, we set about looking for messianic figures who might express the superior culture of the other people, and might lead the human race to a higher stage of development. And if someone objects to this analysis, we say, oh, we inferior Westerners are incapable of understanding the mysterious thought-patterns of those other people, so who are you to judge?

MJT: I think you have it pretty well worked out.

Paul Berman: I assure you, I don't.

Read the whole thing.

Lynn Redgrave, RIP

What a wonderful actress

A Writers' Writer: John McPhee

I dreamt last week that, in the course of and for my work, I needed to read someone named Rebecca Mead. When I woke up, I wondered who she was and if she were even a writer. I googled her; she's a staff writer for The New Yorker, so it is likely I've seen her byline but it had not stuck. I immediately went out and bought her book, and also downloaded from The New Yorker site three of her articles. One is a profile of the current director of the Metropolitan Museum, and Mead wrote (in a separate piece) that when she was doing her research, she "read with pleasure--and considerable envy--John McPhee's lengthy, fascinating profile of Thomas P. Hoving, who was the museum's director from 1967 until 1977."

You can, if you subscribe to The New Yorker, read the whole thing online, as the magazine has digitally archived every page of every issue. The first thing you will notice, if you get to the Hoving profile, which runs sixty pages, is how very many ads there are in the magazine; leafing through these is a museum experience in itself. But downloading and printing would have been a veritable bear, and so I bought a collection that contains the essay, which I read in one big gulp yesterday morning. This is the very finest writing of its kind: perfectly paced and measured, masterfully constructed, illuminating, playful. Superb in every way, it made me realize what the phrase "trip the light fantastic" means, or can mean.

Extra bonus: if you have an iPhone, you can download the images Hoving refers to as you read.

Michael Totten, "Twenty Years After the Fall of the Tyrant"

My admiration for my friend Michael Totten grows exponentially with the number of countries he travels to and writes about. He's made his career as an international correspondant under his own terms, and is as good as anyone writing in the field. Today's post is about Romania, twenty years after the fall of Ceausescu. Here, you will find Michael speaking with members of Parliment, and attending a Bucharest press conference where Joe Biden expresses his appreciation for Romania's troops alongside America's in Afghanistan, in Iraq.

What also marks Michael's brilliance, for me, is his range of scholarship, as when he observes how Romania's urban landscapes so brutally reflect the ugliness that is totalitarianism.

The brilliant Anthony Daniels, who now writes under the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, loathes ghastly brutalist architecture as much as I do. He properly blames the Swiss architect Le Corbusier and his baleful influence for wrecking so many once beautiful cities like Bucharest and even marring cities like London.

"Le Corbusier was to architecture what Pol Pot was to social reform," Daniels recently wrote in City Journal. "In one sense, he had less excuse for his activities than Pol Pot: for unlike the Cambodian, he possessed great talent, even genius. Unfortunately, he turned his gifts to destructive ends, and it is no coincidence that he willingly served both Stalin and Vichy." Le Corbusier, he says, "was the enemy of mankind" and "does not belong so much to the history of architecture as to that of totalitarianism."

...

On a blank gray wall in the parking lot across from my hotel, an artist painted cogs in a machine the size of Godzilla chewing the city to pieces.

photo by Michael Totten

Go read the whole thing.