Real Conversations #1: "Democracy is increasingly defined as successful capitalism"

Here in book form are four in-depth conversations, most centering on art and politics, published in 2001. Re/SEARCH publisher-provocateur V. Vale interviews a logical cast of countercultural entrepeneurs and artists: singer/actor/publisher Henry Rollins; former Dead Kennedys frontman, political pundit and Alternative Tentacles Records proprietor, Jello Biafra; City Lights Books publisher and Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti; and the perennially youthful garage punk intellectual Billy Childish.  


Considering the tidal wave of events since 2001, it's astounding how the interviews in Real Conversations #1 still resonate with contemporary issues. Depending on your point of view you'll find Rollins, Biafra, and to a certain extent Billy Childish, insightful or exasperating in their politics, but its hard to miss the passion in their arguments.


Ferlinghetti, by far, takes the longest view of events past and present, and suggests solutions (some new, some old), sounding the most conservative by comparison. Many will consider these four exchanges as nothing more than preaching to the already converted, but in this political season they take on the character of voices crying in the wilderness. Here's an excerpt from the interview with Jello Biafra:

JELLO BIAFRA [having just been panhandled]: Even the homeless have corporate logos on them -- what does THAT say about what we're turning into?!  ...


V: It's finally time to examine how advertising, marketing and branding have gotten so much better, to the point where it's almost impossible to have any kind of "counterculture" anymore-- 


JB: The San Francisco Bay Guardian ran an article about Pepsi trying to buy into the school district here. Soda companies and Frito-Lay will offer millions to a school district that has had its tax money taken away (by the very same people whom the soda companies "funded," I suppose), then say, "We'll give you ten million bucks if we're the exclusive beverage in all of your schools."

And they get to advertise. Like in Colorado Springs: instead of pep banners in the gym, there are Pepsi banners, Pepsi machines the minute you walk in the front door, Pepsi ads on the sides of school buses, posters, etc. And even though they passed a law against it here in California, the companies are trying to do it anyway. 


V: It's the mind-set of the corporate state: Do whatever it takes to make maximum profits as quickly as possible, ignoring people's welfare and the environment -- 


JB: Actually, the corporate state has no mind, because there are too many people (and too much money) involved, who fight with each other because they want total control over everybody else--and no one can have it all, not even Bill Gates! When you get to that level, it's like wealth addiction rather than crack addiction--a far more dangerous drug, in my opinion.

That's why I seized on the Green Party's idea for MAXIMUM WAGE and trumpeted it everywhere. The Green Party didn't set a maximum, but here's mine: six figures, and then cut everybody off! And the benefit would be FREE SCHOOLS, FREE MEDICAL CARE, FREE CHILD CARE-- things that are a given as a human right in other "civilized" countries. And FREE TRANSPORTATION . . . 


I like the idea of abolishing the stock market entirely. That's a major element of wealth addiction. Once somebody gets their first million, what more is there to gain? Obviously, there's a very deep drive to succeed, and success is measured in money, and people figure they have to keep playing the game and play for higher and higher stakes to make more and more money to feed their wealth addiction habit.

And if it means screwing over everybody else, so much the better -- thus Ross Perot, Donald Trump, Dianne Feinstein's husband, etc., etc., etc. That's why the best way to put wealth addicts in rehab is to take their money away. [laughs] 


When I went on "Politically Incorrect" and introduced the idea of maximum wage, I was booed by hosts, guests and audience alike. When I called Michael Jordan a wealthy parasite, another guest (the star of the TV version of "Clueless") whined, "But wait, he was a good basketball player. He deserved all that money" and other pearls of wisdom. 


Part of what I did in Seattle during the anti-WTO protests was just to say: Step One is to divorce oneself from corporate feudalism as much as humanly possible--not to mention sabotage it, if you possibly can. Unfortunately, there's just one way to completely divorce yourself from corporate feudalism -- I know of only one person who ever pulled that off, remaining pure and politically correct as the driven snow, and that's Ted Kaczynski.

But he suffered dearly for his art statement, didn't he? He lived in a little cabin with no windows, so miserable that he sent mail bombs for 20 years to people he didn't even know, because he couldn't get laid. There's got to be a better way! 

That was then; this is now, and 2012 is a radically different election season than 2000, with some surprising echoes. Here's Lawrence Felinghetti: "We can't afford unrestrained capitalism, just like we can't afford unrestrained anarchism. In fact, unrestrained capitalism is the ideal of the Free Trade movement and the whole Republican policy in this country. Democracy is increasingly defined as successful capitalism . . . which is not necessarily so. Thinking the unthinkable, you could say that unrestrained capitalism is a form of anarchism! [laughs] Or, you could say that it's anarchism carried to greedy extremes." That kind of sentiment would have found Ferlinghetti a microphone moment in Zuccotti Park.  

"Sandy Beach at Crane Creek," Leonard Kress

"Sandy Beach at Crane Creek" 
(Leonard Kress)

There are no cranes in these marshes, there never were,
just grebes and coots and trumpeter swans with long,
thin and tapered necks, rising up to the song
of anxious waves. The stinging shallow water
unchanged since the ice age. There are no cranes,
just short-eared owls trolling the open meadow
and cabin cruisers and jet skis bobbing below
the scorching sun. The name deceived, so now we can

betray each other guiltlessly. There are
no cranes in these wetlands, and thus, no rules,
all misnamed. Into the crushed-shell sand
our children dig, and wade out much too far.
One of us embodies desire, and thus steals
the day—the rest, by the unmanned lifeguard stand.

(Port Clinton, Ohio)

"Sandy Beach at Crane Creek" by Leonard Kress appears online in Big Bridge #16 as part of a special poetry section, "Cuyahoga Burning," curated by Jonathan Penton. Kress was born in Toledo, Ohio and grew up in Philadelphia. He studied Polish literature and folklore at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. Among his collections of poetry are The Centralia Mine Fire, Sappho's Apples, Orphics, and The Orpheus Complex. In 2001 he published a new verse translation of the Polish romantic epic, Pan Tadeusz, written in 1834 by Adam Mickiewicz. He currently teaches philosophy, religion, and creative writing at Owens Community College in Toledo.

A "twelve-pack nation" and the Affordable Care Act

(

In March 2010 the Affordable Care Act was about to face its primary legislative hurdle. A majority of the judicial branch including a deciding vote by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts upheld the legality of America's national health care legislation. After more than 40 Republican-led charges hoping to dismantle the law, It is only now that the country is beginning to debate the real meaning of the words," as expressed in this Bellemeade Books post of 2010. It seemed a post worth repeating.

There's another reason: Charles Bowden's study of the Mexican drug trade mentioned below, Murder City, illuminates an aspect of attitudes towards licit and illicit drug use that America still refuses to address. The politics-as-usual of a "twelve-pack nation" -- Bowden's term -- continues to shape the un-winnable War on Drugs, a reactionary policy of fear over any substantive reform. (The state-by-state battle over medical use of marijuana is just a tentaive beginning to that long road.)  

The Supreme Court's decision regarding the Affordable Care Act is a victory of history over politics. History may be as close -- or as far -- as 2014; in politics, eighteen months can seem a lifetime, and the battle for health care has only begun, as everyone decides what's in it for them: after today's historic decision that reaffirms access to health care as a fundamental right for all Americans, politicians will determine who gets what, when, why, and how much.

As of this writing, the fate of the health care bill remains undecided. After a year of passionate debate and seemingly endless fact-mangling on all sides (not to mention a few bitten fingers in last year's town hall debates), Congress is about to clear its throat and speak on an issue that has been as much a "third rail" of American politics as Social Security itself. No matter which position one assumes, the core issue is, of course, about money: who gets it, who deserves how much of it, and how much of it is going to be coming out of our wallets for the costs of our collective well-being.

No matter how the ideas are couched in rhetoric from the far-left to the far-right (those opposing views don't seem to merge anywhere, like a political Moebius strip) the clash of values is undeniably, uniquely American. One would assume those who consider ours a Christian nation (no ironic quotation marks) would be the first to suggest the health of all Americans to be a national aspiration, a charitable goal worthy of unanimous consent -- a Biblical view of charity extending from those who can afford the luxury of choice to those who cannot.

Not so much, it seems. The perceived "leveling" of health-care availability, couched in terms of "socialized medicine" and other less-flattering phrases by some, plays into so many unspoken issues in America of class and privilege that the right's "Kumbaya moment" with the left won't be happening over health care today, if ever. There is just too much money at stake, from the insurance-company CEO to the pharmaceutical manufacturer to the individual health-care payer, and too much political gain to be had by appealing to a political base. Compromise and "reaching across the aisle" is, apparently, a posture for the other guy to assume. Administration concessions on the proposed bill haven't gained a single Republican "yes" vote, and if the measure fails to pass, substantive health-care reform will go to the far back of the line and wait for another election cycle.

And all this, of course, is by way of dealing with our country's already legal drugs and existing medical and insurance structures. Imagine what it might take for agreement on what to do about the other side of the coin: that nebulous, confounding and never-ending "war on drugs" that saps the Treasury, derails any attempt at a solution, and continues to fill American prisons to overflow. The solution could be as simple as decriminalization, as complex as legalization -- there's the money issue again -- but it's too much of a miracle to think that the country might pay for a health-care plan in part with the taxation and regulation of its now-illicit drugs.

Reporter Charles Bowden has written about effects of continuing drug wars in Mexico (his latest book is Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields), and he sees inherent irony in America's approach to its own illegal drug trade. Interviewed March 16 on the Democracy Now website, Bowden puts it very succinctly: "we're a twelve-pack nation that won't let anybody smoke a joint." He makes the case that "there isn't a serious war on drugs. Rather, there is violence nourished by the money to be made from drugs," then goes on:

"We’re spending $30- to $40-billion a year on narcotics officers in this country. Every state in the union, if you get out of the house and drive, is now studded with little prisons, some private. They’re all dependent on the — on laws outlawing drugs. The income from drugs in Mexico exceeds all other sources of foreign currency, except possibly oil, and that’s debatable. In other words, if President Calderon succeeded in his claimed goal of eradicating the drug industry in Mexico, Mexico would collapse in a minute. That’s what I mean.

I mean, why don’t we face the fact that drugs are like alcohol? They’re part of our culture now. They’re not going away. If we want to make them illegal, we can continue to live the way we have: imprisoning our own people, creating a police state, having prisons everywhere. But no matter what we do, they’re going to be in the neighborhood, just as they are. 

There was an interesting government study released a while ago that said 232 American cities now have the presence of Mexican drug organizations. Well, look, I’m a little older, possibly, than some of your listeners, but if you bought a joint in 1975, it wasn’t coming from Finland or some place. They’ve always been here. It’s a market. All we’ve got to decide is whether it’s legal or illegal. That’s it. It’s like gambling. It’s got a life of its own." 

De-fusing an un-winnable war on drugs is too much to hope for at this point. First let's find at least 216 people this weekend willing to hold hands in the Capitol and sing "Kumbaya." Then all of us -- Republicans, Democrats, Independents -- can begin the real debate on the meaning of the words.

(Graphic: States filing lawsuits against the Affordable Care Act, from dailyKos.) 

1969: a conversation between The Lennons & The Learys: "all we want you to do is make a positive move"

Tomorrow never knows:

Michael Horowitz, Timothy Leary's archivist, found a tape-recording of a conversation between Timothy and Rosemary Leary and John and Yoko Lennon recorded during the Bed-In for Peace, May, 1969. The taped transcript was later included in early drafts of an anthology Leary was considering putting together for publication around 1978 with the title Heroes of the Sixties: Meetings with Remarkable WoMen, but the project was never completed. The tape and transcript were put aside.

Recently, Horowitz sent a copy of the transcript to the Timothy Leary Archives, which has published it on the website.  "I’d completely forgotten I had it. In an archival lapse, I had put it in an unmarked envelope in a box of miscellaneous papers.” he wrote.

The curator of the Archives added:  "Michael’s guess is that Tim was given a copy of the tape at the time it was made, or later, and had it transcribed by one of his assistants, whose penciled editorial notes appear on the first two pages, and on the contents and permissions sheets. Michael remembers Tim invited him to assist on the project, “ but he (Tim) was too involved in the Future History Series, where some of these chapters ended up in one form or another, and abandoned ‘Heroes of the Sixties: Meetings with Remarkable WoMen.’”

The article and transcript was to be Chapter 16 under a new title, “The Beatles As Unconscious Evolutionary Agents (with Conversation with John-Yoko).”

An excerpt:

TIMOTHY:  ... But it’s the old story. In the past, societies fought over territory. They thought, “We’ll hold this space, or we’ll force you out.” It’s an old mammalian tradition. As you pointed out about Reagan, what we’re doing in the United States is transcending this notion of the good-guy cowboy. That’s Governor Reagan: he’s gonna shoot down hippies, shoot down blacks and college students. So we gave up Millbrook, because there’s no point in fighting over the land, and making it a thing of territorial pride. If they want it so much that they’re going to keep an armed guard there all the time, they can have it. We’ll be back. ...

JOHN: Pioneers. Pioneers are very important today, because people won’t go where somebody hasn’t already gone. Yeah! That’s what we’re saying: what did your forefathers do? How did they make it?

YOKO: And it’s a healthy thing to do, isn’t it?

TIMOTHY: What do the kids say when they talk to you?

JOHN: About peace, or about anything in general? On the phone? Well, if they’re not saying, “Welcome to Canada,” they’re saying, “What can we do?” y’know?

ROSEMARY: That’s good.

JOHN: They’re saying, what can we actually do, and then I say, we say, “well we can’t tell you what to do?” y’know, we can only sort of say, “there’s other things to do.”

TIMOTHY: You’re in charge. You don’t have to ask.

JOHN: Yeah, think about it. But they’re getting it, y’know, I mean they must be. Our voices must be going out solid about every quarter of an hour. And if it isn’t singing, it’s talking, and we’re just repeating the same bit, y’know, and there’s very little “Me eyes are brown and Paul’s …," y’know? I mean I do that for the ones that need it. Most of it’s just, “let’s get it together,” and it must be going out now like a mantra. We’re trying to set up a mantra, a peace mantra, and get it in their heads. It’s gonna work.

TIMOTHY: It’s Pierre Trudeau that got us in Canada. Because, about a year and a half, two years ago, there was a big university thing in Toronto [Footnote from the Leary website: the reference is  to Perception ’67, a conference / cultural event featuring, in addition to the two named by Leary, Humphry Osmond, Richard Alpert, Ralph Metzner, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Ed Sanders, and Ali Akbar Khan], and they invited people to speak about drugs. Paul Krassner came, McLuhan was there, and I was supposed to come up to give a talk, but the government wouldn’t let me in. So I sent a tape, and they confiscated it.

Then I went to the International Bridge in Detroit and handed it across, and the Americans busted me ’cause I wasn’t supposed to leave the country. That was two years ago, before Trudeau was premier. This time they checked with higher-ups. They kept us waiting about an hour. They were very polite. They were getting instructions from -– wherever they get their instructions.

JOHN: They kept us about two hours, searched through everything. Yeah, well, we wanted to get to Trudeau, we’re really headed for Nixon.

TIMOTHY: I am too.

JOHN: We’re just telling them that we want to give them two acorns—a piece of sculpture that we entered in an exhibition. So we wanted to get that to Nixon and tell him all we want you to do is make a positive move, y’know. And then they’d either have to accept it or deny it publicly, and then we’d ask, “Why, why, don’t you give us that time schedule?” ...

The film "Bed Peace" was made available for free on YouTube in August 2011 by Yoko Ono, as part of her website “Imagine Peace.” Tim and Rosemary’s participation is also documented in  another video on YouTube (also courtesy of Yoko’s Imagine Peace website), where they are seen singing on the recording of “Give Peace A Chance.”

John Lennon wrote another song that week, the earliest version of “Come Together,” for Leary’s campaign for Governor of California against Ronald Reagan. It was the prospect of Tim debating Reagan on television that, as much as anything, led to his imprisonment for a miniscule amount of marijuana. With the campaign aborted, John decided to rework the song for the Beatles’ Abbey Road.

(Photo by Stephen Sammons: Rosemary Leary, Timothy Leary, Yoko Ono and John Lennon, reading the local paper about their "Bed-In." From the Leary Archives site.)

"The Day In Its Color": Charles Cushman's everyday America, 1938-1969

The Day in Its Color introduces readers to Charles Cushman’s extraordinary thirty-year work, an archive of 14,000 Kodachrome photos housed at Indiana University. The photographs, most shot on vivid, color-saturated Kodachrome stock from 1938 to 1969, are the visual record Cushman captured as he travelled constantly, photographing everything he encountered from New York to New Orleans, Chicago to San Francisco.

Cushman, the sometime salesman and non-professional photographer, traveled by auto across US highways before the Interstate system, built in the 1950s, eventually made cross-continental road travel a blur of exit signs and chain restaurants. The result is a chronicle of an era almost never seen in color beyond souvenir postcards and chamber-of-commerce brochures. 

What was America like at mid-century, at city-street level and country-crossroad? As one reviewer of The Day In Its Color expressed it, "Imagine Berenice Abbott or Walker Evans in technicolor." Our collective images of the 1940s, so dominated by black-and-white war photography and dustbowl portraiture, now have a dimension on view in vivid color:  Cushman's photos include portraits and everyday streetscapes, ethnographic studies, agricultural and industrial landscapes, movie sets and media events, children playing, laborers working, all precisely documented in time and place. The result is a chronicle of an era almost never seen or seldom envisioned in color. 

 Charles Cushman, 1939

The book's editor, Eric Sandweiss of Indiana University, selected one hundred fifty images from Cushman's collection. Viewing the original slides and prints was revelatory: in a recent post Sandweiss compares the experience to how people must have felt stepping into the land of Oz in a movie theater in 1939:

Pulling the little Kodachromes out of their slide boxes, I realized how thoroughly the gray shades that, for me, defined America before the late 1950s had, like a theatre scrim, distanced me from the experience of everyday lives lived before my own. Each black and white picture, I realized, reminds you that it is a document — not the thing itself. It pronounces its own pastness before you’ve even made it present. Laid out on the light table, glowing as bright as the room around them, the color slides quickly sucked me into an opposite fallacy: thinking that I was closer to the places pictured within them than I could ever be. “The day in its color,” to quote the poet Wallace Stevens, had come to seem the world itself.

In his archive of images Charles Cushman (1896-1972) preserves mid-century America as a place as vivid as the view out our own window. The collection is all the more remarkable for having gone undiscovered for decades. What makes the photos valuable is the wide range of subjects, landscapes, and moods it captures -- snapshots of America as yet untouched by an overlay of interstate highways, urban renewal, chain stores, and suburban development.

Atlanta, Christmas 1951

America is revealed as a world of hand-painted signs, state fairs, and ramshackle shops, small town living and bustling urban scenes before corporations began to stake claim on every street corner. (Although there were exceptions: Coca-Cola wasn't about to let Atlanta forget its hometown roots, above.) The book also reveals the fascinating and startling life story of the man who stood, unseen, on the other side of the lens, as one of America's most busy amateur photographers. 

To create a now-and-then contrast to Cushman's work, Sandweiss embarked on his own cross-country journey to the same vistas captured in the photographs. In Atlanta, the round Coca-Cola "Neon Spectacular" lit up the foot of Peachtree Street from 1948 to 1981. Today, hotels and office buildings dominate a more demure downtown streetscape, if just as busy. In his recent blog series Sandweiss comments on what has been lost in the intervening 70-plus years of road-travel in the American imagination:

 Tucson Rodeo Day, 1940

Route 66 exists so completely in our literary memories, our imaginations, our online search options, that even the faintest of efforts can serve to satisfy the curiosity that took a man of his generation many years to settle. As with every other aspect of our networked world, such access cuts both ways. While access to information democratizes our ability to fashion a coherent picture of the landscape, it furthers the atomization of our social and spatial selves. 

Locked in our homes, we open Google Maps for a 360-degree view of any square foot of the highway. On our GPS devices and our Mapquest searches, we break down the full experience of travel into a million randomly ranked impressions; “continue west 734.5 miles” takes up less space in our brains than “south 37 feet to unmarked intersection, take a soft right onto eastbound access road.” We know everything and we know nothing about the spaces through which we move.

Clinton Street, Manhattan, 1941

As Sandweiss comments in his post about the photographer as documentarian, "Like most Americans of his day, Charles Cushman was neither preservationist nor modernist. He enjoyed pieces of both past and present, using his camera to assemble a picture of his 'day in its color,' and seldom peering incisively into the shadows of class or race inequality or environmental degradation that lay beneath its surface. Cushman does not ask that we rush to his side in defense of these sites of imminent change, but neither do his pictures suggest confidence that something better awaits. His job (and his real job, at that) was to predict where the market was headed, not to take it there." What we take for granted in our everyday lives always disappears, replaced by some other building, some other idea, some other usefulness: we'd all better have that camera ready.

In honor of Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell): "the runaway train of misattribution"

Eric Arthur Blair -- who wrote as George Orwell, and whose birthday is today -- would have found a special chapter in 1984 for the antics of the current presidential season, filled as it is with a heightened level of prevarication, after-the-fact denial, and endless, "clarifying" media spin.  As one famous actor-turned-president once quipped, "Facts are stupid things." 

In a presidential campaign, facts have even less to do with the truth than with the appearance of truth, and in a media-saturated age, appearance is reality. These days political reality is carefully rearranged in every twenty-four hour news cycle. On the internet, of course, mendacity has a way of seeming endlessly appealing and repeated endlessly until it has the appearance of truth: this disingenuous flyer, above, has been making the internet rounds for some time, and is now being posted on Facebook and elsewhere as something Abraham Lincoln actually said or wrote. The facts are otherwise: they are actually the ideas of William J. H. Boetcker, a Presbyterian minister, in a pamphlet titled “Lincoln On Limitations" published in 1916. 

Over time Boetcker's appealing list -- "you cannot help the poor by destroying the rich" is certainly a thought that has its own logic of compassionate conservatism in business life, contemplating generosity with the bonus of financial gain -- was passed on in many forms: it was called an "Industrial Decalogue" and an "American Charter," as well as a list of "Ten Things You Cannot Do," marking  Boetcker as one of those uniquely American self-inventions: he was an early prosperity minister, proselytizing morals and success in an alluring (and profit-making) path of businessman's righteousness. 

By 1944, when the pamphlet above was printed, the Presbyterian minister and part-time  businessman had passed to his own Heavenly accounting department, and his name had disappeared as the author of the "Ten Cannots." The nation hadn't forgotten the name of Abraham Lincoln, exactly -- Abe's name had an "honest" ring to it -- and it was a bigger selling point than that of a forgotten Presbyterian minister. The Lincoln name on both sides doubtless sold more copies. 

Currently, the "Ten Cannots" are being passed around the web as Lincoln's thoughts, on Facebook and elsewhere, by Tea Party conservatives and others who devoutly wish the GOP would hurry up and find someone -- anyone -- besides Mitt Romney, painted into a corner as a Massachusetts liberal, as their Presidential candidate. Someone as bold and clear-eyed, say, as Ronald Reagan, who had this to say at the Republican convention in 1992:

I heard those speakers at that other convention saying, "we won the Cold War" -- and I couldn't help wondering, just who exactly do they mean by "we"? And to top it off, they even tried to portray themselves as sharing the same fundamental values of our party! What they truly don't understand is the principle so eloquently stated by Abraham Lincoln: "You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves." If we ever hear the Democrats quoting that passage by Lincoln and acting like they mean it, then, my friends, we will know that the opposition has really changed.

It's hard to stop the runaway train of misattribution, as Jane and Michael Stern write on their fact-or-fiction debunking site Snopes.com. The pamphlet did include an actual Lincoln quote on the reverse, and is eminently suited to partisans of either party without either one claiming righteousness as its own property:

Mr. Orwell (1903-1950) would probably find the current state of American political campaigning a fit subject, if he hadn't already described the unsettling results of Newspeak so eloquently more than sixty years ago.

"Lionel Asbo," Martin Amis: "a kind of anti-dad, the counterfather."

 Martin Amis, at home in Brooklyn

“But what happens — it’s already started happening to me — is that you turn 60 and there’s this: ‘This is going to turn out well. This can’t turn out well,’ ” he said. “But life grows in value because of your leave-taking with regard to it. Not very significant things suddenly look very poignant and charming. This particular period of my life is full of daily novelty. That turns out to be worth a great deal.”

As if to announce his own novel style of leave-taking, Amis, 63, has moved from London to Brooklyn with his homesick second wife, leaving Britain behind, but with a new book tramping London one last time. The ex-pat now looks out his windows at Manhattan: the love affair is, apparently, in bloom. In a current NY Times interview with Peter Stevenson Amis is quoted as saying “One of the things I like about Brooklyn is you see Manhattan from a distance ... and it’s magnificent: what a work of man that is." Of course, there is always the Amis dash of bitters in the gin: he never considered living in Manhattan.

“It’s too noisy ... The city that never sleeps? Well, the city whose inhabitants never sleep, that’s what it is. Terrible, self-righteous municipal clangings and bangings at 3 o’clock in the morning." So.

So it is Brooklyn for Amis and his family, a novelist's love affair with New York from a distance. It's a bit of careful calculation from a novelist whose urban fables of London have always observed the underside of city life. 

Amis, who was the rake and rambling man of British fiction after living down the specter of being the son of Kingsley, then made a productive career in criticism and critically-received novels, enters his third act this August with a new book, Lionel Asbo: State of England. It's one more Amis story (his twelfth novel) observed with the author's gimlet eye: Lionel Asbo is another one of the author's bad boys, a character like others of his fiction that made Money, London Fields, Time's Arrow, and The Information a variety of modern Dickens class-morality plays. His novels hinge on sly scams of one kind or another -- emotional, financial, marital. 

This story offers a twist in the fabric of the Amis universe: its central character, Desmond Pepperdine, is a young man of some intelligence, and sincere enough to write an advice columnist about an awkward affair. Unfortunately, the affair is with his grandmother, and there is the plot, simple as that: fifteen-year-old Desmond lives with his Uncle Lionel, a psychotically violent local hoodlum, "a kind of anti-dad, the counterfather." If Lionel finds out that Des has slept with his mother, he will kill him.

Amis has accepted the fact that many British readers find this a parting shot at London's social disequilibrium: he already knows that the early word on his new novel is that it's depressingly bad. Yet it seems to be turf he knows well. He told the NY Times interviewer, “I’ve sort of hung out with a few thugs all my life,” he said. “I love thugs. I’m keen on them.”

Since Amis's relocation to America during an election season, he might now focus on a different sort of thuggish crowd with its own set of mysteries and rituals. As he mused to the Times interviewer, “Is Mitt Romney electable? ... On the face of it, he looks presidential and he’s not stupid. But he lets himself down hideously whenever he has a victory."

"He looks as if he’s had five grams of coke — he’s shaking with a power rush. And that was always the most impressive thing about Obama: how he didn’t let that happen to himself. As if he didn’t feel it.” 

"What a great time to be coming to America," the author tells Stevenson. Well, it's a long four months until the election: surely CNN, Fox, and MsNBC must be considering a new commentator with a British accent for endless, hypothesizing political opinion. Amis's 1986 collection of essays about America, at the height of Reagan's morning-in-America image makeover, was titled The Moronic Inferno. No telling what fodder the next four months will provide the writer with the acid wit.

(Photo of Martin Amis by Mike McGregor from Guardian UK)