Tom Watson

Fifty-Cent Piece

Fifty years ago today, John Glenn circled the Earth three times aboard Friendship 7, the first American in orbit. Fifty years ago yesterday, the New York Mets opened their first spring training with Casey Stengel's stories in St. Petersburg, Florida. And 50 years ago tomorrow, I slipped into this world. My parents had watched Glenn coverage on snowy black and white television the day before, and my grandfather bought a new camera for the occasion of my birth. There was a snowstorm in New York.

Such a round number, fifty. The states of course. The half dollar. The knowledge that within limits of human biology, 50 is often the biggest anniversary most people attain. The Rolling Stones are 50 this year. So is Darryl Strawberry, that meteoric and magical Met, born three weeks after I was. David Foster Wallace would have been 50 tomorrow, born the same day as me in upstate Ithaca.

My father was a newspaperman on the production side, and my mother a school teacher. The American world they brought me into was far smaller and less connected, far more conservative and tribal than the one my children will bring their children into. In 1962, the year that James Meredith sought to enroll as the first black student at the University of Mississippi, much of the South still broiled under legal segregation. Women had little access to the top ranks of the work place, and the Ivy League was all-male. Homosexuals hid their identities away, or faced terrible consequences. The idea that a one-year-old baby born in Hawaii the year before me to mixed race parents would someday occupy the White House was the stuff of pure political fantasy.

Time is a strange phenomenon, particularly when considering generations. The last Civil War veterans died during the decade before I was born, but veterans of the frontier wars against the American Indian and the Spanish-American War were still around when I came on the scene. World War I vets were grandfathers, and World War II vets were the still-young middle-aged managers. The U.S. had a few military advisers in Southeast Asia, and the idea that an American army would someday invade a Middle East nation wasn't even on the radar screen, nor was Islam much of a geo-political factor. The enemy was communism and its spread, personified by 35-year-old Fidel Castro and his patron in Moscow, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. Winston Churchill still lived, as did Harry Truman, Jawaharlal Nehru, Douglas MacArthur and Charles DeGaulle. Mao ruled China. JFK was President, RFK his Attorney General and Martin Luther King was a young civil rights leader. Marilyn Monroe still had a few months to live.

'Tis strange to be 50, I'll admit. So much still to do, so many projects simmering. The challenges mount (precluding much time on this blog, long-suffering followers). But some things are timeless, and music is one of them. Here then, as a little gift to myself, one of the chart-toppers of 1962 (number one on some charts) - and a true classic of the genre:

Hanging Together

The committee to draft the Declaration of Independence reviews the crucial words in this scene from the HBO series John Adams - happy 4th, folks.

Their Shame, Our Stench

The Blue Wren has a long and brilliant, evocative, must-read post that casts a trip to the neat German villages of Bergen and Belsen in the light of current horrors. Here's a taste, but please go read the entire article and leave comments - very well worth it:

America, my country, feels that this horror, this atrocity, this mass murder at a distance, is necessary for a “new Middle East.”

Whatever that is.

America holds prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba without trial or hope of release. We continue to enable and perpetuate a bloodbath in Iraq and stand by as that country collapses into a civil war we perpetuated. We shrug and turn our backs on poor, war-ravaged Afghanistan and we shake our heads, not very sadly, over the sad fact that hundreds of civilians dying horrific, violent deaths in Lebanon and Israel.

After all, there’s really nothing we can do about it. After all, most of the people who are dying are ragheads and Hadjis. They’re not really people.

The Nazis had a universal word for them. “Untermenschen.” Subhuman.

Really, we’re not responsible. We’re uninformed.

We go to work, we shop and play,we talk with our friends, we make love and we live our daily lives as if we have no personal accountability for what the leaders of our country are doing in our names. Never mind that like the good people of those little towns in Northern Germany, Bergen and Belsen, we have to hold our noses and breathe through our mouths to avoid smelling the stench.

Selling Treason in Jersey

For birders and lovers of Victoriana and its gingerbread architecture, Cape May, New Jersey is a throwback to a more genteel time. To the north, Wildwood is also a throwback, but not to gentility; property values along the precious Atlantic coast have not knocked away this last great Jersey Shore honky-tonk outside the gutters of Atlantic City and its failed experiment with organized crime. Strangely enough for a town in a pure blue state, Cape May is below the Mason-Dixon line and seemingly carries a whiff of southern charm and manners; Wildwood sits squat upon it and has neither. Indeed, lately it as become somehow a center for Confederate regalia, according to Rich Juzwiak's blog, fourfour. Rich offers a colorful and shocking photo tour of T-shirt shops and other inspiring sights on the beach and boardwalk of Wildwood, New Jersey [hat tip: Lindsay].

The Confederate flag - known as the Battle Flag to CSA buffs and the Stars and Bars to many others - is all over Wildwood's shops and swimmers, it seems. It's simple really - tons of people don't realize that the flag represents two things above all else: black slavery and treason.

They're content to wear it on their chests, tattoo it on their arms, stick it in their labels, fly it from their flagpoles, wiggle it from their asses, and emblazon it on all manner of vehicles - as if it were really a mere symbol of cultural pride, a lasting badge of honor.

History is simple: a murderous gang of treasonous southern leaders turned their back on the United States of America to defend the enslavement of blacks, for economic, cultural, and racial reasons. It was a catastrophic last stand for a horrid, immoral way of life that may have died out in another short generation because of growing distates for shackles and whip throughout the western world. The flag was the symbol of the armed rebellion against the very idea of America. It is an icon of the greatest act of treason in our history - an icon made worse by the constant attempts at its resurrection as a legitimate cultural symbol after Reconstruction.

But some people are literally unreconstructed; listen to this guy on Rich's blog:

I live in Virginia. I have always had friends from various ethnic backgrounds, grew up listening to hip-hop, and attended a predominately/historically black college. I'm not at all religious and believe in the equitable treatment of people from all races, belief systems, and sexual lifestyles. I also hold the Confederacy dear to my heart. The basic idea of freedom has been altered since the Union won the Civil War, to the point where there is basically no real choice left in America. When people bemoan the two-party system and the choice between two evils that they're forced to make every four years, they ought to understand that it began when the C.S.A. was defeated. It's unfortunate that the source of the conflict was slavery, because it clouds the issues of personal freedom and of the rights of the States. Slavery is indefensible, but this country was founded with an allowance for the freedom of each individual State, and that war destroyed this freedom and led to the death of many others.

So the Confederacy was about some basic idea of American personal freedom? Slavery "clouded the issue." Do they actually teach this stuff? Then there's this:

maybe it is time for a history lesson, the civil war wasn't about slavery and lincon didn't abolish it out of the goodness of his heart. the civil war was about states rights and economy, slavery was abolished as a way to further weaken the south, not to up hold the libreal ideals of abolitionists

And ok, one more:

I am black and the proudest of southerners. The Confederate flag is not patently offensive. What is more, perhaps many northerners should get off their high horse about blacks, slavery, the flag, and the south. The north has it own problems, including racism. I have friends that have the so-called Confederate flag, and they are not racist. As to this topic, it seems northerners lack the ability to comprehend the naunces of love for the South, it culture, long dead family members that fought in the lost cause, while not necessarily hating blacks or loving slavery. It is more than just bumpersticker logic to say that one can be proud of the south, as I am, without being a racist. I am proud of Martin Luther King, but I am also proud of Robert E. Lee, as he was an honorable gentleman, solider, Christian, and educator. We all make mistakes.

We all do indeed make mistakes, but symbols of those mistakes can be very powerful and incredibly offensive. In a land where we attempt to amend the Constitution to prevent the burning of our national symbol, and where mainstream commentators accuse newspapers of treason for reporting accurately on secret government programs, symbols do matter in daily life. And while arguing over the causes of the Civil War in the context of boardwalk T-shirt shacks seems silly, arguing over the symbol adopted by Klansmen to terrorize Southern blacks within many of our lifetimes does not.

Besides, the flag-burning amendment folks have one thing right - if you're an American, there's only one flag.

Tags: Confederacy Stars+and+Bars treason KKK racism New+Jersey Wildwood Civil+War

Paging Harry Truman

My friend Brendan - who runs the Hell Yeah! blog - is always telling me that a big portion of the right's motivation for the disastrous adventure in Iraq is business: and not just keeping the world safe for capitalism, either. Direct business. Big business. In short, profiteering.

Brendan argues that while Marines face trial for murder after more than three years of sitting duck duty, while the death toll nears 2,500, while insurgency melds into anarchy, the cash registers ring.

I was skeptical, but not very. And now I'm not - thanks to an ongoing series over at the wonderblog FireDogLake. In his original April post Merchants of Misery” and the “Do-Less-Than-Nothing” Congress FDL writer Matt O. remembers another backlash against profiteers:

Ironically, we intersect with another statement from the former president. Truman dubbed the 1948 Congress as the "Do-Nothing Congress" because they were in session for only 108 days. But I think the current collection of suits has them beat with only 97 days in session. It’s the "Do-Less-Than-Nothing" Congress and while they chase 12 million undocumented workers all over the country in the House and go off on gay-bashing tirades on the Senate floor, they are ignoring a major issue - war profiteering.

Later this year, director Robert Greenwald will release the film Irag for Sale: the War Profiteers. But FDL is already on top of this. Today, Matt fires off another well-researched installment on "security and logistics" startup Custer Battles (sadly apt for this war) and tales of "gangland-style payments." From FDL: In March, the company was ordered by a jury to pay $10 million "in damages and penalties for defrauding the government on its work in Iraq." Alan Grayson, an attorney for the whistleblowers said:

"Companies like Custer Battles go there with the idea of
stuffing their pockets with cash. This jury of eight people heard the
evidence and were repelled by it."

Clearly, we need another Truman Committee - thought we're not likely to get one without a big sweep in  November. As Matt sums up (read his whole series):

Rapacious corporations profit off of the death and misery of an
ill-fated plan for war and are protected by their enablers in the power
structure. Their cost-cutting actions put our armed forces at greater
risk, inflame tensions with the locals for piss poor work (of which
many use imported labor), and thus, undermine our efforts. All while
ripping off the American taxpayers. I can’t think of anything more
treasonous than that.

Me either. Here's a preview of the Greenwald project via YouTube:

Technorati Tags: Irag, Bush, Truman, Rumsfeld, Custer Battles, Halliburton

A DaVinci Load

Dan Brown's spectacularly successful The DaVinci Code isn't anti-Catholic. It's anti-English. As in the language. While the Church can easily survive a silly pop thriller, I'm not sure the millions who've read the Code can stomach the assault on their literary minds. A.O. Scott nailed it today in his brilliant Times review of the new Tom Hanks vehicle, which is out to universal non-acclaim:

To their credit the director and his screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman (who collaborated with Mr. Howard on "Cinderella Man" and "A Beautiful Mind"), have streamlined Mr. Brown's story and refrained from trying to capture his, um, prose style. "Almost inconceivably, the gun into which she was now staring was clutched in the pale hand of an enormous albino with long white hair." Such language — note the exquisite "almost" and the fastidious tucking of the "which" after the preposition — can live only on the page.

To be fair, though, Mr. Goldsman conjures up some pretty ripe dialogue all on his own. "Your God does not forgive murderers," Audrey Tautou hisses to Paul Bettany (who play a less than enormous, short-haired albino). "He burns them!"

The hilarious "controversy" over the Code's alleged attack on the Church just sells tickets, to a movie that almost by definition has to be better than a dreadful book (I mean, can Hanks and Ron Howard fail to create a not unpleasant two hours)? As the Sawpit says: no one has a monopoly on Jesus. And as Gandalf, er, Ian McKellen told The Today Show this morning: how come there's no disclaimer in the front of the Bible? Different stories, different people, different truths. Or to quote Variety: Catholic League Ballistic. Ticket Sales Soar.

Book, meanwhile, remains a poorly-written, fact-challenged bit of fluffery.

So tonight there's Chris Matthews doing HardBall live from the Lexington Avenue headquarters of Opus Dei, doing his best Larry King imitation - "So Father, the Pope, great man, dead yesterday, already on his way to heaven? Or already there?"

Technorati Tags: davinci code | dan brown | Da Vinci Code

The Georgia Colossus

As President Bush's approval ratings continue to slide, the chattering conventions adopt resolutions comparing his slipping numbers with the lowest of the low: the ultimate Mendoza-line President, Richard Nixon. But right-leaning observers - those who are disgusted by Bush's failure but loyal to their politics - raise another colossal Oval Office flop time and again, when publicly wringing their hands about the slow destruction of their beloved party.

George W. Bush, they'll tell you, is getting perilously close to Jimmy Carter territory.

He should be so lucky.

For all the easy list comparisons of failure and malaise, Jimmy Carter is acres of fertile territory past George W. Bush as President of the U.S. It's not close, just on the basis of Carter's permanent introduction of human rights as an important factor in American foreign policy. Sure, there was the sweater, Iran hostages, oil prices, the stupid Olympic boycott - a litany of disasters, no doubt, and not easily balanced by Camp David, the Carter Doctrine of an open Persian Gulf, and his dual stance of Salt II with a human rights stick for the USSR.

Still and all it's a much shorter list, with fewer dead bodies, than Bush's - and human rights trumps all, in my book. (As does a post-Presidency career of a truly great man- and a burr in the saddle of every President after him). Even Reagan continued that human rights doctrine (on a very selective basis - along with every President after him - but it became part of the national debate permanently).

So yeah, don't lift Bush by comparing him with Jimmy - he wilts in the side-by-side.

Technorati Tags: jimmy carter | Politics | George W. Bush

That 70s Show

Back in season two of The Sopranos, in an episode in which nothing much happens - no ventricle-charged bloodshed, no real turning points, the kind of week that drives the obsessive plot-sitters wild with frustration - Tony Soprano is forced to report for duty every day as an executive at the waste management company he owns. With the Feds closing in, his lawyer advises the boss to stay out of the strip club and away from the streets. As with every week in this brilliantly-written series, the episode was its own discreet chapter and it ran along a crooked road to this soundtrack:

Disco Inferno - The Trammps
Gotta Serve Somebody - Bob Dylan
More Than a Feeling - Boston
Space Invader - The Pretenders
You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory - Johnny Thunders

The songs were perfect; against an almost casual lack of action, they portrayed much of the underlying tension in the life of a mobster. And man, they took me back.

Music propels The Sopranos, and so much of it was either recorded in - or inspired by - the 1970s, and a certain style of life here in the low-down middle atlantic states of that wonderful, dogshit time. Although the backdrop is the real estate-charged world of turn-of-the-millenium north Jersey, the hoods who make up the revolving central cast are leather-clad, picaresque hot-rod jockeys riding the Turnpike of 1977 or so, flipping 8-tracks into the console, sucking on the embers of an old joint,  and downshifting battered Camaros past the exit signs.

Line up Tony's crew in black and white in the parking lot of the Bada Bing, and they look much like an aging band of northeast classic rockers, with paunches, thinning hair, and leather coats - the E Street Band in their 40s and 50s. Oh yeah, one of them is the E Street Band in hs 50s - Steve Van Zandt, a musician of singularly good historical taste, who no doubt inhabits the soundtrack of The Sopranos just as well as he fills the greasy pompadour of Silvio. Van Zandt's wardrobe for the show is amazingly like his threads for the Darkness on the Edge of Town tour - no accident there, I think.

Indeed, outside of Tony's thoroughly modern children and their plot lines, every character in The Sopranos has that 70s grime on them - before unleaded gas, before environmental controls on the refineries of Elizabeth, before new graffiti-free subway cars, before a sterile Times Square. And yeah, before the unrelenting Federal prosecution of the 80s made the Soprano crew into pure fantasy. Although he's the youngest member of the gang, Christopher Moltisanti is the clearest 70s throwback in the cast, played to spectacular precision by Michael Imperioli - those of us who grew up in Yonkers in the 70s knew this guy, and I suspect this goes for Belmont, for Queens, for Brooklyn, for Newark, for Philly, and onward down the seaboard. The character is pitch perfect, although at the extreme range of violence - his sensibilities toward life, his priorities, are closer to The Seven-ups (that underrrated 70s car-chase opera), than to the old-time gangsters of The Godfather.

At the center, of course, is James Gandolfini, whose habitation of Tony Soprano has certainly ruined him for future lead roles. As Chris is the young Tony, living his 70s now, Tony just looks back. He only looks back. There are few clues to what he thinks about the future, what he wants to do, or really, how he wants to live. Everything is about the past - an elegaic but unsympathetic view of the past. Tony talks about his younger days on the therapist's couch, but when he walks into the kitchen singing Aqualung, you're back there.

Sunday's episode indulged that 70s symbolism to the max, with its noirish, filthy carnival scenes, the short leather jackets, the focus on cars and drugs, the big hair, and the music. Over the course of its run, repeat musical quotations have framed the action, with pulll quotes from Jefferson Airplane, Booker T and the MGs, Cream and Eric Clapton, Paul Simon, The Eagles, Boston, Led Zeppelin, Steve Miller Band, Stones, Tom Petty, Elvis Costello, and Steely Dan. No accident that Silvio tried to lure the outed gay gang member back with backstage passes to the big Blood, Sweat, and Tears show.

This week, as Christopher fell back into heroin and self-hatred, the score returned to Johnny Thunders - the ultimate destructive 70s era New York rocker. The carnival faded to near black and white: deep, horrific colors like a faded print of the French Connection. And Thunders and the Heartbreakers lurched into a live, raucous version of Pipeline - no doubt played in some dive club in Brooklyn circa '78, filled with half-drunk, leather-clad guys like Christopher Moltisanti.

Trouble in the Heartland

Like many men of my age and geography, I will purchase just about anything Bruce Springsteen sells, and that includes his strange and raucous new release, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, nominally a tribute to octogenerian folksinger Pete Seeger, but more broadly another small piece in Springsteen's ongoing reinterpretation of American culture. The record covers traditional folk material - no originals. It sounds entirely live, recorded with a wide-ranging group of musicians, the errant tuba occasionally reminiscent of Springsteen's whirling, precocious early sound.

Being both a careful producer and a careful liberal, Springsteen is always controlling about both his musical releases and his statements. But this record is sloppy, haphazard. So is the message, but the results are less joyful. Because there in lineup is that old folk warhorse, the Ballad of Jesse James - and because of it, the calliope crashes to the ground.

Everybody knows the song, and perhaps in its inherent long-standing myth, there's an innocence that calls for forgiveness to actual history, at least for aging rock musicians:

Jesse James was a man
And he killed many men
He robbed the Glendale train
And he took from the rich
And he gave that to the poorer
He'd a hand and a heart and a brain

History tells a different tale. Skip the heart - in history, Jesse James had a hand, and a gun, and a brain - that brain belonged to the lost cause of the Confederacy, to race hatred, and to revenge. And the gun belonged to American terrorism.

Jesse James was terrorist who killed without compassion. The record on that is clear. Oh, he wasn't the mastermind of a movement like Osama bin Laden (that honor in the Border Wars belonged to the hate killers Bill Anderson and William Quantrill), but he certainly was of the ilk of killers like Ayman al-Zawahiri, Abdelkarim Hussein Mohammed al-Nasser, and others on the U.S. most wanted list of international terrorists. And the U.S. government, on behalf of its terrorized civilian population in Kansas and Missouri and the midwest, hunted Jesse and his brother Frank and the rest of their gang with at least the relentless passion we now employ against killer hiding in Pakistani provinces.

Author T.J. Stiles wrote a brilliant revisionist book a few years back that tore the cover off the James myth (created largely in the 20th century, long after his death at the hands of bounty hunter Robert Ford). Jesse James : Last Rebel of the Civil War is a terrific page-turner, but it's also terrifying to those who believe in the ancient values of the American heartland, who go for the Disney view of the Civil War's aftermath, western expansion, and the deadly growth pains of our nation. It's surprising that Springsteen hasn't read it, and that musicians like Seeger and Van Morrison (who also prominently covered the ballad) don't have a clue as to the real story.

Under a greater "lost cause" movement led by Quantrill after the Confederacy to punish pro-Union supporters in Missouri, James and his ilk engaged in ritual torture, murder, scalping, dismemberment, attacks on unarmed civilians, destruction of property, and general violent mayhem. They also lined their own pockets. But James is remembered primarily because of his canny use of the media of the day, mainly pro-Southern newspaper publishers who created in him a Robin Hood figure for the lost cause of the South. "In his political consciousness and close alliance with a propagandist and power broker, in his efforts to win media attention with his crimes," wrote Stiles. "Jesse James was a forerunner of the modern terrorist."

There is nothing but religion and modern munitions technology to seperate the Quantrill/James movement of the midwest from the al-Qaeda of today. Yet, when Stiles' book reached the Amazon best-seller list a few years ago, some reviewers attacked it as "anti-southern." In an instant, you could see the distant, historic connection between the defeat of the Confederacy and its violent aftermath and the successful "Southern Strategy" of Ronald Reagan's Republican Party, which leveraged the chip on the South's historic shoulder to provide stunning electoral success - and reward the very political party that Southerners once believed had ravaged their culture forever. Steve Gillard writes about this quite often, under the banner of not letting the GOP off the hook (and I think, under the hope that the strategy is on its last legs in 2006). He has another good post on the traditional Reagan-based Stars and Bars strategem; here's a piece:

There are two Confederacys, one of history and one of imagination.

The one we deal with today is of imagination.

The one of rebel flags and the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the cult of the dead rebels.

It has little to do with reality.

The real Confederacy was closer to Biafra than Nazi Germany. A poor, break away Republic destined to be crushed by the larger neighbor.

The reason you get people like Jim Webb playing cute and George Allen praising the Confederacy has to do with how the Confederacy was resurrected in the postwar period. It was about race and integration, not history.

He is exactly correct. And it's really not such a Southern Strategy any more - as Steve has said, it's a dissatisfied, disenfranchised whites strategy nowadays, going far beyond the borders of the Southern states. But it's showing its age and fraying at the edges as well, mainly because the economic reality for so many middle class white people is so starkly disadvantaged when compared to the wealth of those who actually run the Republican Party. These days, the civil rights battles of the old South make for good tourism in the new South. I've been the Birmingham and Montgomery recently - civil rights history is bringing the tourists in.

Still, this love of Confederate myth - the glorious lost cause - persists. A few years back, I was in Charleston on business and a friend and I took a walking tour of the old part of the city. Fascinating and beautiful. But in the old church downtown, there's a memorial to the martyred sons of "the nation" - and it's ain't the United States they're talking about. My friend was horrified, and vilified the local guide - who calmly described the pre-Civil War Charleston as a city in a golden age when African-American slaves had it pretty good. We passed on the Bobby Lee statues in the gift shop and decided on a self-guided tour from that point on.

Bruce Springsteen should know better. This pining away for the Confederate past and its post-war terrorist followers shouldn't make his latest record - no matter how traditional the tune is. The hero myth should die.

In Kearney, Missouri they still hold their Jesse James Festival every year - paid for partly with municipal funds - and the official history of the town on the Web still rails against the cruelty of "the Federals." A group of citizens gives tours at the nonprofit Jesse James Farm Museum, and raises money to preserve the hallowed ground.

Tourism, I guess - maybe someday there'll be a similar set-up in the mountains of Afghanistan.

Bulletin: Silicon Alley Still Dead

Don't believe everything you read, and watch out for what section of the paper you read it in. Those are the two thoughts I have for you this morning, as I add my voice to the disapproving chorus of those reacting to the rather silly story in the Style section of the Times. Alive and Well in Silicon Alley purports to document the rise of New York's media technology sector once again - and damnit, the wonderful "style" of those go-go 90s we all miss so damned badly. So cool. But as Jason Chervokas says this morning, "if Silicon Alley's going down that road again, well, I've got a start-up to sell you, online pizza delivery, $100 million valuation. It could happen."

Great line, and it refers to an actual company that (successfully) made the funding rounds in 1996 in New York. Which should tell you something. After the Netscape IPO in 1995, the gold rush enveloped the formerly anti-entrepreneur ruling class of New York. Silicon Alley 1.0 was a gold rush town straight out of HBO's virulent Deadwood - a shoot 'em up frontier village filled with con men, hustlers, snake oil salesmen and all the hookers, hangers-on, and profiteers you could possibly fit into lofts and cube farms from the Hudson to the East River. It was all great fun, I have to admit - oh except for the heartache, the bankruptcies, and the thousands of employees left with stock options that retained as much value as Confederate paper circa 1865. Nor was it much fun for all the late investors, for would-be angels, the amateur money that flooded the town looking for the next eBay, the next Amazon.

Still and all, there was a creative spirit that was eventually welded to the greatest graduate business school of them all - the mean streets of a cruel market - and I know it was a fascinating period in my own professional life. Ideas were everywhere, even if countless ne'er-do-well trust fund babies spent other people's money on high-end vodka, cocaine, and Super Bowl ads. [When I found myself featured in a full-color spread - clothed - in Penthouse magazine next to a certain notorious party boy and his dog, and two pages away from an explicit montage of two, er, Vikings of some sort ... well, I knew the jig was up: the for-sale sign went up quickly at good old @NY].

As a board member of NYSIA, I spent a couple of hours at the our old haunt at 55 Broad Street this week and schmoozed with its chief Bruce Bernstein - who has more staying power than any dozen start-ups - and we talked a bit about the buzz in the air. It's not the money really, although there have been a few nice exits, primarily of companies that ran cheap and have been plugging along for years now, some of them before the catastrophe of 9/11. It's more the creativity - lots of ideas, lots of open discussion, some collaboration. And then there's Google and Yahoo - why did they move their big sales units to New York? Easy: it's where big media lives and they want to get the big campaign money. And they probably will: that's business.

Which the Times Styles article clearly was not. Back in the day, Jason and I were first attracted to the business story and to its place in New York's history; as he says:

...first and foremost we took seriously the ideas that New York could be an important hothouse for the invention of new media technology businesses and that the boys in Silicon Valley could learn something from New York's media-centered approach to technology. We also believed that media technology start-ups could have a major financial impact on a city that hadn't had a new home grown industry since movies left in the 1920s.

The kernel of this remained during the bad years, but the explosion of the phony bubble we had predicted accurately - but too early, of course - killed thousands and thousands of jobs. Now we're getting photos of pool tables again, and descriptions of techie wardrobes. Who cares? At 55 Broad, I bumped into John Tepper Marlin, the economist who did some terrific reports on New York's job growth and job decline during and after the bubble. Now out on his own and working on some project, he told me that the job numbers are just starting the creep up again. This is a good thing, real evidence of an important - and still young - sector coming back from the dead in town. The Times didn't bother to report this. In short, I'll agree with Fred Wilson's take:

I don't like the name Silicon Alley either and never did.

Why do we need some wannabe name to describe something that is going on in every major city in our country and increasingly every major city in the world?

Entrepreneurs are building interesting companies using technology and brains and imagination.

That's all there is to it.  And if there's a story in that, let's put it where it belongs in the business section or the technology section, not the style section.

There is a business story there, and I'll be paying more attention myself in the coming months. But I have to chuckle. This morning I noticed that Jason Calacanis, our old bete noir from the 90s, is in fighting spirit and spitting at my old partner (and me as well) after Jason's initial blog post. Here's the Calacanis take:

I love the fact that I beat them so bad that Jason still can't get over it. That is what competition is about--getting inside the other guys head to the point at which they take their mind off the game. I *tortured* these guys for five years and ten years later they are still throwing stones.

I think Jason has let L.A. get into his DNA, infecting his viewpoint - it's a very non-Brooklyn sentiment, it seems to me: unkind, inaccurate, and all-hype. You know, post 9/11 in this town and after the Iraq debacle, bragging about torture - even in jest - ain't cool. We like to keep it real around here (let's hope the Times is listening). Hey Jason, time to get out of the cabana and come back to a real city. Where, it seems, there is some interesting growth - in business, not in style.

UPDATE: Man, so much passion for the 90s. Read the comments via Chervokas, Wilson, and Calacanis as well as Steve Gilliard's acerbic memories of the boom - here's a handy list of links via Pamela Parker, an ex-@NYer who proved one thing: Jason and I knew talent, at least. Her post is here.

• Jason Chervokas - Style over Substance in Silicon Alley
  
• Tom Watson: Bulletin: Silicon Alley is still Dead
  
• Jason Calacanis: 10 years later... lessons from the SAR/@NY Battle
  
• Fred Wilson: Alley Wag and Revisionist History, Calacanis Style
  
• Brouhaha: Back Alley Fighting
  
• Steve Gilliard: Warning, bullshit alert
• i-boy: Fight Club: Silicon Alley Style
• PR Differently
• Daly Om: Silicon Alley vs. Silicon Alley

It's a good debate, and I'm glad the initial Chervokas post touched things off. Meantime, I re-read the Times story and you know, it's not such a bad business piece - a bit simple perhaps, badly labeled and positoned, but the story is well-told, in general  - there is something brewing again in town.