Alaska

Ad libbing as he warmed up the Republican convention crowd for their vice presidential nominee, Rudolph Giuliani quipped: “She got an 80 percent approval rating. You don’t get those kinds of numbers in New York!”

Of course, getting those numbers would be just as easy for a New York mayor or any other mayor or governor if they were able – like the charming hockey mom -- to send $1200 to every man, woman and child in their jurisdiction thanks to a windfall profits tax on the oil industry.

But wait a second. Didn’t Rudy tell us that she had reduced taxes and cut government spending?

Actually, for all her boilerplate conservative rhetoric about the wonders of freedom and the evils of taxation and government, her career reflects a penchant for raising taxes and redistributing wealth.  read more »

BLOOMINGTON, Minn.—Bill Noll, an Alaskan delegate to the Republican convention, has been a coal entrepreneur, an appointed state officeholder and the mayor of a small town in his home state. “Smaller than Wasilla, actually,” he said with a grin. It had been four days exactly since John McCain had made Alaskan Sarah Palin the most famous former small-town mayor in America. (With the possible exception of Clint Eastwood.)

Since Palin was introduced to the world last Friday as a reformist, no-nonsense female chief executive, her image has been clouded by the revelation of family problems (a pregnant teenage daughter, a no-good state trooper brother-in-law, a husband with a history of drinking and driving), flip-flopping problems (on “the bridge to nowhere” and the subject of earmarks), embarrassing-bedfellow problems (she served on the board of a 527 called “Ted Stevens Excellence in Public Service, Inc.  read more »

On January 5th of this year, Alaska Governor and Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin wrote an op-ed in the New York Times opposing listing polar bears on the endangered species list. Her argument was well reasoned and thoughtful, although in the end, unsatisfactory. In her piece Governor Palin noted her support for policies that helped preserve polar bears:

"We have a ban on most hunting - only Alaska Native subsistence families can hunt polar bears - and measures to protect denning areas and prevent harassment of the bears. We are also participating in international efforts aimed at preserving polar bear populations worldwide.

 read more »

Last weekend an old friend came by and surprised me with an offhand statement. She had been friends of the writer George W.S. Trow, who died last November at 63, and she said he had been in and out of mental institutions in the years before he died.

When I was young, all journalists of any ambition worshiped Trow because of his groundbreaking 1980 essay, "Within the Context of No-Context." As style, as vision, a theory, the piece had enormous impact. It was published in The New Yorker, and I'd read the New Yorker's eulogy to Trow, a loving piece by Hendrik Hertzberg (a former speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, whose name Carter dropped at Brandeis the other day during his speech, to get a little cred with the homeboys). Hertzberg's piece elided Trow's apparent miseries with oldfashioned ellipticalness:

He abandoned the house he had designed and built in upstate New York, and wandered in Alaska, Texas, and Newfoundland before finding a tenuous stability in Naples. Poignantly, for one whose life was delineated by intense and, on his part, generous friendships, his last years were shadowed by the loneliness he had written about so acutely. During that time, many of us had only fleeting glimpses: a message on an answering machine, with no return number; a secondhand report of a sighting. "A product consumed by a man alone in a room exists in the grid of one, alone, and in the grid of two hundred million," George wrote in his famous essay. "To the man alone, it is a comfort. But just for a minute."

The NYT obit on Trow was a little more forthcoming, referring to "a psychiatric hospital." But as film-commenter Ray Pride notes:

"The NY Times obituary had a number of seemingly coded passages and ellipses, one of which suggested that he hadn't been well. "In the last half-dozen years, Mr. Trow's nostalgia for a waning world grew into an enveloping despair, his friend Mr. Nugent said. Mr. Trow forsook his home in Germantown, N.Y., and roamed North America, from Texas to Alaska to Newfoundland, living a pared-down existence, never settling long in one place. After treatment in a psychiatric hospital, he expatriated himself to Italy." Still, "Context of No..." still provokes."

I wonder how much more Trow's eulogists knew on this score. Trow was a literary genius, with a burn rate like Stephen Crane and E.A. Poe; and literary geniuses often suffer from mental problems. I thought we were supposed to be past shame about these matters.

As the price of gasoline jiggles about and above the $3 line, there is cause for tepid rejoicing for  read more »

It was a few days before Christmas, and it was well past 7 p.m.  read more »

That's why condo prices are so high! The Times reports that Francine Blacher, a Manhattan real-estate agent, has pleaded guilty to filing a false income-tax return for 2001. She apparently hid income in a bank account in the Bahamas. Looks like the Mayor and the Governor have a bit of friction between their competing views of what should go up Ground Zero way. Mr. Pataki wants mucho office space; Mr. Bloomberg doesn't want an area that's desolate at night after the workers go home, according to the Post. Charles Gargano, the Governor's chief economic-development adviser, conjures up a false dilemma: "Lower Manhattan is the financial capital of the world. Don't you want to keep it that way?"

And the Post also takes a tour of 7 World Trade Center.

There's an oil spill that's twice as big as the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, contaminating 55 acres of land in Greenpoint underneath 238 homes, and City Councilman Eric Gioia has joined a suit by Riverkeeper to force ExxonMobil to clean it up. The spill goes back to the 50's, reports the Daily News. That explains all the greasy hair in nearby Williamsburg, at least.

And The Sun reports that Housing Here and Now, a housing-advocacy coalition, says that the city is failing to ensure repairs in some of the city's most dangerous buildings.  read more »

-Matthew Grace

"It was like looking into an abyss," said Werner Herzog of the footage left behind by Timothy Treadwell. "Human beings are always like an abyss."

"But," Mr. Herzog told The Transom, "that is how I knew it was potent material. Both the editor and I had given up smoking, but it was so astounding that we had to stop immediately and rush to buy a packet of cigarettes."

Mr. Herzog—the legendary German director who ate his shoe on camera, walked to Paris from Munich for a dying friend, and never formally studied film—churns out documentaries the way film critics churn out bad reviews. Recently—amid the wildlife tableaus of the Natural History museum—Grizzly Man, his second of three docs to be released this year, was trotted out for a few hundred lucky guests. At least as many were left stranded outside, while those indoors hovered over sweaty cheese platters with Kurt Andersen.

Grizzly Man, which was co-produced by Lion's Gate and the Discovery Channel, tells the story of self-proclaimed eco-warrior Timothy Treadwell and his time among the grizzly bears in Katmai National Park, Alaska. Mr. Treadwell, a flaxen haired failed actor and erstwhile alcohol consumer, traveled to Katmai for the first time in 1990 and spent the following 13 summer immersing himself in the grizzly world.

His grizzly games began as therapy but developed into a full scale profession, complete with appearances on David Letterman and book deals. Each summer he allowed himself to venture further into their sanctuaries. He named his bear friends, adopted a family of mangy foxes, and spent most of his time recording unnervingly emotive segments on his camera.

Having survived thirteen summers among the carnivores, he and his girlfriend were ravaged by a bear moments before they were to be transported back to the mainland. The 100 hours of footage left behind eventually found its way into Mr. Herzog's hands. When the Transom asked whether it should address Herr Herzog in German, he declined. His English, though heavily accented, is pristine. "I had not seen any of Treadwell's footage when I started to shoot my half of the film..." he purred. "I did not want to."

The whole process, including travel to Florida, Alaska, and Long Island, was done incredibly quickly, in less than a month. But Mr. Treadwell is now, for Mr. Herzog, like an old friend. "He is part of the family, no doubt. If he showed up at the dinner table for Thanksgiving, everyone would recognize him."  read more »

According to sources close to the studio, there is footage of Mr Treadwell's death, which was so gruesome that Mr. Treadwell's family would not allow it to be seen. Instead Mr. Herzog makes do with just the audio. He vows that visual footage does not exist. "He should be granted some privacy and dignity in his death. We are not going to do a snuff movie," Mr. Herzog sniffed.

At the end of the day, there is something just a bit off about Mr. Treadwell and his fellow bear enthusiasts. Mr. Treadwell's good friend and sometime co-author, Jewel Palovak, who is also a producer of the film, comes across as remarkably unstricken and even callow in the documentary. She also addressed the crowd at the screening in a most bizarre way. "I mean here I am, living the life Timothy always wanted to lead, addressing hundreds of people. I've got all that now." —Jessica Joffe

After allowing his Republican friends in Congress to spend without restraint for four years-fearing  read more »

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"We have a special pizza tonight," said our waitress.The two 11-year-olds at the table brightened.  read more »

In the supposed gloom-and-doom atmosphere of the recently concluded Cannes Film Festival, it is hard  read more »

After I had taken some friends to an indifferent meal in Chinatown recently, I tried to think of a w  read more »

"Svoboda is not your typical East Village haunt," reads the press release.  read more »