Price-fixing and (the) IRS

(Wiki Commons)

Now that I've got your attention, this isn't about the IRS we all know and loathe. It is, however, about a woman whose initials were IRS, and who was loathsome. She was a managing editor for a publishing house I worked for back in the dusty eons of recorded time...and I got her good. Indeed, it was one of my finest hours, and I'm going to crow about it a little. Since I paid for my fun with blood, sweat and tears, I figure I'm entitled.

“Men of the same trade seldom meet but that it ends in a conspiracy against the public.” -Adam Smith

I was reading a great column on Smirking Chimp just now in which the author, Joshua Holland, editor at Alternet, made the case that the "new right" is not a political ideology at all, but a religion, and a particularly hide-bound fundamentalist one at that. Included at the bottom of one of the comments to that column was the quote above. It put me in mind of my editorship of a little known, and totally crappy, publication called P.S. For Private Secretaries.

I wanted that job badly. I NEEDED that job badly. My husband and I had just moved from Athens, GA, to NYC with a scrimped thousand bucks to our name. We had just spent more than $600 of it getting a teeny little apartment on the Upper East Side, a pricey neighborhood but safe. Except for the woman killed on the block I lived on a week before we moved...but I didn't know that until I visited my new dentist, who told me while poking around my teeth and occasionally peeking at his car, parked on the West Side docks, to see if it was still there. This was NCY in the 70s, not yet Disneyized, but as god made it, warts and all. (The dentist's office was on the 52nd floor of the Empire State Buildling; I still miss going there. Plus he was a great dentist.)

So, anyway, I got the job. I had interviewed after a publishing specialist employment agency had shoehorned me in at the last minute.  I was given a "test" assignment to write. And I did it really, really badly. But I knew it. So I simply wrote another one and delivered it. My spunk and the quality of the second one clinched the deal. Whew!  We could eat!

Time passed, but not much time before I realized the publication was crap and the managing editor, initials IRS, certifiable. We didn't know about the Queen Bee syndrome then, but she could have been its poster girl. Some of us took to killing off her flowers while she was at lunch by pouring salt into the vase. We would knacker her desk chair by letting string twine around the rollers on the legs. She was really a fright, and truly deserved the pranks. But still, I decided, after less than six months, that I had had enough. I decided I could begin freelancing, as I knew ALL the ropes by then. (Stop laughing.) I did have good feedback from no less than Lewis Lapham...but never did get published by him.

I did, however, get my own back with IRS. On the back page of each issue was a cute little feature whereby we slightly messed up a few of ten sentences and the trick for the private secretary reading the issue was to find the bad grammar or spelling. Luckily, I had that task for my final issue. I shared editing that title with another editor, which left both of us so much free time that we wrote a porn novel that actually was purchased for publication by some sleazy book publisher. But we pulled it. She was a minister's daughter, and I was chicken.

In that final P.S. issue, one of my sentences read something like (who can remember exactly after almost 40 years?): "The CEOs of several major corporations met to discuss what the price structure of their products should be for the coming year." It was one of the un-screwed up sentences, so it flew by IRS's final edit.

Then the issue came out. My buddy, Pam, called me when it arrived. "You should have been here," she said, or something similar. "I thought IRS might literally fly, she was so wound up.  We had a great time at the editorial meeting. And when can we have lunch?"

I remained friends with Pam for years. She left that company, eventually, and went to a fashion/pattern publisher. She convinced her colleagues to hire me to write copy. As a result, I know more about Kenzo and Betsey Johnson than most freelancers alive, and moreover, I can write about them in very few characters, as copy was specified to fit ad layouts. I can also instruct people on inserting zippers. But it was a fun gig. The offices were freaking perfumed, very pleasant. The company was on lower Fifth Avenue, the edge of Greenwich Village, so there were lots of good places to have lunch.

Eventually, Pam and I lost touch. But not before we had gotten to know and appreciate each other quite well. Who knew she would knit? But also be able to climb a mountain? This seemed an odd combination to me back then, but I used it to create the first short story I ever sold.

Moral: Do what you have to do, up to and including zingers for horrific bosses who would be better off in Bellevue's psych ward than on the eighth floor of a publishing house in Manhattan. Oh, yes. About those CEOs. I was pretty much right, no?

Shut up! I TOLD you Strauss-Kahn was set up

Dominique Strauss-Kahn may get his smile back; wonder what will happen to his lying accuser? (Wiki Commons)

On May 14, charges were lodged against Dominique Strauss-Kahn that both forced him to step down as head of  the International Monetary Fund, and derailed his putative run for the French presidency.

I smelled a rat. And I said so on, among other blogs, Smirking Chimp. I was roundly trashed as being anti-feminist and anti-poor people and lord knows what else.

No, I'm simply an experienced journalist whose nose begins to quiver when the stench of corruption or outright lying or both begin to waft from the pens of knee-jerk reporters who engage in the reprehensible activity of verbally penalizing the rich simply because they are rich, and championing the poor simply because they are poor. Mr. Strauss-Kahn is rich; his accuser is a poor immigrant from Guinea.

She is also a liar.

It was, according to a New York Times (NYT) report, the prosecution that uncovered the facts about the accuser's possible motives, including the king of all motives, money. She had been bribed before. Did she have sex with Mr. Strauss-Kahn? Probably. Was it consensual? Almost without question. A quick slide between the sheets with a wealthy, powerful man meant enormous amounts of income for the "poor" housekeeper. We should all be so poor. As the NYT reported:

According to the two officials, the woman had a phone conversation with an incarcerated man within a day of her encounter with Mr. Strauss-Kahn in which she discussed the possible benefits of pursuing the charges against him. The conversation was recorded. 

That man, the investigators learned, had been arrested on charges of possessing 400 pounds of marijuana. He is among a number of individuals who made multiple cash deposits, totaling around $100,000, into the woman’s bank account over the last two years. The deposits were made in Arizona, Georgia, New York and Pennsylvania. 

Whether it was about ruining Mr. Strauss-Kahn politically, as he suggested when he was arrested, or something a little more New York gangland in its style--perhaps a multiple-layered gambit by various organized crime factions to put acquire some negotiable legal favors--one thing is so virtually certain that the prosecutors have come forward before the next court date to admit that their case has fallen apart. It didn't happen at all the way the housekeeper claimed.

Good for the NY prosecutors. It takes guts to make a complete u-turn after all the posturing they did at the beginning of this debacle. I give them, I might add, the benefit of the doubt here. There is no guarantee, none at all, that someone in that office was not paid off when the arrest was made, and has now slunk back into his or her hole. I wouldn't like to think that, but it wouldn't be the first time a prosecutor had been suborned. Good on NYC for making mincemeat of whatever arrangement, if any, might have been made, or, if no arrangement, for coming clean in public as soon as practicable.

I'm not going to say more about the charges themselves or the conduct of any particular person or organization in this case, except one: the press.

The press inexcusably rushed to judgment on this. That unleashed the dunderheads of knee-jerk feminism and the addlepated anti-wealth activists all over the planet. The unconscionable biased and titillating early reporting of the incident caused upheaval in French society. It caused enormous grief to the Strauss-Kahns. It further divided an already divided global population.

I am no big fan of the International Monetary Fund. I certainly believe there are a lot of rich people out there with ill-gotten gains; just look at Wall Street. And I certainly believe there are poor, hard-working immigrants who are abused, one way or another, by those with real or imagined power over them.

What I don't believe is that journalists should convict rich people of crimes based on their wealth, and elevate poor people to sainthood based on their lack of funds. While there are plenty of scoundrels in this situation yet to be totally sorted out*, the so-called journalists--particularly those in New York City who should not be that wet behind the ears--are deserving of a good deal of wrist-slapping, and, if they had any decency at all, would be publicly eating a large serving of humble pie, and slinking off with tail between legs until they actually learn their trade.

*It may well be that the case against Mr. Strauss-Kahn is dropped; one wonders how prominently that will be reported by the increasingly gormless New York Times. One also wonders whether any case brought against the housekeeper for, among other things, filing a false police report--and whatever may attach to what look like bribes to her--will be reported with gusto equal to that of the initial reporting of the case against Mr. Strauss-Kahn.

Take Three Cups of Tea and lie to me in the morning

Three cups of tea? Or a helping of swill? (Wiki commons)

About twelve years ago, one of New York’s toughest agents―a man who had worked to sell my most incendiary manuscript when my usual agent failed―told me there was one problem with selling it.

It was not the writing. Not the subject matter. It was that I didn’t have a platform. That is, I had not killed anyone or otherwise engaged in notorious behavior that would make some imbecilic publisher and its moronic sales staff get excited about pumping it to the jaded, overpaid, possibly coke-snorting buyers of various bookstore chains.

I told him I had no intention of committing mayhem just to sell books, and put the manuscript back in the drawer.

I was wrong. All I had to do, apparently, was make up a good tale, such as the one Greg Mortenson made up to sell Three Cups of Tea and make a name for himself, as well as a fortune. The fortune? Well, yes. He said he was going to give it all to charities in Pakistan and so on, which apparently was also mainly cut from whole cloth, or at least pinned together and not sewn.

Celtic kidnapping results in charity abroad

So here’s a possibility: Woman of a certain age travels to Ireland where she is lured into what she thinks is a gypsy caravan but is actually a cell of the neo-Celtic group, the Druid Militia. Once she is there, they cannot let her go; unless she joins them, they’ll have to kill her, but they assure her that the ancient Celts did not fear death. Still….she didn’t want to die, regardless of what modern morons think ancient Celts believed. So she pretended to join them. She helped them carry out raids on music stores, destroying all the discs by Enya in the process because Enya, as every militant neo-Celtic Druid Militia member knows, had taken Celtic ideas and made them global. And global is evil. Everyone knows that.

Global Church of Enya and Embroidery Society
After a year of pretending to be one of them, she found herself alone one day, unattended by a Militia member. Gathering what was left of her wits, she escaped, running immediately to a Roman Catholic Church, where she asked for asylum but was told she was unworthy as she wasn’t a Roman Catholic or a pedophile clergyman of any denomination. So she did the only thing left to her. She packed her Enya CDs into a suitcase (she had secretly saved her share of the loot), went to New York City, flung them onto the desk of a gullible publisher, and told him that she had suffered blackouts for years, and when she woke from them, she had been visited by an angel who told her to found a fan club for Enya. The current Enya fan club? It was nothing, of no account, she assured the publisher. It was not the angelic one she had come to found, the one that would teach every Celtic child in Ireland and the world how to play the harp and sing. The one that would build schools for global cooperation. It was not the one that would become the Global Church of Enya and Embroidery Society.

She took for herself a new name―Angela of the Ashes―and was sent on a worldwide tour, speaking the truth of Enya wherever she went. She amassed a fortune. (She laughed aloud whenever she thought how gullible people were, that they didn't figure out she, Angela, was her own angel.)

And then someone found out. None of it was true. Indeed, the woman had never met Enya or an angel (although she quite liked Enya’s music, but thought the angel cult of the past 20 years just a tad ludicrous.) She hadn’t founded any schools in Ireland, although she did visit quite often to stay at her favorite Dublin hotel, Pembroke Townhouse, and dine at her favorite steak house, FXB. (That part about becoming a vegetarian when she was founding the cult of Enya? Hyperbole. In fact, she simply added an apple a day to her diet.)

So, Mr. Curtis, will that do as a platform? Or have you sent some ignorant publisher to Bozeman, Montana, to sign Mortenson to another book contract? This one will doubtless be about how he repented and came clean about his lying and cheating the first time out, and maybe will include information about his upcoming heart surgery.

Disclaimer: Yes, I know 60 Minutes did not write the Bible on outing stinkers. But it has a fairly decent track record. And anyway, there have been so many famous authors whose personal history was bogus, if not this one, then another.

Frank Lloyd Wright and the Upper Crust ethos

Kentuck Knob, a Frank Lloyd Wright house now on the National Register of Historic Places. (Wiki Commons)

One of the things missing in England is Frank Lloyd Wright. There is an installation of a room he designed, an office, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, but I’ll need a lot more reasons for a London trip than viewing a single room, even if it was by Frank Lloyd Wright. London, contrary to popular belief, is not close to every other place in England. First, there are the miles and miles of two-lane roads with little motorway involvement. Second, Cornwall is about 200 miles from London. Plus one has to pay 12 pounds a day to the government to take one’s car into the city itself…But I digress.

I have always loved Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs because they are so perfect not only architecturally, but in their underlying ethos. Wright’s Usonian house idea always intrigued me; these were marvelous houses meant for the middle class, and not the filthy rich. There are only about sixty of them standing today, but one was in the Baltimore neighborhood where I lived for six years. You can see it here.

There were also, nearby, the Frank Lloyd Wrong houses, modern cubes with oddly attached roofs and stacks of glass bricks here and there on the façade, seemingly with no rhyme or reason. (I use the term façade with my tongue firmly in my cheek; to Baltimoreans, the word is fakade. I swear.) I didn’t name them Frank Lloyd Wrong houses. My late good friend the Rev. Jeffrey Proctor called them that after he moved to Baltimore; he, too, was fond of Frank Lloyd Wright, and had a lovely sense of humor.

However, this is about neither the Frank Lloyd Wright house in my larger  environment all that time, nor the Frank Lloyd Wrong houses I had to drive to get to Starbucks.

It is about elitism, and how bone-deep it seemingly is in the American moneyed class. The Old Money class, that is.

It was probably more than 30 years ago that I first became friends with a couple who lived in a swell house on Manhattan’s East Side. It was filled with museum-quality furniture and paintings. After I moved away from NYC, when I was their weekend guest, I awoke to a Courbet hung above the dresser in the room I was assigned. It certainly was fun, too, to be served the de rigueur East Side watercress soup followed by a chicken wing and a mushroom cap at the elegant dinner parties the couple hosted, parties where one might easily meet Nepalese princes and princesses, among other people born to the ermine. (At West Side parties, one actually got fed real, life-sustaining food, although those soirees lacked the monkey-suited serving guys one would encounter on the East Side.)

Still, I quite enjoyed going on the New York Garden Club tours each spring as a guest of my friend’s mother. I got to see Zubin Mehta’s house and garden one year. On those days, we always had lunch at the Summerhouse, a very preppy spot on the upper East Side.

Once, my friend and I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to be, as she ALWAYS put it, “culture vultures.”  I was keen to see the new installation of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Francis W. Little House II Living Room.  “I can’t stand that stuff,” my friend intoned. “If you want to see it, I’ll just go and wait for you outside.”

I did want to see it, and I did see it. No accounting for taste, I thought, and thought nothing of it.

But now, on reflection, and coupled with a later incident, I have decided her distaste was not aesthetic, at least not totally, but cultural/class-based as well.

The other incident?  While disagreeing with my political views, my friend’s husband told me I was childish and used the term “you people” to denigrate my opinion. I ended the friendship over that, and not before time, I think.  

I suspect I was the house oddity for the couple, the unaccountably well-raised member of the middle-class, decently educated, slightly traveled, and with a knowledge of which fork to use. But I didn’t fit intrinsically into their world, just as Frank Lloyd Wright, with his ideas of a decent bit of ground and some lovely furnishings for all, didn’t fit. (NOTE: Wright wasn’t a universal egalitarian. His ideas descended only down through the middle-class, but that was better than most architects of his day, who thought only about the wealthy and their needs).

Regarding its Wright room, the Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that the house from which it came “is composed of a group of low pavilions interspersed with gardens and terraces, which, in plan, radiate from a central symbolic hearth.” Wright took into account the architectural/cultural lexicon of a few thousand years, making the ancient concept of the cultural heart/hearth move onward through the Roman vernacular of rooms for specific uses, to the thoroughly modern concept that a home should be an organic whole.

That is not so, of course, in the homes of America’s upper classes. They are not now, and never were, organic wholes. There would have to be separations so that servants would not forget their place, so that mere tradesmen should be forced to use a rear entrance, while invited gentry used the front. (Visiting the house of George Bernard Shaw last weekend, I learned that he refused to use the servant bells in his house; he both believed and lived his socialist ideals, in direct contravention of British upper crust mores, which the American upper crust was aping.)

Upper crust houses have not historically featured flowing spaces, meant to put residents and guests at ease as in a Wright house. Rather, the upper crust manse will feature defined and delimited areas, entry to which denotes one’s position in the hierarchy of the family or in society at large. Admission to the kitchen meant one was a servant; houseguests, of course, could also enter to get a glass of milk before bed and so on, being temporary “family.”

Usonian houses did have separate dining rooms, or at the very least, dining areas. And the kitchen itself conformed to the upper class ideal; it was place where the work of cooking and cleaning up was done, and was not appropriate for guests. Not because kitchen work is inferior and should be reserved only for servants, but because dinner guests are to be pampered and honored in return for the conversation and liveliness the contribute to the occasion. Although he was an egalitarian, Wright drew the line at imposing a host’s tasks on guests--a line I do retain in common with my ex-friend--and kept the kitchen where it belongs, as a separate room.

Unlike my friend, I could easily live in a Frank Lloyd Wright house, should I ever be fortunate enough for the gods of civilization to bestow one upon me. And everyone, from the man cleaning the gutters to Prince Charles, would be invited in the front door and given some refreshment on the good china.* Indeed, it has never once occurred to me to treat tradesmen/women any differently than I would treat Prince Charles. As my mother used often to say, they all put their knickers on one leg at a time. (Actually, she said, “What, they pee perfume?”  We got the message.)

Her message was that it doesn’t matter who you are, but what you are matters very much. Who you are is denoted by whether you live in a Frank Lloyd Wright house,  a mansion on Manhattan’s East Side, a Frank Lloyd Wrong house, my house, or a tent. Or your car, these days. One’s estate is not what one is; it merely represents one’s current state of finance, something that changes over time for everyone. Everyone. Even my fine friends had to sell some paintings to afford schools for their kids, darn fine schools, but still….And in the end, when they couldn’t afford the inheritance taxes on that fine East Side pile of bricks, they had to rent it out and move to the hinterlands.

But you know what? They are doubtless still referring to those they perceive to be of lesser estate as “you people.” The great unwashed. Yup. The rest of us.  I’m one of “you people,” and proud of it.

But I still wouldn’t mind if the gods of bricks and mortar dropped a bona fide Frank Lloyd Wright house in my back garden.

* Ludicrous thought, as is “good silver.” If you and your family aren’t good enough for the good china, who is? Reverse snobbery…against yourself. If you don’t regularly use the silver, you’ll have to polish it by the time you get it out of the drawer. Far better to regularly use your “stuff” I think.