The World's Worst Airports

Keeping with our theme of dodgy airports, my friend Dr Newman recently sent me a consolidated list of the world's worst airports. Some beauties here. Special mention goes to Mineralnye Vody Airport, which earlier this year was profiled on this blog - a lower circle than hell. Nice.

Hate flying? You are not alone. But often, it's not the crowded, overly air-conditioned airplanes themselves that are the problem: Just getting on and off the plane is the real nightmare. For this week's List, Foreign Policy looks at five airports around the world that make traveling hell.

Leopold Sedar Senghor International Airport

Location: Dakar, Senegal

Firsthand account: There is only squalor, an unnerving sense of confinement, and to some extent danger. Patrick Smith, Salon.com, May 25, 2007

Why it's so bad: Because its standing room only. As a regional hub, an ordeal at Senghor is often unavoidable for travelers to West Africa. Once you're in the terminal, don't plan on relaxing: There are no seats, and guards will advise you to stop loitering if you hang around in one spot too long. Immigration lines can take up to three hours. And in any event, it's best to keep moving since you can expect to be surrounded by vendors selling counterfeit goods and unofficial porters who will pressure you into hiring their services if you happen to come to a standstill. But the good news is that help may be on the way. The Senegalese government has begun construction on a new airport set to open in 2010, which will double the country's air passenger capacity. No word yet on whether the new terminal will actually have chairs.

Indira Gandhi International Airport

Location: New Delhi, India

Firsthand account: Of all the regional capital airports this one takes the cake¦ a piece of crap ... bring the bug spray. Anonymous commenter, The Budget Traveller's Guide to Sleeping in Airports, Dec 11, 2005

Why it's so bad: Because it's sheer chaos. The IT boomtowns of Hyderabad and Bangalore have built shiny new airports in recent years, but old standbys like New Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport have failed to benefit from India's economic expansion. Visitors report aggressive panhandlers, filthy bathrooms where attendants charge for toilet paper, and used syringes on the terminal floor. The main terminal building was even closed to visitors for a few months in 1999 after a flight from Nepal was hijacked. Things have hopefully gotten a little safer since an Australian tourist was murdered by a taxi driver leaving IGIA in 2004, prompting the Indian government to form a special tourist police force. But there's still a danger of things going slightly awry: In 2005, an act of sabotage in an ongoing feud between cable television providers led to a pornographic film appearing on the airport's television monitors. Let's just hope it provided a much-needed respite from CNN International.

Mineralnye Vody Airport

Location: Mineralnye Vody, Russia

Firsthand account: Mineralnye Vody airport is a lower circle of hell. The Economist, Dec. 19, 2006

Why it's so bad: Because nobody told Mineralnye Vody that the Soviet Union is no more. Most of Russia's airports have come a long way since the bad old days of communism, as new construction at Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport attests. Competition from increasingly popular Domodedovo International Airport finally induced its cross-town rival to build two new terminals including cafes, electronic displays, and a new train service. But Mineralnye Vody, in a war-torn region of the Caucasus not far from the Chechen border, remains a stubborn throwback, right down to the large map of the Soviet Union that hangs in the departure hall. The airport seems to have earned a special place in the hearts of Russia's foreign journalists, including the BBC's Steve Rosenberg, who wrote in 2005,"Rather worryingly there's a man selling Caucasian swords and daggers in the departure lounge and opposite him, over on the wall, is a list of local criminals wanted for murder." Other amenities include snow and ice inside the terminal, feral cats wandering around, and Brezhnev-era copies of the Kama Sutra in the gift shop.

Baghdad International Airport

Location: Baghdad, Iraq

Firsthand account: Before jumping out of your seat to complain to the pilot, consider the good news: You've just avoided being shot down by a missile. Alan T. Duffin, Air & Space magazine, Oct./Nov. 2006

Why it's so bad: Because it's in a war zone. The Baghdad International experience begins before you even touch the runway. That;s when you're treated to the stomach-churning effects of a Vietnam-era landing technique known as the corkscrew, used to avoid projectiles like the shoulder-fired missile that took down a DHL Airbus cargo plane in November 2003. The corkscrew involves an abrupt roll during final approach that twists into a spiraling, straight-down descent until the plane flattens out and lands at what feels like the last possible moment before crash landing. The terminal at the former Saddam International Airport is itself apparently not that bad, having been refurbished after the war by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Homesick American troops can even chow down at a food court featuring Burger King and Pizza Hut. But that feeling of comfort ends abruptly after leaving the airport, as visitors have to brave the infamous highway of death between the airport and downtown Baghdad.

Charles de Gaulle International Airport

Location: Paris, France

Firsthand account: Charles de Gaulle is a disgrace¦ it's like a third-world airport. Michel-Yves Labba, president of French travel company Directours, Aug. 14, 2007

Why it's so bad: Because a city this great with an airport this bad is just plain embarrassing. It may not have surface-to-air missiles or feral cats, but visitors to Paris should expect more than the grimy terminals, rude staff, confusing layout, and overpriced food that they;ll find at Europe's second-busiest hub. Charles de Gaulle's most recent attempt at modernization, the construction of futuristic terminal ”you might remember it from U2's Beautiful Day video”led to tragedy when its roof collapsed in 2004, killing four people. In June, President Nicolas Sarkozy opened a new facility capable of handling up to six Airbus superjumbos at one time, or about 8.5 million passengers per year. Normally, such a move would be welcome, but CDG already boasts eight terminals and handled 57 million passengers in 2006. Making the airport bigger only makes the problem worse.

Drogin on Curveball

In a very clever and disciplined campaign, Kevin Rudd
effectively articulated a vision for Australia. After
11 years of divisive and calculated political
manoeuvrings, John Howard was unable to find a
'Rovian' wedge to derail the ALP campaign.

Rudd's instinct was that Australians were beginning to
awake from 11 years of prosperity and question what it
all meant. He was correct. In calling for new
leadership, he minimised policy differences on issues
that were Howard's traditional strengths - national
security (including Australian deployments in Iraq and
Afghanistan), economic policy, government spending,
indigenous affairs and immigration. This strategy of
"me tooism" flustered Howard, who in past campaigns
had mercilessly picked apart ALP policy initiatives.

Facing a confused and hapless Howard campaign, Rudd
clinically stuck to his core themes of mortgage
stress, climate change, hospital bed shortages, and an
education revolution. Importantly, Rudd also
campaigned doggedly on rolling back unpopular work
place relations legislation that many saw as a further
erosion of the Australian gospel known as ‘the fair
go’. Economic growth and low unemployment are all well
and good, but many people's perception was that
Australia had evolved into a meaner and less
egalitarian society.

Another important element in Howard’s defeat was an
ongoing and combustible leadership debate within his
own political party. Having declined to gracefully
retire from politics a year before following an
unsuccessful challenge to his leadership, Howard
authored an unworkable transition arrangement with
Peter Costello. Despite being a competent and youthful
senior minister responsible for much of Australia’s
resource fuelled economic boom, Costello was a
divisive figure both within the Liberal Party and the
Australian public. The electorate was never able to
reconcile Howard’s announcement that if returned to
power he would retire and hand over the reins of power
to Costello.

Rudd exploited this indeterminate decision endlessly.
He goaded his opponent by asking how was it that
Howard was unveiling new policies about the future of
Australia, when he was publicly outlining succession
plans for the unpopular Costello. Howard never
successfully bridged this dilemma. The outcome was an
all too apparent contrast between a crisp almost
presidential style ALP campaign focussed on 'new
leadership', and a confused, negative, and ageing
Liberal message that shifted as the campaign
progressed.

Much and more will be written about this election. It
ushers in a new epoch in Australian politics. While
brilliant tactical campaigning by Rudd partly explains
the end result, an Australian Prime Minister does not
get thrown out of his own parliamentary seat (an event
that has only happened once before in 1929) unless
something deeper is at play. It is clear that the
Australian public wanted and sought political renewal.
A youthful and shrewd Rudd answered their call.

Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings :: 100 Days, 100 Nights

Nun who nurtured reggae

Bar the odd dent - such as the depiction in the film The Magdalene Sisters of cruelty in their now-defunct Irish orphanages and laundries - the reputation of the Catholic Order of the Sisters of Mercy is of 200 years of good deeds in some of the most underprivileged areas of the world.

Less well known, and more bizarre, is that this order of nuns is also partly responsible for the birth of reggae music.

The sisters had already been working in Kingston, Jamaica, for 12 years when they founded the Alpha Boys' School in 1892. Its purpose was to house and educate "wayward boys", most of them from backgrounds of dire poverty.

With instruments donated by a benefactor, a drum and fife corps was set up, which as the years passed became a martial brass band. By the mid-20th century, the connection with military music was still a constant, but the Alpha Boys' bandmasters were increasingly influenced by swing and jazz.

"Without the school, there just wouldn't have been the blossoming of talent on the island in the key period of the '60s and '70s," says Laurence Cane-Honeysett, a music consultant to reggae label Trojan Records, who has compiled the excellent album Alpha Boys' School: Music in Education 1910-2006. "When the Jamaican music industry took off, it was totally dependent on those who studied there."

A quartet of Alpha alumni, Tommy McCook, Johnny "Dizzy" Moore, Lester Sterling and the celebrated trombonist Don Drummond, were founder members of the Skatalites, and, as such, co-creators of Jamaica's first indigenous pop music. Reggae would eventually bloom from these roots at Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd's hugely influential Studio One, all built on horn sections featuring Alpharians.

Another old boy, Winston "Sparrow" Martin, has been the school's bandleader for the past 18 years, having also worked with artists from Otis Redding to Bob Marley. He attributes the sound of Marley's original '60s versions of Stir It Up and One Love to ex-Alpha musicians.

Martin well recalls life at the school in the '50s. "We worked six days a week," he says. "Some boys were on the morning shift, some on the evening shift; those on the morning shift would go to band practice in the evening, and those on the evening shift would go to band practice in the morning."

Despite the strict discipline, the school's musical reputation was such that trumpeter "Dizzy" Moore faked tantrums just so his parents would be forced to send him there.

There were, of course, times when the children weren't so willing to buckle down to work. "I was one of the boys who used to try to escape practice," Martin says, laughing. "There was a tree they used to have by the name of the monkey puzzle tree, and I climbed up this tree, hid up this tree.

"Rain was falling when Sister Ignatius found me and said, 'Come out the tree, you naughty little sparrow. What will your mother do if you stay there and drown?' From that day until now, that name is mine - 'sparrow'."

Sister Mary Ignatius Davies perhaps best encapsulates the spirit of the school. She joined the Sisters of Mercy in 1939, aged 18, and remained at Alpha until her death in 2003, but it was her devotion to the music programme for which she is remembered. Hard as it is to imagine, this nun also ran sound-system dances at the weekends, where she would spin records from her vast collection.

"Sister Ignatius preferred secular music to anything," says Sister Susan Frazier, the school's current director. "She was really a blues fan, and loved jazz music.

"In the early days in Jamaica, whenever there was any significant event such as a hurricane or earthquake, a 45rpm record would immediately be cut about it. Iggy, as she was affectionately known, would send out a couple of boys to buy these records. She had an expansive collection, which eventually went to the Seattle music museum."

Don Drummond's 1964 number Eastern Standard Time was Sister Ignatius's favourite piece of music - and a key moment in ska's development. And as the Alpha Boys' School album runs in chronological order, it's possible to trace the astonishing musical impact of Drummond and his fellow Skatalites.

Proceedings open with '50s British jazz recordings by Alpharians such as Joe Harriott and Dizzy Reece, but as the school's graduates develop their sound such music gives way to something far rootsier and uniquely Jamaican.

It seems that nuns - and a boys' brass band - inadvertently helped release the spirit of one of the most musical islands in the world.

'Alpha Boys' School: Music in Education 1910-2006' is out now on Trojan Records.

Article by Thomas H Green Telegraph 12/01/2006

Writing Desk

Artist: Schulim Krimper

Birth/Death: 1893–1971

European refugees and immigrants with design and crafts skills found a small but dedicated clientele among those seeking to reflect in their homes a sense of the prosperity of the period and a connection to contemporary European design. Schulim Krimper used his formidable craftsmanship and an enthusiasm for exotic and Australian native timbers to make luxurious modern furniture, such as this writing desk. With its organic and clearly expressed structure, his furniture shared the same qualities as the more innovative domestic architecture of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Paradise Garage and Larry Levan

Loss and Gain

When I compare

What I have lost with what I have gained,

What I have missed with what attained,

Little room do I find for pride.

I am aware

How many days have been idly spent;

How like an arrow the good intent

Has fallen short or been turned aside.

But who shall dare To measure loss and gain in this wise?

Defeat may be victory in disguise;

The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide.

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Latest Solidstate Los Angeles Mix

[click on image to download podcast]

Sureshot Symphony - Sweet Calypso Disco Pon City Of Frisco

Timewarp inc. feat. Emma - Afrofunk

Quantic Soul Orchestra w/ Noelle Scaggs - Lead Us To The End

The Bongolian - The Champion

Free the Robots - Jazzhole

Casbah 73 - Pushin Forty

Woolfy - Odyssey

Omar - Stylin (with Angie Stone)

Build an Ark - You Gotta Have Freedom (J Rocc mix)

Sureshot Symphony - I Like Movin', I Like Goovin

AIFF - Akwaaba (Diesler remix feat. Laura Vane)

Ohmega Watts feat. Tita Lima - Adaptacao

J-Live - The Incredible

Modaji - Don't Explain

Sureshot Symphony - Jah Makes the World Go Round

Bacao Rhythm and Steel Band - Ease Back

Mother Earth - Time of the Future

Nicole Willis and the Soul Investigators - My 4 Leaf Clover (Dynamics Remix)

Border Crossing and Ricky Ranking - City of Love

Yam Yam - Bittersweet

Black Spade - Say So

NPR Jazz Profile Wes Montgomery

[click on image to listen to radio jazz prolife]

The jazz guitar of Wes Montgomery, deemed "the biggest, warmest, fattest sound on record," still reverberates today, nearly forty years after his death. The most influential, widely admired jazz guitarist since Charlie Christian's heyday, Wes re-invented the instrument with his thumb-plucking technique, his innovative approach to playing octaves, and his inventive, masterful execution of complex lines. In the short span of a 9 year recording career as a leader, his name became synonymous with the jazz guitar.

Despite the sophistication of his technique, Wes had no formal musical education. Born on March 6th, 1923 in Indianapolis, Wes grew up making music with his brothers, several of whom also became professional musicians. Electric bass guitarist Monk Montgomery recalls buying his brother his first guitar, a four-string tenor, on which 12-year-old Wes demonstrated immediate proficiency. Wes learned by jamming with his brothers and by emulating Charlie Christian, who inspired Wes to pursue jazz guitar professionally.

After his first big-time gig, touring with Lionel Hampton's band, Wes returned home to Indianapolis, where he worked days to support his growing family and played guitar in local bars all night. Meanwhile, Wes' brothers were enjoying some degree of success with their group, the Mastersounds, and they invited Wes to record with them to gain the gifted guitarist greater exposure. Sure enough, word spread and soon musicians like Cannonball and Nat Adderley were flocking to the Missile Room to witness the new sensation. Riverside Records producer Orin Keepnews was blown away by Wes' virtuosity and signed him on for 25 sessions. Wes' second album, The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery, earned him Downbeat magazine's "New Star" award in 1960.

Wes' lush, inimitable sound was a product of his unusual stylistic approach. Guitarist Lee Ritenour explains how Wes played with his thumb as opposed to a pick, freeing himself from rhythmic constraints and typical phrasing. According to Wes, thumb-plucking and his technique of "playing two notes at the same time an octave apart" were both accidental revelations. While Wes was not the only guitarist to utilize the octave approach, he did so with incomparable "freedom and fluidity," and the technique "became one of his trademarks."

When Riverside Records went bankrupt, Creed Taylor of Verve Records signed the acclaimed guitarist, steering his career in a different direction. Although Wes recorded a few straight jazz albums with Verve, including his triumphant Smokin' at the Half Note, Taylor sought to bring Wes' music to a broader audience, convincing him to cover the R&B hit, "Goin' Out of My Head." The album, which earned Wes a Grammy Award, was his ticket to "crossing over" and made a name for him on the pop scene, enabling him to support his wife and seven children.

To the chagrin of jazz purists, Wes did not record another jazz album after 1965. However, in concert, as critic Gary Giddins attests, Wes continued to improvise stunning solos until his death of a heart attack in 1968. In a remarkably brief time frame, Wes Montgomery, a kind, modest man and a magnificent musician, left a legacy of enormous distinction to the jazz community.

NPR.org, September 26, 2007

Don't Mess With The Coens' Texas

[click on image to view trailer]

"In Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else," explains M. Emmet Walsh in the voiceover that opened the Coen brothers' first film, Blood Simple. "That's the theory, anyway. But what I know about is Texas, and down here you're on your own." Made for less than two million dollars in 1984, the fierce, meticulous thriller launched not only the Coens' career, but, to a significant degree, the neo-noir revival and the modern indie movement. Yet it has taken a dozen films and nearly two dozen years for the Coens to return their attention to the lawless byways of the Lone Star state. We may be forgiven for wondering what's taken them so long.

In Blood Simple and their second film, the geographically eponymous Raising Arizona, the Coens demonstrated a deep affinity for the parched land and distant horizons of the American Southwest, for trailer parks and shabby motels and highways that go on forever. The wide open spaces suit their cinematic vision, with its emphasis on stark, simple compositions. They experimented with an arctic variation on this setting in Fargo, but otherwise have confined themselves to the urban Northeast (Miller's Crossing, The Hudsucker Proxy), Deep South (O Brother Where Art Thou?, The Ladykillers), and California (Barton Fink, The Big Lebowski, The Man Who Wasn't There, Intolerable Cruelty), visually busy locales that have served as backdrops for ever busier movies, stuffed with chatter and steeped in irony.

In No Country for Old Men, the Coens are at last reunited with the Texas mesa, and one can almost hear a long-held breath being slowly exhaled. This is an austere and purposeful film, as laconic as the brothers' recent comedies were verbose, with only a few twinges of music here and there to distract from the sound of a dry wind blowing or boots scraping across crusted earth. At last, the Coens are taking their time.

Their reward is what is likely the best film of their career and certainly their best in many years. Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men is a crime film, but also a meditation on chance and destiny, on growing old and on dying young. Like Blood Simple, it is a film in which wrongs are done and there is precious little anyone can do to make them right again. And like Blood Simple, it begins with an older man's voiceover, though in this case one more rueful than ruthless. "I was sheriff of this county when I was 25 years old," begins Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), reminiscing about friendlier days, when some lawmen didn't even carry guns. "The crime we see now, it's hard even to take its measure," he continues. "I don't want to push my chips in and go out and meet something I don't understand."

We meet just such a something moments later, when Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a dead-eyed drifter with a Beatles mop-top, is arrested and taken to a police station by a young, unlucky patrolman. When Chigurh subsequently strangles him, the scuff marks from his frantic, dying kicks radiate out across the floor like an exploding sun. Chigurh helps himself to a police cruiser and, pulling over a motorist, asks, "Will you please hold still, sir." He then calmly uses a cattle gun to punch a hole through the man's forehead as neat and round as a half-dollar. This is clearly not someone with whom you want to push your chips in.

We next encounter Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), drawing a rifle bead on a herd of antelope in the Texas scrub. "You hold still," he echoes Chigurh, another hunter addressing his prey. Moss misses his antelope but finds something else: A collection of bullet-ridden trucks and bodies, evidence of a drug deal gone very badly wrong. A short hike from the carnage, Moss finds something more interesting still: another dead man and, at his feet, a briefcase containing two million dollars. Moss decides to take it, and his die is cast. As he later explains to his wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald), "Baby, things happen. I can't take 'em back."

From here, the film unfolds as a chase, though one conducted at a measured pace. Moss hits the road with his case full of cash, and Chigurh is hired to find him, as are sundry Mexican enforcers and a slightly dandyish cowboy named Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson). Jones's avuncular Sheriff Bell hopes to track Moss down, too, if only to rescue him from the fate that will certainly befall him if Chigurh catches him first.

Bardem is a marvel as the implacable Chigurh, a killer at once casual and calculated. I would be tempted to describe him as the most indelible monster to stalk the big screen since Hannibal Lecter, but it seems unfair to compare his performance to Anthony Hopkins's thick slice of ham. Bardem's villain is more original and more understated: Though there is clearly a diabolical intelligence behind his murderousness, he feels little need to share it. Amusing himself is enough; why bother amusing anyone else when they will soon be dead anyway? Even the few words he speaks seem to be swallowed when they are halfway out of his mouth. Chigurh is simultaneously less than human and more, a blunt instrument and a philosophical ideal.

Jones picks up where he left off in In the Valley of Elah. Like Hank Deerfield in that film, his Sheriff Bell is a man of formidable capacity who nonetheless knows that his best days are behind him. The difference is that Bell begins with the knowledge that Deerfield attains only at the end of his journey: that there are evils in the world too unrelenting to be pushed from their courses, unhappy fates than cannot be denied. Jones's lined face conveys pride and acumen, as always. But there's a weary patience as well, as if each crease and fold his features have accumulated contains a lesson he might rather not have learned.

As Moss, Brolin delivers easily the best performance of his breakout year. After two decades of consistent but largely under-the-radar work, Brolin is suddenly everywhere: Grindhouse, In the Valley of Elah, American Gangster, and now the lead role here. (I'm not sure how it is that he abruptly became so indispensable, though I imagine it has something to do with the moustache. Perhaps his Dad, James, advised him on the professional compensations of facial hair?) The role of Moss is a challenging one: Brolin has long stretches without dialogue, and when he does speak, it's often to himself, the half-grunted conclusion--"Yeah," "There just ain't no way"--of an internal conversation to which we have not been privy. Yet Brolin manages to embody Moss despite the lack of exposition, to convey the ego of a man who's been underestimated by others for so long that he's come to overestimate himself.

As for the Coens, No Country for Old Men carries echoes of many of their past successes: Blood Simple, surely, and Fargo, another somber noir featuring a cop who functions less as enforcer than as moral compass, an observer of the hurts men inflict on one another for "a little money." But there are less obvious cousins, too, such as Raising Arizona, whose "lone biker of the apocalypse," Leonard Smalls, is the comic twin of Chigurh. (As Nicholas Cage described the former, "I didn't know where he came from or why. I don't know if he was dream or vision. But I feared that I myself had unleashed him.") There are even hints in Sheriff Bell of Sam Elliot's cowboy-narrator in The Big Lebowski.

But even as No Country for Old Men recalls past Coen brothers films, it represents something new. Though they have mined literary sources in the past (Hammett for Miller's Crossing, Homer for O Brother), this is the Coens' first true adaptation. And while their trademark flourishes still appear--the meticulous compositions (a pickup on a hill silhouetted against the night sky), the ominously amplified sounds (a candy wrapper uncrinkling, a light bulb being unscrewed), the snatches of absurdist dialogue ("You get a lot of people who come in here with no clothes on?" "No, it's unusual")--they are anchored to something weightier. McCarthy's ferocious tale gives the Coens room to unleash their cinematic gifts, but keeps them from wandering too far afield and losing themselves in the marshes of technical prowess or easy irony.

The result is a masterpiece, a film by turns harrowing and contemplative. There are moments when it is difficult to stay in one's seat--a scene in which Moss is chased down a river by a dog-paddling pit bull; a hotel encounter with Chigurh that is as extraordinary an exercise in sustained suspense as I can recall--and moments when it feels hard to get up out of it. Like the novel, the film ends on one of these latter moments, with the recounting of a dream. It is a dream about death, but a death more welcoming than feared. "You can't stop what's coming," a character advises late in the film, and indeed there's only one thing that comes for all of us. For some people it will be sudden and unexpected, perhaps the violent outcome of an unlucky coin toss. For others, it will accumulate over time, enough time for them to recognize what's been lost, to fall out of step with the world. The very title of No Country for Old Men suggests which people might be the luckier.

CHRISTOPHER ORR. New Republic 09 November 2007.

Style Wars

New York City 1982......rockin the city with your name on a train.

Norman Mailer 1923-2007

Pulitzer Prize-Winner Norman Mailer Dies at 84

By Bart Barnes
The Washington Post Saturday, November 10, 2007

Norman Mailer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author who wrote compellingly about sex and violence, conflict and politics, love and war, as the tempests of his personal life complemented the turbulence of his prose, died today at age 84. Mailer, who died of kidney failure at New York's Mount Sinai Hospital, achieved literary fame at the age of 25 with his first novel, "The Naked and the Dead," which was based on his experiences in the Army in the Pacific during World War II. The book led the New York Times bestseller list for 19 weeks in 1948 and 1949 and was later made into a movie.

Its publication launched Mailer on a parallel career as a celebrity who became notorious in a variety of roles. He was widely known as a drinker and brawler, womanizer, political campaigner, social critic, talk-show guest, self-promoter and symbol of male chauvinism. He had six wives and nine children. In his career as a writer, Mailer produced novels, essays, social commentaries, movie scripts and nonfiction narratives about national events and public figures. His subjects included ancient Egypt, political conventions, actress Marilyn Monroe, the CIA, Adolf Hitler and the first landing on the moon. He won the first of his two Pulitzer Prizes for "The Armies of the Night" (1968), based on his participation in the 1967 march on the Pentagon to protest the war in Vietnam.

Mailer used fictional techniques in "Armies of the Night" to describe his arrest during the protest and to address the philosophical underpinnings of the nation's military involvement in Vietnam. The title of one of the book's chapters, "Why Are We in Vietnam?," became a popular slogan in the antiwar movement.

Mailer won his second Pulitzer Prize for "The Executioner's Song" (1979), which he described as a "true life novel" about Gary Gilmore, who in Utah in 1977 became the first convict to be executed in the United States in more than a decade.

The author Sinclair Lewis once called Mailer the greatest writer of his generation. But critics were neither uniform nor consistent in their evaluations of his work. Orville Prescott of the New York Times praised "The Naked and the Dead" as "the most impressive novel about the second World War that I have ever read." But Time magazine condemned Mailer's second novel, "Barbary Shore" (1951), as "paceless, graceless and tasteless." When his 1983 novel, "Ancient Evenings," received tepid reviews, Mailer responded with full-page newspaper advertisements, juxtaposing the attacks on his book with similar criticism of such classics as "Moby Dick," "Anna Karenina," and "Leaves of Grass." He considered "Ancient Evenings" to be his finest work.

He broke new ground in political commentary with his 1960 essay about John F. Kennedy, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," which deftly described the aura of sexuality and romance surrounding the Massachusetts senator. Published in Esquire magazine three weeks before Kennedy's election as president, the essay helped establish the Kennedy mystique.
"For a heady period, no major public event in the United States seemed complete until Mailer had observed himself observing it," a Time critic wrote in 1983.

As a nationally known celebrity, Mailer made headlines by running for mayor of New York in 1969 on a ticket with columnist Jimmy Breslin. They finished fourth in a field of five.

There was a mystique of personal violence about Mailer, which he encouraged. He often wrote about boxing, and he liked to spar with boxer Jose Torres, who was among his friends.

Mailer's reputation as a rowdy, unpredictable writer was confirmed during a bacchanal at his New York apartment in 1960, when he stabbed his second wife with a penknife. In 1970, while Mailer was directing the film "Maidstone," actor Rip Torn attacked Mailer with a hammer. In a fight that lasted several minutes and was captured on film, Mailer bit off part of Torn's ear.
Another time, Mailer punched author Gore Vidal in the mouth after tossing a drink in his face. The confrontation, which Vidal would later call "the night of the tiny fist," had its origins in a bitter verbal battle between Mailer and leaders of the feminist movement.

Over lunch at the Algonquin Hotel, Mailer asked Gloria Steinem what women had against him. "You might try reading your books," Steinem told him. Kate Millett, in her 1970 study, "Sexual Politics," described Mailer's prose as "blatantly and comically chauvinist."

Never one to retreat from a battle, Mailer declared on a talk show, "Women should be kept in cages." In a Harper's magazine essay titled "The Prisoner of Sex," he wrote: "The prime responsibility of a woman is to be on earth long enough to find the best mate for herself and conceive children who will improve the species."

Vidal then entered the fray with an article in the New York Review of Books, finding "a logical progression" from Henry Miller to Mailer to Charles Manson.

The two authors later traded insults on ABC television's "Dick Cavett Show." Then, at a 1977 Manhattan dinner party, Mailer threw his scotch whiskey in Vidal's face, butted him with his head and punched him in the mouth. When the hostess, journalist Lally Weymouth, begged other guests to pull the two apart, Clay Felker, then editor of Esquire, told her, "Shut up. This fight is making your party."

Norman Kingsley Mailer was born Jan. 31, 1923, in Long Branch, N.J., and grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. His father, Isaac Barnett Mailer, was a Lithuanian-Jewish immigrant from South Africa who worked as an accountant.

As a schoolboy, the young Mailer managed to convince both his parents that he was a genius. His mother, Fanny, expected great things from him. When he received a low mark on a report card in the third grade, she marched into his school to protest.

In September 1939, the 16-year-old Mailer entered the freshman class at Harvard University. Partly at the urging of his family, who wanted him to acquire practical skills, and partly because he liked making model airplanes, he majored in engineering. He graduated cum laude, but it was also clear that literature and writing were his primary loves.

At Harvard, he began reading the novels of John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Especially compelling for the young Mailer was James T. Farrell and his character Studs Lonigan.

"In the figure of Studs Lonigan, Mailer found the first of his many Irish alter egos," wrote Carl E. Rollyson in his 1991 biography, "The Lives of Norman Mailer." "Studs swaggers. He is a small guy who has the nerve to take on bigger men . . . He is a romantic who dreams of conquering the world and of mastering beautiful women, but he is also one of the boys, embarrassed by his mother's coddling of him."

In his first year at Harvard, Mailer began writing short stories, one of which won a first prize award from Story magazine. After graduating in 1943, Mailer went back home to Brooklyn to work on a novel. In March 1944, one month after his first marriage, he was inducted into the Army and later shipped out to the Pacific, joining the 112th Armored Cavalry Regiment in the Philippines.

He was a rifleman in an intelligence and reconnaissance platoon that engaged in a few skirmishes but saw no heavy action.

After the war ended, he served with occupation forces in Japan, then returned to the United States in May of 1946. He spent the rest of the year in a bungalow near Provincetown, Mass., transmuting his military experiences into "The Naked and the Dead."

His publisher, Stanley Rinehart, insisted that he clean up the language in the book. Mailer complied by inventing the word "fug" as a substitute for an expletive that the publisher found offensive.

In a "word to the reader" on the book's dust jacket, Rinehart compared Mailer's novel with Dos Passos's "Three Soldiers," Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front," and Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms."

After the 1948 publication of "The Naked and the Dead," Mailer went to Paris, where he studied at the Sorbonne. His next two novels, "Barbary Shore" (1951) and "Deer Park" (1955), drew hostile reviews.

It would be almost 10 years before he wrote his next novel, "An American Dream," about a professor of existential psychology who murders his wife. During the intervening decade, Mailer wrote essays, short stories and commentaries, while becoming increasingly prominent as a public figure.

In 1955, he helped found New York's Village Voice weekly newspaper.
Among his most provocative work of this period was "The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster," which caused a sensation when it was published in 1957 in Dissent magazine. In it, Mailer wrote: "The psychopath murders -- if he has the courage -- out of the necessity to purge his violence, for if he cannot empty his hatred, then he cannot love."

The essay was included in the 1959 collection "Advertisements for Myself," in which Mailer gathered essays and commented on his literary career, describing the effort as the "biography of a style."

In November 1960, after stabbing his second wife, artist Adele Morales Mailer, during a drunken party, Mailer spent two weeks in a psychiatric unit of New York's Bellevue Hospital.
His wife, who was wounded in the abdomen and back, made a full recovery and declined to press criminal charges. They separated and were subsequently divorced.

Eleven years after the 1962 death of actress Marilyn Monroe, Mailer wrote "Marilyn," in which he suggested that she was murdered by either the FBI, CIA or Mafia because she was "reputed to be having an affair" with Robert F. Kennedy. Writing in Parade magazine, Lloyd Shearer called the book "a shameful, rehashed potboiler."

With the publication in 1979 of "The Executioner's Song," Mailer recorded his last major literary triumph. Even with its success, he was in dire financial straits because of his many marriages and child support payments.

One of the most notorious episodes in Mailer's career occurred when he championed the literary career of Jack Abbott, a felon who had spent most of his adult life in prison after being convicted for armed robbery and killing a man in prison. After they corresponded for several years, Mailer helped publish a collection of Abbott's letters, "In the Belly of the Beast," in 1981. Mailer then helped win Abbott's parole from prison.

Soon after his release, Abbott stabbed a restaurant waiter to death after an argument about using the restroom. Mailer testified for Abbott at his trial and said he was "sorry as hell about the way it turned out."

After his novel, "Ancient Evenings," Mailer wrote a 1984 murder mystery, "Tough Guys Don't Dance," which he later revised into a screenplay for a movie, which he directed himself.
He wrote two interpretive biographies, "Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man" (1995) and "Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery" (1995), about the assassin of President John F. Kennedy. His later novels, including "Harlot's Ghost" (1991), about the CIA; "The Gospel According to the Son" (1997), an imagined life of Jesus; and "The Castle in the Forest," a fictional account of the youth of Adolf Hitler (2007), received mixed reviews.

Mailer's first marriage, to Bea Silverman, ended in divorce in 1952. He married Adele Morales in 1954 and divorced her in 1962, the same year he married Lady Jeanne Campbell. They divorced in 1963, and he married actress Beverly Bentley later that year. They separated in 1970 when Mailer began living with Carol Stevens, a nightclub singer, but did not divorce until 1980.

Mailer and Stevens had already separated when he married her in November of 1980 to "legitimize," in his terms, their 9-year-old daughter. Mailer divorced her immediately after the marriage and married his sixth wife, artist Norris Church, with whom he already had a son. His children included a daughter from his first marriage; two daughters from his second marriage; a daughter from his third marriage; two sons from his fourth marriage; a daughter from his fifth marriage; two sons from his sixth marriage; and 10 grandchildren.

Albania. Beyond Pyramid Schemes and Pill Boxes

Albania, Europe’s Rough Corner, Loosens Up

New York Times by Matt Gross December 10, 2006

NOT long ago, to suggest Albania as a destination of any kind, even a frugal one, would have been the height of chutzpah. Within five years of Albania’s abandoning Communism in 1992, a Ponzi scheme destroyed the nascent market economy and widespread rioting turned Albania into a byword for rampant lawlessness. It was not, except for aid workers and smugglers, on anyone’s map.

In the last several years, however, Albania has made enormous strides in democracy and development — and revealed itself to be not only ripe for tourists, but affordable to boot. The capital, Tirana, with its brightly painted apartment buildings and molto Italiano cafe culture, is a fantastic starting point, especially since it’s hard to spend more than $15 a person at the city’s nicest restaurants. But it’s the southern part of this Balkan country that holds the most intriguing sights and bargains.

Start in Gjirokaster, a beautifully warped city that produced two of Albania’s most important 20th-century figures: Enver Hoxha, the country’s dictator for 40 years after World War II, and Ismail Kadare, the novelist perennially mentioned as a Nobel Prize candidate. Gjirokaster is built on slippery, cobblestoned hills so steep they seem to defy human habitation, yet the town of stately slate-roofed Ottoman houses bustles.

One house, now an Ethnographic Museum, happens to be Hoxha’s birthplace. Another is the Hotel Kalemi (355-84-63-724; hotelkalemi.tripod.com), where for $40 a night you can sleep under a carved-wood ceiling that’s 200 years old.

During the day, your legs will get a workout wandering the streets and exploring the massive fortress overlooking the city. At night, recuperate with roast tongue of veal and yogurt soup at the friendly Festivali restaurant. And don’t leave Gjirokaster without a handmade carpet from Ruha’s shop (355-69-254-2122); they start at $40.

Your reward for enduring Gjirokaster’s hills is Sarande, a busy port on the Strait of Otranto. At the Hotel Kaonia (355-85-22-600), right on the boardwalk, a simple but modern double room with great water views runs just 30 euros ($40 at $1.36 to the euro).

The pebbly beach in the center of Sarande may not be too exciting, but there are white sand stretches nearby, including the popular beach at Ksamili, 10 miles to the south. And if you’re hankering for a taste of classical Europe, the Greek island of Corfu is a quick hydrofoil ride away.

Southern Albania’s greatest treasure, however, is Butrint, a 2,500-year-old city that was inhabited by successive generations of Illyrians, Greeks, Epireans, Romans, Byzantines and Venetians, before dwindling to a tiny fishing village in the late 19th century. It’s the kind of place where history is still waiting to be discovered.
Situated on a hilly, forest-shrouded promontory south of Sarande, near the Greek border, Butrint (a Unesco World Heritage Site) was first excavated by Italians in the 1920s, who unearthed an amphitheater and Greek-built walls. Archaeologists later discovered early Christian basilicas, a baptistery and as many as eight bathhouses.

Butrint is large — about 11 square miles — and still shrouded in mystery, so you’ll want a guide. Vasil Barka (355-69-227-6460) has 25 years of experience and knows where to find Cleopatra’s name in a string of Greek letters on a huge stone block outside the amphitheater. In the basilica, where the frescoed floor is covered in sand to protect the tiles from the elements, he knows just where to brush aside the grains to reveal a spectacular red-and-blue bird.

And at the Venetian fort-turned-museum, he can tell you which statues have just been dug up and which recovered from looters.

Afterward, head straight to the nearby Livia Hotel (355-891-2040) for a feast of mussels, shrimp, eel and squid.

Like Albania itself, this lost city harbors untold treasures for the intrepid — and at a price that just about anyone can afford.

Royal with Beats

[click on image to download podcast]

Albany Bulb: A Favourite Old Haunt

The Hour by Michael Lind

Maybe the moment recurs daily at six, when commuters,

freed from the staring computers,

elbow and bump in unsought intimacy on a station

platform with you, and frustration

rots what is left of your strength. Maybe the hour comes after

dinner, when televised laughter

seeps from a neighboring room; maybe the time is the dead of

night, when you ponder, instead of

dreaming. Whatever the time, you will escape it—by sinking

down with a book, or by drinking secretly out in the dark studio, or by unbuckling

pants on a stranger, or chuckling,

one with a mob, in a deep theater. Soon, though, the hour

comes to corrode all your power,

pleasure and faith with the damp dread that it daily assigns you.

How you evade it defines you.

Now That Is What I Call Shhh Vol.3

[click on image to download podcast]

Tracklist

1) Sssshintro

2) Art Farmer - Soulsides

3) Charly Antolini - Attention

4) Roger Webb - Sunkissed

5) Dave Pike Set - Raga Jeeva Swara

6) Gabor Szabo - Ravi

7) Deidre Wilson Tabac - Magic One

8) Alice Clark - Charms of the Arms of Love

9) Jacques Louissier - Fugue 16

10) Pierry Henry - Jericho Jerk

11) Wendy Carlos - Dillology

12) Barney Kessel - The Look of Love

13) Alice Coltrane - Prema Muditha

14) Stanislaw Sojka - Naima

15) Buddy Terry - Kamili

16) The Impressions - East of Java

17) Chuck Mangione - Hill Where the Lord Hides

Fit to be Tired

"The task for me is to not only comprehend the world, but to change the world. I would like to see a world where America lives up to its ideals, and resolves the contradiction between reality and principles."

Ronald Takaki

Modernist Landmark Raises Concerns as It Goes to Auction

The Kaufmann House, a 1946 glass, steel and stone landmark built on the edge of this desert town by the architect Richard Neutra, has twice been at the vanguard of new movements in architecture — helping to shape postwar Modernism and later, as a result of a painstaking restoration in the mid-1990s, spurring a revived interest in mid-20th-century homes.

Now the California homeowners who undertook that restoration hope Neutra’s masterpiece will play a role in a third movement: promoting architecture as a collectible art worthy of the same consideration as painting and sculpture.

Those owners, Brent Harris, an investment manager, and Beth Edwards Harris, an architectural historian, are finalizing their divorce, and plan to auction the Kaufmann House at Christie’s in New York in May. The building, with a presale estimate of $15 million to $25 million, will be part of Christie’s high-profile evening sale of postwar and contemporary art.

Commissioned by Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr., the Pittsburgh department store magnate who had commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright about a decade earlier to build Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, the house was designed as a desert retreat from harsh winters. Constructed as a series of horizontal planes that seem to float over glass walls, the house seems to absorb the mood of the surrounding desert.

Auctions of such midcentury landmarks have become more common in recent years. In 2003 Sotheby’s sold the 1951 Farnsworth House southwest of Chicago, designed by Mies van der Rohe, at auction for $7.5 million. In June Jean Prouvé’s 1951 Maison Tropicale, a prototype for prefabricated homes for French colonial officials stationed in Africa, sold at Christie’s for $4.97 million.

Such auctions are bringing a new level of scrutiny to a form that, little more than a decade ago, attracted so little notice that the Kaufmann House was being offered for sale as a teardown.

Still, such sales sometimes draw criticism from preservationists who would prefer that the houses be tended by a public institution or trust that guarantees continued access for architecture students and scholars rather than sold to the highest bidder. (The Farnsworth House, now open to the public, was bought by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, while the Maison Tropicale went to a private bidder.)

But Dr. Harris, who worked toward her doctorate in architectural history while restoring the Kaufmann House, said she believed an auction would further the preservationist cause. “It’s an odd thing, but the more money this house goes for, the better it is for preservation in my point of view,” she said on Monday while giving a tour of the house to a reporter. “I think it will encourage other people who have the income to go out and get places like these to restore, rather than just looking for some pretty palace somewhere.”

The Kaufmann House is one of the best-known designs by Neutra, a Viennese-born architect who moved to the United States in the 1920s and designed homes for the next few decades for many wealthy West Coast clients. His buildings are seen virtually as the apotheosis of Modernism’s International Style, with their skeletal steel frames and open plans. Yet Neutra was also known for catering sensitively to the needs of his clients, so that their houses would be not only functional but would also nurture their owners psychologically.

When Brent and Beth Harris first saw the Kaufmann House, it was neither a pretty palace nor an obvious candidate for restoration. Strikingly photographed in 1947 by Julius Shulman, it stood vacant for several years after Kaufmann’s death in 1955. Then it went through a series of owners, including the singer Barry Manilow, and a series of renovations. Along the way, a light-disseminating patio was enclosed, one wall was broken through for the addition of a media room, the sleek roof lines were interrupted with air-conditioning units, and some bedrooms were wallpapered in delicate floral prints.

In 1992 Beth Harris, an architectural tourist of a sort, scaled a fence one afternoon to peek at the famous house while her husband discovered a for-sale sign in an overgrown hedge.
“It quite clearly was at some risk of being severely modified by whoever was to buy it, or potentially demolished,” Mr. Harris said, recalling his first glimpses of the house.

In Palm Springs, increasingly dominated by faux Spanish estates, Neutra’s Modernism “wasn’t the prevailing style,” Mr. Harris said, and the Kaufmann House “had been for sale for at least three and a half years.”

He added: “No one wanted it. And so it was a gorgeous house, an important house, and it was crying out for restoration.”

After purchasing the house and its more than an acre of land for about $1.5 million, the Harrises removed the extra appendages and enlisted two young Los Angeles-area architects, Leo Marmol and Ron Radziner, to restore the Neutra design. They sought out the original providers of paint and fixtures, bought a metal-crimping machine to reproduce the sheet-metal fascia that lined the roof and even reopened a long-closed section of a Utah quarry to mine matching stone to replace what had been removed or damaged.

Without the original plans for the house, the Harrises dug through the Neutra archives at the University of California, Los Angeles, looking at hundreds of Neutra’s sketches of details for the house. They persuaded Mr. Shulman to let them examine dozens of never-printed photographs of the home’s interior, and found other documents in the architectural collections at Columbia University.

The Harrises also bought several adjoining plots to more than double the land around the 3,200-square-foot house, restoring the desert buffer that Neutra envisioned. They rebuilt a pool house that serves as a viewing pavilion for the main house, and kept a tennis court that was built on a parcel added to the original Kaufmann property.

The Harrises “were visionaries in their own way,” said Joshua Holdeman, a senior vice president at Christie’s who oversees the 20th-century decorative art and design department. With the renovation “they created a whole new public awareness of midcentury-modern architecture.” Describing the results of the restoration in The Los Angeles Times in 1999, Nicolai Ouroussoff, now the architecture critic for The New York Times, said the house could “now be seen in its full glory for the first time in nearly 50 years.”

The pending sale is bittersweet for the current owners, who said they planned to give a portion of the proceeds to preservation groups. Asked how it felt to be close to selling the property, Dr. Harris looked back at the house, blinking away tears.

“Oh, it’s horrifying,” she said. “But we did our time here. There will be other things.”

New York Times 31 October 2007 by Edward Wyatt

Khun Sa Dead at 74

Burma's 'Opium King' Khun Sa died today in Rangoon aged 74.

A warlord, liberation fighter, heroin king pin, and rumoured associate of the CIA, Khun Sa became one the principal figures in opium smuggling in the Golden Triangle.

At one point commanding a private army of 15,000 men, he fought for the autonomy of the Shah ethnic minority in Burma's remote north-eastern Shan State. He also ensured a steady flow of heroin to the streets of Europe, the United States, and Asia.

Having given himself up to Burmese authorities in 1996, Khun Sa retired in Rangoon and successfully avoided US attempts to have him extradited.

For an excellent PBS Frontline documentary on the Burma's heroin trade and the rise and fall of Khun Sa see:

Also see slide show on the 'King of the Highlands'

Meditatio

When I carefully consider the curious habits of dogs

I am compelled to conclude

That man is the superior animal.

When I consider the curious habits of man

I confess, my friend, I am puzzled.

Ezra Pound

Tribute Oscar Niemeyer

Shame is for Sissies

Once again it is time to reflect on the infamous exploits of Edward von Kloberg III -- the cape wearing Washington based aide-de-camp to the damned.

Edward von Kloberg III, Lobbyist for Many Dictators, Dies at 63

Edward von Kloberg III, a flamboyant lobbyist here who maintained a high-profile client roster that could easily be found in his Rolodex under "d," for dictator, died on Sunday in Rome. He was 63.

Mr. von Kloberg, whose death was classified a suicide, apparently leapt from the parapet of a castle, the State Department said on Tuesday. He left behind a note, the contents of which were not disclosed.

In a town where public relations is nearly a fourth branch of government, Mr. von Kloberg eagerly took on some of the toughest cases: tyrants, dictators and mass murderers whom others refused even to meet. Among them were Saddam Hussein, Nicolae Ceaucescu of Romania, Samuel K. Doe of Liberia and Mobuto Sese Seko of the former Zaire. He once called these and other clients "the damned."

Mr. von Kloberg liked to call himself the lobbyist for "the impossible," rather than the reprehensible, and he proudly noted that he turned away only one potential client as irredeemable.

"I did refuse to represent one dictator, Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid, the Somalian warlord," Mr. von Kloberg told The Washington Times in 2003. Explaining the choices he made in his life, he liked to say: "Shame is for sissies."

Nevertheless, Mr. von Kloberg also represented less controversial governments and business interests. He was known to be well informed on the substance of foreign policy and was often up to date on the intrigue at foreign embassies and the State Department, in both Democratic and Republican administrations. A frequent host of salon-style dinners, he relished mixing political figures with Washington reporters.

Mr. von Kloberg lived in Washington. Among his survivors are his companion, Darius Monkevicius of Rome, and a sister, Carol van Kloberg of Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

Edward Joseph Kloberg III was born in New York on Jan. 9, 1942. He attended Princeton University and graduated from Rider College in 1965. He had a master's degree in history from American University, which later hired him to be a fund-raiser and then an administrator until 1982, when he entered public relations.

His firm became the public relations outfit of choice for many leaders who were on their way to becoming outlaws. Mr. von Kloberg (he grafted the "von" onto his name because he thought it sounded distinguished) ran an organization called Washington World Group and earned large fees from the assorted potentates and pariahs he represented, allowing him to live extravagantly (he often wore a black cape to formal occasions), with frequent lavish parties and travel, for which he packed one or more steamer trucks.

One of his favorite lobbying strategies was letters to the editors of newspapers - especially his apparent favorite, The Washington Times - defending his clients when front-page news articles questioned their actions.

For example, after reports that Pakistan had purchased missiles from North Korea in 2003, Mr. Von Kloberg dispatched a letter to The Washington Times in which he said "our so-called ally, Pakistan" - an ally of the Bush administration in its fight against terrorism - "systematically deceived and lied to the United States by engaging in clandestine nuclear exchanges with North Korea."

Pakistan had actually been his client years earlier. In 1994, Ali Sawar Naqvi, a senior diplomat in the Pakistani embassy, wrote Mr. von Kloberg to thank him for his "warm affection and ready assistance," the newspaper India-West reported in 2004.

It came out later that he had acquired a new client: India, Pakistan's bitter rival. This was not the first time he had switched allegiances. After representing Mr. Mobuto of Zaire, he took as a client the man who replaced him, Laurent Kabila.

"Some may wonder why Mr. Kabila, who had waged war to topple Mr. Mobuto two years ago, would now turn to us for representation," Mr. von Kloberg wrote in 1999. He did not answer the question directly but did note that he would not try to "justify or hide" the human rights and other abuses of his clients.

"Instead," he added, "we attempt to balance and even change the situation by offering realistic advice to our clients and facts that are often ignored by the press."

Later, he appeared to be courting Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader, when he wrote another letter in 2001 praising North Korea's efforts to "reunite with the South" and "recognizing North Korea's rightful seat among the community of nations."

There is no evidence that Mr. von Kloberg ever recruited Kim Jong Il. He once acknowledged that he had also failed in his efforts to recruit another outcast.

"I've had every great dictator in the world except for Stroessner," he lamented in 2003. Gen. Alfredo Stroessner was the corrupt and ruthless ruler of Paraguay from 1954 to 1989.

For all his flamboyance, Mr. von Kloberg did show flashes of modesty. In 2003, when HBO began the show "K Street" on the world of Washington lobbyists, Mr. von Kloberg remarked, "I can't imagine that the rank and file of American life will be that interested."

New York Times May 4, 2005 by Joel Brinkley

Tatra T-87

The Tatra T-87 emerged in 1937 as the first true streamlined production motor car. Its pioneering design was developed by Austrian-born Hans Ledwinka and engineers at the Czech Tatra company. Tatra had built carriages and rail coaches since the mid 19th century before entering into motor-car production in 1897 (the year that Ledwinka joined the firm). Around 1930, Tatra engineers conceived a radical redesign of what had become the standard box-shaped automobile, mounting an air-cooled engine at the rear of a backbone chassis.

Several prototypes appeared in 1931 and 1933, before the launch in 1934 of the T-77, a six-seater luxury car powered by a V-8 engine. Its distinctive features were a central seat for the driver and a dorsal rear fin similar to those used in contemporary racing cars. Despite its advanced design, the car’s road holding was criticised and relatively few were produced before the T-87 appeared two years later.

The new model handled better, was lighter and more compact, delivered an even higher top speed of 160 kph and used less fuel. Many of these improvements followed from its monocque shell structure, which had first been used in aircraft and racing cars. Although the driver was now conventionally placed, the T-87 retained its predecessor’s central third headlight and what had now become Tatra’s trademark fin. Introduced for aerodynamic reasons, the fin emphasised the T-87’s striking streamlined form. This drew on studies in minimising air resistance and drag by the Swiss-based designer Paul Jaray and on bodywork patents licensed from the American Budd company (responsible for the Zephyr train). Other suggested influences on the overall design include the sculptor Constantin Brancusi and the architect Erich Mendelssohn.

When Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938, the Nazi authorities monitored closely the Tatra company’s output. The T-87 was permitted in limited numbers as an ‘autobahn’ car, while its successor, the intended mass-market T-97, was suppressed to make way for Porsche’s Volkswagen, the design of which may have been influenced by the Czech car.

Kama Sutra and Feral Cats

To understand contemporary Russia, consider its airports WORKING as a journalist in Russia, with its eleven time zones, its endless steppe and perpetual taiga, means spending a lot of time in the air. It involves flying in planes so creaky that landing in one piece is a pleasant surprise —then disembarking in airports so inhospitable that some visitors may want to take off again immediately.

But, if he has the strength, beyond the whine of the Tupolev engines and the cracked runways, a frequent flyer can find in Russia's airports a useful encapsulation of the country's problems and oddities. In their family resemblances, Russia's airports show how far the Soviet system squeezed the variety from the vast Russian continent; in their idiosyncrasies, they suggest how far it failed to. They illustrate how much of that system, and the mindset it created, live on, 15 years after the old empire nominally collapsed. Russia's awful, grimy, gaudy airports reveal how much hasn't changed in the world's biggest country—but also, on closer inspection, how much is beginning to.

Sheremetyevo: Landing at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, first-time visitors may be unnerved to see their more experienced co-passengers limbering up, as if for a football match or gladiatorial combat. When the plane stops taxiing, or before, the Sheremetyevo regular begins to run.

Sheremetyevo is war. The international terminal was built for the 1980 Olympics, to showcase the Soviet Union's modernity; now it recalls the old regime's everyday callousness (the anarchic domestic terminal is even worse). On a bad day, the queue at passport control stretches almost to the runway.

The Sheremetyevo virgin soon meets the various species of Moscow queue-jumper: the brazen hoodlum; the incremental babushka; the queue-surfing clans who relocate in groups when one of their number reaches the front. The immigration officer—usually sporting peroxide blond hair, six-inch heels and an abbreviated skirt—offers an early insight into Russian notions of customer service. Reflecting the country's neo-imperialist confidence, the immigration form was for most of this year available only in Russian (“distributed free”, it says, in case anyone is tempted to pay).

As with most Russian problems, cash can mitigate the Sheremetyevo ordeal: beautiful girls meet VIPs at the gate and escort them straight to the counter. If he passes customs unmolested, the visitor emerges into a crush of criminal-looking taxi drivers. If, as it will be, the traffic is bad on Leningradskoe Shosse, the road into town, the driver may try to ingratiate himself by driving on the pavement; a 50-rouble backhander will settle things if the police pull him over. On his return to Sheremetyevo, to reach his departure gate the visitor must negotiate a bewildering series of queues, starting with one to get into the building: if he is unassertive, he will still be standing in one of them when his plane takes off. There is nowhere to sit. Forlorn African students camp out in the upstairs corridors. The attendants in the overpriced food kiosks are proof incarnate that the profit motive is not yet universal—though stewardesses on Russian carriers offer unofficial upgrades on reasonable terms. For a small consideration, they sometimes oblige smokers on long-haul flights by turning off the smoke alarms in the toilets.

Mineralnye Vody: To reach this airport, in the north Caucasus, passengers pass through a series of military roadblocks, where documents and the boots of cars are checked by slouching policemen, looking for weapons or terrorists. But a sensible terrorist would leave his weapons at home and buy new ones at the airport, where a wide selection of enormous knives and ornamental Caucasian swords is on sale. There are also embossed Caucasian drinking horns, and a large number of Brezhnev-era copies of the Kama Sutra.

Mineralnye Vody airport is a lower circle of hell. In Soviet times, before the region that the airport serves was desolated by separatist insurgencies, blood feuds and government brutality, the nearby mineral spas were popular holiday resorts. The building is incongruously large for a part of Russia that today, for all its macho hospitality and merriment, feels more African than European in its violence, poverty and corruption. It is weirdly cold inside. Feral cats have been sighted. The floor has not been cleaned since perestroika; the toilets are hauntingly squalid. On the wall there are arrival and departure boards that no longer work, and a big, proud map of the Soviet Union.

Vladikavkaz: Roughly meaning “to rule the Caucasus”, this city, south of Mineralnye Vody, is an old tsarist garrison and the capital of North Ossetia, one of the semi-autonomous ethnic republics of the north Caucasus. Backed by the Caucasus mountains and bisected by the rugged Terek river, Vladikavkaz might be pleasant, were it not for the occasional terrorist eruption and internecine gangster bombing. The Ossetians are Christians, give or take some residual animism, and are Moscow's traditional allies against the restive Muslims of the other republics. Like several other local peoples, the neighbouring Ingush were deported by Stalin in 1944; the Ossetians took part of their territory, and the two fought a war in 1992.

Vladikavkaz airport is actually closer to another, smaller town, obscure and unremarkable until September 2004: Beslan. The road to the airport leads past the auxiliary cemetery that was used to bury the hostages slain in the terrorist atrocity at a Beslan school; toys and drinks (because the dead children were denied water by their captors) are scattered on the graves. The airport ought to be hyper-sensitive to security risks.

It seems not to be. When your correspondent passed through, he noticed a couple of shady characters and their hulking bodyguard talking to an airport official. The official took their documents to the security desk. “Who are they?” asked the security officer. “They are businessmen,” replied the official, as the documents were stamped. The party appeared to reach the runway via a side door, with a large hold-all seemingly unexamined.

Kaliningrad: This airport has a sort of holding pen in which passengers are kept before being released onto the tarmac. Surveying the assembled crew, with their standard-issue gangster coats and tattoos, it becomes obvious why Kaliningrad has a reputation as a smugglers' haven. It used to be Königsberg, city of Kant and celebrated Prussian architecture. By the time the Nazis, British bombers and the Red Army had finished with it, little of pre-war Königsberg was left. Then Stalin took a shine to it, deported the remaining Germans and incorporated the region into the Soviet Union. It is now an island of Russia in a sea of European Union—an anomaly that is profitable for a certain class of businessmen. As well as contraband, the exclave boasts most of the world's amber and Russia's ageing Baltic fleet.

The Kremlin worries that the Poles or the Germans might try to take Kaliningrad back; but, in truth, no one else really wants it. As the aromas of vodka and Dagestani cognac waft around the airport holding pen, the consolation for the nervous traveller is that if one group of dodgy passengers starts something nasty on the flight, another one will probably finish it.

Vladivostok (“to rule the east”): At the other end of the Russian empire, near China and on the Sea of Japan, Vladivostok is the terminus of the Trans-Siberian railway. It became famous during the Russian civil war as a wild eastern entrepot of refugees and interventionists; nowadays it is described (mostly by people who haven't been there) as Russia's Hong Kong or San Francisco. Here you face a classic Russian-airport dilemma.

You have clambered around the tsarist fort, and inside the decommissioned Soviet submarine. You have seen the children riding reindeer on the cigarette-ash beach, and peered at the disconsolate alligator in the aquarium. You have also met the mayor, known in the city, not altogether affectionately, as “Winnie the Pooh”, or “Vinnie Pookh”. He acquired his nickname during his fabled reign as a gangland boss. The mayor has ridden the post-Soviet escalator from crime to business and on into politics, securing his office after his main election rival was wounded in a grenade attack. In response to questions about his past, the mayor inquires whether you yourself have ever been in prison. You are not sure whether the mayor is asking or offering.

A dubious car arrives to take you to Vladivostok airport, about an hour's drive from the city, along a road lined with the forests that, like crab and salmon, are one of the great but fragile prizes of far-eastern Russian power struggles. Your driver is keener on talking than driving. “The Chinese are too cunning for us,” he says, decelerating with every fresh lament. “We are giving away our natural resources”. The factories are all closed; there is no place for anyone over 40 in the new Russia. It becomes clear that this driver is not entirely sober. You are running perilously late for your flight out of Vladivostok. Should you or shouldn't you ask him to go faster?

Murmansk: Well into the month of May, the runway at Murmansk is still fringed with snow; it dusts the pine trees over which incoming planes descend, along with still-frozen ponds and rivers. In the airport's VIP lounge there is a set of sofas of daunting tastelessness. The main terminal is mostly empty, save for a bar, a pool table and some fruit machines. Downstairs, outside the toilets, there is a strange drawing of a man wearing a trilby hat, silhouetted against the sun. But upstairs there is a lovely metallic relief on the wall, depicting everything that is produced in the Murmansk region, or that was once produced.

The biggest city anywhere inside the Arctic Circle, Murmansk was built for and shaped by war. It was founded during the first world war, and was a destination for the famous allied sea convoys during the second, when it was utterly destroyed. When the Kursk submarine was raised from the floor of the Barents Sea in 2000, the corpse-laden wreck was towed back to the nearby dry docks; nuclear icebreakers are their regular customers. A church was built in memory of the dead sailors, and stands amid the other monuments to deceased warriors. Otherwise, Murmansk is cluttered with the usual post-Soviet paraphernalia: a Lenin statue; shabby kiosks; gambling halls; pavements that seem to dissolve into the road.

For all that, the Arctic setting has its own appeal. Icy it may still be, but from late spring the Murmansk girls don their short skirts, and it is light around the clock. In the small hours, down at the port, seagulls wheel around the cranes resting motionless, like giant, paralysed insects, against the illuminated pink clouds. A Ferris wheel rotates on a hill above the town.

Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk: In tsarist times, Sakhalin island was a giant prison camp. Visiting in 1890, Chekhov considered it the most depressing of the many depressing places in Russia. From 1905, when Russia lost its war with Japan, the southern part of Sakhalin was ruled by the Japanese; it was taken back in 1945, along with four smaller islands that the two countries still bicker over. Traces of Japanese architecture are still visible; so are the descendants of the Korean slave labourers whom the Japanese imported. The Soviet experiment bequeathed sparse squares and omnipresent Lenins. After the experiment failed, many of Sakhalin's inhabitants fled its wasting beauty. Salmon can still be scooped by hand from its rivers in the spawning season, but much of the fishing fleet is rusting in the bays.

Yet Siberia and Russia's far east have always been lands of opportunity, as well as exile. On Sakhalin, today's opportunities are mostly in oil and gas, which foreign consortia are extracting from beneath the frigid Sea of Okhotsk, off the island's northern shore. New pipelines cut through forests, and up and down mountains, to an export terminal in the south. A stone's throw away, there are elderly Russians living on what they can fish and find in the forest; the few remaining indigenous reindeer-herders survive on even less. But in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the capital, there are new hotels, bars and jobs.

The primitive domestic terminal at the airport has a tannoy system, but the announcements are inaudible, and their main effect is to spread fear. Destination names are put up, taken down and put up again above the check-in desks. The upper floor is appointed with weirdly ornate Soviet chandeliers. Last year a family of bears wandered onto the runway: the airport authorities hunted them in vain. But there is also a new international terminal to serve the flights from Japan and South Korea. The staff there speak English, and do not regard checking in as an unforgivable insolence.

Irkutsk: Five hours ahead of Moscow, in eastern Siberia, Irkutsk is the nearest city to Lake Baikal, the world's largest body of fresh water—water so clear that it induces vertigo in many of its visitors. The drive to the lake leads through vast forests, past the roadside shamanistic altars of the indigenous Buryats, under an enormous Siberian sky. In the 19th century Irkutsk was home to many of the so-called Decembrists, and the wives who followed them into exile after their 1825 revolt against the tsar: men and events that might have changed Russia's history, and the world's. Alexander Kolchak, a diehard White commander, was shot in Irkutsk in 1920; his body was thrown into the icy Angara river.

Planes descend into the city's airport over identikit Soviet apartment blocks and rickety Siberian dachas. The current arrivals terminal is a hut on the apron of the tarmac. Passengers wait in the street until the baggage-handlers feel inclined to pass their bags through a hole in the hut's wall. The bags then circulate on a terrifying metal device apparently borrowed from a medieval torture chamber. The nearby departure terminal is chaos, though by ascending an obscure staircase passengers can find an interesting photographic display on “minerals of eastern Siberia”.

The staff speak English, and do not regard checking in as an unforgivable insolence The hut, however, is only temporary: a new, modern terminal is being built. It will be needed if the local authorities attract all the tourists they are hoping for. Lake Baikal, the awesomely beautiful main draw, was threatened by a new oil pipeline—until Vladimir Putin ordered its route moved away from the shores of what Buryats call the “Sacred Sea”.

Yekaterinburg: Long-term residents of this city in the Urals shudder when they recall the state of its airport in the 1990s: never any taxis, they say, and very often no luggage. The arrivals hall still has a faint abattoir feel. But, next to it, a colonnaded Soviet edifice has been turned into a business terminal. And there is a new, glass-walled international terminal of positively Scandinavian gleam and efficiency, erected recently using private money. It has a swanky bar that serves edible food. There is an internet café where the internet connections work. “An airport”, says one of its managers proudly, “is a city's visiting card.”

It is not too fanciful to see the contrasting parts of Yekaterinburg's airport as a metaphor for the city's development. It was in Yekaterinburg that the Bolsheviks murdered the last tsar in 1918. Outside town, close to the border between Europe and Asia, there is a memorial to the local victims of Stalin's purges—a rare and moving place in a generally amnesiac nation.
In a nearby cemetery stand what wry locals describe as memorials to the victims of early capitalism: life-size statues (complete with car keys) of the dead gangsters who earned the city its 1990s sobriquet, the Chicago of the Urals. Because of the military industries that moved there during the war, Yekaterinburg was closed to foreigners until 1990. But these days most of the surviving crooks have gone straight, or into politics. Hoteliers are parlaying the city's infamy into a tourist attraction, foreign consulates are being opened, and businessmen and tourists can fly directly to the new airport.

Sheremetyevo: Ignore the snarling waitresses and look again at Sheremetyevo: something is happening. Its operators have come under pressure from Domodedovo, Moscow's other main airport, which was reconstructed a few years ago, and to which airlines have migrated in such numbers that its spacious facilities are often overrun. Sheremetyevo is getting a makeover (as are several of the other airports mentioned in this article).

There is a new café. There are now electric screens on the baggage carousels, displaying the numbers and origins of incoming flights (even if they do not, as yet, always correspond to the baggage circulating on them, much of which is still wrapped in clingfilm to keep out thieves). The nightmarish domestic terminal is being replaced, and a third terminal is going up. A new train service will one day replace the agony of Leningradskoe Shosse. Haltingly, frustratingly but undeniably, Sheremetyevo has started to change—much like Russia itself.

Dec 19th 2006 MOSCOW From The Economist print edition

Lunch with the FT: John Bolton

By Edward Luce

Published: October 19 2007 17:01

I am no believer in providence. But having booked lunch with John Bolton – perhaps the most hardline (now former) member of the Bush administration – I arrive to find Donald Rumsfeld seated at the next table, and have the fleeting thought that I might possess my own newspaper-reading guardian angel.

Since I have arrived first I now have the advantage of watching Bolton, whose shock-white handlebar moustache gives him an unmistakeable Asterix-like appearance, cross the floor towards me. I wait to see what happens when he chances upon the former Secretary of Defense.

A brief moment of camaraderie ensues in which the former US ambassador to the United Nations takes out the cover of his forthcoming book about his time there – Surrender Is Not an Option – and shows it to Mr Rumsfeld. The latter clearly approves and they both laugh heartily. Then Bolton moves on to my table.

We are meeting at the lobby restaurant of the Mayflower Hotel – one of Washington’s most upholstered establishments. It is just a block away from Bolton’s office at the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think-tank he joined last January. He had been left with little choice but to resign from his job at the UN, Congress having refused to confirm his appointment. Bolton says that he eats here often.

“In fact I introduced Rumsfeld to this place,” he says. “We had lunch here shortly after we both left the government [Rumsfeld was ejected in November]. We were sitting right here at this very table. Maybe it’s my libertarian philosophy: but being in government is hard. So we were both feeling liberated.”

We order immediately – Bolton goes for the club sandwich with freedom – oops – French fries and a glass of iced tea. I order a salade Nicoise and a cranberry juice. Clearly this isn’t going to be one of those fancy meals. Bolton makes a point of telling me that he prefers plain food – although the Mayflower has plenty of continental dishes on its menu. “I like this place because if you want something simple, then you have that option,” he says.

Ordering over, it’s my turn to scrutinise Bolton’s book cover. I ask where the title came from. He tells me it was prompted by his memories of being a 15-year-old volunteer for Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential bid. The hardline Republican was trounced by Lyndon Johnson.

Goldwater’s reputation has been rehabilitated in recent years, and he is now portrayed by conservatives as a kind of John the Baptist to Ronald Reagan’s Jesus. At the time he was criticised harshly by moderate Republicans. But to John Bolton, who came from a blue-collar background (his father was a fireman in Baltimore), Goldwater’s uncompromising conservatism made him an instant and lifelong hero: “It was just outrageous that a man like Goldwater could be trashed the way that he was,” he says. “One thing was clear – surrender was not an option, and the book editors said that would be a great title.”

Feeling mildly intimidated, not least by Bolton’s warlike moustache, I venture an ill-timed joke: “Well of course, everyone will instantly think of that phrase ‘Cheese-eating surrender monkeys’,” I say, referring to the memorable line coined for the French after they had voted against the Iraq war at the UN. Bolton looks at me suspiciously. An awkward moment of silence follows.

I break it with a question, asking him to explain what made him a “Goldwater conservative” – Bolton’s preferred tag – as opposed to a neoconservative, such as Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s former deputy who nowadays sits along the corridor from Bolton at the AEI. Bolton warms instantly to the theme. One of the key differences, he says, is that most neoconservatives used to be left-wing. As a Goldwater teen, Bolton had clearly avoided that provenance (interestingly, Hillary Clinton started off as a “Goldwater girl” in 1964). Bolton is also keen to point out that he is a follower of Edmund Burke, the late 18th-century Anglo-Irish politician and philosopher, whose empirical conservatism would rule out most of the neocons’ utopian agenda.

“We used to joke that neoconservatives were liberals who’d been mugged by reality,” Bolton replied. “I have always been a conservative. The idea of big-government conservatism has more neocon adherents than from unmodified conservatives.”

Our food arrives and Bolton periodically drenches his fries in tomato ketchup as he eats. I try to counteract the lingering sense that I have shown myself up as too European for Bolton’s taste by tackling my salad with aggressive jabs. We carry on with the neocon versus Goldwater conservative discussion as we eat. I suggest that on Iraq, or indeed the nuclear ambitions of Iran, the views of both groups happily coincide.

Through a mouthful of fries, Bolton only half-agrees. He concedes that their views coincided on the need to remove Saddam Hussein – Bolton felt it was in America’s interest to eliminate a potential threat. But he parted ways with the neoconservatives on the objectives of the subsequent occupation. “I am all in favour of democracy in Iraq,” he says. “I don’t know what else I would say. But our national interest today is to stop any part of Iraq from becoming a base for terrorism and if that is accomplished with a less than Jeffersonian type of democracy, then that’s OK with me.”

Mistakes were made, he concedes – only not the ones most people would identify. “In terms of Iraq’s governance I would have put the Iraqis in charge as soon as possible,” he says. “I’ll exaggerate for effect but what we should have done is said to the Iraqis: ‘You’re on your own. Here’s a copy of the Federalist papers. Good luck.’”

And what of the Bush administration’s idea of spreading democracy, I ask. Is that now discredited? “You can’t discredit something that was wrong from the start,” he replies with evident feeling. “Their [the neocons’] ultimate conclusion is that if all the world were filled with democracies, there would be no war. But that is contrary to the entire human spirit.

“I’m not sure history has ended. Russia has passed through democracy and come out the other side. You could make the same case about the European institutions, which don’t seem to be accountable to anybody except their foreign ministries.”

The waiter asks what we would like next. Bolton asks for a coffee – “just a coffee” – while I request a double espresso with separate hot milk. Bolton gives me another of his flinty looks. Feeling the need to explain, I say: “Ordinarily I’d order a large macchiato, but sometimes they don’t know what that is.” I realise at once that I am only digging myself deeper. “I wouldn’t know,” says Bolton after a pause. “I just get coffee.”

The pause continues. To get things going again, I raise what is perhaps Bolton’s favourite topic – the State Department, his home through several Republican administrations but which he continues openly to disdain. Much like the British description of diplomats having “gone native”, American diplomats are often accused of succumbing to “clientilism”. Is that still his view? Bolton springs back to life.

“Yes,” he says, “but even the word ‘clientilism’ shows how little the State Department understands the problem: surely your client is the US? In fact what they mean by clientilism is that if you’re the French desk officer, then you become too pro-France.” Bolton is more than happy to continue in this vein. Meanwhile I try to slurp my double espresso as noisily as possible.

As I do so Bolton relates a story, “possibly apocryphal”, about George Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, who would point to a large globe and ask newly appointed American ambassadors to find their country. Invariably they would point to where they were going. “No,” said Shultz, spinning it back to America, “that is your country.”

Bolton continues: “The foreign service ought to be advocates for American interests, not apologists. This problem is not unique to the US but neither is it necessarily the rule everywhere else.” So which foreign services do serve their national interests? I ask. “The Russians,” he says. Then he pauses for a while before adding, “And the French.” Formidable, I think. “And the Indians and especially the Pakistanis.”

I ask whether nakedly pursuing one’s national interest might be counter-productive, particularly in the post-9/11 world. Surely alienating people around the world might also undermine America’s interest? Bolton dislikes the premise of my question. “Every country has an aspect to it that rubs up people the wrong way,” he says. “I quote in my book a great rhyme from world war two: ‘In Washington Lord Halifax whispered to Lord Keynes, it’s true they have the moneybags but we have all the brains.’”

Look what happened to the British, I reply. Such hubris didn’t serve them very well. “Name a country that hasn’t had hubris at one point or another,” Bolton responds. “Sweden had an empire as did Lithuania…” But sometimes, I interrupt, foreigners detect a providential quality to American motives that it might be better to downplay – that God has a hand in the US’s destiny.

“Well,” he replies and pauses before continuing. “There are Americans who believe that. My favourite story is of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams who were bitter enemies during their presidencies, but who become friends at the end. They both died on the 50th anniversary of the declaration of independence – 4th July, 1826. Now try to put that in its historical context.”

It was a revealing example – and also interesting and provocative, as is Bolton’s wont. By this stage I sense that his suspicion of me has mildly dissipated. As we wait for the bill, we finally get round to the subject of Iran. Bolton finishes with a flourish, confidently predicting that George W. Bush will launch a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities before leaving office.

He can’t resist one last European dig. “Four years of European diplomacy have given the Iranians the one asset they could not have purchased – and that was time,” he says, wagging his finger. “And now, irony of ironies, after fiddling around with all this futile diplomacy, we finally have a French president who sounds just like we do on Iran.” C’est la guerre, I think. A sobering conclusion to a sober Anglo-Saxon meal.

Edward Luce is the FT’s Washington bureau chief

Mayflower Hotel, Washington DC
1 x club sandwich
1 x French fries
1 x salade Nicoise
1 x iced tea
1 x cranberry juice
1 x regular coffee
1 x double expresso
Total: $57.54