It seems that the tangled story at which I could only hint in my Tuesday post, “Ayn Rand linked to Deutsche Bank skyscraper tragedy?”, has caused some serious bustle around the city desk at the NYTimes.
The lead story on the front page reports that the firm whose creators picked the Ayn Rand hero John Galt for its corporate name was a paper corporation with no employees. It had been assembled to insulate or hide its “integrity”-challenged owners and officers from the view of its clients, the people and officers of the New York community. This is the company which was given the lucrative contract to perform one of the most hazardous and certainly one of the most visible jobs in the city if not in the entire country.
Two firefighters died fighting a fire inside the building last Saturday, probably as the result of criminal negligence.
Meanwhile, inside the same section of the paper we learn in another story that the New York Fire Department hadn’t inspected the Deutsche Bank building’s standpipe or sprinkler system since 1996, in spite of the fact that twice-monthly inspections were mandatory for buildings under demolition. It seems the department was also aware that the sprinkler system was not working. Some have argued that the FDNY was unwilling or unequipped to enter a building permeated with the toxins that had necessitated its condemnation, but since demolition began firefighters had been in the building on at least two occasions for reasons unrelated to the standpipe or the sprinkler system.
[image of the two firefighters from NYFD via Gothamist]
Category: General
Ayn Rand linked to Deutsche Bank skyscraper tragedy?
skyscrapers have very complex lives
I’ve just read that the name of the sub-contracting company in charge of the demolition at the Deutsche Bank building is the John Galt Corporation. Who is John Galt? I immediately recognized the intriguing literary/political reference within the firm’s name, and, regardless of what we eventually learn about the ultimate responsibility for the death of two firemen this week, the connection is likely to continue the fictional character’s complex association with corporate greed and laissez-faire capitalism .
ADDENDA: I’ve turned up these few bits on the John Galt Corporation by searching Google and its cached links:
The firm is located at 3900 Webster Avenue in The Bronx [718-654-5300]; its principals are former executives of the Safeway Environmental Corp., a firm with its own history of problems; Galt’s work at the Deutsche Bank site was already causing injury and incurring fines before this week; and finally, World Trade Center-area neighbors had expressed serious concerns about the firm’s qualifications since early last year.
[image from wikipedia]
TEAR IT DOWN
Guantanamo. Again.
But this time I’m encouraged by the appearance of a new site devoted specifically to the subject. Amnesty International has just gone public with a new site, tearitdown.org, dedicated to solely shutting down permanently the most notorious of the U.S. concentration camps.
I had purchased the domain they’re using sometime last year with the intention of devoting it to a totally different form of protest, one which would not have addressed such fundamental issues of humanity. When Barry and I were approached by Amnesty’s people I was happy to see it depart for higher purpose.
Bon voyage!
[all images from Amnesty]
of one-party governments, war crimes, collective guilt
Bloggy explains why he and so many of us have abandoned American electoral politics. My own take on it: A people which liked to describe its system as “democratic” has finally been occupied by what our last real “republican” President called “the military-industrial complex”.
After a graceful segue into the subject of war crimes and collective guilt, Bloggy reminds us why these things matter as much today as they did in 1945.
[Tom Tomorrow image from Salon]
Kenneth Walker at the SVA Open Studios
Kenneth Walker did these beautiful drawings on mylar, seen at the SVA Open Studios last Thursday. They had a three-dimensional, sculptural quality but suggested weightlessness at the same time.
Pimientos de Padrón at the Mayflower in Getaria
It’s a very simple thing, but I think our most exciting gustatory discovery while in Spain was a traditional (Galician) pepper dish, Pimientos de Padrón, and I’m willing to go to great lengths to find the right pepper in order to reproduce the dish at home.
This picture shows us on the terrace outside the Mayflower restaurant in Getaria finishing a magnificent, elegant but extraordinarily-minimal appetizer of house-cured anchovies, in a terrific local olive oil combined with chopped garlic, just after the peppers were brought to the table and before the wood-grilled monkfish entrée (cola de rape a la plancha) had arrived directly from the fires burning ten feet behind Barry’s chair.
The wine in that beautiful thin [cider] tumbler was an excellent Txakoli from the Basque country.
we’re back, but it still looks pretty dreadful around here
like a bad penny
I cannot hide it any longer: We arrived back from Spain Wednesday afternoon. Our luggage, having decided to extend the holiday for another day, arrived at our door 24 hours later, sadder but a little wiser. Next time there will be no dawn check-ins at a remote airport for a connection to a Transatlantic flight.
I have tons of images from our trip to Spain which I’d like to put up on this site. I’m going to keep putting more up until I get distracted by the next new thing.
Unfortunately I really am very easily diverted. Witness my delight in one of today’s biggest news stories and my failure to resist looking back almost four years to three of the entries on this site which dealt with Paul Wolfowitz – in one of his earlier incarnations. Too bad he’s never gotten fired for his real failures and crimes: total personal incompetence and state murder on an international scale.
If you can still stand to read about the man, see this, my September 21, 2003 post and both this and this post each filed two days later, concerning Wolfowitz’s appearance at The New School.
[yucky image, but perhaps also an homage to Deborah Kass, from trueblueliberal]
Atocha Train Station Memorial
Barry and I went to Atocha early this afternoon, to see what the station looked like, but also to see the memorial to the March 11, 2004 Madrid train bombings which killed 191 people and injured some 1800.
Especially considering the circumstances of its origin, it is, as Barry said, the least chauvinistic monument imaginable. Texts composed of hundreds of expressions of grief sent in the days after the attack from all over the world are printed on a clear colourless membrane that is inflated by air pressure, rising balloon-like inside a cylinder. That structure is composed of glass blocks and sits on a platform or terrace overhead. The light in the empty blue room below comes from this source alone. At night the cylinder is illuminated by lamps within its base and can be seen throughout the station neighborhood.
leaving for Spain
Francisco de Zurbar�n Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose 1633
We’re flying to Spain tomorrow for two weeks: Madrid, a motor trip north, ending in Barcelona, from which we fly back on the 16th.
I was in Barcelona in 1961. I was almost arrested for wearing Bermuda shorts while riding around on my bike. I went back to Spain (Madrid, Toledo, Segovia, Salamanca) in 1980. the Caudillo was dead, and it felt like one big party; I can’t believe I haven’t been been back in the meantime.
Barry just did a post covering some territory we’re going to have to miss, several benefits and some theatre.
I have no idea whether I’ll have a chance to blog while away. Okay, maybe some pictures if we have good internet connections.
[image from gatochy]
5 years of the jimlog
a survivor of the original IRT numbering system from 1904
I started this blog five years ago today. It was the successor to an eight-month series of emails with which I had been plaguing my friends since September 11.
Jimlog may have begun with a passionate Leftist political take on the follies of this country’s response to the events of that day, still an important part of its content now, but the original dark muse was soon joined by the happier world described by most of the other interests of its author/publisher. Those enthusiasms include queerdom, the arts, history, and the spectacle of a New York which is but a mirror of the beautiful diversity of a much larger world.
Once again I declare that it never could have happened and couldn’t continue without Barry, my patient wizard.