Category: Commentary

Today is Andy Warhol’s birthday. He would have been 85.

I was born in the early 70s. By the time I was old enough to appreciate art, Warhol had become something of a caricature of himself. Sure, I knew who he was, and was familiar with his work. Hell, it would have been hard to grow up in the 70s and 80s and not know who Andy Warhol was. But I was too young to remember the “Revolutionary” Warhol of the 60s and early 70s. I didn’t know him as the counter-culture icon he truly was back then. Warhol was kind of like The Beatles to me: I knew who The Beatles were, and had heard dozens of their songs. But the band broke up before I was born, and I totally missed the whole “Beatlemania” phenomenon. It’s kind of like how teenagers of today know what MTV was, but didn’t live through it, and can’t ever know how truly awesome it was at the time.

So anyway, one thing I always found odd about Warhol was how stiff he seemed. I’d see him on TV and thought it was weird how he didn’t really move his body much. It almost seemed as if Warhol was a fully-functioning human head on top of a mannequin’s body. It wasn’t until much later – the past few years, actually – that I realized why that was.

Valerie Solanas was a radical feminist, born in New Jersey in 1936. In the mid 1960s, she moved to New York City. She ran in to Warhol outside his art studio, The Factory, and asked him to produce her play, Up Your Ass (the play has never been published, but is about a prostitute who kills one of her johns, apparently an eerie foreshadowing of Aileen Wuornos’ story). Warhol said that he would. But, so the story goes, he lost her manuscript. Solanas, enraged, demanded $25 from Warhol as compensation. Instead he paid her $25 to appear in his film I, a Man.

At the time, Solanas was living at the Chelsea Hotel, the former home of Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, Charles Bukowski, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, Leonard Cohen, Arthur C. Clarke, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller (and the place where Sid Vicious allegedly killed Nancy Spungen). Also living at the Chelsea was Maurice Girodias, founder of Olympia Press. In 1967, Girodias signed Solanas to a $500 contract. Solanas, who was later diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, freaked out about this, thinking Girodias would “own” her work. She began to think that Warhol and Girodias were behind some sort of “conspiracy” to steal her work.

On June 3, 1968, Solanas sat in lobby of the Chelsea and waited for Girodas for three hours, despite having been told by the front desk that he had left the city for the weekend. She then went to Grove Press and asked for Barney Rosset (another member of her imagined “conspiracy”). She was told that he was out of town, too. So she went to The Factory. Warhol’s friend, director Paul Morrissey, told her that Warhol wouldn’t be there that day, either. Solanas waited outside for two hours, then went up to the studio, where Morrissey again told her that Warhol wasn’t coming in that day. So Solanas rode the elevator up and down until Warhol showed up. They walked in the studio together, where Morrissey again asked her to leave. He then went to the restroom. While he was gone, the phone rang. Warhol answered it, and while he was on the phone Solanas took three shots at him. The first two missed, but the third hit Warhol in both lungs, his spleen, stomach, liver and esophagus. Warhol was taken to Columbus-Mother Cabrini Hospital, where he barely clung to life. According to Warhol lore, he was actually pronounced dead, but when the surgeon realized who it was, he opened Warhol’s chest and massaged his heart until it started beating again. Warhol faced a long, painful recovery. The bullet had literally torn up his insides, and for the rest of his life he was forced to wear a “surgical corset”… which is why Warhol always appeared so stuff on TV.

As for Solanas, she turned herself in the next day. At her arraignment, she went off on a bizarre rant about why she shot Warhol. She was promptly committed to Bellevue Hospital. She was transferred to several hospitals, and was eventually deemed fit enough to stand trial. She was convicted of “reckless assault with intent to harm”, and sentenced to three years in prison, with the year she spent in mental hospitals credited to her sentence. After getting out she moved to California and lived in several flophouses before dying of pneumonia on April 25, 1988. She was 52. A giant pile of typewritten papers were found on a desk in her hotel room, but we’ll never know what they said because her mother burned them all.

One more interesting thing about Warhol: he was a really devout Catholic. Born in Pittsburgh, Warhol was baptized at St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church. After moving to Manhattan, Warhol attended mass almost every day at Church of St. Vincent Ferrer (even before the shooting, when a lot of people might “find Jesus”). St. Vincent’s priest at the time, Father Sam Matarazzo, speculated that Warhol kept his religious beliefs a secret because of his homosexuality (although Warhol was gay, many who knew him said he was kind of asexual, more prone to “voyeuristic masturbation” than actually having sex with people). Others have speculated that Warhol kept his piety to himself because it wasn’t “cool” to be religious in the 1960s art world. Amusingly, Warhol himself said that he kept a low profile at the church – by sitting in the back row, refusing communion, and not going to confession – because he “was self-conscious about being seen crossing himself the Orthodox way”.

Live in North Carolina? Have a library card? Own a Mac or Windows PC? Optionally, do you have an iPhone, iPod, some other portable MP3\WMA player, a Kindle, Nook or Android device? Then you have access to the North Carolina Digital Library! Just click here to go to the site. All you need to create an “account” is your library card: click on the “Account” link, choose your county library from the drop-down list and enter your library card number when prompted.

You’ll have to download and install something called the OverDrive Media Console, but so far I’ve found it to be remarkably well-behaved for this kind of software. Once installed, you can go to a book’s page and click the “Borrow” button. You’ll be prompted for the type of file you want (in many cases, both WMA and MP3 files are available). You then download a small *.ODM file, which you open with OverDrive, which automagically downloads the audiobook(s) you want, much like the Amazon MP3 Downloader.

Part of the reason the OverDrive software is so well-behaved (for me) is that I’ve only downloaded mp3 audiobooks, which by definition cannot have DRM (I once saw a hilarious “this is why people pirate” webcomic where a guy recounted his real-life troubles with downloading content from his library, which ended with him downloading it from The Pirate Bay instead. I can’t seem to find the comic again, but this one from The Oatmeal is pretty similar and The Oatmeal is hilarious, so go read that and come back. I’ll wait.).

You’re supposed to delete any file(s) you’ve downloaded after a certain number of days, and OverDrive will do that automatically if you open the software after a book’s due date. But here’s the thing: all OverDrive does is copy mp3 files to a “My Media” folder in your Documents folder. If one were to, say, copy the mp3s to a different location, one could (theoretically) keep the files forever. Not that I would ever do such a thing… I’m just pointing it out to you. And if that’s a bit close to straight-up piracy for you, note that the OverDrive software will (in many cases) allow you to burn the files to audio CD or copy them to a portable player:

I don’t know anything about how the NC Digital Library handles ebooks… because quite frankly I’d rather have my eyes gouged out than read a book on my PC, phone or netbook. As tech-friendly as I am, I’m not even excited about Kindles or Nooks, either. So I really can’t help you there. I just know that ebooks are available in Kindle, OverDrive READ and Adobe EPUB formats, so if your device can handle those, knock yourself out.

One last thing: if the book you want is “out” – and many appear to be – you can place a “hold” for it, and the library will email you when the book is available for download.

Companies – especially tech companies – face the difficult task of convincing consumers to buy future products… while at the same time getting people to also buy their current products. I’d guess that all of us have delayed a purchase at one point or another. Maybe you needed a new desktop computer, but wanted to wait for one with the latest Intel processor or USB 3 ports. Maybe you wanted an iPhone, but instead of getting the current iPhone 4 you waited a couple months for the iPhone 5. Or maybe you wanted to upgrade your HDTV but wanted to wait until LED TVs or 3-D TVs or 240 Hz TVs hit the market.

Believe it or not, there’s a name for this phenomenon. It’s called the “Osbourne Effect” and it comes from the Osbourne Computer Corporation. On April 3, 1981, the company released the Osbourne 1, the first commercially successful portable computer. It was the granddaddy of all laptop computers:

Sales were pretty good at first. The company was selling around 10,000 units a month, which wasn’t bad for a computer that cost $1,795 at the time… which is a whopping $4,464 when adjusted for inflation!

But the Osbourne 1 wasn’t without faults. Although it was truly “portable”, the computer weighed almost 24 pounds (10.7kg), making it difficult to carry through airports. In fact, the Osbourne 1’s designer, Lee Felsenstein, once wrote that he had to carry two units four blocks from his hotel to a trade show and it “nearly pulled my arms out of their sockets”. The computer’s screen was tiny: just 5″ (13cm) across. What’s worse is that the unit’s floppy drive only supported single-sided single density disks, which were too small (even at the time) to support most business applications. Early units also had a failure rate of 10-15%, which is unbelievably high for a consumer product. To give a comparison, early Xbox 360 units had a notorious failure rate of 16%, compared to just 3% for the PlayStation 3 and the Wii.

Early in 1983, company founder Adam Osbourne announced a new model, the Osbourne Executive. Priced at $2,495 ($5,662 in 2012 dollars), the Executive would fix a lot of the problems of the Osbourne 1. It would have a larger 7″ (17.7cm) display, would support double-density floppy drives, would come with twice the memory of the Osbourne 1 (128KB vs, 64KB), and would come with useful software, like Supercalc and WordStar. The Osbourne Executive only worked off AC, although a battery pack with a 1-hour runtime would be made available as an option. But instead of getting lighter, the Osbourne Executive was actually heavier: 28 lbs (13kg).

When computer dealers saw the Osbourne Executive – in small groups in locked hotel rooms, a cloak and dagger scenario right out of a spy novel – they were blown away. But instead of keeping their current orders for the Osbourne 1 and placing new orders for the Osbourne Executive, they did something strange: thinking the Osbourne Executive would be a “game changer”, they instead cancelled their current orders for Osbourne 1s and placed orders for the new, upcoming Executive.

Osbourne Computer’s sales started slipping, so the company slashed prices on the Osbourne 1. But it didn’t help. The company, which had once manufactured 500 Osbourne 1s a day, soon ran out of cash. The company declared bankruptcy before the Osbourne Executive ever came to market.

But while the “Osbourne Effect” of badly managed expectations is a popular example in university economics, marketing, management and computer science classes, one might ask: is the story true?

Some folks prefer calling it the “Osbourne Myth”, which acknowledges the original tale while dismissing it at the same time. According to these people, it wasn’t just the announcement of the Osbourne Executive that killed the company. According to former employee Mike McCarthy, competition from Kaypro, which had released a portable computer with a 9″ (22.86cm) screen that was $400 ($936) cheaper than the Osbourne 1, really hurt Osbourne’s sales. But this, of course doesn’t “dispel” the myth of Osbourne’s demise. It just says that there was more competition in the marketplace than some otherwise remember. Plus, it could be that McCarthy was just playing a bit of “cover your ass”.

In 2005, a former Osbourne repairman named Charles Eicher told website The Register about how an Osbourne executive “found” $150,000 worth of Osbourne 1 motherboards in a warehouse. According to Eicher, the executive convinced Adam Osbourne to convert the motherboards into complete units for sale. So the story goes, the conversion ended up costing $2 million, and that was the real reason Osbourne ran out of cash. Osbourne’s own autobiography from 1984 – Hypergrowth: The Rise and Fall of the Osborne Computer Corporation – noted the incident, and called it “throwing good money after bad”. But is Eicher’s story true? $150,000 worth of inventory in 1982 would be worth $351,281 in 2012 dollars, which seems like an awful lot of inventory to “misplace”. Heck, it’d be a lot for Dell or HP to misplace today, and both companies are orders of magnitude larger than Osbourne ever was. And if Adam Osbourne knew that Osbourne 1 sales were tanking, why would he agree make more Osbourne 1s?

Perhaps we’ll never really know what happened at Osbourne. After all, it was 30 years ago. Many involved in the company are getting older or have passed on (Osbourne, born to an English father in the waning days of the British Raj in India, died in Kodaikanal, India on March 18, 2003 aged 64). And others who led Osbourne have an obvious incentive to downplay the company’s faults or their role in it. So while the “Osbourne Effect” might not be 100% true, it’s still an important tale for business leaders of the future.

So one of my clients had an employee leave a couple months ago, and last week I finally got permission to delete the user’s Exchange mailbox. My standard operating procedure in this situation is to export the mailbox to a PST (archive) file (in case the data is needed later), then delete the mailbox. But since this user had been gone for a couple months, the mailbox had several hundred unread messages. So I decided to go through it first, deleting anything that was obviously spam.

I deleted dozens of “CHEAP Vi@gr@!” and “PRESIDENT APPROVES MORTGAGE RATE SLASH!” emails before I noticed a few little poetic emails. There were no links in the emails, no mention of satisfying your woman or your credit score changing or new careers in interior design or the latest secret discovery by Dr. Oz. Just little bits of – what I assume are – test emails to see how spam filters work. I was struck by how these little emails sounded like something Ezra Pound would have written:

He was awful surprised

And away he went, Next day was auction day.
She was beautiful.

So gather around the drum circle, stroke your beard if you’ve got one, and enjoy the beatnik poetry of the spammers:

He looked surprised

I cleaned out the place, CHAPTER XXVIII.
Good! says the old gentleman.

Nice. Short, solid, and to the point.

I tried it

Thems the very words, CHAPTER XXV.
All right.

A southern twang, almost like Flannery O’Connor!

It was dreadful lonesome

So she hollered, But the king was cam.
You git it.

No wait… that’s Flannery O’Connor.

We are highwaymen

And Ive et worse pies, Hungry, too, I reckon.
Well, guess.

Alan Ginsberg, for reals.

On March 13, 1964, a woman was brutally murdered outside her apartment in Queens, New York. While the murder was tragic – as all murders are – it wasn’t especially noteworthy. It wasn’t until two weeks after the murder, when the New York Times published an article about the incident, that the whole world lost its mind.

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Kitty Genovese was born in New York City on July 7, 1935. The eldest of five children, Kitty grew up in Park Slope, Brooklyn. In what has to be one of the saddest ironies of all time, Kitty’s mother witnessed a murder on a street in 1954 and demanded that the family move to a safer place. And so, later that year, the family moved to Connecticut. But Kitty was 19 by then, and decided to remain in the city. By 1964, Kitty was managing Ev’s Eleventh Hour, a sports bar in Hollis, Queens and living in Kew Gardens with her partner, Mary Ann Zielonko.

At around 3:15 AM on the morning of March 13, Kitty drove home from the bar and parked her car at the Long Island Rail Road parking lot. The lot was on Austin Street across from an apartment building called The Mowbray, and approximately 100 feet from the entrance to her apartment, which was above some shops. Kitty had no idea that a man named Winston Moseley had woken up at 2:00 AM and quietly left his house. He had driven around Queens looking for a woman to murder, and Kitty was simply at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Moseley approached Genovese in the parking lot. Genovese, frightened, ran across the lot towards towards her apartment, but changed her mind and turned to run up Austin Street towards Lefferts Boulevard, a street that was usually busy, even at 3:15 AM. Moseley caught up to her and stabbed her in the back twice. Genovese cried out “Oh my God, he stabbed me! Help me!”. A neighbor named Robert Mozer leaned out his window and shouted for Moseley to “let that girl alone”.

Mozer’s shout frightened Moseley. He ran back to his car, a white Corvair, and drove around for several minutes. He came back, parked in a different location, and put on a wide-brimmed hat, which he pulled down low to hide his face. He scanned the LIRR lot, the street, and the area around the shops. Genovese had slowly walked towards the rear of the shops, where her apartment was, and Moseley found her there in an exterior hallway. He stabbed her several more times, raped her, and took $49 from her wallet (around $360 in 2012 dollars). He then walked back to his car and drove away.

*     *     *

At the time, most crime reporters simply took the NYPD’s word on most cases. Sure, there was the occasional high-profile case in which reporters would interview neighbors or witnesses. But most of the time, the NYPD would simply hand out sheets with crime summaries on them, and the reporters would rewrite them and submit them to their papers.

On March 27, 1964, the New York Times ran an article by Martin Gansberg with the headline “Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police”. The article begins thusly:

“For more than half an hour thirty-eight respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.

Twice their chatter and the sudden glow of their bedroom lights interrupted him and frightened him off. Each time he returned, sought her out, and stabbed her again. Not one person telephoned the police during the assault; one witness called after the woman was dead.

That was two weeks ago today.”

The only problem is, almost everything in Gansberg’s article is wrong. In fact, there’s a huge factual error in the story’s very first sentence: there were only two attacks, not three. And the alleged “38 witnesses”? The District Attorney’s office searched high and low for witnesses prior to Moseley’s subsequent trial, and according to ADA Charles Skoller, only six credible witness were found. And, due to the layout of the crime, none of those people actually saw Moselely murder Genovese.

Continue reading “RIGHTING THE WRONGS: Kitty Genovese”

Have you ever been at home, doing some task (like the dishes), with your headphones on, and you’re just groovin’ to the tunes and lost in the task at hand, so lost that when you open the door and see that it’s raining when it wasn’t before you’re like “HOLY SHIT! IT’S RAINING!!”, as if you’re the first person to ever see rain?

*     *     *

As I get older, certain “rules” of social behavior get easier to understand, while others get harder. The “big rules”, like those against murder or adultery, get easier to accept and understand. But the finer points of social interaction seem to get more difficult for me to grasp.

I was at Walmart a couple of days ago, and as I stood in the checkout line I noticed that ChapStick has a new “Red Velvet Cupcake” flavor. “OMG!”, I thought to myself, “Lisa’s co-worker Kim loves anything red velvet! I should get her a tube!”

But then I thought “is that OK? Is that appropriate? Should I be buying another man’s wife ChapStick? Is that weird? What if some random dude bought Lisa ChapStick? How would I feel about that? But hell, man… you’re not ‘some random guy’! You know Kim. You went to her wedding! You’ve gone out bar hopping with her and her husband! It’s not like you have anything ‘going on’ with her… and it’s not like you’re buying her a dozen roses or some sex toy or something. But speaking of, why would I buy someone ChapStick? Maybe I should get her a couple quarts of oil and a belt sander while I’m here… ‘cos a tube of ChapStick is a pretty random thing, even if she loves red velvet. But then there was that time in Latin class… remember your professor? The sweet older Southern lady who kinda looked like Flannery O’Connor and lived in that HUGE house in Druid Hills and went to Agnes Scott back when that was something to be proud of? What was her name? Anyway, remember that one time when she had a horrible case of the sniffles, and during a break you went to that convenience store next to Walter’s – remember? It was called ‘Fast Lane’ and that older Indian guy worked there who tried to be really hip with the college kids with his ‘heeeeeyyy doooode, what’s a happenin’?’, and you were gonna write that pilot for a sitcom called Life in the Fast Lane… Anyway, the Latin professor, whose name you can’t remember but was realty sweet, had the sniffles and you went to Fast Lane and bought her a pack of tissues, and that wasn’t weird? Remember that?”

Aaaaaannnndddd this, folks, is why I couldn’t get in any of the “good” universities.

*     *     *

Hey atheists: what if I told you your mockery of religion is as disrespectful as me calling your precious snowflake of a baby “ugly”, and your constant atheist proselytizing is not only “as annoying” as Jehovah’s Witnesses or Old School Baptists, it’s actually worse because you’re selling… nothing.

Imagine walking on to a car lot, and being approached by the typical Ingratiating, smarmy, sycophantic, sleazy, greasy car salesman. Now imagine, just as you start talking with the salesman, another salesman appears – just as Ingratiating, smarmy, sycophantic, sleazy, and greasy as the first guy – only this guy is calling you and your need for a car “stupid” and “ridiculous”, and he tries to get you to not buy a car. That’s not annoying at all, is it?