Englishman in New York

I pretty much haven’t stopped since I arrived in England on Sunday. There is very little time to write and I seem to be working almost constantly from 9am to 1am, but I couldn’t resist taking some photographs of my home town, Leeds, today. It has changed so much since I left in 1995.

I don’t have time to write but hopefully some of these pictures will provide an interesting sight for those who still think of Leeds as a grim northern town or those who have never seen Leeds. I love this building which I think has only been up for a few years now.

I understand this old Post Office is now a trendy restaurant. And I love the way this newer building (below) blends into City Square so well.

And I couldn’t resist this (below). Not something you see every day as you are driving around Leeds. A biker doing his bit for transatlantic relations.

Now, back to work. And hopefully, some time soon, to bed.

CORRECTION: I stand corrected. As my friend Beau pointed out, I moved back to Leeds in September 2002 for almost a year. How could I have forgotten those joyous days sticking price labels on Top Man suits on the bank of the River Aire?

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Phew. Simply no time to post today. Apologies. I’m heading for England tomorrow (for a work trip) and there have been too many loose ends to tie up. I still haven’t turned to packing and the sun is already setting on possibly the nicest day of the year so far, a sweltering 84F/29C.

The weather forecast for England is less than encouraging. I fear a wet, chilly, gray metropolis awaits. What else would you expect for a Bank Holiday weekend? The heatwave always hits once people are tucked safely behind their desks, so I expect the weather to improve during the week.

Hopefully, I can resume blogging when I reach my final destination, Leeds, late Monday. Though I have been promised enough work to keep me busy day and night for seven days straight, so we’ll see. In the meantime, I leave you with a great clip of the kings of Gypsy Jazz, Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli (via Clive Davis). How did Django do it with just two fingers?

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A short while ago I visited the Hotel Chelsea to interview Ed Hamilton and Debbie Martin, who write the Living With Legends: Hotel Chelsea blog. It’s one of the few times when I have felt that words simply cannot do a place justice. All I will say is that walking into the hotel is like stepping into a surrealist painting. Nothing is quite what it seems.

If you want to take a look for yourself and you’re not in New York, the next best thing is to watch this 18 minute documentary about Ed and the hotel that ran on Australian television recently. It doesn’t take you along all the floors, or introduce you to even a handful of the eccentric characters who roam the hallways, but it does at least give you a flavor of that eerie lobby and an introduction to the hotel manager, Stanley Bard.

For Brits there is the bonus of an interview with Cindy Gallop, a wealthy expat businesswoman who lives across the street from the Chelsea and who has been on the receiving end of Ed’s ire as a symbol of the neighborhood’s gentrification. All in all, a great intro to the hotel and some great street scenes of the neighborhood.

The picture above is a screen grab from a lobby scene in the documentary. If that doesn’t make you curious, I don’t know what will. Click here for the Real player version and here for Win version.

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A brilliant multimedia piece on nytimes.com today about one unit’s search for the three missing US soldiers in Iraq. Go here and click on “A Deadly Search for Missing Soldiers” in the multimedia section to the left of the screen.

UPDATE: It looks like one of the soldiers’ bodies has been found.

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I don’t know how much coverage Rupert Murdoch’s bid for Dow Jones, the owner of the Wall Street Journal, is getting in the UK. But over here, it’s big news.

The question seems to be not if, but when Dow Jones’ owners, the Bancroft family, will cave to Murdoch’s $60 a share offer. (Though it should be pointed out that a Bloomberg news article today suggests that Murdoch may be losing patience.)

At the weekend, Joe Nocera wrote a fascinating analysis of Murdoch’s takeover bid, arguing that the Bancrofts would be fools not to sell considering Dow Jones’ lackluster performance in recent years.

Nocera blames that poor performance on the Bancrofts and on two Dow Jones chief executives, Warren Phillips and Peter Kann, both former journalists who ran the company from 1975 through 2006. Here are a few choice excerpts, but it’s worth reading in full:

I HAVE a theory as to why Dow Jones management has been so inept over the years. It is a company that has long prided itself on being run by journalists. That was also part of preserving the integrity of The Wall Street Journal. Journalists, after all, would be less likely to damage the paper or cater to advertisers. But journalists tend to be terrible businessmen; they lack the risk-taking mindset that marks a good chief executive. Making the kind of big, bold bets that C.E.O.’s have to make all the time in industries undergoing wrenching change, like the newspaper business, just does not play to their strengths, which are observing, critiquing and finding out things.

[…]The one thing Mr. Phillips and Mr. Kann were good at — indeed, great at — was placating the Bancroft family. They did so, in part, by paying an enormous dividend — more than the company could really afford. But they also did so by telling the family, again and again, what a great thing they were doing in protecting the independence of The Wall Street Journal. Indeed, it was Mr. Phillips who came up with the idea of two classes of stock, which would allow the family to sell some shares and still retain control. An inept chief executive couldn’t hope for a better deal. No matter what move Mr. Phillips made, neither the family nor the trustees were ever going to question him. It just wasn’t their style.

[…]To the Bancroft family, Rupert Murdoch has always been the devil — the epitome of the meddling down-market mogul who would wreck the paper if given half a chance. Or at least that’s what they’ve been taught to believe all these years by Mr. Phillips and Mr. Kann. And no matter how many promises Mr. Murdoch makes, their opinion is not likely to change. If they do wind up selling to him, they will do so holding their noses. There was a time, not so many years ago, when they could have sold to Bloomberg or the Washington Post Company or possibly even The New York Times Company. But Mr. Kann wouldn’t pursue those deals, and now those buyers are on record as saying they are no longer interested. It’s Rupert or nothing.

Even now, Mr. Kann and Mr. Phillips are trying to persuade the family, one last time, that it’s all about The Journal’s independence — and not their own incompetence or the family’s unwillingness to act as a true steward over its asset. Last week, Mr. Kann, who did not respond to my phone call, was quoted in The Wall Street Journal as saying how much he admired the family “for taking the position of maintaining Dow Jones as an independent public company.”

On Thursday, I did get Mr. Phillips on the phone. “If they are as determined in their support of The Journal’s independence as they have been in the past, then I think the paper is in good hands,” he said.

Would that it were so. But it’s not. “We had to destroy the village in order to save it,” was the famous phrase that came out of the Vietnam War. With the path they’ve been on, the Bancroft family seems intent on destroying Dow Jones in order to save it.

You can read the full article here.

Meanwhile, BusinessWeek media columnist Jon Fine and Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff discuss Murdoch’s bid and what it could mean for the New York Times over at Mediabistro.

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Currently running on BBC News:

Israeli dies in Gaza rocket raid

An Israeli woman has died of her wounds shortly after a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip hit her car in the border town of Sderot, medics say.

The woman was the first Israeli killed in a rocket attack since November.

The attack came after Israel carried out an air strike on a refugee camp in northern Gaza. The Islamic Jihad militant group said four members died.

Israeli air strikes have killed more than 30 people in the past week, several of them civilians.

Although the BBC report does not say it explicitly, you could be forgiven for thinking that the two acts were related. In fact, you could be forgiven for thinking that the killing of the Israeli woman was in retaliation for Israel’s earlier attacks.

You could be forgiven for thinking that if you only read this story, and you didn’t know that militants had fired over 200 rockets at Sderot since November, that a home and a school were hit in the past week, and that the situation had become so bad that the Israeli government had already started evacuating people from the town.

in other words, one incident has very little to do with the other. At least not in the way that this story portrays it. If the rocket attacks were retaliation, they could not have started last year.

Meanwhile, it’s interesting to see Fatah now accused of being in the pocket of the Zionists. This from the New York Times article covering the Israeli air strike and the rocket attack on Sderot:

Asma al-Hayya, 24, said her father, Nimir, worked in Israel until the beginning of the second intifada, or uprising, in 2000 and was killed “because his brother is Hamas,” she said.

“This isn’t war between Hamas and Fatah,” she said. “This is a war against Islam. Those pretending to be Fatah are collaborators, and they coordinate with Israel against Hamas.”

A Hamas legislator, Huda Naaem, said, “Inside Fatah there is the program that is American-Zionist, and which fights resistance.” Another Hamas legislator, Jamilah Shanty, asserted that Hamas “will remain in government to protect resistance, so we will continue fighting and will insist on government, too.”

A very sad situation indeed.

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The gay bashing Westboro Baptist Church has found a novel way of pissing off America.

Not content with picketing soldiers’ funerals, waving banners claiming American deaths are god’s punishment for tolerating homosexuality, they have taken one of the most goodhearted song of the past generation and given it an evil twist.

“God Hates The World” is a parody of the song “We Are The World” that raised about $50 million for famine relief in the 1980s. In the new version, Westboro Baptist congregants cheerfully sing about the world’s sins and mankind’s impending doom:

“God hates the world and all her people, you, every one, face a fiery day for your proud sinning. It’s too late to change His mind, you lived out your vain lives, storing up God’s wrath for all eternity.”

Needless to say, Warner/Chappel Music, which holds the rights to the song, has written to the Church threatening legal action. But the Church has countered that the song is a parody and is protected under First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and religious expression.

Shirley Phelps-Roper, church attorney and daughter of Wesboro pastor, the Rev. Fred Phelps Sr., told BusinessWeek, “It’s all our effort to deliver a faithful message to this generation.”

Meanwhile, church members are planning a protest appearance at the funeral of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the evangelical pastor who died a couple of days ago.

“WBC will preach at the memorial service of the corpulent false prophet Jerry Falwell, who spent his entire life prophesying lies and false doctrines like ‘God loves everyone,’” says a message on the church’s website godhatesamerica.com.

“Falwell warmly praised Christ-rejecting Jews, pedophile-condoning Catholics, money-grubbing compromisers, practicing fags like Mel White, and backsliders like Billy Graham and Robert Schuler, etc.”

Weekly services at the church in Topeka, Kansas, must be a blast.

(Cross posted at Anorak.)

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My Sweeney vs Scientology post quickly devolved into a debate on Anti-Americanism in the UK. Vikram, with whom I disagreed in the comments section, would no doubt love the following post on EU Referendum:

It is not often one whoops with joy listening to the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, but Jon Humphrys interviewing John Bolton, former US ambassador to the UN, this morning was a sheer delight. (You can listen to the piece here.)

From Humphrys we got the usual BBC droning, with forthright responses from Bolton. Eventually though, after a run of sneering negativity over Iraq, Bolton had had enough. What did it was the suggestion that the US was “a busted flush”, Humphrys calling in aid George Soros.

“Are you kidding me!”, responded Bolton. “This is a man of the extreme left. I am sure you will find a great deal in common with him, as would many others on the continent.”

A sniffy Humphrys was not going to take that lying down though. On the attack, he demanded: “Do you make the assumption then that because one asks questions – perfectly valid questions about the conduct of American policy - one is on the extreme left?”

Bolton was unfazed: “I can see it from the content of your questions and the perspective from which you’re coming and from the direction that your questions are taking. If you tell me you’re a conservative, I would be happy to accept it.”

That really got Humphrys going: “I would tell you that I’m neither conservative, nor left wing not right wing, nor middle wing, because…”

A laughing Bolton took that in his stride: “You have no views at all. Your brain is empty, you have no views at all…”

Attempting to muster all his majesty, Humphrys was almost squeaking in indignation: “I have an awful lot of views, Ambassador, a view for every subject under the sun but I don’t express them during the course of my interviews. I ask questions… That’s what interviewing is about… You’ll have heard of a thing called devil’s advocate… Maybe they don’t do it like that in the United States, but…”

“I know, you’re a superior Brit as well!” rejoins Bolton.

You can see why he really pissed them off at the UN.

Via Anorak.

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