Karen Hughes defends Bush

Reporters spar with the Texas governor's campaign spokeswoman over the meaning of a "direct answer."

Karen Hughes, communications director of the George W. Bush campaign, in a press conference Friday morning:

Karen Hughes: Good morning. How’s everybody?

I double checked the public record. The only time Governor Bush has ever been previously asked whether he had ever been arrested for drinking, he responded, quote, “I do not have a perfect record as a youth.”

That was his response in October of 1996 when he was directly asked this question, more than three years ago.

And I find it interesting that in the closing days of this campaign, the Democratic candidate for governor of Maine has now admitted that he is the one who released this information, to the public and to the media — in the closing days of this campaign, about something that happened more than 24 years ago.

I think the American people are tired of this kind of “gotcha” politics. They’re tired of last-minute dirty tricks. And I think the Democrats owe the American people an explanation.

When Governor Bush was asked about this, he acknowledged [it] last night. The first time we’ve ever been asked directly about this incident, we immediately acknowledged that in fact, more than, about 24 years ago, he had been arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol.

He regrets that that happened. He does not believe it sets a good example for our children. And he thinks it’s important that we send a clear signal to all our children that they should not drink and drive.

Reporter: But Karen, he has been asked whether he’s been arrested before and his answer at the time to [Wayne Slater] of the Dallas Morning News was no.

Hughes: That was not reported and the governor disputes that. We do not believe that is accurate.

The reporter later told me that he was left with the impression that the governor in fact had been involved in some sort of incident involving alcohol. And therefore I think there’s some illogic in that assertion.

The reporter was clearly left with the impression that the governor — an accurate impression that the governor had been involved in some incident involving alcohol. And, again, when he was directly asked, on Oct. 9 of 1996, he was asked directly had he ever been arrested for drinking, and the governor replied, quote, “I do not have a perfect record as a youth.”

Reporter: So he never said no, consciously, that he had in fact been arrested?

Hughes: Well, again, I think that the governor at the time — remember, the governor has twin daughters who are at a very impressionable age.

He had made a decision as a father that he had been very forthcoming in acknowledging that he’d made mistakes. He has always been very forthcoming in acknowledging that he drank too much in the past, before he quit drinking 14 years ago. But he had made a decision as a father that he did not want to set that bad example for his daughters or for any other children.

Reporter: But would it be an acceptable excuse for President Clinton if he had said that he lied under oath because he didn’t want to set any bad example for Chelsea?

Hughes: Well, Jake, again, the only time the governor was directly asked — he was directly asked if he had ever been arrested for drinking, and he replied, and I quote, “I do not have a perfect record as a youth.”

Throughout this campaign, he has been very forthcoming with the American people that he made mistakes as a youth, that he did things as a youth that he is not proud of, and he has been very open about that.

Reporter: Is a 30-year-old a youth, Karen?

Reporter: There are two issues here. The first is that a specific recollection of something that was very unambiguous. A direct question, and a direct answer, which was a denial on the issue of “have you ever been arrested?” — not for drinking but just arrested, period.

Hughes: We just dispute that, David. We dispute that. And the reporter also told me afterward that his recollection is that he was left with the impression that there had been some sort of incident — an accurate — a truthful impression that there had been …

[unintelligble talking]

Reporter: … said that Bush said no.

Hughes: That there had been …

Reporter: … It doesn’t answer the question. You’re talking about apples and oranges. The impression’s not relevant. You got a direct answer to a direct question, and the dispute is that when this conversation appeared in print and in a profile of you, you never disputed the veracity of it.

Hughes: David, again, I don’t remember seeing that in print. I do dispute the veracity of that. The governor — the only time the governor believes that he was asked this question was in October of 1996, when he was asked if he had ever been arrested for drinking. That’s about as direct a question you could get. And he answered directly, “I do not have a perfect record as a youth.”

Reporter: Is that a direct answer?

Reporter: That’s not a direct answer.

Hughes: I think that is consistent with his desires as a father to set a good example for his own daughters. He made a decision, as a father, that this was something that had happened 24 years ago and something he had not shared with his own daughters.

Reporter: Is a better example, Karen, that he not — is it a better example to your daughters that you mislead or do not tell the entire truth, as opposed to just telling the truth outright? Wouldn’t that be the better …

Hughes: Well, again, Governor Bush has been very forthcoming. He has always acknowledged that he has made mistakes. He has always acknowledged that he occasionally drank too much in the past. He quit drinking, more than 14 years ago, has not had a drink since.

And he has acknowledged that he had a problem with drinking too much on occasion, and this is one of those occasions.

He has made mistakes. He has been very forthcoming about acknowledging he made mistakes.

Thank you all very much.

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Bridging the Irish-Italian divide

A Jersey transplant shares the chicken Parmesan recipe his outcast aunt brought to the family

By Felisa Rogers

Clockwise from left: Aunt Sissy, Uncle Frank, Aunt Jonie and Aunt Rosie (Credit: Courtesy of Tom Gannon)

Topics:Heirlooms, Food

You wouldn’t want to tangle with Tom Gannon. When I look at Tom, I end up imagining his ribcage, which must be massive, like the stays in the hull of a galleon. He has a wide chest and meaty arms scrolled with tattoos: on one arm, a full sleeve of roses against a black background; on the other arm, a giant Ganesh winks from a swirl of peacock feathers and smoke. Tom is tall and balding with a neatly shaved head, a red goatee dusted with white, and no-nonsense blue eyes. But in the end, his fortress-like demeanor stems not so much from his appearance as from his attitude.

Maybe it’s the Jersey. Tom’s dad was a New York cop, and his mom worked full-time as a nurse, yet somehow found the time to give four boys a good Catholic upbringing. “It was different in the city,” Tom remembers. “We were surrounded by family and other people who had tons of kids. Childcare was not an issue.” When Tom was 9 the family moved from the city to Hackensack, N.J., where they lived in a close-knit neighborhood Tom describes as “very Irish and Italian, with some token Protestants.”

Listening to Tom talk about his family is like watching a nostalgic movie about growing up on the East Coast — one of those films that begins with a rueful voice-over as the camera pans in on the old neighborhood. Tom is not sure when his ancestors emigrated from Ireland to New York: “We don’t know. My father’s generation was the first generation that was literate. No one could read. I don’t think anyone kept track.” He describes his family as close; they ate dinner around the table every night (classic stuff: meatloaf, spaghetti with meatballs, roasted chicken), watched the game together and took care of their own, no questions asked. When I ask Tom if he can pinpoint a family philosophy, he answers immediately: “The philosophy of my family is family,” he says, and laughs a little as he unloads a shopping bag full of onions and canned tomatoes.

Tom’s chicken Parmesan recipe comes from his great aunt Rosie, who caused a huge family scandal when she married Tom’s great uncle Frank in 1914. Frank was 16 and Rosie was only 14, but the scandal had nothing to do with age. Tom’s densely Irish family disapproved of Frank marrying an Italian. “Their generation was, of course, very bigoted,” Tom remarks, rolling an onion onto the cutting board. “By the time my father’s generation rolled around, it was much more common. Some of my dad’s best friends married Italian women and nobody cared. But back in Rosie’s day, it was different, it was a huge deal. Until they got married — then you couldn’t say anything.”

Rosie and Frank moved into an apartment above Frank’s brother’s funeral parlor in Gramercy Park, where they would live for the next 70 years. As soon as Frank married and the family realized they were stuck with Rosie, everyone shut up about the Italian issue. “As a matter of fact,” Tom says, “she became like the most popular person in the entire family. I mean everybody loved Aunt Rosie. She was very gregarious. She was very opinionated. She liked to complain a lot, but in a funny way.” When I ask him what she looked like he says, in his thick Jersey accent, “She looked very stereotypical. She had a wide nose and hair like steel wool. Very sad eyes, kinda baggy, like some kind of basset hound or something like that. She liked to eat,” he adds, slapping his gut. He remembers Rosie pinching the kids’ cheeks, drinking Seven and Seven and “a fair amount of wine,” and cooking constantly, until her classic Italian-American recipes were adopted by every household in a proudly Irish family. In fact, half of Tom’s favorite family recipes are Italian-American.

To make Rosie’s chicken Parmesan, Tom starts with the sauce. He shows me a neat way to peel a large quantity of garlic cloves: Put the unpeeled cloves in a lidded cook pot and shake vigorously. I’m amazed to see that half the cloves are peeled in the first rough shake; after a second session, all the cloves are skinless. He throws the garlic in with the onion, which is already sautéing in a cast iron pan. “This is about how you want them to look,” Tom remarks, gesturing to the pan full of translucent golden onions. He dumps two cans of whole tomatoes into the pot and mashes at the mixture with a potato masher.

Despite making a huge mess in the kitchen, Tom is not a haphazard cook. He takes his time as he slices each chicken breast into cutlets, and then dips the meat in eggs and bread crumbs. He’s a more precise cook than I am — his every motion betrays the typical New York obsession with exact culinary tradition. When I suggest we could use a preexisting bag of panko to coat the chicken filets for the Parmesan, he looks horrified. “No,” he says decisively. “We need the cheap stuff.”

While he’s making the Parmesan, he’s instructing me on how to make another family specialty, Uncle Frank’s meatballs. When I start rolling the mixture of pork, beef, eggs, panko and spices, he views my handiwork with a dubious expression — it’s clear that my meatballs are neither small enough nor round enough for Tom’s taste. When I later offer to help fry the chicken fillets for the Parmesan, Tom doesn’t allow me to bread the cutlets myself — he does it for me, and then hovers behind the stove to make sure I’m letting the cutlets get crispy enough before I flip them.

Tom’s concern doesn’t come across as fussy — he’s just the type of guy who likes to do things right. It makes me think about the difference between East Coast and West Coast culinary culture. I come from a culinary tradition that is primarily focused on innovation and substitution. “Sure, that’s good, but how can I make it with nettles?” Tom’s background is more old school — recipes were passed down from generation to generation, and changing things up was more likely to be viewed with horror than with admiration.

But Tom’s family story isn’t all about staying the same. During the course of our conversation, Tom affectionately describes his family as square and later says his parents were “straight as a pin.” The same could hardly be said for Tom: He says he always felt a little different, never liked suburbia or really bought into the whole Jesus thing. When I ask him how he “was led astray,” he laughs and answers: “rock ‘n’ roll”. After a deadhead phase, Tom moved to Seattle, where he fell in with a group of friends that reads like a who’s who of the grunge era. His family back home didn’t know much about his Seattle life. “They never saw my tattoos for years,” he says, taking a sip of beer and meditatively stirring the red sauce. “In those days I only went home for Thanksgiving, and I always wore long-sleeved shirts. I didn’t know how long I could keep it going, but I always figured as long as I could keep it going for that Thanksgiving, I’d be fine,” he laughs. “But then I got real sick with pneumonia — it was around 1998, and my lungs stopped working. I was in a coma. My parents flew out. They thought I was dying. That’s when they first saw my tattoos — I’m lying in a hospital bed, totally inked, and they’re like ‘what the hell?’ But I never got a lick of shit for it, because I lived — suddenly me having tattoos didn’t seem too important to anybody. Never any discussion about it — to the point when my mom eventually even started thinking she wanted a tattoo herself.”

Despite their dramatic tattoos and stereotypically West Coast behaviors (Tom manages the recycling program for the city of Seattle, his wife Becky eats organic) Tom and his wife are pillars within their East Coast family: In the summertime the entire extended family vacations in the Adirondacks, where Tom and Becky’s son Jack runs wild with his Jersey cousins. I hear shades of Aunt Rosie in Tom’s story, and both tales remind me of something that’s been on my mind lately: When we are forced to accept Italian Aunt Rosie or tattooed Uncle Tom or gay cousin Doug, we become a little less likely to jump to conclusions and, more often than not, our realities are enriched in untold ways. (In a best case scenario, this enrichment appears in the form of cheese-coated chicken cutlets.) On a grander scale, the way we are forced to evolve as families plays out in the way we see the world and the way we change as a nation.

But perhaps I’m getting too high-minded — when I’m sitting in the glow of candlelight spooning Aunt Rosie’s chicken Parmesan onto my plate, I’m just happy. The sauce is tangy and simple, the chicken is crunchy and coated in gooey cheese, and the company is solid. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Aunt Rosie’s Chicken Parmesan (Serves 6)

Ingredients

1 package spaghetti noodles (cooked, still hot)
6 tablespoons olive oil
1 onion (chopped)
3-4 garlic cloves (chopped)
1 32-oz can whole tomatoes
½ cup red wine
1 bay leaf
1 tablespoon fresh oregano (minced)
1 tablespoon fresh basil (minced)
1 teaspoon sugar
Salt to taste
2 lbs chicken breasts (sliced into ½-inch thick fillets)
2-3 eggs (beaten)
1½ cups bread crumbs
1 small zucchini (sliced)
10 ounces baby spinach
1 tablespoon butter
Mozzarella cheese (sliced)
Grated Parmesan

Directions

In a large pan, heat 3 tablespoons of olive oil and sauté onion over medium low heat for 5-6 minutes. Add garlic. Continue to cook until onion is translucent. If necessary, turn heat down.
Add tomatoes, wine and bay leaf. Break up whole tomatoes as you stir. Simmer sauce for 30 minutes. Add water or stock if necessary.
Add spices, sugar and salt to taste. While sauce continues to simmer, slice chicken breasts into cutlets and preheat oven to 350.
Dip cutlets in eggs and then in bread crumbs. Brown cutlets in olive oil. When one side is thoroughly brown, flip and fry the other side.
While cutlets are frying, add zucchini, spinach and butter to sauce. Cook for a few minutes and remove sauce from flame.
Cover bottom of baking pan with sauce. Add chicken. Cover chicken with mozzarella and additional sauce. Bake in oven for 15 minutes.
Serve over spaghetti with Parmesan cheese.

: Felisa Rogers studied history and nonfiction writing at the Evergreen State College and went on to teach writing to kids for five years. She lives in Oregon’s coast range, where she works as a freelance writer and editor. More Felisa Rogers

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Paul Gauguin’s Polynesian “paradise”

An innovative new exhibition seeks to put the French artist's exotic voyages into greater context

SLIDE SHOW

By Emma Mustich

Paul Gauguin, "Arearea no Varua ino (Words of the Devil, or Reclining Tahitian Women)," 1894. (Credit: Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen)

View the slide show

Topics:Five-Minute Museum, Art

The sun-dappled scenery and boldly beautiful figures native to some of Gauguin’s most famous Polynesian paintings are only half the story: That’s the thesis of an innovative exhibition currently making its only U.S. touchdown at the Seattle Art Museum.

“Gauguin & Polynesia: An Elusive Paradise” seeks to broaden our understanding of the artist’s exotic works through physical — rather than merely textual — explication. By allowing Polynesian art and artifacts equal exhibition space with Gauguin’s own creations, the show promises viewers an unprecedented aggregate understanding of this key moment in the artist’s career.

In separate interviews, Seattle Art Museum curators Chiyo Ishikawa and Pam McClusky — experts in European and African and Oceanic Art, respectively — discussed Gauguin, his Polynesian voyages, and the value of integrated exhibitions such as this. Click through the slide show for a preview.

What is the idea behind this exhibition? What makes it different from other showings of Gauguin’s work?

Chiyo Ishikawa: No exhibition or study has taken on [Gauguin's Polynesian works] in a full-blown way, as this one does. The goal of the exhibition is to understand this particular aspect of his career more fully. Gauguin was always drawing from a whole range of traditions — but nevertheless, there is a significant role that the Polynesian material plays in his work, even before he goes [to Tahiti].

An essay in the exhibition catalog proposes that Gauguin actually saw Polynesian material for the first time earlier than we thought, around 1884-85, when he was living with his wife in Denmark. This was after he had lost his job; he was trying to make his living in another way. They ran out of money and moved to Denmark, where her family was from. One of the things he did there was visit the national museum, which is sort of a museum of natural history and ethnography. They had an exhibition of pan-primitive art that included material from New Zealand and from Polynesia; we know that he went [to see it]. And so that is probably the first time he saw [Polynesian material] before he had the specific idea in his mind to go to Tahiti. The idea was further solidified after Gauguin visited the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris, which had an individual Tahitian pavilion, and numerous works of art from Polynesia, which he saw and then incorporated after he’d actually been in Tahiti.

Pam McClusky: In some regards, art museums and curators tend to be segregated by specialization — so that European painting specialists, like Chiyo, and African and Oceanic Art experts, like me, never intersect. But artists do intersect, and they have for centuries. And so this is a chance for us to look at it a bit more through the artist’s eyes. To be able to put Polynesian art out there in conjunction with Gauguin’s vision is new, and to present them equally is new … Other exhibitions may reference Gauguin’s interest in Polynesian art, but it’s treated as an art historical footnote rather than a really thorough experience. We’re delivering on the notion that it is very helpful to look through an artist’s eyes, and see how he or she can draw from things in ways that surprise you.

What did the idea of “the exotic” mean to Gauguin? Where did he get the idea of it that he had, and when he was in Polynesia, did it live up to his expectations? My understanding is that it didn’t — but he may have depicted it as if it did anyway.

CI: This is a very complicated question that’s at the heart of Gauguin studies. I’m not going to formulate an exact answer, but I will put some things out there.

One of the things I’ve come to realize as I’ve been working on this is that the period of stability that Gauguin had as he was working in the stock market and building a family and building a collection and starting to paint — that was about a 10-year period that was an anomaly in a life that was full of travel and searching. I think [traveling] was a fundamental part of his personality; he was taken to Peru when he was around 1 year old, and lived there for seven years (his maternal grandmother was Peruvian), and then at 17 he joined the merchant marine, and immediately after that he joined the navy. He had sailed all around the world; he was unusually well-traveled for anybody today, let alone someone from the mid- or late-19th century. I think that there was something in him that always knew that if he was dissatisfied with something here, there must be something else out there.

Gauguin’s family and friends always talked about him as an eternal optimist. I think that was part of what fueled him too: the idea that “this might not be working out, but over there, it’s going to be great.”

The first time Gauguin goes to Tahiti, I think it’s a fairly conventional romantic quest for the exotic — for a more pure kind of society. He went there with a government grant to document the customs and people of Tahiti, and so in some of his work from that first period, there is a kind of — I don’t want to say “journalistic” quality — but there is a kind of effort to communicate routines of daily life, or what a village looks like — that kind of thing. After a little while, he leaves that behind (it isn’t very natural to him anyway), and he goes back to his idea of dreaming in front of nature, and creating a synthesis that makes an interesting painting whose colors are maybe unnatural but feel right to him.

Then he goes back to Paris for two years, because he wants to regain his footing in the art world, and he has numerous disappointments. Not many people are buying his paintings; he gets good reviews, but it’s just not finding a market. Then he breaks his ankle, and he gets syphilis, and he’s estranged from his family, and all these other things … And so he goes back to Tahiti with a vengeance, vowing not to return. That’s interesting to me because then I think it’s less a quest for the exotic, and more just looking for a hospitable place that doesn’t have the baggage that his life in Europe does. However, after he’s been there for about six years, he is still questing, and ends up in the Marquesas Islands.

Was Gauguin sending work back to Europe the whole time he was away? Does he always keep on eye on the European art market?

CI: Yes, he does. … He definitely wants to be part of the artistic dialogue that is going on in France; he wants people to see his paintings. He’s writing to people about his work, and he’s very much keeping track of what’s going on in the art world — he knows that younger people are coming up and he doesn’t want to be usurped, which is why he goes back eventually. I mean, it’s the bane of his existence that he’s not making a living as an artist. It’s the constant refrain, once he becomes a full-time artist, is that he’s not appreciated enough. Unfortunately, that appreciation didn’t come until after his death.

Do you have one or two favorite items that are in the show?

PM: [One] favorite is the Maori house-post. It has a man standing, and his two hands are each three-fingered (that’s an indicator that he is an ancestor); he has red sealing wax in his eyes, and his body is tattooed in a very kind of signature way. It is so compelling. Part of what I think is invested in that work is the memory of having the Maori courier come [to the museum] and introduce us to this figure. He played four instruments, and told us about who this ancestor was — that he was a living presence, that we’re to talk to him every day — and we all had to shake this courier’s hand and touch noses with him, to sign our commitment to take care of his relative. The whole encounter with this courier reminded me that we’re cultural activists, but sometimes we get caught in the more corporate model of business-like demeanor. This was an eye-opener, reminding us that these things came from — and are still cared for by — indigenous cultures who have something to teach us about how attached you can be to artwork.

“Gauguin & Polynesia: An Elusive Paradise” will be on display at the Seattle Art Museum through April 29, 2012.

View the slide show

: Emma Mustich is an assistant editor at Salon. Follow her on Twitter: @emustich. More Emma Mustich

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Taking sex out of the city

We lead R-rated lives. So why are so many cities -- even New York -- declaring war on adult entertainment?

By Will Doig

(Credit: Salon, Mignon Khargie / Shutterstock)

Topics:Dream City, Editor's Picks

Where once there were peep shows, now there’s a W Hotel.

The last two remaining strip clubs in Boston’s notorious “Combat Zone” may soon host their final lap dances, says Boston magazine. The neighborhood, once a garish carnival of smut, has fully upscaled. The newest hot spot is a swanky bar at the W that actually boasts design touches paying homage to the street’s bygone sex dens.

We all know this story. America’s urban sleaze centers have zipped up and retreated into the night. The Combat Zone was flushed out, the Sunset Strip sanitized, Times Square Giuliani’d. But almost as soon as they were gone, nostalgia bloomed. When Times Square’s last seedy strip club closed two years ago, New York magazine lamented that its streets had been “completely lost to Bubba Gumps and T.G.I. Fridays.” One poll showed 65 percent of New Yorkers preferred the Times Square of hookers and skin flicks. What could a neighborhood of peep shows, porno and prostitutes possibly offer a city?

The fact that we have the luxury of entertaining that question shows how orderly cities have become. “Now we’ve got great places where you can plug in your computer,” quips Josh Alan Friedman. As a journalist in the ’70s and ’80s, Friedman covered Times Square. “That type of lawless, sexual Wild West, a lot of people miss it. It was renegade, almost like a political statement.”

Governments don’t like renegade political statements. So, since sex-oriented businesses are protected as free speech, cities have increasingly turned to zoning and draconian regulations to disperse them — and sometimes to make operating them more trouble than it’s worth. “People say, ‘Hey, it’s adult entertainment, do anything you want to them. Regulate the hell out of them,” says Angelina Spencer, director of the Association of Club Executives, an adult-nightclub trade group. “But you have to think about the ramifications for that. We’re on a slippery slope.”

Spencer cites a new Missouri law that bans alcohol and strip clubs, sets closing time at midnight (prime time for adult entertainment) and makes it a crime for performers to come within 6 feet of a man. Last month, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that towns can restrict smut simply because it’s accessible close-by in New York. And last year, Louisville, Ky., banned nude dancing citywide, a move that could end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Welcome to another dreary winter’s day in your newly nudity-free city,” moaned LouisvilleKY.com. “This is not the America my dad grew up in,” declared the local blog Louisville’s Strange Brew.

There’s something about the death of urban tawdriness that gives some people existential agita. It’s been happening ever since VCRs turned every living room into the Pussycat Theater, dragging sleaze off the streets with an assist from politicians and developers. It’s bubbled up through the resurgence of titty-tassled neo-burlesque shows, scattered attempts at porn-theater preservation, a “Deep Throat” documentary, and dewey-eyed paeans to the bad old days. The Times Square visitors center even recently installed three genuine peep booths, complete with the refurbished neon “Peep-o-Rama” sign from the neighborhood’s last peep emporium, shuttered in 2002.

Of course, you won’t see nudes in those peep booths. Instead, you’ll feast your eyes on New York Times articles chronicling the neighborhood’s transformation. Like the bar at the W, it offers a stylized approximation of the scummy experience, without the weird smell. Or, from another perspective, makes “a mockery of what New York City is supposed to represent,” according to the New York Observer.

But what New York and other cities represent, sex-wise, isn’t so cut and dried. While the sticky-floor triple-X joints have declined, chains like Babeland and the Pleasure Chest have thrived, selling high-end dildos and in well-lit shops to a very different clientele. Yelp reviewers draw a stark line between “sex-positive” establishments like the Smitten Kitten, a sex-toy boutique in Minneapolis, and the “neon-signed sleaze-baskets, where you kinda feel you could catch something just by browsing.” As urban amenities of all types have upscaled, from gyms to coffee shops to cupcake emporiums, so too have sex stores, offering a gentler experience at a premium price.

These venues provide a valuable service, especially to women. They’re not degrading or leering, and they preach the gospel of sexual progressivism. But they also emphasize how startlingly appropriate our cities have become, at least outwardly. When we say we miss the old sleazy neighborhoods, we’re not really mourning the sex, which was always for a small number of men anyway. We’re talking about exactly what the respectable sex shops can’t offer: bawdy distastefulness, throngs of misfits, an unapologetic lack of decorum. These were zones where dysfunctional behavior was embraced. “I used to think of it as a loner’s paradise,” says Friedman of Times Square. “You could be all alone and yet you were in the midst of this teeming humanity.”

Mike Edison, who wrote about Times Square for Screw magazine in the 1980s and who just released a book about American pornography, agrees. “I think it’s important to remember that 42nd Street wasn’t just peep shows and porn. There were grindhouse movies, kung-fu double features, blaxploitation. You could see ‘Shogun Assassin’ and ‘Five Fingers of Death’ for a dollar. There was Playland, a big arcade with pinball machines. It was a great place for a juvenile delinquent like me to hang out.”

Jonathan Tudan, who lived in the Combat Zone in 1969, says there was “an excitement about it. The minute you stepped onto Washington Street you got a jolt of electricity.” These neighborhoods represent a particular fantasy of city life, one where you need to be streetwise to survive. “I learned not to be intimidated by anybody,” says Tudan, who moved to the Combat Zone an 18-year-old virgin from Connecticut. He managed an apartment building there, living rent-free among the sailors and prostitutes, and occasionally scuffling with johns. By the time he moved out, he had the respect of the street and was dating one of the top strippers in Boston.

Old photographs reflect this fantasy: sneering kids drinking in cars, wild-eyed preachers screaming about Jesus, suggestive titles on blazing marquees. Times Square looked like an awesome nightmare. Why did people go there? “Why do people go to horror films?” asks Anthony Bianco, author of “Ghosts of 42nd Street.” “Because it transcends ordinary experience.” Friedman echoes that: “For me, it was like going through the looking glass. Times Square was a world that was upside down and in another dimension.” It was bizarro Disney, a fabrication that existed in the imagination as much as it did in real life. “The grim actualities of the Deuce in the 1980s seemed to matter less than the idea of it as the ultimate antistreet,” writes Bianco in his book.

The sex-oriented businesses that are succeeding in cities today do exactly the opposite. They bring sex down to earth, demystify it and make it easy to explain and digest. There are his-and-hers oral-sex seminars and intimacy-inspiring yoga classes. There are trained professionals on hand to help you decide which butt plug is right for you in a totally non-sleazy way.

And there are strip clubs: Costco-size franchises like Scores and 4Play, with VIP rooms and valet service. There are pole-dancing classes and strip-tease lessons. And there’s the new burlesque scene, which is more like a pantomime of an old-timey art form than what we normally think of as sexual. “I’ve been to the new burlesque places down in the East Village, but the girls are all comedians,” says Friedman. “I think it’s great what they’re trying to do, bring back some of the old burlesque. But they’re doing it for a laugh.”

Could these two worlds, the old Peep-o-Rama and the new Pleasure Chest, coexist in the same city? Of course. In fact, they do — there’s still plenty of filthy behavior going on. It’s just not out in the open anymore. Now sex clubs and orgies are something to find through Google, and prostitution is moving online. But it’s hard to imagine unabashed sleaze in concentrated neighborhoods as part of the new urban order. And maybe it shouldn’t be part of it. It wasn’t all fun and games. “People got hurt,” says Tudan. “Most of the folks who actually lived in the neighborhood, they don’t miss it.” Sex workers, some of them children, endured horrific abuse. And for women in general, these could be mean and outright hostile places. “If these girls had a choice to get a job as a secretary, they would have done that,” says Tudan. (You’ll notice that all the historians quoted on this topic, both official and armchair, are men.)

But the nostalgia persists. It seems like every time a new Rem Koolhaas tower rises, it inspires, along with the oohs and ahhs, a little wistfulness for the old grunge. “You did not have to actually roll in the gutter to take comfort in knowing it was there,” writes Bianco, “affronting bourgeois pieties by its very existence.” And if you did want to roll in it, no shame on you.

: Will Doig has written for the Daily Beast, New York, the Advocate, Out and Black Book. More Will Doig

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“Walking Dead” creator: Get ready for breakneck pace

Robert Kirkman heard fans' howls about Season 2 being dull, and promises to bring the action starting Sunday

By Roger Catlin

(Credit: AMC/Gene Page)

Topics:Television, TV, The Walking Dead, Editor's Picks

“The Walking Dead” returns Sunday to AMC to finish its second season, with sheriff Rick Grimes’ revolver still smoking from the first half’s shocking finale. While audience numbers have stayed high, the show has run into problems other than the packs of drooling undead. Showrunner Frank Darabont left for unspecified reasons, the pace of action noticeably dropped – to what creator Robert Kirkman admits now was “a little bit slower than it should” — and the zombies, when they did appear, seemed to be moving a lot faster than you’d expect from a group called walkers.

The affable Kirkman, 33, who also created the bestselling “The Walking Dead” comic book series, paused to address these issues as well as hint about new threats and locales to be encountered by the characters, and discuss the approach of new showrunner Glen Mazzara, who he says will bring a comparatively “breakneck pace” to the show as it resumes. (For those who haven’t finished the first half, there may be one spoiler included.)

What are you calling this point in the series, anyway, Part 2 of Season 2?

We call it all kinds of different things in the writers’ room: It’s Season 2.5; it’s the second half of the second season, which sometimes seems a little cumbersome, so I don’t know. It’s the last six episodes of Season 2.

I guess cutting it in half is now a common way for cable networks to present its seasons. How do you look at starting in the middle like this?

There’s a lot of different ways to look at it. I sort of enjoy the “mini-season finale” thing because I think season finales are really kind of cool and I’m a big fan of cliffhangers. Also, it’s nice to have a little break. It’s also nice to structurally make your season have some sort of punch in the first half and more punch in the second half. So structurally, it’s kind of cool. It helps writing-wise. But I don’t know, I could take it or leave it.

Consensus on the first half of the season is that it had a much different pace than the first season. Did you just want to slow the storytelling down?

It appears that the first half of second season moves a little bit slower than maybe it should. And I think that’s a byproduct of building to our midseason finale and knowing where we were going to end up, and putting all our pieces in place, and trying to tell the story in a somewhat cinematic kind of way, which may or may not work in episodic television.

I will say that’s one of the holdovers from Frank Darabont. He really wanted to take things slow and spend a lot of time dealing with different things. He was very much a big fan of the slow burn. Because he’s no longer on the show and Glen Mazzara took over as showrunner, he’s a big fan of much more fast-paced storytelling. So I think there will be somewhat of a shift when we come back with the season where we’re going to be a little more action-packed and are going to move at kind of a breakneck pace compared to the first few episodes.

And I think, looking at whole season together, when you see the first two parts, you’ll see that the first half of season kind of works, because we were building towards an event. And once that event happens — when Sophia emerges from the barn — things just continue to escalate. So it will make sense and the whole season will be cool to watch as a whole. But there is going to be some drastically different pacing issues now that Glen Mazzara is running the show.

Do you regret that it went as slow as it did in the first half?

I don’t know that I regret anything. I think that despite the criticisms of it being slow, it was good to take the time to know the characters a little more and it was nice to see them interacting at that farm and I think that that sense of security and that tranquility, when it’s played against the chaos of coming episodes, will make chaos seem that much more intense. I think it will accentuate these episodes. So I liked it. But if I had to do it over again, I might have tried to cram some more stuff in.

From this side of the screen, it appeared that there were fewer zombies so far this season, and setting it at a farm seemed a little less expensive than clearing out part of the city. People assume it was a cost-saving measure.

No, it wasn’t a cost-saving measure at all. It was just adapting what we did in my comic book series. If you read the comics, you’ll see that eight years ago, when those stories were being told, there was a little bit of Atlanta action and then they moved into the more rural parts of Georgia and went there for safety. So it was just a decision to follow where the comics went. Filming out in the woods is not as cheap as you might think.

What has it been like for you to write for two different versions of your story, first for the comic and then for TV? Do you consider them the same story or separate?

I kind of have to view it as separate. That’s really the only way to do it. I still write the comics month in and month out, putting new issues out. If I weren’t able to separate the two into two separate projects, it would be a little confusing.

But I’m having a lot of fun on the show. The collaborative medium of television is a really cool thing. I really do enjoy working in the writers’ room and getting to experience working in a group and forming a kind of a hive mind to try and tell stories. It’s a very different way of doing things for me.

Comic books are also kind of a collaborative medium in that you work with an artist and you tell that story together through words and pictures. But the artist on “The Walking Dead,” Charlie Adlard, he lives in the U.K, so I’m never in a room with him saying, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we did this.” It’s a very solitary working environment, where I’m in a room — I was in Kentucky and now I’m in Los Angeles — and then he’s in his room on the other side of the ocean, and we’re making a product together. But working in a room with guys and coming up with ideas and really having that exchange and pushing each other is a lot of fun for me. I really enjoy it.

We’re actually in our third or fourth week of working on Season 3 right now in the writers’ room. And one of the first things we did is we basically blocked out what happened in the comic book series in a chunk of time, from issue X to issue whatever, and said, “This is the story that we want to cover in our third season. What from this do we think is essential? What do we want to keep? Is there anything we want to add?”

It’s kind of cool to look at the comic book as a framework to improve upon; being able to have seven other talented writers look at your previous work and say, “Oh, you could have expanded this, I would have glossed over that, it would be cool if this had happened instead of that.” And for me to be involved in that process, it’s kind of a cool thing.

I guess it can be a little nerve-wracking to sit in a room with seven people and pick apart something you wrote seven years ago, but I don’t know, I think it’s a fun experience and I like being in the mix. And even I’m going, “Well, this led to this and it might be good to leave that out and it might be better if we did this instead and this really worked, people really liked this, I think we should definitely do this.” Being able to do that, and have this give and take, is a lot of fun.

But at the same time you want to have surprises for fans of the comic book.

Absolutely. That’s why there are so many differences in the show. People who read “The Walking Dead” comic, I think one of the appealing things about it is when you sit down and read an issue, you have no idea what’s going to happen. So to lose that in the show, for people who have read the comic, I think, would be a horrible thing. So even when we adapt something in the show, we try to arrive upon an event in such a different way that it still holds a bit of surprise for people who are absolutely familiar with the comic. I like to change things up, and keep people guessing.

The comic is so similar in form to a storyboard. Does that explain why the series is so much more visual than most?

Yeah, well, it’s not really an action show. But there is definitely a lot more to be done with the visuals in this show than I think other shows. Because we’re adapting the comic, I think there are a lot of visuals to adapt from the comics. I think Charlie Adlard in particular is a fantastic artist who has been doing some real cool stuff. To leave that stuff on the cutting room floor would be a mistake. Also we have Greg Nicotero doing an amazing job bringing our zombie creatures to life. His team at KNB Efx are really essential to the show. So there’s definitely a wealth of visual storytelling for us to draw upon in order to make this series happen.

But there’s quite a lot visually happening, with those big wide establishing shots, or those subtle scenes, like the one Sunday where Daryl and Carol just sit there and don’t even speak a word. A lot of shows don’t do that.

Yeah, well, I think that’s good storytelling. When you’re making people talk just to make people talk, I think that’s when things start to be kind of fake.

So what is it about zombies in general that people are so interested in them these days?

First of all, they’re awesome. They look cool. They do cool things. There’s definitely a lot of reasons to love zombies. Culturally, the last time zombies were this popular was the height of the Cold War. So I think any time there’s a sense of unrest in society, it tends to drive people toward stories of the apocalypse and the end of the world. It makes it interesting to sit on your couch and think: OK, if society did collapse, would I be like Daryl Dixon? Would I be like Shane Walsh? Would I be like Rick Grimes? Which person would I be like? What decisions would I make? And analyzing that kind of stuff makes it easier to ignore the economic collapse or the crisis with oil prices, or whatever is going on in the world today. It’s much easier to sit in the safety of your living room and analyze it rather than to actually think about all the horrible things that are going on out in the world.

With the current cultural zombie takeover, is there a possibility of reaching overkill, as vampires seem to be doing?

Vampires cycle in and out every few years; they get really popular, then they go on the back burner for a while. I think that zombies reaching this level of popularity is a cool thing. In the history of entertainment, zombies have never got that kind of height of popularity where there is an overkill of people making zombie things and telling zombie stories. It’s kind of a cool thing for zombies to reach that level.

But I definitely feel the big budget World War Z movie with Brad Pitt and things like that that will carry it along, ‘The Walking Dead’ included. It will shoot back down eventually. But I think “The Walking Dead” hangs its hat on drama. And isn’t necessarily just a zombie adventure. It’s about human characters dealing with survival after the fall of civilization and I think that kind of story is always going to hold a vast appeal for audiences, whether it’s got zombies running around or unicorns or whatever.

While vampires (and unicorns, for that matter) seem to have their rules set in stone, things seem to be not quite nailed down yet for zombies.

One of the things I was trying to do with “The Walking Dead” was canonize zombie lore. Most people do try to reinvent the wheel when they do the zombie thing. Sometimes you have to dismember them completely, sometimes you have to shoot them in the head. Sometimes they eat brains, sometimes they eat flesh — people try to play around with it a little bit too much.

With “The Walking Dead,” I try to take the best part of the Romero model – George Romero by far did the best zombie movies in history — and his films are all consistent. Then I wanted to use most of those rules, because those are the best, and then add a few of my own — things that are logical; things that to me make sense. To just to try and say: Look, there should be some set rules on zombies. There are certain set things that make zombies cool, and we should try to maintain them.

That said, it seems like the zombies in “The Walking Dead” are a little speedier the second season than they were in the first. And why weren’t, say, the dead people in the highway pileup at the start of Season 2 not all turned into zombies as well?

There were definitely a few zombies trucking around in the first season as well. I don’t know if people didn’t notice them, or maybe they should just go back and watch it. One of the rules that we have in “The Walking Dead” is, depending on how fresh the corpse is, or how rotted it is, would logically make it fast or slow.

I don’t think we have any Olympic sprinters or anything like that. But a fairly recently formed zombie would be able to move somewhat like a human, but not quite. And we definitely have zombies that are much slower and mill about as they get more rotted. We’re trying to do things that are logical and make sense. And then every so often, you have an overzealous extra who is moving a little bit too quick, and we have to edit around that.

What about those bodies in the cars?

That’s the whole ting. That’s part of the fun of “The Walking Dead” is that you don’t really know all of the rules yet. What’s going on with those dead bodies? Why are they not zombies? Why are they just sitting in cars? That’s part of our specific set of rules that will be revealed over time.

So there are going to be mysteries like that: Why is that guy a zombie and the other guy isn’t? What happened with that guy, and various different things. I think by the end of Season 2, you’ll have a better understanding of what makes a zombie, and what goes into it and why those zombies in the car weren’t walking around.

So, in the short term, what can we expect?

We’re getting off the farm a little bit, and we’re introducing a lot of new characters and new threats. The very first episode that we come back on, on Sunday, we introduce new characters that represent a larger threat that is going to be coming after Rick and the rest of the group. And that’s really going to be a driving force that gets us right up to our finale. We’re going to be dealing with a lot of big problems.

There are a lot of questions as to whether or not Hershel knew that Sophia was in the barn, or how he and Rick are going to deal with that. And that’s not really what we’re going to be dealing with. We’re not going to have time to rest on our laurels and analyze the whole Sophia situation. There’s so much more happening and so many more threats coming into the forefront that we’re going to have to hit the ground running and deal with all these problems on our feet as we go.

“The Walking Dead” resumes its second season Sunday at 9 p.m. on AMC.

: More Roger Catlin

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Female soldiers fight the brass ceiling

While relenting on gay soldiers, the Pentagon still excludes women from combat

By Linda Hirshman

Esasha LeBlanc, left, an Army drill sergeant at Fort Jackson, S.C., works with Pvt. Daniel Ladd, 17, of Darlington, S.C.

Women move toward combat (Credit: AP/Brett Flashnick)

Topics:Pentagon

Having dragged its feet for almost two full decades on letting openly gay citizens serve in the military, the Defense Department is now “evolving” on women in combat. Those sex roles move at a geological pace, don’t they?

On Thursday, the Pentagon released a report allowing a trickle more of estrogen into the front lines, with women now officially assigned, instead of informally attached, to battalions. But despite an explicit recommendation from a panel of neutral experts, still no ground fighting, no combat infantry, no special forces. In a press release, the women veterans’ Service Women’s Action Network “regretted” the failure to lift the “unfair” Combat Exclusion Policy, which precludes women from becoming infantry members.

Will they never learn? A year ago, the lame duck Congress finally voted an end to the despised exclusion of openly gay men and women from the service, “don’t ask, don’t tell.” The same arguments – unit cohesion, unfitness for combat – that were used against open gay service now live on as the last barriers to women. For however many women are fit enough and inclined to take those hard-line jobs, as for the many dedicated gay and lesbian service members, the exclusions are an insurmountable barrier to their aspirations and a costly waste of human power for the country.

The exclusions are, equally, a pitiful excuse for the real agenda – that warfare is the business of heterosexual men, the penetrators. As Bush White House advisor and political scientist John Diulio put it in an infamous article in the New Republic, “by military cultural definition a soldier can’t be gay.” If any evidence of this agenda were needed, the same person who created and defended the dreaded “don’t ask, don’t tell” — military sociologist Charles Moskos — was the loudest advocate of excluding women from any combat roles.

Woman’s “compassionate nature” Moskos speculated in a 1990 Washington Post op ed, would be a real hindrance. The debates about today’s report bear an eerie resemblance to the naturalistic explanations for the heterosexual definition of soldier from “don’t ask, don’t tell” days.

Well, what about that compassionate nature? Is it a step forward when females, supposedly the less bellicose gender, fight to be able to … fight in combat? In feminism’s bell-bottomed days, this would have been a serious debate. Proponents of drafting women in the Vietnam War days were mostly shouted down as running dogs of the military industrial complex.

And it is true that enlisting people into mortal combat in the service of the state is a weird misfit in the liberal state, which justifies itself on the basis that it won’t make peoples’ lives worse than they would be if they lived without any state at all. But like the gay movement and marriage, feminism has mostly moved beyond the contention that women are morally superior or that war is always and incontestably wrong. If the society is sufficiently threatened, sometimes even liberal states must invoke the willingness to sacrifice, even life itself, for the good of the enterprise. At crucial times in Western history – classical Athens, revolutionary France – full military service was indistinguishable from citizenship itself. Why should women who can serve be excluded from this service to the state?

The women in service – and especially the ambitious women who hope to make a mark and a career for themselves in the service – know that exclusion from combat throws a definite pall on the already Byzantine process of military promotion. They call it the “brass ceiling.” When the question of women in combat first came up in the ’90s, surveys revealed that it was the female officers who were really exercised about their exclusion.

Uppity women with guns have to be a pretty scary prospect for the believers in that naturalness of male war-making. But if the gay revolution is any indication, the exclusion of women who want to volunteer their lives for the nation is too inconsistent with the rest of American values to last much longer.

: Linda Hirshman is the author of “Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution,” forthcoming in June 2012. Follow her on Twitter @LindaHirshman1 More Linda Hirshman