Here’s the delicious irony: Sidney Blumenthal, premier theorist of right-wing conspiracy, may leave as his greatest legacy the public reminder that he himself is part of a claustrophobic media-government sewing circle whose interconnections put the Scaife network to shame — an inbred nightmare community where every pseudopod of the elite-opinion amoeba dines, drinks, goes to bed and marries with another. Early discussion has centered on whether Hitchens’ act violated the journalistic tradition of not naming anonymous sources, notwithstanding the fact that Blumenthal’s lawyer grandly welcomed anyone with this sort of information to come forward, which — if Hitchens is telling the truth — was a sleazy attempt to take advantage of colleagues’ honor by making them complicit in a lie through their silence. But it only proves the cluelessness of this Washington power circle if they think the public is going to give them a standing ovation for defending the sanctity of comfy cabalistic gossip sessions at the Washington Occidental. By violating journalism’s most sacred principle — the rule of lunch — Hitchens may ultimately hurt the bottom line of Jean-Louis Palladin establishments, but if he encourages Washington journalists to befriend and marry people who don’t have Cabinet officials on speed-dial, the readers and the human gene pool of tomorrow will thank him.

The women who would be Debbie

When Debbie Matenopoulos, the much-spoofed voice of the younger generation on Barbara Walters’ “The View,” suddenly vaporized (or, as an ABC publicist put it, left voluntarily to “pursue other opportunities”) last month, the producers of the daytime chat show decided to hold a televised job fair — a live Gen-Xpo in which four young would-be Walterettes auditioned for two days each for the post of youth spokesmodel.

On-air groveling is hardly new on talk shows — “Tonight Show” guests must still take care not to trip on Jay Leno’s kneeprints — but bringing a string of candidates to essentially interview for the job live is much rarer. And it’s a typically sharp move for the most of-the-moment chatfest of daytime TV. “The View,” an engrossing, funny round table of “women of different generations, backgrounds and views,” has been called a lot of things (among them a female Rat Pack), but this parade of résumé-toting twentysupplicants shows that “The View” is above all the first talk show for the age of fetishizing work.

The traditional morning chat show was conceived as a surrogate living room, sans Legos on the carpet, for kid-shackled suburban women. “The View,” launched in 1997, knows how its viewer has changed: She may be telecommuting or working part time, on maternity leave or stuck with a sick child (all situations, by the way, reflected in the commercials: cold and stomach remedies to “get kids better faster”; adult medicines to get you back to work pronto). She gets all the home she cares for in her own damn house. She wants a surrogate office.

And there’s the genius of “The View.” Here, the coffee table is replaced by a dinner table, as in an employee break room, and the hosts around it look like the family that we give the most QT now: our co-workers. “The View” panel is the kind of race- and age-integrated group we find only on the job, all familiar white-collar types: the leonine chief executive (Walters), on vacation every other day; the wisecracking second banana (comedian Joy Behar); the earnest office mom (journalist Meredith Vieira); the warm and self-promoting diva (attorney Star Jones); and, of course, the ghost (Matenopoulos) — the young achiever who quietly vanished one day and who no one talks about anymore. Rather than give us fake intimacy, “The View” gives us fake fake intimacy, a simulation of workplace didja see the Post this morning jawboning over institutional java, as Vieira tosses out hot-button headline questions (Does Chelsea deserve privacy? Is oral sex really sex?) for the same off-the-cuff analysis you find so endearing in Patty from Accounting (It’s always the children who suffer!).

With admirable honesty, “The View’s” hosts never let us forget that they’re doing a job, one that’s a damn sight more enviable than ours. It’s fitting, really, at a time when sitcom audiences avidly follow the upper-class follies of lawyers, doctors and fashion editors, that Babs and company acknowledge readily and often the gulf between them and the viewer. (On a recent show, Star Jones pulled the signal busier-than-thou ’90s careerist move, whipping out a cell phone in mid-interview with Judge Judy Sheindlin to take a call from Mom.) They have drivers, they have law degrees, they dine with Prince Edward, they negotiate interviews with Monica Lewinsky. You don’t. Deal with it.

Seeking a piece of this action came four ingenues — a Nordstrom saleswoman, a newspaper reporter, a TV anchor and a former cast member from MTV’s “The Real World” — who exchanged patter in the opening round table, co-hosted light advice segments and, above all, in this haven of commercial tie-ins, shilled with gusto, helping Victoria’s Secret models and self-help authors move units, and even, in one case, donning a hairpiece and holding up “Price Is Right”-style price tags to help Jones push her new line of href="http://abc.go.com/theview/cohosts/jones/wig_collection_index.html">wigs.

Well, isn’t the grunt-level humiliation of young aspirants — the willingness to grit your teeth and run the boss’s errands — the driving engine of our economy? Isn’t the job interview’s excruciating dance between sycophancy and belligerence the most important skill in boom or bust? Certainly, anyway, it’s top-notch TV, proof that some canny producer should be pitching Fox a reality program of taped job interviews. Forget animal attacks, drug busts or booby-trapped birthday cakes. Watching someone banter about the impeachment trial and her boyfriend and a woman in England who had 20 kids, all the while knowing that her chance at national TV stardom is at stake — that’s edge-of-your-seat TV.

Consider the chitchat minefield facing she who would be Matenopoulos. You have to ingratiate yourself while striking provocative sparks. You can’t be too bubbly (heed the ghost of Debbie!) or too dour (delightfully grouchy New York Post writer Amy Kean may have hurt herself grousing about being shushed at the movies by “some freak! Who probably came to the movies alone!”). You have to remind us that you’re young without implying your co-hosts are old. And you have to discuss oral sex with Barbara Walters without plotzing on camera (you don’t know from “the coarsening of American discourse” until you’ve heard the doyenne of soft focus say “penetrated”).

The candidate with the biggest fan base (and, judging by her being invited back for a third day, the inside track) was Rachel Campos, best known to viewers of MTV’s “The Real World” href="http://www.mtv.com/mtv/tubescan/rw7/where/sf.html">season three as the comely, big-eyed 22-year-old conservative who messed around with psycho bike messenger Puck. A “View” spokesperson says more candidates may yet be auditioned, but if Campos lands the gig, she’ll continue one of the strangest careers in showbiz history. The first “Real World” cast member to snag a national TV platform outside MTV (whose “Road Rules” specials, reunions and dance-party shows provide GI Bill-style support for “Real World” vets), Campos will have made a life as a professional twentysomething.

In other words, she’s a new type of star, the personality famous for being representative. On “The Real World,” Campos pushed a whole row of popular youth-type buttons — rebellious Hispanic Catholic with Republican politics and a wild side — plus, as an easy-on-the-eyes conservative, she presaged Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, Ann Coulter and the whole raft of male and female MSNBC Friends. (The candidates, by the way, skewed decidedly rightward, showing the enduring value of the ever-popular betrayal-of-the-’60s schtick.) Five years later, she stands for the maturation of the “Reality Bites” crowd, having lost the convent-schoolgirl skirts and become a teacher and even, in a segment detailing Puck’s recent jail stint, assuring us that while the publicity-crazed bike messenger is a dear old friend, she’s moved on now. Like each candidate, Campos delicately but firmly pushed her Class-of-18-to-34 cred, with a combination of obeisance to her baby boom overlords (“Your generation had a defining moment; all we have is this Clinton scandal”) and asserting herself as a Gen-X spokeswoman in classic fashion, by denouncing the label as a media construct — all, of course, while applying for a job whose chief qualification is her birth date.

Still, I can’t begrudge candidates’ milking their youth, since, judging by the (willing! willing!) departure of their predecessor, it could also be their biggest liability. The four older hosts had far greater chemistry with one another than with Matenopoulos, as a “View” producer acknowledged to the New York Post. And isn’t that just like the office too? As middle managers get replaced by cheap, energetic youthbots working 80-hour weeks, as the business press fawns over 30-year-old zillionaire entrepreneurs, age is thicker than any other unifier in today’s office — a situation only intensified in the “Logan’s Run” world of women broadcasters. And generational tension bubbled up during the tryouts, at least in jest, as when Kean dissed women who take weight-loss pills: “It’s great that we have another skinny little bitch on the show!” Behar ripped, smiling.

Now that’s entertainment. Indeed, maybe this happenstance crossing of “The Real World” and “The View” suggests something bigger than a “World’s Craziest Job Interviews” one-off: the 24-Hour Work Channel. With hidden cameras throughout the workplace, the wiring’s already in place, along with an even more crucial piece of infrastructure. The office, not the home, is really where the heart is now.

“I don’t understand your optimism,” an audience member says in an
incredulous tone.

“Actually, I wouldn’t call it optimism,” Henwood responds with a wry
smile. “For me it’s pessimism, since I want capitalism to end.”

Despite these sentiments, Henwood has spent more than a decade devoting himself to an intensive study of why capitalism and its ruling class are stronger than
ever. His newsletter, the Left Business Observer, founded in 1986, is so packed with
detailed research and insights about the goings-on of the free market
that it’s read by everyone from radical Marxists to rabidly
pro-capitalist libertarians. Norman Pearlstine, former executive editor
of the Wall Street Journal, has been roused enough by Henwood’s work to
characterize him as “scum.”

Pearlstine’s invective is proudly blurbed on the dust jacket of
Henwood’s latest book, titled simply “Wall Street” (Verso Press, 1997). A
mind-bendingly exhaustive account of the market in that most fictive and
fetishized of commodities, money itself, “Wall Street” is a masterful
overview (and indictment) of big finance and the wealthy rentier class
whose “labor” consists of trading stocks, bonds, futures, currencies
and the latest mutant spawn of the derivatives market. Written in the
language of finance theory, statistics and political economy, “Wall Street”
is like a “Satanic Verses” for the creditor set. Henwood speaks a kind of
financial blasphemy, using the sacred wisdom of capital against itself.

Between lectures at UC-Berkeley and Seattle,
Henwood took some time to relax and chat with me about how he came to be
one of the few Marxist economists ever to appear on CNN. “I hope my
work is participating in cultural subversion,” he cracks, “because I’ve
spent all this time studying stuff that I hate — I have to read IMF
reports and bourgeois economists. Wall Street is populated by some of
the most cynical, greedy bastards on earth. But it’s not enough just to
say that. The last thing I want to do is sound like a guy on a soapbox
moralizing. It’s not their personal moral characteristics that create
the system they populate. Capitalism is essentially an amoral system
based on exploitation. And Wall Street is part of the class struggle,
to use an unfashionable term. But most people don’t realize this, so
the market looks incomprehensible to them.”

Henwood came to be the renegade conscience of the bull market by a
rather unusual route. Growing up with the baby boom in a quiet New
Jersey suburb, he became infatuated with conservatism his senior year in
high school. “Bill Buckley and Milton Freedman were my heroes,” he
recalls. “When I got to Yale in 1971, I joined the Party of the Right,
which at the time seemed very exciting.” But after a year of intense
conservatism and what Henwood calls “caveman sexual politics,” he grew
disenchanted with the right wing. “Basically I fell in with a gang of
corrupt hedonists and became an English major.”

Despite his predilection for American literature, Henwood couldn’t seem
to stray far from the politics of the marketplace. “After college, I
got a job at a crappy little brokerage firm on Wall Street, formed by a
Bell Labs physicist who wanted to apply mathematical models to the stock
market. He and his gang of reject brokers were running this place,
which eventually went under.” In the introduction to “Wall Street’,” Henwood
describes how his experience at this firm formed his first impression of
Wall Street as a place run not by the rules of freedom, but by force.
“One morning riding the elevator up to work, I noticed a cop standing
next to me, a gun on his hip,” Henwood writes. “I realized in an
instant that all the sophisticated machinations that went on upstairs
and around the whole Wall Street neighborhood rested ultimately on
force. Financial power, too, grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

But Henwood did not begin to record his thoughts on the coercive power
of money until he dropped out of a Ph.D. program in English, where he
had been tackling a dissertation project about narcissism in American
literature. Fascinated by psychoanalysis, and intrigued by the idea
that modernist poet Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive,
Henwood kept trying to draw parallels between the worlds of aesthetics
and speculative finance.

Finally, after working for several years in New York writing indexes
for medical textbooks, Henwood was struck by an idea. “I was reading
Rock ‘n Roll Confidential, an eight-page newsletter, and I thought, “I
could do one of these!” While I had been doing my dissertation, I read
the business press a lot, along with Marxian economics, so I had spent
quite a few years immersing myself in financial matters. I thought I
had developed enough expertise to tell the world.” A friend designed a
logo for the Left Business Observer (whose masthead reads “accumulation
and its discontents”), and Henwood sent out the first 200 copies for
free — “some to famous people,” he grins.

Although he is a self-taught economist, Henwood immediately gained
attention for his outspoken, educated perspective on topics so murky
that even high-paid investors find them difficult to articulate. “Within two days I got a call from Victor Navasky [publisher of the
Nation], who wanted me to come down and meet him,” Henwood recalls. Later,
with favorable reviews from progressive journalist Christopher Hitchens
and a plug from Alan Abelson of Barron’s, the Left Business Observer
hit its stride. Henwood became the media pundit to call when
markets were collapsing. “If the TV producers start calling me,” he
laughs, “it’s time to buy.”

“One of the reasons I started the newsletter was that I thought most
leftist economic theory was really dull or out-of-touch. But then the
journalism was all of a moral exhortatory style. I wanted some
combination of being aware of history and theory, mixed with a
journalistic engagement with the present. I really do admire the
scientific method; I admire the whole mode of investigation which you
might call institutionalized skepticism.” It’s this devotion to
scientific rigor and skepticism that shapes the LBO’s content, which is
often illustrated by charts, graphs and statistical calculations. You
won’t find any foamy predictions of spontaneous revolution in its pages,
nor will you find wishful screeds about how the stock market is just a
weird but irrelevant growth on the body of the “real” economy. You
will, however, find clear explanations of why bonds become more valuable
when interest rates drop; investigative reports on the so-called “social
investment” strategies of firms like Working Assets; and informed
coverage of everything from why the Mexican stock market collapsed to
the latest census statistics on race and work.

Henwood is skeptical of accepted wisdom on both the left and the right.
“One of the most embarrassing inheritances of Marxism is the idea that
the system has to collapse inevitably into our waiting arms. It’s a
substitute for politics. If you assume there’s a scientific
inevitability, then you don’t have to do anything.” This lesson — that
there will probably be no inevitable flaming demise for capitalism in
our near future — became hair-raisingly obvious to Henwood during the
1980s savings and loan disaster and accompanying stock market crash. “In
1987, I thought that the crash was the end of the world,” Henwood says
ruefully. “I thought it was the beginning of another depression.
That’s why I’m so measured now. When the depression didn’t happen in
the late ’80s, that made me really rethink why it didn’t, and I came to
appreciate the power of state bailouts.”

Bailouts are on Henwood’s mind right now, as he prepares a series of his
recent essays for a possible new book with Verso Press. “Wall Street” has
sold more than 20,000 copies, a gargantuan run for the small, progressive publishing house, and Henwood’s editor is eager for more.

Although he’s leery of making market predictions — it would make him too
much like the market analysts he loathes — Henwood is clear about what he
thinks are bad economic choices. Privatizing Social Security, as he
explains in “Wall Street,” is a “horrible” idea; it will likely result in
smaller Social Security checks for the poor, which will get even smaller
when the market is shrinking.

And the idea that we can improve the financial market through
socially conscious investing (à la Ben & Jerry’s or the Body Shop) is
also flawed. There is almost no way to engage in large-scale corporate
production and not deal with supposedly “bad” industries like logging
and steel. After all, to choose just one example, Ben & Jerry’s needs
cardboard for its ice cream containers and metal for the chairs in
its shops. Ben & Jerry’s may be buying brownies from Vermont collectives, but
ultimately it’s also dealing with clear cutters when it buys
thousands of yards of cardboard containers for Chocolate Brownie ice
cream.

“Back in the ’80s I used to play the market in stocks and options,”
Henwood admits. “I actually made quite a lot of money in the crash, but
after that I sold all my stocks. What money I’ve got now — which isn’t
much — is in government bonds. Ethical investment is just like military
justice. It’s a contradiction in terms.”

“No activity under capitalism is undertaken unless you can make money at
it,” Henwood notes. “Markets are political institutions
in the broadest sense — they’re about organizing ownership and control.
Through the bond markets, a small number of investors control public
policy, and through the stock markets, the same small group exercises
control over corporate policy. One might conclude wrongly that you can
separate ‘virtuous production’ out of all this. But you can’t.”

As for the future of capitalism as we know it, Henwood is cautious. He
admits we’re in a time of unprecedented flux, but isn’t about to suggest
where this might lead us. “The great bull market of 1982 is at best in
its late phases. Earlier this year it had reached a phase of total
wackiness, with speculative manias and a kind of Ponzi structure. But
then Asia just fell apart. And it’s very hard to point to an external
cause, unlike Mexico a few years ago when interest rates rose and so
Mexico collapsed. You could understand that by traditional methods.
Asia collapsed out of nowhere,” he says. “It shouldn’t have had such a radical collapse, just a minor adjustment. We can see empirically that something went wrong. And yet financial leaders still can’t figure out that unregulated markets are simply by their nature destructive. They want to blame cronyism, not the nature of markets themselves.”

Henwood leans back on the sofa and sighs. My roommate wanders into the
room where we’re talking and offers the latest news about his leftist
punk band, the Christal Methodists. He and Henwood swap tales of the
music underground. This is just another of Henwood’s contradictions: He’s respected in the worlds of finance and punk rock.

But what about the next stage of the free market, of capitalism itself?

Henwood shrugs. “People have realized that something is fundamentally
wrong, but they don’t want to take the next step and control capital and
regulate. No one really knows what re-regulation would look like, who
would do it or what political forces would be mobilized. There’s a
sense that the old order is dying but there’s nothing new being born
yet.”

Cruisers will get a chance to jawbone about liberalism, labor,
environmentalism, impeachment, identity politics and the future of the left —
plus, says Nation editor Victor Navasky, “shuffleboard, dancing to Guy
Lombardo, whatever else people do on cruise ships.” If all goes well,
Nation contributors, several of whom have been publicly feuding over the
years, will avoid tearing one another’s throats out.

Just last month, Nation columnists Alexander Cockburn and Christopher
Hitchens (a frequent Salon contributor) used their columns to lash one another for their respective views
on the question of whether George Orwell was a snitch who gave British
leftists’ names to the British Secret Service.

Meanwhile, Eric Alterman and Katha Pollitt exchanged some heavy vitriol
in Slate wherein — in an e-mail exchange with Andrew Sullivan — Pollitt
slammed Alterman’s diary as “self-satisfied and vain and vainglorious.”
Declaring Slate an unfit place to air intra-Nation feuds, Alterman
proceeded with exquisite cruelty to “find it sad …. to read the same
tired tripe over and over from the pen of a writer who once appeared on her
way to being a great poet and gave it all up to write a single column, over
and over, for the past 15 years.”

Later in her Slate exchange with Sullivan, Pollitt rips a
Hitchens column about Viagra: “Rape humor, nasty darts at feminists,
reflections on alcohol and potency, all decorated with literary references
and tied up in syntactical knots. Talk about the attraction of the moth to
the flame!”

Cockburn and Alterman have, of course, also exchanged a few venomous
rounds in the Nation’s letters page. Though Cockburn is determinedly
amiable about his shipmates today, there are those who remember that he
tempestuously derided Katrina vanden Heuvel and her husband, Stephen Cohen,
for what he deemed their foolish fantasies about Mikhail Gorbachev;
declared Navasky an awful journalist who would have been good
running a nightclub or circus; mocked Pollitt for knee-jerkery; and
once — in addition to having had a probable hand in the vicious hatchet
job on Cockburn’s Counterpunch co-editor, Ken Silverstein, in
the Village Voice some years back — referred to Alterman as “3/4 brown
noser, 1/4 cheeky chappy.”

Needless to say, the Nation cruise was itself the subject of some
contentiousness among the magazine’s contributors. Navasky says he
is flying Barbara Ehrenreich to St. Thomas, where she’ll moderate a
seminar on “labor, environmentalism and the global corporation,” but won’t
confirm that Ehrenreich isn’t sailing with the group because of political
problems she has with cruise ships. (Ehrenreich did not respond to an e-mail
inquiry about this subject.) Cockburn says his only problem with the cruise
is that it will take place in the Caribbean, “which is full of black people
who quite rightfully hate whites and would cheerfully kill us all if it
didn’t disturb the flow of money into their own hands.” Next time, Cockburn
says, he hopes the Nation Cruise, will be on the Aegean, but, he says, “then
we’d have to worry about Turkish human rights.”

All of the Nation contributors Media Circus spoke to, many of whom
declined to speak on the record, agreed that the animosity between the
magazine’s columnists would be tempered by the sea air and camaraderie of the
floating hotel. “We never see each other in person so we’re a little
abstract. It’s easy to take pot shots at people who are just words on a
page,” offered Pollitt. “After spending time together everyone may be
surprised by how much nicer we all are in real life.”

Though Cockburn noted that “a lifeboat stuffed with Nation contributors
would pose interesting questions of triage if I were in charge,” he
too said he is certain no one will bother with any old enmity. “We’ll be
too busy wondering what to wear to the cruise’s formal event,” he said.

“I think it’s going to be known as the love boat in the end,” says
Navasky. “The Nation contributors are all such nice people — in print, they’re
fearsome; in person, they are all just lovely people.”

Nice. But don’t forget to pack those personal, portable life preservers.

We don’t just report the news, we make it

Days after he told the Judiciary Committee that he did not appear on TV talk
shows, Kenneth Starr appeared on a magazine show, “20/20,” whereupon he gave Diane Sawyer
unsurprising answers to questions about his views on infidelity, his office
and his investigation of President Clinton. Nor was it surprising that Starr
gave his first prime-time interview to “20/20″ — which reportedly beat out
competition from other shows at ABC and other network shows like “60
Minutes.”

The “20/20″ interview with Sawyer was produced by Chris Vlasto, a
name familiar to readers of Jim McDougal’s “Arkansas Mischief.” In his
book, which was written with Curtis Wilkie, McDougal credits Vlasto with
convincing him to cooperate with Starr’s investigation.

Wilkie remembers that Vlasto spent a lot of time in Arkansas in his
capacity as producer in charge of ABC’s Whitewater coverage and that Vlasto
was probably the one news guy McDougal felt most comfortable with. Wilkie
remembers that shortly after his conviction, McDougal confided to Vlasto that he (rightly, it turned out) feared he
would die in prison. In the book, McDougal writes
that Vlasto responded by saying, “‘Listen Jim, you don’t have to go out
this way. Walk in to see Kenneth Starr, he’ll greet you with open arms.’ He
recommended that I at least talk with the independent counsel.” McDougal’s
subsequent cooperation set the Whitewater investigation and all that was
to follow in motion.

Any conflict involved in Vlasto’s playing a role in the story of the
Starr investigation and producing a piece on it? Vlasto wouldn’t
comment. ABC’s Washington bureau chief did not return a call seeking
information as to whether the network has rules governing whether producers
may produce segments on stories in which they play a part.

Where’s the Tickle Me Stoic doll?

Movie tie-ins are old hat, but here’s a new one: book tie-ins. Tom
Wolfe’s “A Man in Full” apparently makes mention of Epictetus, the venerable
first century Stoic philosopher who was born a Roman slave. Enter HarperCollins, trumpeting Epictetus’ “A Manual for Living: A New Interpretation” and
“The Art of Living: The Classic Manual on Virtue, Happiness, and
Effectiveness,” in modern translation, published — since 1994 and 1995 —
by HarperCollins.

“If Wolfe sparks an explosion of interest in Epictetus, we want people
to know we’re the ones who have these volumes,” says an amused HarperCollins spokesperson who voiced the hope that, as the ancient text “The Art
of War” became a bible for the business-minded in the go-go ’80s, perhaps
Epictetus might guide the multitudes during the remainder of the more
austere ’90s.

Epictetus’ formula for a happy, meaningful and flourishing life comes in
the form of clean, aphoristic instruction, viz., “Know What You Can Control
and What You Can’t,” “Seeking to
Please Is a Perilous Trap,” “Stay Away From
Most Popular Entertainment” and, a special one for those attending the
First Annual Nation Seminar Cruise, “Speak Only With Good Purpose.”

The HarperCollins spokesperson concedes that Epictetus sales weren’t
exactly zooming along before “A Man in Full,” but says it’s too soon to
tell whether the Wolfe book will cause a bump in sales.

Jonathan Kwitny dies

Jonathan Kwitny, 57, died of cancer last week in New York. Kwitny, an
excellent investigative journalist and a gentleman, was the author of eight
books, including one on the CIA and one on drug smuggling for people with AIDS.
His latest book was “Man of the Century: The Life and Times of Pope John
Paul II.” There will be a memorial service in New York on Dec. 17 at
6 p.m. at the Friends Meeting House on Rutherford and East 15th streets.