Tuesday Evening Links

Bush Threatening Veto of Amtrak Funding

Union-StationUnion-Station, originally uploaded by xtol7

Via David Alpert comes the news that President Bush plans to veto an Amtrak funding bill because it doesn’t provide accountability or reform Amtrak. The legislation, House Resolution 6003 (see Beyond DC’s summary) would (among other things) fully fund Amtrak for five years, legitimately expand and study high speed rail in the Northeast and create State matching grants.
Reading between the lines, the main objection starts and ends with not killing Amtrak. This marks the second time in as many weeks a Republican has tried to kill Amtrak, all in the name of competition, reform or modernizing rail service.
Note the objections:

But the White House says the measure provides little opportunity for competition on existing Amtrak routes and doesn’t include provisions that would condition Amtrak’s funding based on the progress of reforms.

Funny how the Federal Highway Administration’s $40.3 billion per year budget receives no reformation requirement and lacks any other competition while mass transit’s detractors attempt, both overtly and covertly, to defund and eliminate mass transit programs.
The transparency of the recent Republican proposals to mitigate high gas prices vacillate from the silly (gas tax holiday) to the disastrous (ending Amtrak) reflect the deeply unserious nature of the proposals at hand. I look forward to a veto fight with the current President and his party just in time for the Presidential Election.
Update
11 June 2008
Providing for the consideration of H.R. 6003, the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008, the Amtrak funding bill passed, 227-187 with all democrats voting Yea (except Baron Hill – IN).
Bring on the Veto – we dare you.

Belmont Stakes Links

Listen Honeypot, David Niland Sues UC

After 40 years teaching architecture at the University of Cincinnati, David Niland felt he earned the right to criticize UC over changes to its curriculum.
But after he took that criticism to faculty meetings and student sessions, UC told Niland, in unusually blunt terms, to stay away from the College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning where the program is housed.
He was welcome, UC officials told him in September 2006, only if he specifically was invited.
…
Niland, who retired as a full-time faculty member in 2001, responded last week with a federal lawsuit, alleging UC violated his free-speech rights.
Niland’s bosses also revoked his status as an adjunct professor and his privileges as a professor emeritus, according to the lawsuit.
“This is protected speech,” his lawyer Marc Mezibov said. “It’s speech on matters of public concern.”

Wow – Ex-professor sues UC over free speech.

Philip Johnson: anti-Semite & Fascist?

PJGlassHousemainPJGlassHousemain, originally uploaded by Zzzzt!Zzzzt!
I was doing going over Philip Johnson’s basic biography for a post regarding Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns relationship (see Kriston’s Heternormalizing Rauschenberg) and I came across this passage on Philip Johnson’s Wikipedia entry: In the 1930s Johnson sympathized with Nazism, and expressed antisemitic ideas. Funny what they don’t stress in school or in reviews. After some further search, I found a New York Times editorial concerning Johnson’s fascism, Form Follows Fascism:

Philip Johnson did not just flirt with fascism. He spent several years in his late 20’s and early 30’s – years when an artist’s imagination usually begins to jell – consumed by fascist ideology. He tried to start a fascist party in the United States. He worked for Huey Long and Father Coughlin, writing essays on their behalf. He tried to buy the magazine American Mercury, then complained in a letter, “The Jews bought the magazine and are ruining it, naturally.” He traveled several times to Germany. He thrilled to the Nuremberg rally of 1938 and, after the invasion of Poland, he visited the front at the invitation of the Nazis.
He approved of what he saw. “The German green uniforms made the place look gay and happy,” he wrote in a letter. “There were not many Jews to be seen. We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed. It was a stirring spectacle.” As late as 1940, Mr. Johnson was defending Hitler to the American public. It seems that only an inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation – and, presumably, the prospect of being labeled a traitor if America entered the war – led him to withdraw completely from politics.

After more searching it is clear that Johnson never denied what he claimed was youthful indiscretions – stretching the term youth elastically to include a man of 33 – when Johnson was invited by Germany to view the invasion of Poland.
Inside the Glass House
His visit to war-torn Poland would resurface in his Glass House as Kazys Varnelis notes in his article, Philip Johnson’s Politics and Cynical Survival, which makes clear how much Johnson’s ideology and political views influenced his work:

The first major landmark in Johnson’s refashioning of his public persona was his Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, which established him as an architect to watch and, as a site of numerous high society parties, became a symbol of his role as power broker. In his 1950 photo-essay in Architectural Review, Johnson presented a series of historical justifications for its design in a series of images with extensive captioning texts. The first ten images of the essay were of what Johnson cited as its precedents for the Glass House, the captions indicating that his interest in precedent was limited to drawing together formal moments from history. By reducing history to a slide-show of formal events, Johnson’s photo essay repressed its materiality.
After the historical images, Johnson shifted to images of the Glass House itself with captions explaining its different elements. Under a picture of the house illuminated at night, Johnson wrote:

The cylinder, made of the same brick as the platform from which it springs, forming the main motif of the house was not derived from Mies, but rather from a burned-out wooden village I saw once where nothing was left but the foundations and chimneys of brick. Over the chimney I slipped a steel cage with a glass skin. The chimney forms the anchor.

Certainly most readers would not have known about Johnson’s visit to post-invasion Poland or his reasons for doing so. Why then did Johnson make the connection with the war? In his 1979 introduction to Philip Johnson. Writings, Peter Eisenman elaborated on Johnson’s interpretation:

the Glass House is Johnson’s own monument to the horrors of war. It is at once a ruin and also an ideal model of a more perfect society; it is the nothingness of glass and the wholeness of abstract form. How potent this image will remain long after all of us have gone, as a fitting requiem for both a man’s life and his career as an architect! I know of no other architect’s house that answers so many questions, has such a symbiotic relationship with personal atonement and rebirth as an individual.

Like Johnson, Eisenman did not explain Johnson’s role in the war. Without an explanation of the conditions Johnson saw the chimney under and his subsequent erasure of the violence against the Jews and the Poles, it becomes not a confession but a cynical inside joke.

You could write (and I’m sure an enterprising graduate student already has) a whole thesis on the Structuralist or Post-Structuralist interpretation of Philip Johnson’s Glass House vis-a-vis his fascist past.