December 1, 2002

From the LATimes Sunday Magazine:

The Cost of Apparel Has Declined for a Quarter Century, Helping Make Americans the Best-Clothed People in History. All Is Right in the World, Unless You Ask How It Happened.

By FRED DICKEY

Brenda Pope sits at the kitchen
table and stares sadly at her work-hardened hands. Inside one wrist is
the purple welt of a surgical scar that runs halfway to her elbow. Twenty
years at a sewing machine gave her the carpal tunnel injury. That scar
and $15,000 in severance is what she has to show for those years. Near
the edge of Blue Ridge, Ga., the Levi Strauss plant where she once worked
now sits empty, a glass-and-brick shell overlooking acres of empty parking
lot. Bored security guards stroll the grounds to protect what no one any
longer values. A factory dies an honorable death when it falls apart from
hard work and time. This one was cut down in full productivity.

    For a
half-century, this apparel sewing plant was a wellspring that pumped life
into the town. The workday was switched on by the gathering of 400 workers,
mainly women, chattering as they punched the clock. Hour after hour, they
created a cadence from clacking sewing machines, generating wealth for
their bosses and modest wages for themselves.

    The plant
was shut in June, one of six Levi plant closures that left the San Francisco
apparel giant with just a tiny U.S. manufacturing presence–a plant in
San Antonio, Texas, devoted to quick turn-around products that have deadlines
overseas plants can’t meet. At the end, the Blue Ridge workers stood in
small knots, tossed about by a maelstrom of emotions. Some were in shock.
Some muttered that they would never again wear Levi clothing. Most worried
about the future. Brenda Pope was one of those.

    Blue
Ridge is a town of nearly 2,000 in north Georgia, just south of the Tennessee
and North Carolina lines. Blue-green hills rise sharply a few miles south
of town and provide a gateway to the Appalachians, gaining loveliness as
they gain height. Residents are mostly Scots-Irish, descendants of the
hard-edged people who broke the Cherokees, and then broke the soil. Today,
many here, like Pope, are working poor.

    Measured
against what most of us feel we need, the 44-year-old single mother asked
little. She wanted to live among familiar pines and trustworthy people,
create value with her hands and raise her child in the old ways. She did
not think she needed a college degree to do these things. She was right,
until she made the mistake of pricing herself out of the labor market–a
feat accomplished by earning $14 per hour putting zippers in Levi’s famous
blue jeans.

    When
Levi moved Pope’s job out of the country, she became one of hundreds of
thousands of American workers who have lost jobs during the past six decades
as the garment industry seeks lower wages in underdeveloped countries.
In that context, the decision to close the Blue Ridge plant was hardly
unusual. Levi had clung to its last U.S. manufacturing plants long after
most of its competitors had fled.

    Yet when
a company like Levi, with a reputation for good management and strong relations
with employees, finally turns out the lights in the United States, it might
be an occasion to measure the human toll, here and abroad, of the flight
of garment industry jobs–and to remember that it’s happening so that American
consumers, who buy more clothing than any people in history, can get a
shirt for $20 instead of $25.

In 1950, 1.2 million Americans
were employed in apparel manufacturing. By 2001, that figure had fallen
to 566,000. In the same time span, the U.S. population almost doubled.
Jobs went out of the country, and finished products came in. In 1989, the
U.S. imported $24.5 billion in apparel; in 2001, $63.8 billion. In the
last quarter of 2001, 83% of all apparel sold in this country was imported.

    The migration
of these jobs is seen as the natural result of globalization, the economic
process that melds the technology and finance of the developed world with
the vast labor pool of the underdeveloped. This trend is especially attractive
to the apparel industry because, basically, all it needs are sewing machines
and low-paid workers.

    Globalization
has crept up so stealthily that it wasn’t generally recognized until full
grown. It accelerated around the end of World War II, when the industrialized
world was reshuffling, says Charles Derber of Boston College, author of
“Corporation Nation,” a book that views corporate power through a populist
filter. As American corporations witnessed the economic rise of Japan and
other foreign competition, they started looking for an edge, and they found
it in cheap labor abroad. “They realized that more money could be made
by using those billions of workers as producers as well as consumers,”
Derber says.

    Many
corporate executives view this sea of cheap labor as an attractive profit
center, or, if they find it predatory and distasteful, as a competitive
necessity. Economists say globalization will be the platform for Third
World countries to build their own free-market economies, and that low
wages are part of the growth process.

    Michael
M. Weinstein, a New York economist who has studied the job-flight phenomenon,
says of the plight of Pope and others like her: “Any policy you give me
for saving that person’s job is going to threaten somebody else’s. I don’t
mean to sound callous, but there are plenty of low-end jobs [in the U.S.]
that need filling. If we bar low-cost goods from abroad, it would be the
poorest among us who depend on these products who would be punished most
harshly.”

    In other
words, it is the poor who would suffer most if, say, clothing at Wal-Mart
suddenly cost more. Weinstein adds, “We don’t need garment jobs to have
full employment for Americans. It’s a good thing when these jobs go to
the worst-off people in the world. I regard it as unconscionable to clamp
down on sweatshops that are making these people’s lives better than they
would otherwise be.”

    The search
for the worst-off people in the world means the garment industry is looking
for a target that’s always moving. As soon as wages rise in one country,
work can be moved to another. Charles Kernaghan, director of the National
Labor Committee in New York City, calls this long-distance shuffle a “race
to the bottom” of the wage scale. The committee has a list of hourly apparel
wages in Third World countries, including: Guatemala, 37 cents; China,
28 cents; Nicaragua, 23 cents; Bangladesh, 13 to 20 cents.

    In
addition to low wages, manufacturers in many countries benefit from child
labor and long workdays as well as the absence of health plans, environmental
protections, workplace safety standards and efforts to organize workers.
In fairness, some U.S. apparel makers, Levi among them, have taken steps
to police conditions in plants overseas, and to pay fairly. But those efforts
are far from universal.

    “American
companies make showcase visits to these offshore plants, but they always
get the VIP tour and are maneuvered to talk only to employees who have
been coached for such occasions,” says Kernaghan, an old-style, angry labor
activist who knows his enemy, doesn’t     trust him
and never gets too close.

    Levi
Strauss & Co. has taken on the role of dressing people to look sexy
and cool, but the company began in 1853 as a wholesale dry goods business.
Its first garments were work pants made of canvas-type material to serve
workers in dust-clogged mines and on docks. As the years passed, Levi grew,
its sales reaching $4.3 billion by fiscal 2001, and the company expanded
its manufacturing to other parts of the country. Levi became a paragon
of corporate beneficence. It provided benefits, fair wages and even helped
employees earn diplomas. It donated ball fields to the small towns where
it operated. Even unions liked the company.

    Ann Woody
was a management employee at the Blue Ridge factory. She remembered when
Bob Haas, a descendant of the founders and Levi’s president and CEO, visited
the plant about a decade ago. Workers planted a tree in his behalf to show
their affection. It was a touching moment of mutual fidelity.

    Company
fortunes faltered in the mid-’90s in the face of competition from goods
made overseas. When the time came for Levi to close Blue Ridge, Haas had
become chairman of the board, replaced as president and CEO by Philip A.
Marineau, who was recruited from Pepsi-Cola to “turn this thing around.”

    To reduce
labor costs, Marineau had to break the paternal mold that the Haas family
had formed over many years. Journalist Karl Schoenberger wrote in his 2001
book, “Levi’s Children,” that “Levi Strauss is one of the very few major
companies in the apparel industry that has not been indelibly branded a
scoundrel by human rights critics. . . . It has the distinction of trying
harder and far longer than any other multinational corporation to do the
right thing.”

    The new
boss was tough enough to say to the workers: Sorry, but this is about money.

Marineau doesn’t do fireside
chats. He’s all business. Asked why the company closed Blue Ridge and turned
out faithful workers, he says: “To be competitive in the marketplace required
us to lower our cost of goods. It required us to go offshore. Apparel prices
have gone down for the last 25 years, and it continues unabated, driven
by an aging population that wants to spend less on clothing.”

    In announcing
the six plant closures, Levi said it was becoming a “marketing company,”
and that future production in almost all cases would be by contract manufacturers.
That would take place in 50 countries, including Mexico, Bangladesh and
China.

    To author
Derber, that explanation is code language that actually says: We’re going
for the cheap labor, and we don’t want the dirty hands of ownership that
go with sweatshops. The goal is to have “plausible deniability” about labor
conditions. He said that foreign plant owners are rarely steeped in touchy-feely
management techniques and operate with the backing of powerful politicians
who can impede whatever government oversight might technically be on the
books.

    Asked
why Levi contracts out its manufacturing, Marineau gives several competitive
business reasons, then he pauses and acknowledges, “The apparel industry
is chasing low-cost labor.”

    For Levi,
the advantages became obvious this year. In the third quarter, which ended
Aug. 25, Levi’s sales were up 3.5%, its first increase since 1996. Five
weeks ago came an agreement to sell a new line of lower-priced jeans through
the vast Wal-Mart Stores chain. Marineau predicted that the new Levi Strauss
Signature brand would generate hundreds of millions of dollars in sales
each year–all from garments made abroad.

    To its
credit, Levi has been a pioneer overseas, creating a corporate code of
standards for every manufacturer with which it contracts. Levi also pays
inspectors to enforce the standards. Writer Schoenberger acknowledges Levi’s
effort, but says, “How well they have managed to enforce that code is probably
very debatable,” given the serpentine twists in Third World countries.

    In fact,
enforcing the codes of various private groups and international organizations
is not achievable, Weinstein says. Groups such as the World Trade Organization,
NAFTA and the International Labor Organization have no real leverage to
control American multinationals because the United States has such vast
economic clout. “Say the Philippines has a beef against American trade
practices,” he says. “What are they going to do, refuse to do business
with the U.S.?”

    That
segues into a main Kernaghan point. The labor activist says that the most
effective step against globalization abuses would be to pass legislation
in the United States prohibiting the entry of goods from countries whose
products fall short of acceptable standards. In other words, the U.S. would
be saying to multinationals operating offshore: We can’t stop you from
making clothing in sweatshops, but you can’t sell it here.

    “We have
the power to determine what comes into our country,” says Jay Mazur, retired
president of Unite, the union that traditionally represented most American
apparel workers. “We say cocaine can’t come into our country; so we can
say that goods produced in sweatshops can’t either.”

    Kernaghan
and his allies (human rights advocates and some labor unions, but thus
far not many politicians) believe that such legislation would eliminate
the common explanation companies give for abusing humane standards–we
do it because our competitors do. Opponents argue that the law would send
clothing prices higher in the U.S.

    Karen
Collis was the president of the Unite local in Blue Ridge. When Levi announced
the closure, there was little the union could do except negotiate severances.
Collis, 31, is luckier than most. She’s bright, young and ambitious. She
has a supportive husband and plans to use her $11,000 severance to pursue
an accounting degree. She may be one of the few for whom being laid off
will be a blessing.

    Collis,
though, knows her former co-workers do not need severance packages. They
need employment. She is upset–at the union she believes gave up on the
Blue Ridge plant, at Levi for turning its back on loyal workers, and even
at Mexico, which is where she and other workers heard their jobs are going.

    So in
the race to the bottom, is Mexico the next stop?

In the sand-blown Mexican
border town of Piedras Negras, two hours southwest of San Antonio, a mother
of five prays that Collis’ prediction comes true. It won’t. The woman,
who did not want her name used for fear of reprisal at work, lives in a
two-bedroom crumbly stucco house so narrow it seems you can’t open the
back door without closing the front. The tiny front room is filled with
rows of family photos, religious symbols and a snowy old TV that is always
on and seemingly never watched. Even the furniture coverings are threadbare.
At the moment, the room is festive and crowded as several relatives have
gathered for the momentous occasion of this interview. Her children are
almost awkwardly polite and listen as attentively as if this were pay-per-view.

    She says
she earns about $55 a week sewing cloth bags at the local factory. Two
years ago, she earned twice that much working on Levi jeans at a large
factory, but it closed and the jobs moved to Central America and the Far
East. The closure left her and her husband, whose own job is spotty, with
far more bills than money.

    Today,
she worries that she will fall behind on her sewing quota. She is not as
nimble as she once was. She holds her bladder until lunch or quitting time
to avoid slowing down. She knows that 100 people would line up for her
job, and would gladly take the latest starting wage of about $35 per week.
There is no job security and no one to appeal to because the union in her
plant is as answerable to the company as she is.

    This
year’s economic downturn in the U.S. has hurt the Mexican apparel industry,
but most jobs were lost because companies moved to countries with lower
wages, says Julia Quinonez, head of CFO (Border Committee of Women Workers)
in Piedras Negras. She says that 4,500 apparel jobs have disappeared from
that small city in the past three years and that wages have gone from $4
per hour 10 years ago to an average of 80 cents today. Quinonez says the
jobs are going abroad, or farther south in Mexico, where wages are about
60% of those along the border and labor protections are rarely enforced.

    Martha
Tovar, president of Solunet-InfoMex, an economic research company in El
Paso, Texas, says that 68 textile plants closed in Mexico last year, depressing
conditions in the border area, including the poor woman’s family in Piedras
Negras. Prices are so high, they cross the border to buy beans and rice,
and occasionally–very occasionally–some chicken or cheap beef. When told
that some housekeepers in L.A. earn her weekly income by lunchtime, the
mother’s eyes widen and she says, “How can that be?”

    Her ambition
is to gather her family and slip across the border, where she wishes to
find out if such stories can be true for her. Asked how she would do that,
she shrugs. “I’ll just use a guest pass to cross over, then not return.”

    She has
little curiosity about the companies responsible for her wages. She would,
however, like to ask them–whoever they are–“Why is it that you can’t
pay me enough so I can live decently? So that I can feed my family chicken
even once in a while?”

    She is
not an economist and she has never heard of globalization, but her instincts
tell her that the job that allows her barely to survive is soon going the
way of thousands of other jobs in her town. In the race to the bottom,
it turns out, Mexico is in the rearview mirror.

    Lisa
Rahman would consider that Mexican family blessed with riches, because
$1 an hour far exceeds any amount the 19-year-old garment factory worker
would dare dream of when asleep in her family’s shack. Her closer-to-earth
ambition is to double her income to about 30 cents per hour. That would
mean chicken in her rice maybe once a week.

    Rahman
lives with and is the main support for her parents and two young relatives
in the vast slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh. All she can afford is one room,
and during the rainy season, the family collects the bedding and moves
to the one dry corner so that they don’t get soaked. She has never gone
to school, ridden a bicycle or seen a movie. Her wages allow the eating
of chicken maybe once every two months. She describes the neighborhood:
“Ninety to 100 people in my neighborhood all use one water pump, one outhouse
and one stove with four burners.”

    Rahman
has worked in garment factories since she was 10, the last three years
at the Shah Makhdum factory. She says she often works from 8 a.m. until
10 p.m. seven days a week, with a day off maybe once a month. Her take-home
pay is the equivalent of 14 cents per hour. The factory is hot, and the
drinking water is dirty. If she gets sick and can’t work, she doesn’t get
paid. If she gets sick very often, she’ll be unpaid permanently.

    Rahman
is waif-like–about 5 feet and 110 pounds–and has round eyes that float
in her still-young brown skin. Everything about her begs for a protective
arm around her, but that draws her no slack on the job: “If we fail to
meet [production quota], the supervisors yell and curse at us. They curse
our parents and call them filthy [names]. Sometimes they slap us.”

    One product
that Rahman worked on most recently was for the Walt Disney Co. of Burbank,
a contract purchaser from the factory. It’s a Winnie the Pooh shirt that
retails for $17.99. Asked to guess the shirt’s retail price in the U.S.,
Rahman says, “About 50 or 100 taka,” which is 86 cents to $1.72.

    Rahman
had never heard of Disney, Disneyland or Mickey Mouse until a labor dispute
broke at the plant recently over working conditions. The Disney licensee
promptly suspended its work there–forcing Rahman and others to reverse
field. They are now trying to have the manufacturing resume.

    Rahman
says she hopes to work at the plant until she is old.

    And what’s
old?

    “Thirty.”

    A spokesman
for the Disney company, Gary Foster, says of Rahman’s allegations about
the Shah Makhdum plant: “We have visited that plant 12 separate times,
and everything she says about it is untrue.” Asked if Disney garments are
still being produced there, he says, “As far as we know, there is no Disney
licensee making products in that plant.” Asked why he isn’t certain, he
says, “That is the licensee’s decision.”

    Bangladesh
is a desperately poor nation of 134 million that needs a lot of Lisa Rahmans
to staff its 3,300 sewing factories. The country provides garments for
most major American apparel manufacturers, including Levi. In 2000, Bangladesh
companies made 924 million garments for U.S. companies with a wholesale
customs value of $2.2 billion.

    Recently,
however, the Bangladesh minister of commerce complained that wages in other
countries, such as China, were undercutting laborers in his nation. That
is not surprising to labor activist Kernaghan. He says that fickle multinationals
have found new low-wage destinations, and China heads the list.

    Richard
H. Dekmejian, an international relations expert at USC, makes a judgment
on where globalization is leading us: “Third World countries have no
choice but to let these companies operate so their teeming populations
don’t die of hunger. People take what crumbs they’re able to catch. But
the overall impact of globalization is that the rich get richer and the
poor starve. That will eventually lead to an explosion. It’s inevitable.”

    Union
veteran Mazur is more sanguine. “The world sees us as the great economic
engine, and they just want it to work for them, too. By giving the world
fair wages for labor, we would create social stability, and make peace
more possible.”

    Sitting
at the table with Brenda Pope is her 11-year-old son, Brian. He’s a chubby,
pleasant boy, well-mannered in a “yes sir, no ma’am” way that sounds almost
quaint to a Southern California ear. Brian was found to have lupus a year
ago, and he has red splotches on his face and arms caused by the disease,
which can kill if it’s not carefully–and expensively–controlled. He can
do nothing about his face, but he reflexively tries to cover his sleeveless
arms. When I ask if he would mind playing outside for a while, he complies
without a murmur. When he’s gone, I ask his mother how he’s doing.

    “Lots
of kids give him a hard time. They call him pizza face and stuff like that.
It just breaks my heart. He once asked me, ‘Momma, are you ashamed of how
I look?’ When the doctor told him about the lupus, the only question he
had was, ‘Am I gonna die?’ “

    Pope
has been pushed around by life, but some of it was her own doing, and she
knows it; to wit: the two men she married, including Brian’s father, whom
she divorced 10 years ago. The look on her face as she discusses them tells
me I could write the familiar script. “I dropped out of school; figured
I could live on love. I was stupid, I reckon,” she says with a hollow laugh.

    When
Pope switches attention to her lost job, she says she anticipates drudging
trips to the welfare and unemployment offices, and endless job hunts that
promise little for her limited skills. She could flip burgers for about
$6 an hour–if they’d hire a middle-aged woman with a G.E.D. and an old-fashioned
work ethic–but that wouldn’t be enough to save her house and pay the costs
of treating her son’s sickness. “I’d dig ditches if the pay’s good,” she
says.

    Helen
M. Lewis, who also lives near Blue Ridge, is an author and authority on
the familiar Appalachian struggle to make a living. She doesn’t know Pope,
but she has known thousands in the same situation. “I’m sorry to say it,
but she’ll probably lose her house and move onto her parents’ property
with a trailer home. It’s an old pattern. There are millions of people
in this country like her who want to be productive workers and who are
content to live marginally middle-class lives; instead, they become dependent
on society because large corporations tromp on them chasing more profits
from sweatshop foreign workers.”

    No one
in Blue Ridge, currently, is looking for a woman who has sewn a couple
million zippers into pants. In fact, not many in Blue Ridge are looking
for anyone. The town is rapidly turning into a mountain resort of antique
shops, summer houses for rich Atlantans, and retirement and convalescent
homes. In job-availability shorthand, that comes down to bedsheets and
bedpans serving those low-paying industries.

    The state
of Georgia has set up a job agency for the former Levi workers. State employees
eagerly staff job banks, but for far too few positions. They encourage
people who can’t type to learn computer skills, and provide some funding
to go back to college or trade school. That’s of marginal value to middle-aged
people conditioned to manual work and who, in any event, can’t afford to
stop working while going to school.

    Brian
is invited back to the kitchen table. He listens to his mother vent at
her ex-employer. Levi was part of the Pope family. Her mother worked there
for 26 years before retiring, and three other members of her immediate
family were let go with Brenda. “Four of us are out of a job.” It’s as
though another husband took off.

    “They
said they was going to give us a commemorative denim bag.” She pauses for
the irony of that to settle. “Twenty years, and I get a denim bag made
out of the same damn scraps I threw in a basket?” She laughs. “I just can’t
wait to get that denim bag.” Brian chuckles, too, but isn’t sure why. Asked
about his mother’s situation, he responds with a child’s heart. He smiles
at her proudly and says he wants to give back his allowance to help out.
She hugs him tightly. As I walk down the driveway, I look back and see
Brenda and Brian Pope standing on the step holding hands.

    American
consumers are blessed in many ways. As the nation’s standard of living
has risen and the cost of clothing has dropped, homes have grown bigger,
as have closets. Shopping for clothes has become a pastime for millions
of people because they can afford to do it regularly. Thanks to this
Levi closure, we can buy, say, five shirts for $100 instead of four.

    The
cost of having that fifth shirt? Higher welfare, health-care and job retraining
costs for hard-working people like Brenda Pope, the shrinking lives of
people like Lisa Rahman and the family in Piedras Negras, and perhaps the
explosion forecast by Dekmejian.

It is part of the American
character to believe that things will always get better. However, many
poor countries are mired in the depression that says bad things never change.
Both are often right.

    On March
25, 1911, 275 young immigrant women who sewed garments for six bucks a
week were about to go home. It was quitting time in the cluttered Triangle
Shirtwaist Company factory in Manhattan. A fire broke out and spread quickly
through clutter on the floor. The rush to get out turned to panic as they
realized they were trapped on the upper floors, where the doors opened
inward. Many leapt onto pavement from eight stories up. At the end, 146
died. Photographs of their bodies laid in an orderly line on the sidewalk
shocked America. In response, laws were passed establishing workplace safety
standards. Wage laws eventually followed, decreeing that apparel workers
should not only not die, but their lives should be worth living.

    Ninety
years later, on Nov. 25, 2000, a fire broke out on the fourth floor at
the Chowdhury Knitwear factory in Narsingdi, Bangladesh. It darted across
the factory floor and enveloped tables piled with shirts. A can of solvent
exploded into a fireball. Someone grabbed an extinguisher. It was broken.
The 1,250 apparel workers panicked. Some dashed to the roof, where they
were cornered and jumped to their deaths. Some raced down the stairs to
the main exit, where they discovered the metal gate was locked. As their
pounding went unanswered, others piled up behind them. Fifty-two workers
died, mostly young women and children. The factory was soon back in production.
No new laws were passed and nothing much changed, except about 50 new faces
at the sewing machines.

ABOVE: Shoppers at a Bakersfield
Wal-Mart grab televisions after the store opened at 6 a.m

The Washington-based National
Retail Federation predicts total holiday retail sales, which exclude restaurant
and auto sales, will increase by 4 percent to roughly $209.25 billion.

from The New York Times
for April 24, 2001:

Labor Standards Clash With Global Reality

by LESLIE KAUFMAN and DAVID
GONZALEZ

SAN SALVADOR ˜ Six years ago, Abigail Martínez earned 55 cents an
hour sewing cotton tops
and khaki pants. Back then, she says, workers were made
to spend 18-hour days in
an unventilated factory with undrinkable water.

Employees who displeased
the bosses were denied bathroom breaks or occasionally made

to sweep outside all morning
in the broiling sun.

    Today,
she and other workers have coffee breaks and lunch on an outdoor

terrace cafeteria. Bathrooms
are unlocked, the factory is breezy and clean, and

employees can complain to
a board of independent monitors if they feel abused.

    The changes
are the result of efforts by Gap, the big clothing chain, to

improve working conditions
at this independent factory, one of many that supply

its clothes.

    Yet Ms. Martínez today earns 60 cents an hour, only 5 cents more an hour than six years ago. In some ways, the factory, called Charter, shows what Western companies can do to discourage abuse
by suppliers. But Gap’s experience also demonstrates the limits to good intentions
when first-world appetites collide with third-world
realities.

    Ms. Martínez’s
hours are still long, production quotas are high, and her

earnings are still not enough
to live on. She shares a two- room concrete home with a

sister, two brothers, her
parents and a grandmother.

    Yet the
real alternative in this impoverished nation is no work. And

government officials won’t
raise the minimum wage or even enforce labor laws too rigorously

for fear that employers
would simply move many jobs to another poor country.

    The lesson
from Gap’s experience in El Salvador is that competing

interests among factory
owners, government officials, American managers and middle-class

consumers ˜ all with their
eyes on the lowest possible cost ˜ make it difficult to

achieve even basic standards,
and even harder to maintain them.

    “Some
have suggested that there are simple or magic solutions to ensure

that labor standards are
applied globally,” said Aron Cramer, director of human

rights at Business for Social
Responsibility, a nonprofit advocacy group that receives

support from business. “In
fact, it takes a great deal of work.”

    Fed up
with abusive conditions, Ms. Martínez and a small group of other

workers organized and began
to hold strikes at the factory, then called Mandarin

International, in 1995.
As tension rose, workers took over the factory and shut down

power to the plant. Security
guards forcibly ejected strikers; union members said the

guards dragged women out
by their hair and clubbed them with guns. The

factory’s owners fired hundreds,
including Ms. Martínez.

    It might
have ended that way, except that it occurred just as concern

about sweatshops was rising
in the United States. Groups like the National

Labor Committee, a union-backed,
workers advocacy group based in New York, had formed to

oppose sweatshops. Mandarin
offered a media- ready case of abuse, and the

revolt was widely publicized.

    Still,
two of the four retailers using Mandarin left after the protests

˜ J. C. Penney and Dayton
Hudson (now Target). Eddie Bauer, a unit of Spiegel Inc.,

suspended its contract.
Gap Inc., which is based in San Francisco, intended to quit,

too, but a group of Mandarin
workers pleaded with the company to save their jobs. Some

blamed union organizers
for the trouble. “Problems were made to look worse by the

union,” said one employee,
Lucía Alvarado, who has worked at the factory for eight years.

    Gap executives
chose to stay after deciding that all the groups involved

˜ workers, labor activists
and factory owners ˜ were willing to make changes. The

workers were expected to
stop disrupting the plant, and managers had to agree to more

humane practices and to
accept outside monitors.

    To make
sure the changes stuck and to arbitrate disputes, Gap decided to

try the then innovative
idea of hiring local union, religious and academic leaders as

independent monitors who
would meet regularly with workers to hear complaints,

investigate problems and
look over the books.

    “It’s
not a paradise,” said Carolina Quinteros, co-director of the

Independent Monitoring Group
of El Salvador, as the monitors call themselves. “But

at least it works better
than others down here. They don’t have labor or human rights

violations.”

    The push
for change ranges far beyond the Charter factory, or El

Salvador. Today, activists
on college campuses are calling for an end to sweatshops

everywhere. [As recently
as this past weekend in Quebec, world trade officials debated

how to clean up those operations,
and the United States has pushed developing countries

to raise pay and working
conditions in thousands of plants from Bangladesh to

Brazil.]

    Results,
however, have been negligible. The basic problem is that jobs

and capital can move fast
these days, as the president of El Salvador, Francisco Flores,

is keenly aware. “The difficulty
in this region is that there is labor that is

more competitively priced
than El Salvador,” he said.

    Here,
as in many other countries, labor advocates say the problem is

made worse by the government’s
cozy ties with factory owners. When a Labor Ministry

committee issued a report
critical of forced overtime, poor safety and threats

against labor organizers,
factory owners complained. The government swiftly withdrew

and disowned it.

    Salvadoran
officials and business leaders have also objected to monitors

Gap has hired to police
working conditions. They contend that the group is a tool of

unions that want to keep
jobs from leaving the United States ˜ or a leftist

anti-government front, a
suspicion left over from El Salvador’s long civil war, which ended in

1992.

    Then
there is practicality. Gap spends $10,000 a year for the

independent monitors at
Charter, which is owned by Taiwanese investors, and thousands more for

management time to arbitrate
disputes and for its own company monitors to recheck

the facts on the ground.
For the company to duplicate these intensive efforts at each

of the 4,000 independent
factories it contracts with would have taken about 4.5

percent of its annual profit
of $877 million last year.

    In a
world where costs are measured in pennies, that percentage would be

a significant burden. Wal-Mart
and Kmart are praised by investors for relentlessly

driving down costs, but
they have much less comprehensive monitoring programs.

    Gap says
that expense and staff time are not even its main concerns. The

experiment in El Salvador
has only reinforced the company’s conviction that

companies cannot substitute
for governments indifferent to enforcing laws. Also, it said,

retailers have limited power
over their independent contractors. Either they pull out,

which would punish innocent
workers, or they must accede to a slow process where

they must cajole and bully
for every bit of progress.

    “We are
not the all-powerful Oz that rules over what happens in every

factory,” said Elliot Schrage,
Gap’s senior vice president for global affairs. “Do we

have leverage? Yes. Is it
as great as our critics believe? Not by a long shot.”

Sitting Down: Monitoring
Effort Enlists Outsiders

Still, monitoring is the
sweatshop opponents’ great hope. Watchdog

groups say that only people
outside of the company can win the trust of workers and

evaluate complaints. “That
is where you get problems that won’t show up in paper

records and interviews with
management,” said Sam Brown, executive director of the

Fair Labor Association,
a labor advocacy group in Washington.

    At the
time, however, no one had ever done it, said Mr. Brown, who is a

former Ambassador to the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe

and past director of Action,
federal domestic volunteer agency.

    Gap’s
efforts are still in many ways a blueprint for the international

labor advocacy movement
˜ since 1995 other companies like Liz Claiborne and Reebok have

attempted to start similar
programs. But what has actually happened in

El Salvador is a process
that lasted longer, cost more and achieved less than what many

people had hoped for. “We
knew it would be hard,” Mr. Schrage said. “But it’s been

harder than we ever imagined.”

    The company
has found that no aspect of its efforts escapes local

politics. On the recommendation
of Charles Kernaghan, the director of the National Labor

Council, Gap turned to the
legal aid office of the Archdiocese of San Salvador and to

the Jesuit University here.
Earlier, both institutions had helped uncover abuses in

the plant, which to Gap
demonstrated their experience and independence from management.

But both also had a history
of sympathy for the Farabundo Martí National

Liberation Front, a coalition
of rebel groups and political parties during the civil war.

The coalition is known as
the F.M.L.N., its initials in Spanish.

    “When
companies see me, they see someone to the left of the F.M.L.N.,”

said Benjamín Cuéllar,
the director of the Institute for Human Rights at the

University of Central America
here who is also on the board of independent monitors. That view

manifests itself in mistrust
and resistance by managers, he said.

    Beyond
politics, Gap says it is not easy to impose its will on

contractors simply because
it is a major customer. Pedro Mancía, the factory’s manager,

indicated that he looks
on the monitors as an annoyance, not a threat. In his view, the

only meaningful role they
played was in easing tensions among the workers themselves

after the 1995 strike.

    That
event “was not between management and workers,” Mr. Mancía argued.

“We had two warring factions
of unions and they could not sit down together.”

    Factory
managers agreed to accept monitors mostly to avoid losing Gap

and going out of business.
Still, trust is tenuous and the managers have found ways ˜

subtle and not so subtle
˜ to resist, monitors say.

    It took
about a year to rehire all of the workers fired during the 1995

strike, for example. And
30 of those rehired in 1997 were fired again recently, not

because they were strikers
but because the company said they were not productive

enough. “They are playing
by the rules of the game,” said one member of the monitoring

group. “But I’m not much
in agreement with the rules of the game.”

    Gap says
that this project has taught it the limit of its own influence.

“We can’t be the whole solution,”
Mr. Schrage said. “The solution has to be labor laws

that are adequate, respected
and enforced. One of the problems in El Salvador is

that that was not happening
and is not happening.”

Moving On: Economic Obstacles
Impede Reforms

Before dawn each day, Flor
de María Hernández leaves her three children

in the tent where they have
lived since an earthquake leveled her home earlier this

year and begins her two-hour
commute to the Charter clothing factory.

    She and
the others, like Ms. Martínez, must be at work before 7 a.m.

Managers close the gate
precisely on the hour and dock the pay of anyone who is late.

    Inside,
rows of sewing machines face blackboards on which supervisors

have written the daily quotas
for shirts and trousers, roughly 2,000 a day for each

line of 36 machines. The
pace is relentless, but by local standards it is a

pleasant place to work.
There are lockers, tiled bathrooms, a medical clinic and an outdoor

cafeteria. Large fans and
high ceilings keep temperatures down.

    But Ms.
Martínez remembers just what it took to get this far. She was

among the workers who protested
the abusive conditions in 1995. “Workers would

bring in permission slips
from their doctors to go to the hospital,” she

recalled, “and supervisors
would rip it up in their faces.”

    Of the
70,000 garment workers in El Salvador, 80 percent are women. Few

earn enough to take care
of their families. Ms. Hernández, for example, earns

about $30 a week inspecting
clothes. It is not enough to feed her children; to make

ends meet, she relies on
help from her ex-husband.

    She keeps
her job because the most common alternative is to work as a

live-in maid or a street
vendor. Jobs cutting sugar cane in the searing sun, once

plentiful, are difficult
to find now, and wages have fallen in recent years along with commodity

prices.

    El Salvador,
never a wealthy country, is struggling every bit as hard as

its people. Roughly 75,000
people were killed and thousands wounded in the civil

war. The war also drove
away foreign investment, shuttered relatively high-paying

electronics factories and
left roads, power lines and other basic services in

tatters.

    Earlier
this year, two powerful earthquakes compounded the difficulties

by wrecking hundreds of
thousands of buildings. Economists estimate that 180,000

Salvadorans are jobless.
Almost half of the population lives in poverty.

    The government
has gone out of its way to attract investment and jobs.

Government leaders pin the
country’s future on the optimistic hope of doubling the

number of factories making
clothes for the United States, to more than 400, in

three years.

    “Maquilas
have been a source of significant economic growth in recent

years,” President Flores
said using the Spanish term for the plants that enjoy tax and

trade benefits. “They are
the most dynamic economic sector in the country.”

    That
growth, however, has not been matched by the budget of the Labor

Ministry, which is among
the worst-financed agencies. It employs only 37 labor

inspectors to enforce regulations
˜ 1 for every 10 factories, not including coffee

plantations, construction
sites or other places of business in this country, which

has 6.1 million people.

    The limits
of the government’s willingness to be an advocate for labor

was illustrated last summer
when it suppressed the report critical of factory working

conditions. The labor minister,
Jorge Nieto, said that the report was technically

flawed, and insists that
the government intends to modernize his agency and improve inspector

training. “We want investment,
but only with respect and fairness,” he said. “Only

when workers’ rights are
respected can we generate more contracts with American

companies.”

    But to
get those contracts, El Salvador must compete with neighbors like

Honduras and Nicaragua,
where wages are lower and the population even poorer and

more eager for work. Government
officials and factory managers concede that El

Salvador’s current minimum
wage is not enough to live on ˜ by some estimates it covers less

than half of the basic needs
of a family of four ˜ but they are wary of increasing it.

    “We cannot
be satisfied with the wage, but we have to acknowledge the

economic realities,” Mr.
Nieto said.

    Since
Gap pioneered the independent monitoring effort, few other

American companies have
followed. They cite costs, politics and questionable effectiveness.

Gap executives echo those
worries when they assess the experience at Charter.

    “We are
in a very competitive marketplace,” said Mr. Schrage of Gap.

“Consumers make decisions
on lots of factors, including price. There is no clear benefit

in having invested in independent
monitoring to a consumer and it is not clear if we were

to make it more broad policy
that consumers would get a benefit or care at all.”

    As she
shopped at the Gap flagship store at Herald Square in Manhattan,

Claire Cosslett fingered
an aqua cotton T-shirt made in El Salvador to check

for quality. Ms. Cosslett,
a legal recruiter, said she reads labels and sometimes worries

that her garments are “made
by some child chained to a sewing machine.”

    American
companies dread comments like that. Yet for all their fears,

they ultimately have to
balance their concern over image, and any feelings they have

about third-world workers,
with customers’ attitudes. Then there are the competitive

pressures to keep costs
low. Would the cost of raising working standards in El Salvador

raise the price of a
T-shirt enough to drive off customers?

    Among
several shoppers who were interviewed at the Manhattan store, Ms.

Cosslett was the only
one to say that reports of sweatshop conditions had stopped

her from buying a particular
brand. She said she would be willing to pay more for

a garment made under
better working conditions.

    But
then she paused and hedged. “It would depend how much,” she said.

Missing Pieces [IMPORT]

Talk Talk

(February 16, 2001)

Number of Discs: 1

Label: Blueprint

1. After the Flood (Outtake) [Alternate Take]
2. Myrrhman
3. New Grass [Edit]
4. Stump
 5. Ascension Day

6. 5:09
7. Piano – Mark Hollis

‘Missing Pieces’ picks up
where EMI’s ‘A’s & B Sides’ left off. After leaving EMI the band signed
to Polydor to produce their final album ‘Laughing Stock’. This CD is a
collection of the A and B-sides of the singles issued during the Polydor
era. Also includes the very rare piece called ‘Piano’, recorded in 1998.
1999 release. Standard jewel case.

http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?channel=artcol.jhtml&doc_id=210409

Crisis in a Coffee Cup

The price of beans has crashed.
Growers around the world are starving. And the quality of your morning
cup is getting worse. So why is everyone blaming Vietnam?

Fortune: Monday, December
9, 2002

By Nicholas Stein

Nestled among the rugged
hills of Vietnam’s Central Highlands, 200 miles north of Ho Chi Minh City,
Buon Ma Thuot is a remote and isolated village in a remote and isolated
land. The only road in and out of town is a narrow, winding, muddy track
interrupted by gaping potholes and meandering yaks. Until the mid-1990s
the region was notable only for a key battle in the final days of what
Vietnam calls its American war. A replica of the first North Vietnamese
tank to roll into Buon Ma Thuot sits in the center of town as a monument
to South Vietnam’s “liberation.” But in the past decade almost everything
else here has changed. The rain forest that once blanketed the region is
gone–pulled up and burned down to get at the fertile soil beneath. The
population has exploded. And the streets now reverberate with the buzz
of motorcycle traffic and the hum of commerce. The development is exemplified
by Phuc Ban Me, a gaudy resort complete with a hotel, a sprawling water
park, and a karaoke bar built in the shape of a cave.

    The catalyst
for Buon Ma Thuot’s growth was a plant associated more often with the lush
climes of Latin America than the jungles of Southeast Asia: coffee. Between
1990 and 2000, Vietnamese farmers planted more than a million acres of
the crop. Annual production swelled from 84,000 tons to 950,000, enabling
Vietnam to surpass Colombia as the world’s second-largest producer (Brazil
is the first). Vietnam may not have Juan Valdez, but its coffee is probably
in the can in your kitchen pantry.

    In 1997,
after a frost in Brazil sent the price of green (unroasted) coffee on New
York’s Commodities Exchange soaring above $3 a pound, Buon Ma Thuot’s coffee
sector suddenly had more money than it could spend. But the coffee renaissance
in Vietnam proved short-lived. In 1999 prices began to fall, sinking last
December to 42 cents a pound, their lowest level in a century. For three
consecutive years prices have not even covered the cost of production.
Many of the region’s farmers are heavily in debt. Some have replaced their
coffee plants with corn or pineapples. Others have simply abandoned their
farms. Phuc Ban Me gets few visitors these days, and its water park stands
vacant, a reminder of the excesses of the boom.

    Vietnam’s
coffee industry is not the only one suffering. The prolonged price slump
has ravaged many of the world’s 25 million coffee growers. In Central America,
where the costs of production are triple those of Vietnam, the repercussions
have been particularly severe. The U.S. Agency for International Development
estimates that at least 600,000 coffee workers have lost their jobs. Conditions
are equally dire in Africa, where impoverished nations such as Uganda,
Burundi, and Ethiopia rely on coffee for the majority of their export revenues.
Nestor Osorio, executive director of the International Coffee Organization,
calls this “the worst crisis ever” for coffee, the second-largest globally
traded commodity, after oil.

    Vietnam
is not just a victim of the crisis. For many, it is also the chief culprit,
responsible for flooding the market over the past five years with millions
of bags of unwanted coffee, upsetting the fine balance between global supply
and demand for its own short-term gain.

    But the
depressed prices plaguing coffee growers are not simply the result of a
cyclical glut. They are also caused by two systemic changes within the
global coffee world: the collapse of the cartel that kept prices at sustainable
levels for nearly three decades, and the development of new coffee-processing
technology, which prompted a shift away from high-quality arabica beans
to cheaper, lower-quality robusta. The former was brought on by complex
geopolitical developments. The latter can be traced to the coffee divisions
of four multinational conglomerates–Nestle, Kraft, Procter & Gamble,
and Sara Lee–which buy nearly half of the world’s coffee and own some
of the best-known brands, including Nescafe, Maxwell House, Folgers, and
Chock Full o’ Nuts. In the past, these Big Four coffee roasters blended
small amounts of robusta with arabica to pare their purchasing costs. But
technological advances have allowed roasters to neutralize robusta’s harsh,
unpleasant taste. To reduce costs further, the Big Four have significantly
upped the percentage of robusta in their blends, substituting it for arabica
they once purchased from small farmers in Latin America and Africa.

    Most
of the robusta comes from Brazil and Vietnam, which together have seized
a greater share of global exports, up from 29% in 1997 to 41% last year.
“Brazil and Vietnam offer excellent coffee at very reasonable prices,”
says Frank Meysman, head of Sara Lee’s worldwide coffee business. “It will
be difficult for other countries, particularly in Central America, to compete.”

    The
switch to cheaper beans in the past five years has provided a windfall
for the Big Four. Though none of the companies releases financial results
for its coffee divisions, all acknowledge they have enjoyed record coffee
profits.

25 NOVEMBER 2002: UK
PIRATE RADIO UPDATE

Hold tight the massive

Ever since Simon Dee’s first
broadcast from the MV Caroline in 1964, pirate radio has played a crucial
role in forming Britain’s musical taste. Now the phenomenon is bigger than
ever, the airwaves in the cities so crowded that the pirates are being
pushed into the suburbs and the countryside. Alexis Petridis picks up the
story in an Essex garage with a young man named Stealth . . .

Friday November 22, 2002

The
Guardian

 

It has been described as
a new studio, a nerve centre, and the headquarters of Essex’s top pirate
radio station, and admittance has been granted only after a rigorous vetting
procedure. I have been quizzed at length. ID has been demanded. The Guardian’s
photographer has been accused of spying for the government: “I’m sorry
about that, mate,” says our guide, a 19-year-old who bears the fitting
pseudonym of Stealth. “But he looks exactly like an inspector from the
DTI – he’s even driving a Ford Mondeo.” Finally, though, Stealth has agreed
to drive us to the secret location. On the way, the car stereo blares out
Soundz FM. It plays chirpy UK garage topped not with patois-heavy rhymes
about guns, “haters” and inner-city violence, but rap of a distinctly Essex
strain. “Big shaaht aaht to the XR3i crew,” says the MC. “Buzzing abaaht
in the rain on a Sunday afternoon.”

    The screening
procedures are so exacting, it’s difficult not to be slightly disappointed
when you arrive. You can call this place a studio until you are blue in
the face, but there is no getting around the fact that we are standing
in the middle of someone’s garage. The turntables nestle on a workbench
amid cans of de-icer and Hammerite. The DJs and their friends sit on piles
of stacked-up garden chairs, their baseball-capped heads nodding in time
to the beats.

    A DJ
called Mr Y2K is hunched over the turntables, while his fellow DJ Softmix
chatters into a microphone, taking requests and demands for “shout outs”,
and reading text messages. The mobile phone rings. He hands it to Mr Y2K,
and a brief, animated conversation takes place, just audible over the beats.
A listener is criticising Y2K’s choice of records. “Yeah, I know, mum,”
he mutters. “I didn’t really want to play it myself.” He pauses and looks
momentarily pained. “Will you stop interfering?” he asks, plaintively.
“Big up Mr Y2K’s mummy!” cries Softmix. Stealth rolls his eyes. “Sometimes
his nan rings up as well,” he says.

    Soundz
FM is far removed from the popular image of a pirate radio station. For
a start, we are not in a crumbling Hackney tower block, nor is the atmosphere
fugged with marijuana smoke. Judging by the litter on the floor, Soundz
runs on nothing stronger than junk food and cigarettes. The atmosphere
is cheery with the added frisson of illicit behaviour. It is somewhere
between a youth club and a house party being held while parents are away.
Everyone is friendly, if startled by the arrival of a national newspaper
in their midst. “Shout going out to the Guardian posse,” cries Softmix,
by way of introduction. “Checking out the studio, writing an article on
Soundz FM!” He then decides to conduct an interview of his own. “What do
you make of it?” he asks, thrusting the microphone into my hands. But I
have neither the voice nor the vocabulary for pirate radio. “So far it
seems very impressive,” I say, sounding like the winner of a competition
to find Britain’s most middle-class person. Aware that Soundz FM’s street
credibility is threatened, Softmix takes the microphone back. “Wicked,”
he says.

    From
Radio London in the 60s to So Solid Crew’s Battersea-based Delight FM,
pirate radio has traditionally been a London phenomenon. Two years old,
Soundz is one of a new breed of suburban pirates, uncomfortable with the
gangster posturing and occasional bursts of violence that have become associated
with illegal radio in the capital. Although Soundz reaches London, the
majority of its audience comes from the suburbs: Essex, Surrey, Kent and
Hertfordshire. The “staff” of Soundz FM are curiously prudish. Swearing
is banned on air. “Some stations use filthy language, you know,” bridles
one DJ indignantly. “They’re asking to be taken off the air, no question.”

    “In London
they want that rude boy attitude,” says Stealth. “In certain parts of north-west
London… well, there’s a pirate station there that’s actually based in
a crack den, so that gives you an idea of some of them. But we’re not all
like that. We’re referred to as polite people from Bexley. We’re a friendly,
community station. We’re from the suburbs, we don’t bother trying to get
non-suburb listeners.”

    There’s
a musical distinction as well, albeit one of those infinitesimal sub-generic
shifts that anyone not completely immersed in the dance music world has
no hope of understanding. DJ L-Dubs attempts to explain it to me. “Shady
garage”, he says, is to be avoided at all costs, whereas “happy garage”
attracts “uplifting people who want to be uplifted”. The latter, he informs
me, is what Soundz FM is all about. I nod knowledgeably, but have no idea
what he is talking about.

    Equally
bewildering is the station’s co-founder, Master Control. Portly and middle-aged,
he cuts an incongruous figure amid the sportswear-clad teens. He was a
teenager himself when he first got involved with pirate radio. Now it has
completely taken over his life. During the week he makes “rigs” – radio
transmitters – that he sells to other stations. At the weekends he careers
around the Essex countryside, checking Soundz’s aerial, ensuring that the
signal is not causing interference to television or the emergency services.
Ask him what the appeal of pirate radio is and he looks completely mystified.
“I don’t know. I find it… I don’t know. I can’t really do anything else.
It’s the only thing in my life that I can do. I make rigs that work, I
do it properly. You get a sense of achievement, I suppose.”

    He’s
not alone in his inability to explain the compulsion to break the law on
a weekly basis, endure the endless hassle and expense of having your transmitter
impounded by the Radiocommunications Agency (or stolen by a rival station)
and risk unlimited fines and two years in prison. There’s certainly no
financial reward – the DJs pay a £10 weekly subscription to play
on the station, which goes towards running costs – and little chance of
celebrity. While some of the Soundz staff clearly see the station as a
means of breaking through, circumventing the politburo of ageing celebrity
DJs who control the dance scene, it is statistically unlikely that they
will. For every So Solid Crew, who have converted their pirate notoriety
into a more tangible form of celebrity, there are scores of DJs beavering
away in semi-obscurity: Dom Da Bom, Miss Giggles, Lukozade, DJ Bangers,
the hopefully named Aylesbury Allstars.

    It’s
peculiar, but then pirate radio has always been a bit peculiar. By definition
it exists outside the mainstream, attracting strange characters who don’t
really fit in anywhere else. As befits a criminal enterprise, it regularly
changes its identity. It began in 1964, the brainchild of Irish businessman
Ronan O’Rahilly, who noted that, in the heyday of Beatlemania, the BBC
Light Programme was broadcasting only two hours of pop music a week. Rahilly’s
Radio Caroline and its competitor Radio London invented pop radio as we
know it today. By 1967, however, the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act had
made the seafaring stations illegal, and Radio 1 had swiped both the pirates’
all-pop     format and their biggest DJs: Tony Blackburn,
Dave Lee Travis, Kenny Everett and John Peel.

    Deprived
of both legality and raison d’etre, pirate radio went into decline. By
the 70s, it was the domain of crackpots: Radio Nordsee featured a DJ called
Spangles Muldoon and broadcast virulent Tory propaganda during the 1970
general election. Radio Enoch, meanwhile, offered military music and plummy
voices denouncing immigration.

    It took
the rise of dance music to revive the pirates’ fortunes. Britain’s underground
soul and reggae scenes grew throughout the 70s, but were largely ignored
by Radio 1 or the new commercial stations. Pirates stepped in to fill the
void. Invicta, Radio Free London, Solar, Horizon and LWR eschewed fishing
trawlers and set up in the centre of London, broadcasting urban music in
an urban setting. When acid house was effectively banned from Radio 1 after
1988’s tabloid drug exposés, a host of new pirates sprung up: Centreforce,
Sunrise and Fantasy among them. It set a pattern that has repeated ever
since, in which the pirate stations are the scourge of the authorities
and a vital source of new music for the record industry.

    When
a new dance genre emerges – hardcore, drum’n’bass, and most recently UK
garage – a new wave of pirates appear, devoted to the new sound. Virtually
every garage or drum’n’bass tune that makes the national chart will have
been played on a pirate station first. Occasionally, a pirate DJ finds
himself at the helm of a hit. Flex FM’s DJ Dee Kline went to number 11
in 2000 with I Don’t Smoke, a garage record that sampled Jim Davidson doing
his comedy West Indian voice.

    Radio
1 repeated the trick it pulled off in 1967, luring DJs Pete Tong and Tim
Westwood from LWR, Gilles Peterson from Horizon and the Dreem Teem from
Blackbeard Radio. But this time the pirates, attracted by the relatively
low cost of setting up a station (estimated by Stealth at around £2,500),
won’t die away. In 1991, the RA carried out 475 operations against pirate
stations. Last year, it carried out 1,438. London’s airwaves are currently
jammed with a startling array of illicit stations. At the weekend, you
can hear anything from the pre-pubescent children of So Solid’s Dan Da
Man spinning garage on Delight to Ghanian gospel music courtesy of WBLS’s
improbably named DJ Rabbi.

    Stations
rise and fall with dizzying frequency – the victims of internal feuding,
a lack of suitable studio locations and raids by the DTI’s Radiocommunications
Agency – but there is always someone to replace them. So far this year,
the RA has raided 179 pirate stations in London. Most went straight back
on the air. As the RA dolefully admits: “There’s no easy victory or cure
for pirate radio. You take them down, they put them up again. You can’t
be sure people won’t re-offend. You’re just dealing with a specific complaint
at a specific time.”

    According
to Stealth, central London’s airwaves are so overcrowded that the suburbs
are the best option for a new station. “We’re doing it as a hobby. There
are too many stations in London and they’re all doing it for money. When
it turns into a money market, you get people using dodgy rigs, employing
thick cement mixers to install the equipment.” Meanwhile, he says, pirate
stations are springing up in locations that make Bexley look like a teeming
metropolis: Weymouth, Newquay, Telford, Ludlow, Swindon.

    To prove
the point, Stealth suggests a visit to his friend’s station, Y2K Kent,
which broadcasts from Margate. The next weekend, we rendezvous in a lay-by
near the Blackwall Tunnel. Stealth arrives in a small hatchback, with a
large skull and crossbones flag sticking out of the sunroof.

    In Margate
I am introduced to Y2K’s founder, a stocky 20-year-old who works for a
drainage company by day and who calls himself Fraudster. Fraudster has
been involved in pirate radio since he was 13. He originally DJed around
London before realising the pirate scene was simply too crowded there.
“We realised we needed to go somewhere else,” he says, “so we packed everything
into the car and just started to drive out of London, through the Blackwall
tunnel. This was the first place we got to.”

    Fraudster
says that in its year of existence, Y2K Kent has been successful enough
to attract complaints from the local commercial radio station. “They said
we nicked 1,000 of their listeners, but they play music for over-30s, so
I don’t see how that works.” Nevertheless, it is a modest set-up, located
in the box room of a student house. The room is so tiny that three people
constitute a life-threatening crush. DJs and associates crowd outside,
peering in. It is extremely hot, and the unmistakable stench of bloke wafts
down the stairs. The windows must be kept shut, lest anyone notices the
noise and contacts the RA. “You have to be careful in Margate,” says Fraudster,
“because there’s no crime, the police have got nothing to do. The front
page of the local paper is ‘man steals pork pie from Tesco’s’.”

    On the
floor, an electric fan cools a tangle of wires and electronic boxes, apparently
assembled to plans by Heath Robinson. On our arrival, it breaks down. “Hold
tight the massive,” says the MC, “as we sort it out inside the place.”

    Stealth
immediately springs into action. “You need a graphic on the mixer,” he
suggests. “I need another studio,” groans Fraudster, looking harassed.
In fact, Fraudster spends most of my visit looking harassed. His mobile
phone rings constantly, not with shout outs or requests, but irate calls
from his girlfriend, for whom the novelty of pirate radio has clearly long
worn off. “I sometimes wonder why I do this,” Fraudster admits. “I spend
my whole week cleaning out shitty drains, then spend all weekend doing
this. I’m not in it to earn anything. I suppose it’s for the joy of the
music.”

    The RA’s
spokesman argues that “people suffer as a result of pirate radio. They
tune into a station they want to listen to, and find something else blocking
it. I take their calls, and they’re absolutely furious. If you live nearby
they create a noise nuisance. They’re anti-social.”

    You take
his point – you wouldn’t want to live next door to an illegal radio station,
pumping out UK garage or drum’n’bass from Friday evening to Monday morning.
However, it’s hard not to be impressed by the determined attitude of the
pirates. There is little fame and less cash in their world of box bedrooms
and converted garages.

    Yet still
they doggedly carry on, buying new rigs, finding new studios, skulking
about in search of suitable transmitter sites. Although most of them are
far too young to remember the Sex Pistols, there’s something resolutely
punk about theirattitude: confronted with a dance scene that has slid into
mundane irrelevance, they have decided to do something for themselves.
Their ambitions are not commercially driven, yet they extend far beyond
anti-authoritarian posturing. At Soundz, there’s a lot of talk about digital
radio. When legal stations switch to digital transmission, they live in
hope that the RA will leave the obsolete FM band to them. Soundz even has
aspirations beyond playing music. “We run a show between 8pm and 12am where
we do comedy,” says Stealth, proudly. “It’s absolute chaos. We had a bloke
out with a microphone doing wind ups on people in McDonald’s in Lakeside
shopping centre, and on drivers at the Dartford tunnel. You’d crease up
if you heard it.” A little corner of pirate radio, it seems, will be forever
DLT.

    A few
weeks after my visit, Stealth telephones. Both Soundz FM and Y2K Kent have
gone off the air. Soundz has collapsed due to internal disagreements: Stealth
and Master Control have fallen out over music policy. Y2K Kent, meanwhile,
was raided by the RA, who found not only their rig, but two station staff
standing next to it. For the first time, Stealth sounds bleak about the
future of pirate radio: “Fines are going up, more stations are getting
raided, things are getting tighter all the time. They’re really turning
up the heat.”

    But it’s
still not hot enough to discourage Stealth and Fraudster. Within weeks,
both are back in business with new stations, Fraudster with a station called
Essence 105.1 FM, Stealth with Impact 99.7 FM. He has moved out of the
garage and set up a studio in an industrial estate. And he has finally
nailed pirate radio’s unique appeal. “The buzz is when you’re driving down
your local high street and you hear it playing out of someone else’s radio,
or you hear people talking about it on the bus,” he says. “You realise
you’re having an effect. If it was going nowhere, you’d soon lose interest.”

From November 17, 2002 New York TImes Sunday Magazine:

By HERBERT MUSCHAMP

Why don’t you . . . give all your ideas away to other people, so that you’ll fill up again with new ones? Diana Vreeland, the great fashion editor, understood that this is how creative minds work. It’s fatal to be a hoarder. When you have an idea, get it out there. Pretend you’re Josephine Baker, tossing fruit into the audience. Hit someone on the head with a pineapple. Circulate the energy. Distribute the wealth. Rinse your child’s hair with dead Champagne.

    This is a gnostic way of thinking. Now relax. It’s Sunday. You won’t mind a bit of Gnosticism with your Styles. Glamour and knowledge both share the same root in gnosis (secret learning), so why shouldn’t Gnosticism be fashion’s true faith?

    The gnostics were a religious order, circa the year 0, but in modern times it makes better sense to view them as a personality type. Vreeland was one of them.

    “If you do not bring bring forth what is within you,” the gnostics believed, “what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” And I suspect Vreeland truly believed that if she had an idea and didn’t get it out there, it would kill her. Killer-diller. If she couldn’t come out with observations like “pink is the navy blue of India,” she would die.

    Thanks in part to those observations, she hasn’t. Or, rather, the point of view defined by Vreeland’s insights remains indispensable. It is the viewpoint of fearlessness, the stance of “Why not?” And if Vreeland’s legend looms larger today than it did during her lifetime, that may be because this particular stance has become harder to sustain.

    Vreeland is the subject of a new biography by Eleanor Dwight, and it is the first to explore the personality behind the histrionic public persona. The book rides a wave of printed material by and about Vreeland that did not begin until years after her retirement from Vogue. “Allure,” a coffee-table book, written with Christopher Hemphill, of black and white photographs punctuated ith Vreeland’s taped recollections of them, was published in 1980 and has been reissued this year.

    The first book was followed in 1984 by the editor’s memoir, “DV.” Two additional volumes of Vreeland’s musings have appeared in the last year: “Why Don’t You?” a collection of her columns for Harper’s Bazaar, and “Vreeland Memos,” an issue of the fashion periodical Visionaire.

       Why don’t you . . . buy Dwight’s biography and read it, so that I don’t
have to try your patience with one of those super-compressed summaries
that nobody reads anyhow? “Elegance is refusal,” Vreeland once pronounced.
I don’t know whether this is a gnostic idea precisely. But it appears to
be an essential antidote to excessive gnostic fecundity. If what you have
to bring forth is tedious, just leave it alone.

    Vogue
in the 1960’s was as much the creature of its time as it was the creation
of an editor. At the beginning of the decade, fashion magazines reflected
a relatively rarefied realm of elegance, style and social poise. Ten years
later, they had become a mass medium. Vreeland’s Vogue occupied the pivotal
place in this transformation. Herself a latter-day Edwardian Woman of Style,
she hit her manic professional stride in the postwar years, when people
were just beginning to grasp the full extent of changes brought about by
mass communications.

    These
circumstances are unrepeatable. That’s why it is pointless to complain
that no magazine quite like Vreeland’s exists today. No world like hers
exists today. When she started out, celebrity was tantamount to notoriety.
Now, the news media are glamorous in their own right. Today, everybody
knows who Diana Vreeland was. In her own time, she communicated to audiences
who never gave much thought to who an editor was.

    I know,
because I was part of it. When I started reading Vogue in my early teenage
years, I had little interest in fashion and knew even less about it. Rather,
like The New Yorker, and Ada Louise Huxtable’s architecture columns, Vogue
represented what I recognized as an urban point of view. I found my suburban
life confining. It was a relief to project myself into the escapist fantasies
offered by those texts. I wouldn’t know of the existence of Diana Vreeland
or William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker, until many years later.
Now the situation has changed. We’re all regaled by the antics of editors
without magazines.

    Vreeland,
I later read in a biography of Alexander Lieberman by Calvin Tomkins and
Dodie Kazanjian, once described Vogue as “the myth of the next reality.”
The myth was accurate in my case. The next reality was relatively exempt
from the pleasures of cold war normalcy.

    People
were onto something when they called Vreeland the high priestess of fashion.
She was a gnostic priestess. In the gnostic system, there was an outer
mystery for the many and an inner mystery for the few. So it was with Vreeland’s
Vogue. Many readers may have regarded it as the leading fashion magazine.
Others, too few to constitute a mass readership, understood that glamour
has only incidentally to do with clothes. It has mainly to do with personality
structure, with the places we choose to dwell or avoid within the architecture
of our subconscious fantasies.

    Now,
the point of Gnosticism is to be reborn to the divine within oneself. If
“the divine” is not acceptable, you can substitute the truth within oneself.
Or, as the psychotherapist D. W. Winnicott called it, the authentic self.
But Vreeland probably would be comfortable with the divine.

    Why don’t
you bring out that divine thing that is within you? If you don’t, that
divine thing will slay you.

    In any
case, you have to kill off the inauthentic, or at least not let it take
over the executive committee of the self. Vreeland was vigilant in this
regard. Of course, she was also a fabulist. She made up or grossly exaggerated
her accounts of her past and the world around her. But if she had stuck
to the facts, she would have falsified her self. She had “the wound” of
the creative artist: an unshakeable disbelief in her potential to be loved,
coupled with an iron determination to conceal this disbelief from herself.
From this stemmed her power as an architect of other people’s desires.

    Ms. Dwight’s
biography is, among many other marvels, a brilliant study in the relationship
between love and work. The book is a treatise of changing mores, too, of
course, but at heart it is a report from the front lines in the struggle
to craft new identities for men and women in the modern world of work.
The evidence suggests that Vreeland was not a feminist. She was, however,
a strong woman and a breadwinner who reformed the decorous world of fashion
magazines within her muscular grip.

    Vreeland’s
is the flip side of the “Lady in the Dark” story. This extraordinary woman
blossomed when circumstances forced her to create a world outside her marriage
to a man of limited emotional and financial resources. Reed Vreeland looked
the part of leisured money. The leisure part was real. He was a Ralph Lauren
ad campaign before a Ralph Lauren was even dreamed of, but evidently possessed
neither the earning power nor the work ethic of an average male model.
A woman who considered herself unattractive might see him as a catch.

    But what
a lot of hard work it must have taken for Vreeland to believe that he was
worthy of her devotion! The fantasies it must have taken to fill up the
vacuum between herself and a human version of the spotted-elk-hide trunks
she advised her readers at Harper’s Bazaar to strap on the backs of their
touring cars! She was herself the driver. And although it is pleasing in
life to travel with attractive luggage, greater rewards await those who
travel light. A higher quality of attention will be paid to the active
partner in the wider world.

    “I know
what they’re going to wear before they wear it, eat before they eat it,
say before they say it, think before they think it, and go before they
go there!” This astonishing outburst, once overheard by Richard Avedon,
could be taken as evidence of a fashion dictator’s disrespect for her readers.
But perhaps the woman was simply reassuring herself that she could trust
her instincts.

    What
else did she have to go on? It’s not as if she was dealing with anything
rational. In “DV,” Vreeland recounts the possibly apocryphal story of assigning
a photographer to shoot a picture against a green background. The photographer
strikes out after three attempts. ” `I asked for billiard table green!’
I am supposed to have said. `But this is a billiard table, Mrs. Vreeland,’
the photographer said. `My dear,’ I apparently said, `I meant the idea
of billiard table green, not a billiard table.’ “

    In other
words it did not pay to follow this dictator literally. Far better to respond
with instincts of one’s own. This, I think, was the core clause in Vreeland’s
contract with her readers. We expected her to know where we were going
before we went there. We were traveling to places deeper within ourselves.

From the Oct. 6, 2002 LATimes Magazine:

Metropolis / Chat Room

Antiquity’s Gnostic Church Is Enjoying a Renaissance

By AL RIDENOUR

Near the nexus of Hillhurst Avenue and Sunset and Hollywood boulevards, Bishop Stephan Hoeller has presided since 1977 at Ecclesia Gnostica, the tiny, incense-infused chapel of the Gnostic Society.

Gnosticism, an ancient form of Christianity that flourished in the 1st to 3rd centuries, rejects doctrines such as original sin and emphasizes transcendence through inward, intuitive knowledge (“gnosis”) of the divine spark in each individual. Condemned as heresy by early Roman Catholic authorities,
gnosticism has drawn renewed interest in recent decades thanks in part to the writings of Carl Jung and religious scholar Elaine Pagels.

Hoeller, 70, a Hungarian emigre whose parish extends to Portland and Salt Lake City, recently published “Gnosticism: New Light on the Ancient Tradition of Inner Knowing” (Quest Books).

Where exactly do mainstream Christians and Gnostics part ways?

Where it comes to what is considered salvific, or what saves. We don’t proselytize. There’s no belief that coming to us you’ll be immediately saved and by not coming to us that you’ll be lost. Gnosticism has often been described as “salvation through knowledge,” but Gnosis doesn’t mean knowledge of particular
data. Rather, it’s an inner “knowingness,” a change of consciousness. Salvation through the death and suffering of Jesus is not part of our thought.

What is the place of Jesus in Gnostic tradition?

The Gnostics have held that there are always messengers of light who come from the inner worlds as archetypes of transformation, though many feel that Jesus was perhaps the latest and the greatest of these. However, you’ll have no difficulty finding experiences resembling gnosis within other religious
contexts–the samadhi of the yogis, the nirvana of the Buddhists, satori within Zen Buddhism.

How would you explain the revived interest in gnostic thought?

I believe there are two reasons for this. The first is the so-called Nag Hammadi Library [1,500-year-old papyrus codices found in Egypt in 1945], the largest body of original Gnostic literature ever discovered. It was translated into English in the mid ’70s, giving us a more accurate look than we’d had through
hostile secondhand sources. This allowed people to see that gnosticism is really far less bizarre and marginal than has been assumed. The second issue is a certain harmony between this material and modern and postmodern thinking. Some of these convergences occur within the depth psychology of Carl Jung. I also believe we are beginning to find echoes of Gnostic philosophy within the study
of chaos theory or the approach of deconstructive thinkers.

Is Los Angeles “Gnostic-friendly”?

When I came from Hungary, I had a kind of poetic intuition that the city was re-embodiment of the cultural and spiritual diversity of ancient Alexandria where the Gnostics, the Neo-Platonists and all these old boys were. America enjoys exceptional religious freedom, particularly among those who have migrated to the West Coast and no longer feel compelled to simply follow the faith of their parents.

Gnosticism was mentioned in some discussions of the 1997 Heaven’s Gate cultist suicides in Rancho Santa Fe. Can you comment on that?

People in the press and even some scholars jumped to the unjustified conclusion that because Gnostics feel earthly life is a relatively lowly condition, they are therefore disposed toward religiously motivated suicide. But nowhere in our tradition do we find any indication of this. We believe in overcoming the
darkness, not plunging into it.

How does a Gnostic transcend worldly entanglements?

It’s sort of what our Buddhist friend Alan Watts called “the shifting of the psychological point of gravity.”
Gnostics aren’t exhorted to embrace poverty or chastity or vegetarianism. We look inward, but don’t deny the outer world. We can smell the flowers–maybe even pick a few along the way. But we must keep walking.

Where does Gnosticism fall in with the New Age movement?

New Agers are very much “in denial” of the dark side, and the Gnostics not at all. We feel that we must
recognize both dark and light.

Have you personally ever been called a heretic?

Not since my youth. When I’d have the occasional dispute with Catholic clergy and fellow students, I’d
hear, “Ah, there goes Hoeller the heretic.” Even then it was rather jocular.

http://www.locusmag.com/2002/Reviews/VanderMeer11.html

Edward Whittemore’s JERUSALEM QUARTET

by Jeff VanderMeer

Three writers, above all others, have served as touchstones for my own fiction. All three display
stylistic mastery, contain hidden depths, and reward repeated re-reading. Of the three, Vladimir Nabokov achieved fame during his lifetime, Angela Carter achieved fame after her death, and the third, Edward Whittemore (1933-1995), remains largely unknown.

Until this month, Whittemore was out of print as well, Old Earth finally bringing all five of his books back from the dead: Quin’s Shanghai Circus (1974)1 and the Jerusalem Quartet, Sinai Tapestry (1977), Jerusalem Poker (1978), Nile Shadows (1983), and Jericho Mosaic (1987). The Old Earth editions, handsome and colorful, come complete with introductions from writers such as John Nichols and forewords and afterwords from Whittemore’s agent and his editors.2

The timing of Whittemore’s resurrection could not be more fortuitous, although I cannot
ignore a mingled sadness and irritation that for almost 20 years such remarkable books were unavailable to readers.

The timing is fortuitous because this year, for the first time ever, I have begun to feel that the idea of cross-genre fiction3 ˜ unclassifiable and yet with a clearly fabulist, nonrealistic bent ˜ has become a concrete entity, expressed in physical form in a number of truly wonderful works.4 Between 2000 and the present, we have witnessed the emergence of a number of great writers. In addition, writers who have always been producing this kind of work ˜ including Rikki Ducornet (perhaps the finest fantasist currently alive on the planet) ˜ have written some of their best fiction yet. Factor in the appearance this year of not one, not two, but four anthologies or magazine issues devoted to cross-genre short fiction ˜ Conjunctions 39, my own (co-edited) Leviathan 3, Angel Body (BBR, UK), and Polyphony 1; almost 1,800 pages of cross-pollination ˜ and a sea change seems in the air.

However, Whittemore, among others, got there a generation or two earlier5 ˜ and he remains one of
the best because his ambition was so much greater than that of most writers. With his Jerusalem Quartet, Whittemore set out to do nothing less than map a secret history of the world, focusing on the Middle East, where a welter of religions converge, sometimes with tragic results. The novels are loosely related, in that several memorable protagonists appear in all four, slipping in and out of the narrative as walk-on, secondary, and main characters. Inasmuch as The Jerusalem Quartet tells one story, it follows
the exploits of a man named Stern Strongbow, who hopes to create peace in the Middle East. It also covers the years 1900 through 1975, weaving together different times and places for a thematic resonance that far exceeds anything Thomas Pynchon accomplished in his excellent book V.6

 In Jerusalem Poker, for example, Whittemore launches his novel with a typically audacious image,
one of the great prologues in literature. The novel opens atop the Great Pyramid, where the sun rises on a summer day in 1914. A man named Cairo Martyr, at the time a male prostitute, has just helped a jaded, obese pair of Egyptian aristocrats achieve orgasm, when a triplane flies overhead:

Down, [Cairo] yelled. Down… But the delirious baron and baroness heard neither him nor the airplane. The great red ball on the horizon had hypnotized them with the heat it sent rushing through their aging bodies. Gaily the plane dipped its wings in salute to the most impressive monument ever reared by man, then gracefully rolled away and sped on south… Cairo Martyr got to his feet, not believing what he saw. The nearly invisible man and woman still stood on the summit with their arms outstretched, but now they were headless, cleanly decapitated by the slashing lowest wing of the triplane. The hulking bodies lingered a few seconds longer, then slowly toppled over and disappeared down the far side of the pyramid.

This image is followed by an even more audacious idea. On the last day of December 1921, the Moslem
Cairo Martyr, the Christian O’Sullivan Beare, and the Jew Munk Szondi, who each control part of Jerusalem, begin a game of poker, with the holy city in the kitty. The poker game lasts 12 years and as it unfolds Whittemore tells the stories of all three players, almost incidentally telling the history of the Levant as well. The intertwined tapestry formed by the present interacting with the past is stunning in its complexity, but also in its ability to entertain us. To call Jerusalem Poker One Hundred Years of Solitude
with spies would be entirely accurate. Nor can I overstate the way in which absurdity and the serious commingle in this novel. And, although all three main characters ˜ and the possibly 3,000-year-old owner of the antiquities shop in which the poker game takes place ˜ seem larger-than-life when the novel opens, Whittemore shows us that, in fact, they have lived extraordinary lives. They have earned their colorful eccentricities, often quite poignantly.

Whittemore also earned his extraordinary life. While the dual tragedy of Whittemore’s life was the relative brevity of that life and the short half-life of his books on bookstore shelves, many of us would trade ours for his, I think. After attending Yale University, Whittemore served as a Marine officer in Japan and “spent
10 years as a CIA operative in the Far East, Europe, and the Middle East,” as the biography on the back of the Old Earth editions reads. “Among his other occupations, he managed a newspaper in Greece, was employed by a shoe company in Italy, and worked in New York City’s narcotics control office during the Lindsay administration.” One is tempted to ask if Whittemore worked for the CIA while managing a newspaper in Greece and employed at a shoe company in Italy.

Regardless, Whittemore’s CIA work, his first-hand experience in the Middle East, clearly informs the novels. It is what distinguishes them in many ways from other espionage fictions: a level of verisimilitude, the sense of someone who has peered beneath the surface leading you through the canyons and up the mountains of history.7

The character Stern Strongbow, a visionary and sometimes spy, who inhabits all of the Jerusalem Quartet in some guise, displays complexities to his character that only someone with Whittemore’s background could have rendered properly. Stern, the son of Plantagenet Strongbow, an English adventurer, hopes to one day create a homeland shared in peace by Muslims, Jews, and Christians. That he never accomplishes this goal, that he descends into the irony of running guns between different groups, always still hoping for the peace that becomes more distant with each new mission, is one of the book’s saddest statements about the Middle East.

The discovery of “the oldest Bible in the world” that “denies every religious truth ever held by anyone” in the first book of the Quartet, Sinai Tapestry, is yet another of Whittemore’s statements. When I say “statement,” I don’t mean in any didactic sense ˜ Whittemore’s books are anything but didactic. Instead, he gets his point across with such extended absurdities as a bible created by a madman or through the actions of characters whose ideals become diluted through time, experience, and disappointment.

In this sense, Sinai Tapestry could be termed the most hopeful of the novels, the most like an eccentric adventure or journey, at least at the beginning. It follows the exploits of Plantogenet Strongbow, “an English-born adventurer who becomes a Muslim holy man and finally, on the eve of World War I, the secret ruler of the Ottoman Empire.” In this pre-World War I milieu, Whittemore seems to say that there exists more hope of an individual’s actions leading to substantial results. That Strongbow’s son Stern may fail in his goals does not seem assured. There is also the wonderful sense of humor Whittemore brings to
Sinai Tapestry (as well as Jerusalem Poker and, to a lesser extent, the last two novels of the Quartet). Among Strongbow’s exploits is his documentation, in 23 volumes, of Levantine sex:

Strongbow’s study was the most exhaustive sexual exploration ever made. Without hesitations or allusions, with nothing in fact to calm the reader, he thoughtfully examined every sexual act that had ever taken place from Timbuktu to the Hindu Kush, from the slums of Damascus to the palaces of Baghdad, and in all the shifting Bedouin encampments along the way?All claims were substantiated at once. The evidence throughout was balanced in the Victorian manner. Yet the facts were still implacable, the sense and nonsense inescapable, the conclusions terminal.

However, despite these touches, Sinai Tapestry ends with the brutal intrusion of history. Some scenes,
such as Whittemore’s portrayal of the bloody genocide at Smyrna in 1922, shock as much as anything in literature.

 If the final two volumes of the Quartet are more subdued and more thoughtful, then it may be due to the change in the time of the setting. Nile Shadows takes place mostly in 1942, in an Egypt threatened by Rommel, while Jericho Mosaic details the life and exploits of a deep cover agent between 1959 and the late 1970s. As the novels progress toward the present, they begin to take on more “reality” and shake off the veneer, the exotic gloss, of the earlier novels. In a sense, this makes them of less interest to fantasy readers, but I find it unlikely that anyone who has read Sinai Tapestry and Jerusalem Poker will be able to resist them.8 Further, the changes in Whittemore’s work mean that in an odd way the books encompass the entire literary spectrum, from the fantastical to the realistic, while retaining their intra-book cohesion.

Nile Shadows may be the most dialogue-rich of Whittemore’s novels, but it also has the most explosive
opening pages. After a grenade is lobbed into a Cairo bar, British agents must investigate the identity and purpose of the only man killed by the explosion. The depiction of the initial intelligence gathering, and the
event itself, is breathless and has the effect of a 360-degree camera sweep in a movie, with shifting points of view. As Publishers Weekly noted, Nile Shadows is “one of the most complex and ambitious espionage stories ever written?[that] plunges the reader into a hall-of-mirrors world.”

 In Jericho Mosaic, the world-spanning perspective becomes reduced in scope to that of a double agent active during the many Arab-Jewish conflicts. Whittemore’s CIA experience is even more palpable in this book as we are initiated into the rituals and the dangers of such work. Others have said it before, but there’s no harm in repetition: This may be the most haunting portrait of a spy in the history of literature. Every nuance, every description feels ultra-real. Of all the books, Jericho Mosaic, despite the discussions of three mystical men in a Jericho garden, has the least magic realism element. I have the sense, re-reading the Quartet, that the books were a kind of progression from the deep waters of a well, up into the light, with Jericho Mosaic the most personal book, from Whittemore’s perspective.9 That he was finished
writing about the Middle East is not certain, but he planned to set his next, unpublished novel in the United States.10

* * *

I remember that after I read Jerusalem Poker, I used to imagine Edward Whittemore sitting in a café in the holy city, working on his next novel. It did not occur to me, given the authority displayed by the text, that he lived anywhere but Jerusalem. I imagined that he was much like one of his characters ˜ setting down his thoughts in fiction form after having first led a life of great adventure.11 Some writers conjure such adventures out of a vivid inner life, but in Whittemore’s case, I was convinced that he must have experienced, on some level, what he wrote about. Such is the way that a favorite book can convince
us.

While it is difficult to tell you exactly how influential Whittemore has been on my work, or on me personally, I can tell you that I wrote three-fourths of a novel set in South America that attempted to replicate Whittemore’s brand of decade-spanning fiction.12 I can also tell you that I still find myself, at some level, grasping for superlatives like “amazing” or “mind-bending” even while realizing
that these words have been devalued by a glut of book reviews over decades.

In the end, all I can tell you is this: If you believe in fiction much as you would a religion, or
if you think that great works of fiction contain insights and wisdom that can literally change your life, or if you have known books that took you on strange but wonderful journeys, then you should read Edward Whittemore. He will not disappoint you.

——————————————————————————–

Footnotes:

1 If I ignore Quin’s Shanghai Circus in this article, it is only due to limitations of space and focus. Quin’s Shanghai Circus is a stunning short novel, filled with indelible scenes of Shanghai during wartime, and featuring characters that you will rarely encounter again, in life or on the printed page.

2 I don’t want this article to be about the man rather than the books, but I should point out that the Tom Wallace’s introduction and Judy Karasik afterword (available in all five of Old Earth’s reprints) present remarkably personal accounts of Whittemore as a person and as a writer. Tom Wallace was Whittemore’s editor at Henry Holt and W.W. Norton, where the novels were first published between 1974 and 1987. Wallace subsequently became Whittemore’s literary agent, and then his literary executor. Judy Karasik edited the last two novels of the Jerusalem Quartet.

3 “Cross-genre” is preferable to me as a term to “slipstream.” Slipstream means nothing. It is nothing.
The authors on the “slipstream” list would stare blankly at the word if shown it on a page.

4 Perhaps writers felt something similar during the New Wave, perhaps not.

5 Again, not to mention the New Wave, although the New Wave was often formally experimental.

6 Despite rumors to the contrary, fueled by reviewer comparisons, Whittemore does not write like
Pynchon ˜ his themes sometimes dovetail with Pynchon’s, but as a stylist, Pynchon and Whittemore are worlds apart. If, like me, you had difficulty with Gravity’s Rainbow, you will have no such difficulty with Whittemore. This is not to suggest that Whittemore is a lesser stylist than Pynchon, just that such experimentation and floridness did not interest him. As a storyteller on a grand scale, he clearly did not want the narrative obscured by the way in which he told a tale. Ironically enough, Anthony Heilbut,
wrote in The Nation when reviewing Sinai Tapestry, that “Whittemore is a deceptively lucid stylist. Were his syntax as cluttered as Pynchon’s or as grand as Nabokov’s… his virtually ignored recent novel might have received the attention it deserves, for his imagination of present and alternative worlds is comparable to theirs…” Could it be that Whittemore’s deceptive lucidity has caused his obscurity up to now? It is certainly an interesting theory, and there’s some merit in it, but it is more likely that Whittemore simply suffered from bad timing or bad luck.

7 That Whittemore’s books can simultaneously be called “fantasies” and “espionage” novels may explain
why his work, with its clear, unobtrusive style, has been so difficult for some reviewers to categorize. Such categorization is anathema to work like Whittemore’s, but it does help sell books.

8 However, because of their lack of a fantastical element, relative to the first two books, my examination
of the final two books is cursory in this review.

9 It is always a mistake to presume to know the author’s mind, of course; nonetheless, mistakes can be interesting.

10 According to an informed source, this novel may be published sometime in the next few years.

11 Given the classified nature of his position in the CIA, we may never know just how much excitement
Whittemore experienced first-hand.

12 And, in all candor, I stole a Whittemore technique by which he describes carnage perpetrated in Shanghai (from Quin’s Shanghai Circus) for a similar scene in my novella “Dradin, In Love”.

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Jeff VanderMeer’s upcoming books include Veniss Underground, out in April 2003, and the co-edited
The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases (July 2003). In February of next year, he will teach workshops at the Suncoast Writers’ Festival in St. Petersburg, Florida, along with such writers as Salman Rushdie and Li-Young Lee.