Gloss

“Would you be willing to plant corroborating evidence on a suspect you know to be guilty?” –Dudley, LA Confidential

Ari Fleischer testified on Monday that at his first meeting with Scooter Libby, at a restaurant in July 2003, the first thing they talked about was football. This struck me as either strange or a lie—if two senior administration officials needed to sniff each other’s non-intellectual credentials to establish trust, then why not baseball, something at least in season? But it all made sense after I heard they were talking about the Miami Dolphins. This was code, Miami being a homing beacon for American perversions of political power. (Since it’s topical to my earlier arguments on Florida’s phallomorphism: Dolphins? Are these surrogates in some pre-teen girl’s fantasy? Why not Miami Unicorns? Miami Magic Wands?)

Fleischer then described how Libby communicated Valerie Plame’s CIA identity: “He said it was hush-hush, on the Q.T. and that most people didn’t know it.”

Which is to say, in his desire to get across it was an enticing secret, Libby fell back on quoting the gossip reporter from the opening lines of L.A. Confidential:

Hudgens: “Remember, dear readers, you heard it here first, off the record, on the Q.T., and very Hush-Hush.”

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Well. It seems that my long-held, but largely never followed-through on, plan for a major museum retrospective on the accomplishments of Robert Moses has finally been usurped and staged by, of all things, professionals.

The first fruits of this bi-borough spring of Moses extravaganza is the new wealth of Robert Moses iconography that has appeared on the Internet in connection with these museums’ “Watch out, they’re ignoring Robert Caro” marketing angle, and that is now available for the surfing desk potato’s enjoyment.

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Howard Hunt, the clue that set Woodstein off on the, er, chase for the White House connection to the Watergate break in, has died. In Miami.

THE ADDRESS BOOK. Beside the name “Howard E. Hunt” is the
notation “W.House.” Now, BACHINSKI hurriedly opens the other
book to the letter “H” and there is the same name, “Howard
E. Hunt” and beside it, the letters, “W.H.”

COP (V.O.)
What’d you find?

BACHINSKI (V.O.)
Beats me. These notebooks belonged
to Cuban guys?

COP (V.O.)
S’right.

BACHINSKI (V.O.)
It’s gotta mean either White House
or whore house, one or the other.

We HOLD on the HUNT name, and the address notations. Then–

That’s from Goldman’s screenplay. You’ll remember that in the movie Woodward got this info from over the phone. This shows that the truth was still evolving at that time. The Times obituary states that only one of the burglars’ notebooks, not the movie’s two, had Howard Hunt’s contact info. But one notebook has less gotcha, there isn’t the same narrative oomph in following all the notebooks’ leads. One improvement of the script: the “whore house” slur. It conjures the illicit sexual undercurrent also suggested by the Deep Throat name.

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I snuck over at lunch on Thursday to check out Ryan McGinley’s photographs of Morrissey fans, Irregular Regulars. What hits you first is the way the audience in the photos is bathed in the maxed-out colors that pour over from the stage. In a sort of LSD-synaesthesia effect, the colors seem to show us how the music overwhelms them, how these fans are experiencing a transcendent-ecstatic moment. In some of the photos, you almost sense they’re experiencing the moment of transcendence before destruction. Check out this girl, she looks like the Nazi in Indiana Jones right before the ark melts his face off:

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