Money for Nuthin’ (Updated With Latest Breaking Jason Yoo News, Correction of Misspelling of Our Own Councilmember's Name)

The Wall Street Journal, which is down like white on rice (’scuse us) on Democratic Party benefactor and recently apprehended fugitive Norman Hsu, revealed Wednesday that at least one possible source of the mysterious Chinaman’s heretofore inexplicable largesse was $40 million from a fund headed by Joel Rosenman, an investment banker who, as the WSJ put it, “first gained fame as one of the creators of the Woodstock rock festival in 1969.”

Yeah! Wooden Ships on the Water! This is turning into a story imagined by Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity during a night of heavy drinking.

According to the Journal, the Rosenman-run fund, Source Financing, entered into 37 separate deals with Mr. Hsu but recently found that checks from Hsu’s Components Ltd. were being returned for insufficient funds. Hsu’s attraction for Rosenman was understandable:

Hsu told Mr. Rosenman the money would be used to manufacture apparel in China for Gucci, Prada and other private labels, yielding a 40% profit on each deal [our emphasis] …

The Journal obtained a pitch letter from Rosenman outlining the deal for prospective investors, in which the Woodstock majordomo related that the funds would be lent

“ … to U.S. private label designers that needed interim financing to fill orders for a select group of well-known, high-end U.S. apparel retailers."

… In a "step-by-step" outline of a typical transaction prepared for investors, Source Financing describes the way a deal worked with Mr. Hsu. Source Financing would agree to provide bridge loans for seasonal high-ticket, high-quality retail goods made in China for exclusive brand names, according to investors. Mr. Hsu told the company that he would obtain from Chinese manufacturers a price quote for apparel production. He would then add a mark-up and give the quote to a high-end buyer in the U.S.

Now, the Journal reports, Mr. Rosenman’s attorney is asking that the many Democratic beneficiaries of Mr. Hsu’s generosity not return the tainted (and in some cases, it would appear, illegal) campaign donations so that Source Financing and investors in other apparently non-existent Hsu ventures can recoup some of their losses. "It appears that Source Financing Investors joins Hillary Clinton...and many others as his victims," the lawyer says of the presidential candidate for whom Hsu raised $850,000 before he ran out of suckers.

Victims.

On second thought this story isn’t just a wet dream for right-wing talk hosts---it ties together almost everything that’s gone wrong with America for the past 25-30 years in one not-so-neat and still-developing narrative. Stay tuned, and beware.

Closer to home (yet oh so far away), the Chronicle’s Carolyn Feibel reported that Houston Mayor Bill White, who is said to harbor gubernatorial if not presidential aspirations, is involved in a move to unilaterally extend a “lucrative” food-sales concession at Bush Intercontinental without “a potentially messy competitive bid process.” The beneficiary of this extension would be Jason Yoo, described by the newspaper as “a local businessman” who owns JDDA Concession Management. Yoo has donated at least $28,000 in campaign funds to eight council members and $1,260 to White in the last four years, according to Feibel.

A council vote on the extension has been delayed a week by Councilmember Anne Clutterbuck, who wants the franchise to franchise outlets that sell extortionately overpriced food and drink at Terminal C put up for bid. White says he agreed to negotiate an amended contract with JDDA at the urging of some council members, whom Feibel identified as Jarvis Johnson and Michael Berry. (Update: In a Thursday follow-up Feibel and colleague Matt Stiles add the name of our very own representative on council, M.J. Khan, to the list of Yoo sponsors. Yoo, who according to the Chronicle urped up $4,000 in campaign funds for Khan, is listed as “president, construction co.” in the list of endorsements the councilman is touting in his re-election bid.) The mayor contends he’s wrangled a much better deal than if the city were to seek bids.

That may be so, but we didn’t know whether to laugh, cry or have our self voluntarily committed after reading the council members’ justifications for the extension:

"They had, I guess, a slump in business," said Berry, who received a $5,000 contribution from Yoo in 2005. "And they didn't think it was fair that the contract was up as soon as it was."

JDDA purchased the contract from the previous vendor, Entertainment One Inc., in 2005, but the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and renovations at Terminal C meant lower-than-expected revenues, according to JDDA's attorney, Robert Miller.

Johnson said the extension was the "right thing for the city to do," since food sales declined during the airport renovations.

"The new deal gives us what we need. It also gives the city more income," the councilman said. Johnson received a $2,000 contribution from Yoo this May. Yoo's daughter also worked briefly on Johnson's staff in early 2006. But Johnson and Berry denied any political favors or conflict of interest.

Yes, sure: Jason Yoo and his JDDA, a 65-percent minority-owned business, are victims of circumstance, much like Hillary Clinton and Rosenman of Woostock fame. And what about the legions of suckers who didn’t read or couldn’t understand the fine print in their mortgages … don’t they deserve an extension? Life is soooo unfair.

By the way---for those of us who don’t spend a lot of time loitering at City Hall---who is Jason Yoo?

Is he the same Jason Yoo listed on the steering committee of Friends of the Airport?

The same Jason Woo who founded HBS Construction, a certified Miniorty/Women-owned Business Enterprise and Historically Underutilized Business? (A designation apparently granted to make up for years of discrimination against Korean-Americans.)

The same Jason Yoo listed as a Friend of Bill?

The same Jason Yoo who dropped a grand on Clutterbuck, which the council member told Feibel she’s considering returning “but for reasons unrelated to the airport contract, which she declined to discuss.” Do tell, council lady: it’s the public’s business. Perhaps Clutterbuck has performed some kind of due diligence. We sure hope White has: Democrats need to be extra picky about their “friends” these days.

Would You Have Run Away from Home to Become a Beatnik If You Knew That The Man Who Wrote On the Road Lived With His Mother?

We didn’t write that headline, although we wish we had. We lifted it---stole it, we mean---from the May 1970 issue of a short-lived publication called US: The Paperback Magazine, just as we lifted (stole) our 95-cent Signet paperback copy of On the Road (“The riotous odyssey of two American drop-outs by the drop-out who started it all …”) from a defenseless little antique-y bookstore in our hometown whose name in English means Without Concern. We believe that small yet shameful act of thievery, which we may have committed under the mistaken notion that there was something Kerouacian about the gesture, occurred around 1969 or ’70. That was only 12 or 13 years after the original publication of book, but the Signet edition we five-fingered was already its 15th printing.

The printings probably have crossed into triple digits by now, Sept. 5 having marked a full 50 years since On the Road appeared, a suitable occasion or good excuse for the narrowing stratum of Americans still preoccupied with matters literary to chew over the fate of Kerouac’s work. The consensus seems to be that while it’s not a very good novel---some have even relegated it to the critical remainder bin marked “shitty,” starting with Truman Capote’s sneering, contemporaneous dismissal of Kerouac’s style as not writing but “typewriting”---it nonetheless hit America with a massive and sustained impact, leaving a deep and wide cultural crater whose outlines can be clearly discerned today, even through the obscuring haze emanating from Paris Hilton, Norman Hsu and other pure products of America.

We did not participate in this dialogue, mainly because no one asked us to but also because we read On the Road for the first and only time when we were 15 or 16, and even though we absorbed the book straight into our nervous system we haven’t retained much in the way of particulars (we do remember our delight in discovering that Kerouac/Sal Paradise's travels with Neal Cassidy/Dean Moriarty brought them along a path through South Louisiana and East Texas with which we were intimate). The book was a little different than we expected, and we recall detecting a deep sadness and yearning throughout, something our adolescent mind was not built to fully grasp and our as-yet-unkicked-ass could not relate to.

Now we find our self older than Kerouac was when he died, a bloated and sodden memoirist whom Alfred G. Aronowitz visited shortly before his passing and wrote about in the article that appeared below the purloined headline above. It is this late period Kerouac that interests us today: The homebody whose liver gave out as he sat drinking and watching I Dream of Jeanie with his mother, the middle-aged prude who shunned the excesses of the 1960s he helped set in motion, the conservative who defended the war in Vietnam and sat still (very) to be interviewed by William Buckley. Those latter developments were taken as proof of derangement by the then-ascendant cultural left, but Kerouac’s conservatism---and by that we mean we mean the “conservatism” we detect in the recent works of Bob Dylan (a deep respect for American locality, reverence for the past, an abiding love of nature and the outdoors, suspicion of modernism, cosmopolitanism, consumerism, globalism and all other isms)---was always evident in his books, and his person.

We would argue that Kerouac’s significance has been grievously underestimated: Without him, or more accurately without the influence of the poet Gary Snyder on him, the environmental movement wouldn’t have gotten the traction it did in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Without him, there would have been no “rucksack revolution” (and thus no REI catalogs and no Outside magazine). Without him, the White Negro (“At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro …”) would have been still-birthed by Mezz Mezzrow. And without his interest in and ad hoc practice of Buddhism, there would be no suburban moms spouting The Four Noble Truths and folding themselves into asanas at the Hot Body yoga class.

The only dialogue on Kerouac in which we have engaged of late came a couple of years back with a woman who was then instructing us in the practice of yoga. The Yoga Lady was a nice person but apparently resistant to irony: She drove a Lexus SUV with a “Kerry-Edwards” bumpersticker and another that said something like “Why do people move to the suburbs to enjoy nature and then cut down all trees?” One day, in the course of the idle chat that ensued before class, she was moved to say she had recently read On the Road, for some unexplained reason. “How did you like it?” asked another student, a school librarian. The Yoga Lady, who had just turned 40, made a sour face and said she did not like the book at all. “Why?” we asked. “I … um … I dunno … I think it was all the drugs, all the drug-taking.” Yes, there was much drug-taking in the book: Kerouac and his thinly fictionalized characters partaking of Benzedrine (then legal), some pot, some cheap red wine, perhaps a paregoric cigarette or two. William Burroughs shooting junk here and there; the Cassidy character with Burroughs in Houston and the two searching for a friend in "every shooting gallery in town." But all this seemed incidental to us, beside the point, and as usual we were moved to correct the record. Assuming our English professor persona, we began to expound, “Well, you have to understand the context, the times, in which it was written: It was not long after World War II, The Bomb shadowed everything, blah blah …” The Yoga Lady’s face remained blankly impassive, and our final argument sputtered to a close: “Guess you woulda had to have been there,” we shrugged, and shortly thereafter the Yoga Lady was leading us through a round of Sun Salutations.

"In the empty Houston streets at four o'clock in the morning a motorcycle kid suddenly roared through, all bespangled and bedecked with glittering buttons, visor, slick black jacket, a Texas poet of the night, girl gripped on his back like a papoose, hair flying, onward-going ... "

"Survival of the Richest," Latest Breaking

With the trial of former Coastal Corp. chairman Oscar Wyatt getting under way in New York, we figured it was only a matter of time---days, if not hours---before someone in the local media suited up to inform us of the impact the proceedings are having on Lynn Wyatt, Oscar’s wife of many, many decades and either the reigning or former heavyweight champ-een (although still looking somewhat ill-nourished) of the haute social scene hereabouts.

Sure enough, Shelby Hodge, our very own Robin Leach at the Houston Chronicle, did not disappoint. The news, so to speak, on La Wyatt is kinda bad---for the second consecutive year, she’s foregone her annual summering at a villa in the south of France, previously a 30-year tradition, to stick close to the beleaguered Big O---but it’s also kinda good, according to a long, long line of Wyatt associates and “chums” trotted out and lavishly quoted attesting to Ms. Wyatt’s chin-up attitude as the government hounds seek to run her 83-year-old husband to ground. Hodge sums it up thusly:

The approaching legal storm has failed to dampen her gusto for the extraordinary lifestyle that she has enjoyed throughout her 44-year marriage to Oscar. And the absence of a personal villa did not mean months of seclusion in sweltering Houston.

Yes, no sense in lying around here fanning yourself in the stinkin’ heat when you can jet …

back and forth across the Atlantic, attending designer Valentino's 45th-anniversary celebration in Rome, house-guesting with billionaire Lily Safra on the French Riviera and visiting Lord Jacob Rothschild's archaeological digs at his vacation home in Corfu, Greece.

Wyatt also took time in recent months for the premiere of the London revival of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat as a guest of Andrew Lloyd Webber and a Renée Fleming concert in Monte Carlo combined with a visit to the palace for personal time with Prince Albert and Princess Caroline. (She was a friend of the late Princess Grace and Prince Rainier.)

Perhaps the highlight came in July when Elton John threw a grand black-tie birthday party for the ageless fashion diva. He hosted 16 guests from around the world at his estate in Windsor, England.

Nowhere in the story, of course, is there any connection drawn or even hinted at between the maintenance of at least a small part of that extraordinary lifestyle and the millions in surcharges, or kickbacks if you will, or bribes if you still will, that Mr. Wyatt is accused of paying to Saddam Hussein’s government to buy Iraqi oil under the U.N’s oil-for-food program.

But it’s possible that such a connection is a chimera, a fevered product of small, overly moralistic minds. After all, at this late date it’s very clear that Oscar Wyatt, and possibly even Lynn, was right in warning against our invasion of Iraq (although not, perhaps, in warning the Iraqis [allegedly]). And we’re certainly willing to entertain, if not immediately embrace, Wyatt’s assertion that he’s being unfairly singled out by the vindictive Bush clan (and here’s an interesting piece pushing that line by former Georgia congressman Bob Barr). We have no standing, and few if any facts, to judge Oscar Wyatt, a bull-headed son of Grimes County who generously donated his own time and money and forbearance in dealing with nettlesome foreigners to meet America’s unceasing demand for imported oil.

Yet we must forestall the temptation to extend any of our limited store of sympathy to Oscar and his resolutely jet-setting wife after learning of last week’s death of a 21-year-old Marine from Houston, blown apart by an IED while on his second tour of duty in Iraq---according to the Chronicle, the 89th person with ties to Houston to die there since Bush launched his war. We had heard a story about this young man: It seems the mother of a boy just a little younger than the Marine ran into one of his relatives early last week, and the two women talked of how the young men were faring, with the relative relating how good the military experience had been for the young Marine, how it had helped straighten him out and turn him from a slightly wayward path. At the time the two spoke, the young man was already dead.

Casey Limps Again

Gunfire---the ritualized, celebratory kind---erupted all across southwest Houston early Sunday morning as tens, if not dozens, of the Houston Chronicle’s remaining English-language subscribers unsheathed their newspapers and beheld the news bannered in the above-the-fold “reefer” box: “Rick Casey Rides Again.”

It wasn’t too long, however, before a low collective grumble could be heard metastasizing across the concrete-covered coastal prairie, from inside the Loop to far beyond the Beltway, as the same newspaper subscribers concluded that the writer of the front-page blurb was being wickedly, if not maliciously, ironic.

After a five months-plus “sabbatical,” Casey “rode” back into town (on what sort of conveyance the paper did not reveal, although we now believe that it may have been Casey whom we spotted chugging up the roadway the other day) with a timely column on prospects for the 2009 mayoral race (a subject, by the way, that the paper’s local political columnist could and probably will address with a sharper and better-reported take, at the appropriate time and not as a mere space filler).

If Casey charged his employer for more than the hour (hour and 15 minutes tops) it took to “report” and “write” this blowsy comeback column---or dictate it to a flunky while driving between San Antonio and Houston---then advertisers should immediately demand that the Hearst Corp. slash its ad rates, because that operation obviously has way too much disposable income in its purse. The discerning reader too may have noticed that Casey apparently did not devote any of his down time to learning how to craft a memorable sentence, paragraph, etc.

Oh well. We thnk it was Nietzsche, writing in The Birth of Tragedy, a full century prior to the advent of the blog, who observed: “It’s all asswipe in the end.”

Something Spooky About The Spaghetti Warehouse, and It Ain’t the “Garlic Bread,” Apparently

That’s according to “Sandra” (we believe), who seems to have some position of the authority at the downtown restaurant, 901 Commerce at Travis, and who related the startling news to “Pat” (we think)*, hostess of the mellifluously titled Vibes: Mind, Body and Spirit on KPFT-FM, 90.1: The joint is haunted by ghosts! But they’re friendly ghosts!

Apparently everyone in town except us has been informed of this paranormality, we having missed this eight-year-old expose in the city’s leading daily newspaper (although we can’t find evidence that the once-in-a-century blockbuster has broken itself on to the paper’s front page---a shameful omission, given that the world headquarters of the Hearst Corporation’s local franchise [which we notice is looking these days like a giant, tattered, used-up prophylactic] is but a few blocks away from The Spaghetti Warehouse, and there would seem to be plenty of room for such a tale, given the paper’s unused page-one newshole reserved for that war over there in whatchamacallit). Hostess Pat said that while she was relatively new to town she had heard of the haunting from a nephew, who had learned of it from a teacher at his private school (one you can’t hang on HISD there).

Man, did we feel so out of it---us, the Mike Royko, or perhaps the Henry Timrod, of the Greater Fondren Southwest Super Neighborhood.

Anyhoo, Sandra---who according to Pat had to depart the show early to attend to a “medical crisis” that had befallen her father (and we hope he’s OK)---explained that she and the other Spaghetti Warehouse functionaries have a splendid relationship with the ghosts, who are of course the spirits of the deceased who frequented the premises when still tethered to their mortal coil (and have been photographed in their period costume, sez Pat). In fact, Sandra said she often “thanks” the ghosts for the good vibes they send forth and is careful to “give them their space” while fulfilling her restauranterly duties. Pat, whose post-Sandra guest was a guy with about 9 degrees and a delightful Irish brogue, opined that the ghosts actually added to the family ambiance of the restaurant---that is, no harm would come to you or your penne pasta---and fit nicely with The Spaghetti Warehouse motto, which, as Sandra helpfully noted, is “Great Food, All American Fun!”***

Hmmm. It’s been a long, long time since we patronized The Spaghetti Warehouse---much, much longer than it’s been since we actually sat still to listen to KPFT****---but perhaps we’ll go soon. We’d like to commune with these spirits of Olde Houston, ask ’em what they think of today’s developments: Should Metro not be bound by the supposed confines of the English language and run the University rail line down Richmond, or stick it on the Westpark Corridor, or where the sun don't shine? What of Sr. Chingo Bling? Do they enjoy his modern rhymes? Did Phil Garner deserve his fate? And what of Phil Garner’s father, or the guy who introduced himself to us as Phil Garner’s father, a Foxy Grandpa type who buttonholed us and our associate Il Pinguino***** several years ago while we were dining at The New York Bagel Shop, 9724 Hillcroft (not haunted, as far as we know), and opened the conversational gambit by inquiring whether Il and yours truly were “doctors.”******

And finally, we’d like to ask these ghosts for the straight-from-the-afterlife lowdown on the question that has all of Houston in its grip: Whither Rick Casey?

*We were driving at the time---right near, in fact, where we spotted this fellow traveler---and were unable to take notes, thus our somewhat suspect memory may be confusing Sandra with Pat and Pat with Sandra.


**Although the structure does not rate an entry that we could find in Stephen Fox’s Houston Architectural Guide, from what we could gather in a full 2-3 minutes of deep research of authoritative sources, the warehouse was built in 1912, originally was called the Desel-Bottecher (figures) building, and once housed a pharmaceutical company, during which time and use an employee plummeted to an early death down an elevator shaft, thus accounting for the haunting. Sounds real to us.


***Or something like that.


****Listening to KPFT for more than a minute or two is like being cooped-up in a stalled elevator with this guy.


*****Not affiliated with Slampo’s Place.


******Answer was "no."

In Observance of the 2nd Anniversary of Katrina ...

... If “observing” is how you’re supposed to mark these ginned-up, media-flogged occasions, you could do worse than to spend a few evenings with Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (available on DVD or through HBO’s on-demand service; it’s actually 5 parts). The series suffers from some of the same problems that afflict Lee’s movies: It’s repetitious and muddled at points, especially when the chronology shifts from the hurricane’s passing to its horrific aftermath, and fraught with the usual polemical rage. But Lee’s business here isn’t merely to lay blame (although Bush comes off as the fatally detached numbskull he is; Blanco does nothing to dispel her image as over-stressed and over her head and looks as if she consented to be interviewed at gunpoint; Nagin, who appears to have been more than eager to cooperate with the celebrity director, skates away much too easily for our taste, despite the periodic appearances of his arch-critic [among many], the historian Douglas Brinkley, whom Lee trots out to give some needed context to the proceedings).

By devoting most of the series to snippets of straight-on interviews with New Orleanians---most of them black, some white, almost all possessing that special cross-racial brio that marks the native of the city---Lee unmasks the full human face of the tragedy in a way that we found deeply moving, and we generally try to remain unmoved by anecdote or artful narrative.* One especially affecting presence is Wendell Pierce, the actor and New Orleans native who plays Baltimore homicide detective Bunk Moreland, one the best characters in the history of television drama, on HBO’s The Wire (itself a moving and dead-on exploration of slow-motion urban disasters), who evenly recounts the fucking-over his 80-year-old father sustained after the storm at the hands of his insurer. Pierce recalls how his father, after returning from World War II, scrapped together enough to buy a new house in Pontchartrain Park in Gentilly, one of the city’s first suburban enclaves for middle-class blacks. The house was destroyed by the waters and Pierce’s father relocated to Baton Rouge---a reminder of how many of the displaced were working- and middle-class homeowners with deep roots in the city, including many, many people who are now settled in Houston. Lee’s series also left us with a newfound respect for Sean Penn.

As we noted here shortly after the storm, no large municipality in the country was more ill-equipped to deal with a disaster of Katrina’s proportions than New Orleans. Along those lines, we recommend these anguished pieces in N.O.’s Gambit Weekly dealing with the recent surprise guilty plea by City Councilman Oliver Thomas for taking a $20,000 bribe from a city concessionaire---a crime he committed a couple of years before Katrina. Thomas was viewed as a conciliator and a unifier in what apparently is an increasingly racially divided city and was on track to become mayor; his downfall was especially dispiriting. The paper’s editorial on the same subject refers to the “secret fatalism” that afflicts too many people and politicians in South Louisiana**, a sobering flash of civic self-knowledge that you rarely see in the media, anywhere, especially around here .

In the meantime, it’s perhaps salient to remember that while Houston isn’t New Orleans, the city’s never been tested by a similarly scaled disaster, Alicia and Allison notwithstanding.

And we hope it stops raining soon.

*This is a joke, we think.
**Something of which we have first-hand knowledge.

Hell (Is Other People) On Wheels

The other day we were driving up North Braeswood near its intersection with Stella Link (one of Houston’s most evocatively named byways) when the traffic in the right lane suddenly slowed to a crawl, then stopped … then picked up again at an even more deliberate crawl, then stopped, then … etc. We figured there was some unannounced road work blocking the lane and traffic was backing up while motorists tried to scooch to the left, and so as usual we grew impatient and large thought balloons framing bold-faced cuss words roiled over our noggin, but we let go of our anger as we got closer to the intersection and saw the holdup: an old white guy in a ballcap, couldn’t have been a day under 80, toodling along North Braeswood on one of those Scooter Store-type scooters that had been customized for comfort with the seat from a straight-backed desk chair. He was traveling close to the curb and going no more than 5-8 mph, at best, other motorists swerving wide around him and some honking as he inched along in the 90-plus degree furnace of the mid-afternoon, seemingly oblivious to the threat of imminent if not premature death at the hands of some cell phone-entranced suburban harridan hogging the roadway in her giant Ford Expedition. We saluted the old boy and gave our horn a light tap as we moseyed around him, not in anger but in sheer awe and admiration of his grit and tenacity. He did not take either hand from the handlebars to wave back, or to remove the cigarette that dangled from his lips.