Week in review

A Hodgepodge of Underworld News

By Dana Goldstein and Functionaries

I Only Use Cocaine Medicinally

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illustration by Alyssa Xu
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Are we really surprised that Kate Moss, wearing fantastic black hot pants and knee-high boots, snorted coke off a table in a London recording studio while her rock star boyfriend laid down tracks for his newest album? Everyone put on a shocked face, especially that compass of morality in a stormed-tossed world of imagistic folly known as the fashion industry. H&M, Chanel, Burberry, and jeweler H. Stern canceled their modeling contracts with Moss who, as it turns out, was actually doing what her eerily beautiful laconic skeleton-body appeared to be doing: speedball or nose candy, lady flake or angel dust, white gold, powder or as it is demotically known: cocaine.

Here at the Indy, which has spent the last several years in a methadone clinic, we ask: who expects super models to be role models? Who expects, for that matter, writers not to sell their families' heirlooms for a little blow when beauty, youth, sex, money and fashionable good taste all demand it? You thought mirrors were for looking into?

Moss was "discovered" at the age of 14 in John F. Kennedy airport in New York, and became a sensation in the early nineties when she posed for a Calvin Klein underwear campaign. Roving through the virtual global gallery for images of Moss, if done quickly, is like watching ghostly grey film reels from the silent era. Instead of Buster Keaton, though, whose gaunt-faced resemblance to Moss has thus far gone unnoticed, one gets a wan little girl with curls of hair covering her boyish breasts.

When your most marketable assets are a doe-eyed, drug-addled gaze and a childlike body, it isn't a stretch to imagine a lifetime's worth of self-esteem issues. Today the 31-year old Moss, mother of a two-year old girl, doesn't look much different than she did a decade and a half ago. Though falling flagrantly short of the fearsome Amazonian perfection of her supermodel predecessors (quite literally: Moss is only 5'7"), her adolescent proportions and elfin good looks still lend her a winsome air of rebellious cheek that made her the face of nineties Cool Britannia. In the grand tradition of beautiful girls led astray (i.e. to rehab) by the insidious trappings of fame, Moss offered these seasoned words of wisdom:

"In fashion, excess is not for creative purposes, whatever people may say. It's about escapism. You just have to get out of it to deal with it." H&M et al hoped to escape a PR blunder by dropping Moss. But a little bit, or even a lot, of coke is unlikely to end the career of such a strangely arresting model. In fact, with Pete Doherty (starry-eyed junkie-minstrel of Libertines fame) for a boyfriend and a legacy as the queen of heroin chic, perhaps we should find it refreshing that a celebrity is actually living up to her hype.

—AZ and SG's fault

Institutional Triumphalism

One hundred students from the New Orleans universities Tulane, Dillard and Xavier arrived on Brown's campus during the past three weeks, where they were promised a free semester's worth of classes. But due to Tulane University's tuition policy in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, it seems that Brown's charity will end up subsidizing the structural rehabilitation of Tulane, not only the education of its students.

At convocation on September 6, Brown President Ruth Simmons announced that billionaire liquor-importer Sidney Frank, who last year donated $100 million to the University to support financial aid, had given Brown another $5 million to fund the University's effort to support victims of Hurricane Katrina and rebuild Dillard University, the New Orleans historically black college that is Simmons' alma mater. But the promise of a free semester of college has dried up for the displaced students—Tulane has told its students that if they plan to continue at Tulane in the spring without reapplying and want to transfer credits they earn elsewhere this semester, they will have to pay Tulane fall tuition in full by Dec. 1.

The Tulane website, which has turned into a blog updating students, parents, and staff members on the school's post-hurricane status, tells students "you are a Tulane University student regardless of where you are attending classes this fall" and explains "this arrangement allows affected colleges including Tulane to maintain their long-term viability without having to deplete their endowments and other resources."

The policy elicited a shrug from Ariana Reid, a Tulane senior who has chosen to take the semester off from school and look for a job at home in the New York suburbs. "At least I know I'm getting my money back," she said.

Hero Worship

When Holocaust survivor and human rights activist Simon Wiesenthal died last week, the international press had a delicate task on its hands: eulogizing a righteous man who had lived through the worst of human atrocities, yet whose superhero-styled "Nazi hunting" raised the ire of critics.

During World War II, Wiesenthal survived a mass execution of Jews in his hometown, then later escaped from the Janowska concentration camp in Poland. When he was recaptured several months later, he made two unsuccessful suicide attempts. After liberation, Wiesenthal devoted himself to tracking down individual perpetrators of war crimes. But despite successes in bringing several Nazi concentration camp administrators to justice—as well as the Gestapo officer who arrested Anne Frank—Wiesenthal's role in the celebrated 1960 capture of Adolf Eichman has been called inflated, and his name was attached to many false sightings of Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi doctor known for his cruel experimentation on human subjects.

The Leftist French daily Libération proclaimed that while Wiesenthal was committed to justice, he was also "a bit crazy" in his devotion to Nazi hunting. The New York Times' obituary quoted a French critic who had called Wiesenthal an "egomaniac." To the Washington Post, Wiesenthal was simply "controversial." But most commentators agreed that Wiesenthal was a hero simply for refusing to let the world forget that the perpetrators of mass murder were living amongst us. Though the notion of "Nazi hunting" lent a film noir flavor to the serious work of picking up the pieces of Western civilization in the wake of World War II, Wiesenthal chose a tactic, that, for all its sensationalism, forced the world to remember that it was real people who carried out Hitler's Final Solution, not a faceless bureaucracy.

Turkey In Denial

As the Turkish government prepares to commence European Union membership talks on Oct. 3, two court cases dealing with freedom of speech have embarrassed politicians anxious to portray Turkey as a nation with an EU-ready human rights policy. In an act of civil disobedience, Bogazici University in Istanbul hosted an academic conference last Saturday on the topic of the Ottoman massacre of Armenians in Eastern Turkey between 1915 and 1917. The massacre, which Hitler allegedly cited as an example of modern society's ability to turn a blind eye to genocide, saw the death of over a million Armenians at the hands of the Turkish government. A court order had canceled the conference—the first public discussion in Turkey about the genocide in fifty years. Speaking openly about the genocide in an interview with a Swiss newspaper has also gotten celebrated Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk into trouble; he's set to appear in court Dec. 16, facing charges of defiling the national character. Pamuk faces up to four years imprisonment.

The government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has condemned the ruling in the academic conference case and said charges should not have been brought against Pamuk. As a signatory to both the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights, the Turkish government has indicated its willingness to allow freedom of speech. In May 2004, Turkey hosted the 57th World Newspaper Congress—a confab of newspaper publishers and editors from around the world—in part to signal its new acceptance of press freedoms.

But the Erdogan government faces resistance from Turkey's entrenched bureaucracy, which over the past century has consistently advocated more militaristic and nationalistic policies than elected national governments. Human Rights Watch supports Turkey's membership in the EU on the grounds that it would force continued human rights reforms in the country. But in Europe, legitimate economic and political concerns about Turkey's readiness has meshed with a streak of xenophobia, creating overall resistance to Turkey's proposed EU membership. Europeans aren't likely to be sympathetic to the Erdogan's government's difficulties in pushing Turkey toward the West.

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