A Slight Delay

 My wife and I once spent the better part of a day trying to find a restaurant in New Jersey that served authentic Puerto Rican food. It didn’t turn out to be the easiest thing. I could think of one place in Elizabeth called La Lechonera, but I refused to go back to Elizabeth on general principle, and she remembered a little spot in Lakewood called Yolanda’s Coqui, which was a disappointment. So we were back to square one. Even though New Jersey doesn’t lack for other kinds of Caribbean, central- and south-American, it’s nigh-impossible to find an explicitly Boricua restaurant.

What’s ironic, though, is that Puerto Rico–at least outside of Viejo San Juan–wasn’t exactly an embarrasment of riches when it came to Puerto Rican food either. Luckily, however, it’s not all Chinese, McDonald’s and Pollo Tropical. Read on for a bit of what we found.

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 So we’ve just returned from Puerto Rico. Armed with the knowledge of a week in the Commonwealth, I feel fully qualified to offer this travel guide for your time on the Island of Enchantment.  

We’d been warned 1,277 times (conservative estimate) about not drinking the water and told to avoid the streets of San Juan after dark, but this advice, however well-intentioned, only goes so far. The following article picks up where the usual advice leaves off, letting you know where you can find those little touches of home throughout the island, so that you can alleviate homesickness, and so you need not be exposed to the local arts and culture, much less the locals themselves. Fear not; you’ll find reminders of home nearly everywhere you go.

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In “Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast,” author Patrick McGilligan states that one of the director’s first projects upon coming to America was “Hell Afloat,” a story based on the 1934 Morro Castle fire. It was to have been a typically Langian scenario, full of spies, saboteurs, intrigue, and double-crossing. What the new arrival may not have realized at the time, but would become startlingly apparent over the course of an investigation launched while the liner still burned on the beach off Asbury Park, is that the story of the S.S. Morro Castle already had intrigue to spare. The people involved could have been made to order by central casting, a motley assortment that included communists, dope smugglers, a haunted and suspicious captain dead under suspicious circumstances, one radio operator suspected of being an agitator and saboteur, and another–the disaster’s unlikely hero–a pedophile and psychopath beneath an unassuming exterior.

The investigation would stretch on for weeks, with passengers, crew, and experts being interviewed and cross-examined. Much as the disaster had been the first to be covered on the radio, so too would the investigation be brought into people’s living rooms. What unfolded may have struck some like a soap opera; passengers accusing seamen and officers of neglect of duty and gross incompetence, while the ship’s crew in turn blamed the passengers for panic and drunkenness and blamed one another for lack of foresight and dereliction of duty, just for good measure. The press, in the meantime, found no rumor or innuendo too small or far-fetched to report. The Morro Castle had run guns to Cuba, and this raised speculation that Communists had set the blaze; the commission also allowed that it might have been spontaneous combustion. Rumors also circulated of looters, stolen jewels, officers shooting sailors, and any number of other things. This is perhaps understandable, in a sense; when the “safest ship afloat” burns in sight of shore with the rapidity of celluloid, anything else must also have seemed possible. In the meantime, the ship’s radio operator George Rogers let slip–after a show of hesitation–that he suspected his assistant radio operator, George Alagna.

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A short time after 3 in the morning on September 8, 1934, hysteria seemed to have gripped the Morro Castle as surely as the flames that were consuming the ships’s superstructure. Deck B, where the fire had originated in the ship’s Writing Room, was all but lost, while on Deck A, the flames were closing in on the lifeboats, radio room, and wheelhouse. Decks C and D fared little better, though at least the aft sections of both decks were–for the time being–clear of fire, if not of the bitter, acrid smoke given off by the ship’s wood furnishings and paneling, not to mention layer upon layer of highly inflammable paint, varnish, and polish.

The more passengers awoke, the greater the confusion in the ship’s smoke- and fire-choked passageways. Some passengers were roused by the smell of smoke, some when friends and family pounded on stateroom doors; still others woke to the sounds of stewards clattering pots and pans, or one of the ship’s musicians blowing reville. Nearly all were astonished to find that the fire had not, in fact, been raging for hours while they slept; it was nearly incomprehensible that so much of the vessel should burn so quickly.

The fire’s rapid spread, and accompanying smoke, quickly made the ship’s elevator impassible, and the stairways in public spaces fared no better. While the ship’s crew were aware of, and made use of, steel-sheathed companionways to move between decks, most passengers (save for a few who had been directed to the companionways by crew members) were unaware of their existance. Some passengers were also reluctant to brave the smoke and flames to reach the boats when the fire was less intense, only to find that the way was impassible when they’d finally mustered the courage to try for the lifeboats.

Consequently, most of the passengers, and many of the crew who had tried to help them, found themselves faced with a grim choice: jump–chancing the dark, churning waters in terrible weather conditions–or burn. Some of the crew had, when the fire first broke out, thrown anything bouyant that they could find overboard, in hopes of giving those who jumped over the rails something to cling to. Before the ship’s engines were shut down and the anchor dropped, however, this simply meant that the ship–moving at close to 20 knots into a headwind of about 20-30 miles per hour–left a long wake of flotsam as she moved up the Jersey shore. The fact that the ship was underway also meant certain death for many who jumped overboard and were sucked into her twin screws.

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Captain Robert Wilmott could recite her vital statistics from memory, and often did as he gave passengers a tour of the T.E.L. Morro Castle’s bridge. 11,520 gross tons. 508 feet from stem to stern. 70 foot beam. Turboelectric motors capable of producing 16,000 horsepower, and driving the ship upwards of 20 knots.

As if this weren’t enough, advanced fire detection systems covered the ship’s staterooms and cargo holds, complementing an equally advanced set of fire supression measures; naval architecture had, it seemed, come a long way since the General Slocum fire claimed 1,100 lives scarcely thirty years before. And, in addition, enough lifeboats, life jackets, floats, and other paraphernalia were available to save well over three times the ship’s passengers and crew when the ship was travelling fully loaded–which, in the depths of the Great Depression, didn’t usually happen. Captain Wilmott could often be heard boasting to passengers that the Morro Castle was safer than crossing Times Square; in 1933, after all, she had weathered a hurricane off the Carolinas that had been severe enough to send waves nearly the height of the vessel’s bridge and knock out the ship’s radio system, suffering no more than a handful of wet blankets. When a passenger asked the captain what he would do if he ever had to give up command of the Morro Castle, he joked, “Well, in that case, I’ll take her with me.”

For their part, the ship’s owners, the Ward Line, boasted that this was the safest ship afloat. But a vessel–even one like the Morro Castle, whose design was the state of the art when it was launched in 1930–is only as good as the officers and seamen that staff it. For all the care put into the ship’s design and construction, for all the attention paid to its lavish interiors that called to mind a swanky hotel, not nearly as much effort was put into making sure that the ship’s crew were equal to the task of maintaining and sailing a safe ship.

While the ship’s officers, from her captain to her fourth officer, were all licensed to operate vessels of any tonnage anywhere in the world (and a number of other staff, like her watchman, held mate’s certificates), the Ward Line’s hiring practices were notoriously lax. Crew turnover, especially among the seamen who worked in the bowels of the ship and kept things running in good order, was astonishingly high, resulting in a lack of crew cohesion that would have disastrous consequences later. 

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Since tomorrow is the 75th anniversary of the Morro Castle Disaster, I’ve added a page of links and information on the Morro Castle with useful links and resources. The next few days will see further posts as well. Stay tuned.

It’s official. Glenn Beck has lost it. There are splinters in the windmills of his mind. He is completely, utterly, batshit crazy. This, to far too many on the right, is what currently passes for discourse in civil society. Beck talks of “sav[ing] the Republic,” but one could be forgiven for wondering how, exactly, he plans to save himself. Here, courtesy of Daily Kos, is a distillation of a week’s worth of Beck marginalia.

Yet again, I’m going to be fashionably late getting this out, but it’s been sticking in my craw for a little while now, so here goes nothing.

For all the attention paid to the back-and-forth over healthcare, our ongoing difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan, an economy that’s still apparently built on feet of clay, and a myriad of other issues, the one thing that’s really beginning to piss me off is the lack of anything resembling intelligent debate coming from the Right. It isn’t as though the proposals currently being floated to resolve any of these problems are so perfect as to not need, or deserve, thorough debate. But what we’ve gotten instead is more smoke than substance. Rather than disrupting, trying to pre-empt, or attempting to shut down, the debate, I would much sooner see something approaching concrete and realistic proposals.

What we’ve gotten instead is… this: Glenn Beck informing people that “Obama has a hatred of white people, of white culture.”

The question is, what “white culture”? I think it’s idiotic to talk about a singular, monolithic “white culture” in the same way I think it’s pretty dumb to put a Jesse Jackson or an Al Sharpton out front as a “black leader.” For all the complaints from the right about multiculturalism, the plain truth is that the United States has, from its earliest times, been multicultural. It isn’t just differences in skin color that create identity; even people who self-identify as Americans without any kind of hyphenated modifier being involved will generally acknowledge that they’re not rooted in some nebulous white-ness, but in a specific set of identifiers. Their ancestry comes from Ireland, Poland, Germany, what-have-you, and while people leave the physical geography behind them, they invariably bring something of the psychological geography—language, cuisine, customs, folkways—with them when they emigrate. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a long, strange trip for Gustavo Cerati. The guitarist and vocalist, who turned fifty yesterday, started out as the front man for the ridiculously popular¹ Argentine band Soda Stereo. In 1993, while Soda Stereo was still active, he released his first solo effort, Amor Amarillo, which contained elements that would be blended–in various proportions–ever since; cryptic lyrics², gentle ambience, hot shit guitar playing, and radio-friendly songcraft played off against a slightly skewed sonic and melodic sensibility.

In 1999, scarcely two years after Soda Stereo broke up, Cerati released Bocanada, which sounded like a continuation of the more ambient bits of Soda’s last studio disc, Sueño Stereo. As albums go, it’s a staid, downtempo affair that manages to sound like the better bits of the Cure in places (only Cerati is a better vocalist and guitarist than Robert Smith, and doesn’t have Smith’s dry white whine). When it was followed, a few years later, by Siempre es Hoy, some fans (present company included) enjoyed the techno shadings and electronic squiggles while others wondered where in the hell the guitar had gone, and whether Cerati had lost the plot.³

And then, with Ahi Vamos, Cerati found the guitar, and the plot, again. Tracks like “Dios nos Libre” and “Bomba de Tiempo” were mostly-unadulterated straightforward rock, suggesting that the musician had come to a kind of uneasy peace with the Soda Stereo days, and marking a return to form. Which brings us–in typically roundabout fashion–to the upcoming Fuerza Natural. Read the rest of this entry »