In 1995, the Independent wrote:

Conventional wisdom has it that if a Hungarian gets into a revolving door behind you, the chances are he’ll come out ahead.

Proof of the pudding here, in the New York Times:

Something wonderful happened to Martha Nierenberg in October 2000 when a trial court in Hungary said something very obvious. A fortune in artwork had been stolen from her family at the time of the German invasion of Hungary in 1944, which also ushered in one of the most horrific chapters of the Holocaust. Much of the art was hanging in plain view in the country’s two most prominent museums. It should be given back to her, the court said. The ruling was the second in her favor, and it seemed definitive.

She went to Hungary to see the magnificent paintings by El Greco, Courbet, Van Dyck and others. There were celebrations and grand plans. After decades without hope of recovering the art, after frustrating years of negotiations toward an amicable settlement after the fall of the Soviet Union, it seemed a reminder that justice could be slow, but when it arrived it was a blessed thing.

But, alas, it never arrived. The Hungarian government, eager to keep the art, appealed the ruling. That led to new trials and new arguments, each more legalistic and narrow than the one before.

So when she got more news last week it was not wonderful, but it was not unexpected. Another Hungarian appellate court in Budapest, ruled in favor of the government …

The Hungarian government claims the right to the paintings because it has had them for a long time:

 It found that the government had acquired the art through “prescription,” the principle that by possessing the property for long enough it had gained ownership of it.

Possession is nine-tenths of the law, or something. Like I said: legalized robbery.

On some days, everything you want to blog about is in the New York Times—in the Styles section!

First up, my favorite story of the year so far, which I wrote about here and for which I have nothing to add, is covered again, here:

The French President’s Lover

Bertrand Guay/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

 

SWEETHEARTS Carla Bruni, the former model, and her new boyfriend, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France.

The article suggests that Sarkozy’s ex-wife and current amour are engaged in a catfight and handicaps the fight Upshot? Bruni has it all, she’ll make a better first lady than the ex, and people hate that (unless they’re in the government, and then they wish Sarkozy would get on with it and marry her already so that he can get back to being a credible head of state):

Still, it isn’t necessarily the couplings and uncouplings and recouplings (and cheesy photo opportunities) that appear to offend so many who have tuned into a story that is less soap opera than Feydeau farce. It is the unspoken sense that it is unseemly for those so materially blessed and genetically gifted to want more.

And it may also be the cheekbones. “People always secretly hate the rich and beautiful,” said Long Nguyen, the editor of Flaunt magazine, … “It’s not a matter of whether ex-model is a career path for a first lady. It’s that nobody can stand a person who has it all.”

Ms. Bruni is the daughter of classical musicians, and she speaks three languages; she is also a bestselling musician herself, as well as a former model:

Gerard Julien/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Ms. Bruni on the catwalk for Yves Saint Laurent in Paris in 1995.

Intellectual honesty compels me to point out that in the past, I have been grossed out by American politicians’ PDAs.

I don’t know why I’m more tolerant of the French president’s very public love affair. I won’t try to justify my deeply lowbrow interest in this story. It is news, however. I don’t remember anything like it in my lifetime (except, vaguely, Rudy and Judi’s love affair—and that went over like a lead balloon, including with me).

Here’s another fun story from the Times:

Has Gawker Jumped the Snark?

By ALLEN SALKIN

Gawker, the gossip Web site, seems to be in the midst of a particularly intense period of turmoil, which has led to a slide in its once-hypnotic influence on the news media world.

The setup:

“THE ideal Gawker item,” Nick Denton, the owner of Gawker Media, wrote in an instant message last month to a prospective hire, “is something triggered by a quote at a party, or an incident, or a story somewhere else and serves to expose hypocrisy, or turn conventional wisdom on its head.

Indeed, that’s the perfect gossip item. And gossip has traditionally been a weapon of the powerless against the powerful [which is one reason I do not criticize infotainment--i.e., institutionalized gossip--but rather accept it; in the media age, gossip may be even a more potent weapon than ever against the powerful] , as Gail Collins wrote in her entertaining and informative book Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity, and American Politics [e.a.]:

For much of human history, [gossip] was one of the few weapons available to the powerless: servants who spread stories about their masters, peasants who irreverently speculated about the most private aspects of life in the manor. … In American history, gossip has sometimes been a reaction against heavily marketed politicians who voters might suspect were being thrust upon them against their will.

Back to Gawker. The Times describes a situation in which Gawker moved from criticizing the powerful to attacking the powerless:

Before the wave of staff departures at Gawker, New York magazine published an article in October ascribing the site’s popularity to the resentment of the city’s “creative underclass,” and asked whether pandering to the nasty impulses of those who covet an increasingly rare slot among the news media establishment troubled the souls of Gawker’s writers.

N+1, a culture journal, followed with a thoroughly researched essay noting how Gawker’s voice has changed with successive editors, descending from a homespun blog that smartly sniped about editors like Tina Brown and Anna Wintour, whose prominence arguably opened them to sarcastic comment, to its current state as a cruel behemoth, eviscerating low-level editors and people’s children.

Gawker didn’t “jump the shark.” It was eviscerated by New York magazine and then cut to pieces and stomped into the ground by N+1 (with which Gawker had had a long and not so illustrious history).

The downfall, from the N+1 piece [e.a.]:

Gawker had always sold itself as mean but it now became, actually, very mean. …

If they had only pursued Tara Reid, Fred Durst, and other amateur celebrity pornographers, Gawker simply would have become another version of its own, Denton-owned, Los Angeles spinoff, Defamer.com. Instead, Coen took it upon herself to defame all-but-anonymous people who, within the context of the New York media apparatus, might have seemed like the equivalent of ingénue actresses and other easy-target celebrities.

Taking the form but lacking the content of tabloid magazines and websites, Coen and a succession of guest and co-editors besieged essentially private people, who for the most part did not have the audience or influence of Gawker.

Yep. And now it’s over (though Gawker is still alive, no one reads it anymore: that was the point of the Times piece).

For those of you who missed it, the actual end of Gawker was fascinating. It was described “live,” so to speak by Gawker’s Emily Gould, in this post. Twenty years from now, Gawker will be a distant memory, known to only a handful of people. Its cultural moment is over.

Back from cultural limbo, however, are American heroes from the 1980s.

Tough Guys for Tough Times

By ALEX WILLIAMS

At a time when the country is faced with a new tangle of problems, the return of the ’80s action hero suggests that some Americans, particularly men, are looking to revel in the vestigial pleasures of older times and seemingly simpler ways.

Finally, the New York Times has noticed that our pop culture lags behind reality so badly that people have to turn to “icons” from the 1980s like Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone to serve as role models for 2007. And—surprise, surprise!—it works! Because there seems to be a familiar American archetype in demand among Americans: the hero [e.a.]:

This is a moment in American history bedeviled by a sinking economy, the possibility of environmental catastrophe and violent conflicts in the Middle East and beyond. So it’s not surprising to see men who were raised on cartoonish images of the fictional John Rambo taking out more Soviet soldiers in two hours than the Afghan mujahedeen did in a decade show an appetite for characters who tend to fix even big problems with room-clearing brawls, monosyllabic wisecracks and large-caliber firearms. …

Judith Halberstam, a professor of English and gender studies at the University of Southern California … said that these living G.I. Joes communicate a “not-so-deep code of American exceptionalism,” as well as the American instinct to cut through obfuscation with plain talk and “to not bother with politics, just go in with force and fix things.”

So get ready for red-blooded action stories (and conspiracy stories and spy thrillers, the paranoid counterpart of hero epics) to come roaring back … once Hollywood gets back to its senses and starts making stuff that people want to see again.

The article does note one point that needs elaborating … sometime:

Indeed, heroic caricatures seem comparatively less cartoonish at a time when nonfiction heroes like Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds have been tarnished by accusations of fraud, said David Zinczenko, editor in chief of Men’s Health.

Are sports stars “heroes”? I don’t think so.

I think the current craving is for heroes, not for celebrities. More about this another time.

Actually, I’m torn about whether building skyscrapers and other outlandish structures on a foundation of sand in the Persian Gulf is progress, but I am drawn to pictures of Dubai.

The Burj Dubai tower rises in Dubai. The world’s tallest building since July 2007, it has also become the tallest free-standing structure on earth.

Here’s one more:

And here’s a totally mind-blowing one. Picture this: your own private island in a new world—and it’s not in Second Life, either:

The same company that brought us The Palm Islands, Al Nakheel Properties (Nakheel Corp), have done it again expanding their portfolio of man-made islands with this latest Dubai island project shaped like the continents of the world. The World will consist of between 250 to 300 smaller private artifical islands divided into four categories - private homes, estate homes, dream resorts, and community islands. Each island will range from 250,000 to 900,000 square feet in size, with 50 to 100 metres of water between each island. The development is to cover an area of 9 kilometers in length and 6 kilometers in width, surrounded by an oval shaped breakwater. The only means of transportation between the islands will be by marine transport.