Pedro Rodriguez, a 54-year-old Algonquin staffer who had cleaned rooms at the hotel for more than 30 years, was hit by a truck and killed in front of the hotel yesterday, the New York Post reports. It’s been a sad year as well as a celebratory one for the hotel staff; last May a waiter named Ismael Kurkculer was murdered in Jersey City. If anyone knows whether that crime was ever solved, please let me know.

Garry Kaspaov at the New Yorker Festival

COMMENTARY
Anna Politkovskaya
By GARRY KASPAROV
NEW YORK — The news came when I was getting ready to sit down in front of an audience with the New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, at the New Yorker Festival on Saturday. Suddenly we had a tragic new topic for our talk about the crisis in Russia today. Anna Politkovskaya was dead, shot down in cold blood in her apartment building. One of the few remaining voices of independent journalism in Russia, Anna was a fearless journalist best known for her reporting on the government’s atrocities in Chechnya.
To know Anna was to know how profoundly she cared. She felt the pain of others deeply and communicated that passion in her work. She documented the illegal acts of the Russian security forces in the Northern Caucasus and the brutality of Ramzan Kadyrov and other Kremlin proxies in the region. She tenaciously investigated the government cover-ups around the Beslan and the Nord-Ost theater terrorist attacks, in which hundreds of civilians were killed. She took on the most sensitive stories and the most painful subjects. She was an inspiration because she was never intimidated, because she never wrote a line she didn’t believe in passionately.
And on Saturday — President Vladimir Putin’s 54th birthday — Anna Politkovskaya was murdered. Her killers made no attempt to disguise what their act was, no attempt to make it look like anything other than a politically motivated assassination. Even Russian politicians who always worked to contradict and downplay her reports are calling it a political murder.
But what does that mean in a country where one person is in control of everything? This brutal episode cannot be taken outside the context of recent events in Russia. The forces in control here are facing an impending crisis and fault lines are beginning to appear in the Kremlin’s vertical power structure. The authoritarian structure that Mr. Putin has built in Russia has been very profitable for his circle of friends and supporters. Income is siphoned off from every region of the country. Business and politics have been combined into a streamlined process for bleeding the nation dry. Now, however, Mr. Putin and his associates are approaching a dilemma. The president’s term of office ends in 2008 and this efficient machine is threatening to explode. Should Mr. Putin stay or should he go?
The chaos that will surely occur if Mr. Putin leaves office is relatively easy to understand. Any mafia-like structure is based on the authority of the top man. If he leaves, or appears weak, there is a bloody scramble for his position. Whoever wins that battle must then eliminate the others to consolidate his grip, so the fighting is fierce. Perhaps only 10% of the combatants will pay in blood or incarceration and ruin, but nobody knows who will be in that 10%.
To avoid that dangerous uncertainty, some of Mr. Putin’s closest lieutenants are dedicated to making sure the top man stays right where he is. The problem with this plan is that Mr. Putin is constitutionally prevented from staying in office beyond the end of his term in 2008. The main obstacle is not the Constitution, which can be easily adjusted to the Kremlin’s requirements; the obstacle is that, after he has made so many statements about his intent to step down in 2008, Mr. Putin would lose almost all his legitimacy in the West if he exercised this option. Of course, his regime has never shown concern for the voices of America and Europe, and feeble indeed those voices have been. But the money his associates have become so adept at squeezing from Russian assets resides almost entirely in Western banks. If the Russian government loses its veneer of legitimacy, these accounts could begin to receive an unpleasant amount of scrutiny.
So what can the ruling elite do to avoid both the chaos of succession and the loss of easy relations with Europe and the U.S.? The answer is becoming clearer every day if you read the headlines and look at the big picture. The Kremlin is exaggerating and fabricating one crisis after another, all combining to create an image of imminent peril. Those who believe they have burned every bridge and cannot afford to see Mr. Putin step down are trying to build a case that he is the only alternative to anarchy.
The political showdown with Georgia has led to a government-sponsored racist campaign against Georgians living in Russia. Mr. Putin’s latest statement on this issue was trumpeted as a major victory by Russian ultranationalists, who were delighted to hear his unequivocal endorsement of their platform. Inflammatory language of this sort is, of course, prohibited by our Constitution, which the president is sworn to protect. But what of that!
I am not even certain whether or not Mr. Putin himself desires to stay on. It’s a stressful job and he certainly will not lack for material comforts when he retires, unless of course the next government finds itself in need of a scapegoat.
There is little to be gained from speculating about who exactly ordered the murder of Anna Politkovskaya. The system that encouraged the crime, the logic that made it politically expedient for some of those in power, that is the true face of Mr. Putin’s Russia. This is the same Russia that chairs the G-8 and the same Russian leader who received the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor from Jacques Chirac. With the assassination of Anna Politkovskaya, the forces of corruption and repression in Russia have now made it plain that there is nothing they won’t do to stay in power. This is obviously bad news for my country. But it is catastrophic for every nation that these forces continue to receive the approval of the leaders of the free world.
Mr. Kasparov, former world chess champion, is chairman of the United Civil Front in Russia.

From the NYT:

Stanley Kunitz, the former poet laureate of the United States who died in May at 100, will be celebrated in a free memorial tribute on Sept. 20 at the 92nd Street Y. Among those scheduled to reminisce and read from his work are the poets Mark Doty, Sharon Olds, Marie Howe, Galway Kinnell and Genine Lentine, and Gretchen Kunitz, his daughter. Mr. Kunitz had a long association with the Unterberg Poetry Center at the Y, first reading there in 1958. An archival film of one of his appearances is to be shown. Information: (212) 415-5500.

Related on Emdashes:
Stanley Kunitz, 1905-2006

The five-year mark of the death of Alice Trillin.

Calvin Trillin wrote about his wife in the March 27 issue of the magazine. (There’s a short excerpt here.) It’s worth finding, and saving.

September 11, 2001
Photo © Markus Leutwyler

Photo by Markus Leutwyler, who I was with that day. More of his gallery from that day and week can be found here.

In the haze of afternoon,
while the air flowed saffron,
I played my game for keeps—
for love, for poetry,
and for eternal life—
after the trials of summer.
—From “The Testing-Tree”

From the Post obituary:

In later years, [Kunitz] voiced contempt for the Vietnam War, U.S. support for right-leaning juntas in Central America and the U.S.-led war against Iraq. “The poet can’t change anything,’ he said, “but the poet can demonstrate the power of the solitary conscience.”
…
Mr. Kunitz was regarded as a mentor to many poets, including two future poet laureates, Louise Gluck and Robert Hass, as well as Sylvia Plath.
“Essentially,” he once said, “what I try to do is to help each person rediscover the poet within himself. I say ‘rediscover,’ because I am convinced that it is a universal human attribute to want to play with words, to beat out rhythms, to fashion images, to tell a story, to construct forms.”
He added: “The key is always in his possession: what prevents him from using it is mainly inertia, the stultification of the senses as a result of our one-sided educational conditioning and the fear of being made ridiculous or ashamed by the exposure of his feelings.”

R.I.P.

Sad news from the Robert Benchley Society:

With sadness the Robert Benchley Society notes the passing, at age 65, of Peter Benchley, author of the novel Jaws (1974) The Deep (1976), Beast (1991), and White Shark (1994). He is survived by his wife, Wendy.
Peter Benchley was the son of writer Nathaniel Goddard Benchley, grandson of humorist, theatre critic, and actor Robert Benchley, and brother of actor Nat Benchley.
We send our condolences to the family of Peter Benchley.

Here’s a list of Benchley’s publications and a little more about his career.
Update: Here’s the Times Online story:

Mr Benchley later expressed regret for portraying sharks as creatures that target human beings. Thanks to the book and Spielberg’s film, which remains one of the ten highest-grossing movies after being adjusted for inflation, millions of beachgoers thought twice before venturing into the ocean.

I was pretty young when the movie came out, but I saw the TV trailer and that was it—no swimming in the small lake near our house for the rest of the summer. Sure, there were mostly carp in there, and algae, but one couldn’t take any chances. Now I know sharks are lovely creatures (most of the time), and freshwater Wisconsin sharks are fairly rare. R.I.P., P.B.
Update: Here’s my pal Morgan at Watershed on shark attack rules, courtesy of the best shark B-movies.

This is sad news. Putting aside Penn’s cooler credits for a moment, I’ll always be fondest of his Willard Hewitt in Footloose. If you haven’t watched the newest DVD, with its extremely pleasing commentary track, you should for Penn’s sake alone.

Eldon Dedini, the Monterey Peninsula cartoonist whose artistry and humor graced slick American magazines for a half century, died Thursday of cancer at his Carmel-area home. He was 84.
Well-known for full-page panels depicting saucy satyrs and curvaceous, rosy-cheeked nymphs in Playboy magazine, Dedini was remembered as a top professional who blended his loves of life, art and learning into an immediately recognizable style.
“If 20th century cartooning is ever looked at seriously,” said Lee Lorenz, former art director at The New Yorker magazine, “Eldon Dedini will be one of the outstanding figures of American comic art.”
…
A King City native, Dedini was born June 29, 1921. He became infatuated with cartooning as a boy, when he would pore over “comic books” his mother made for him from the Sunday comics section in the newspaper. One of his favorites was Popeye, and he strived to imitate the spinach-fueled sailor.
Dedini studied at Salinas Junior College, as Hartnell College was then known, where an art teacher’s encouragement led to his first published cartoon in a Salinas newspaper. It depicted the city’s crumbling train depot.
“You’ve got to start somewhere,” Dedini said of that humble beginning. Within a few years, he was a staff cartoonist for Esquire magazine, where he worked from 1942 to 1955.
…
In Southern California, Dedini worked a couple of years doing storyboards for Walt Disney Studios, while sending off cartoons to magazines. His first cartoon in The New Yorker was published in 1950, the same year he moved to the Monterey Peninsula.
…
Dedini fashioned his cartooning from serious studies of art and human beings.
“He was kind of a scholar of human nature,” Carey said. “All his life he was growing and learning. He was a voracious reader,… always looking for clues.”
Dedini’s son said his father reveled in life and appreciated “food, wine, people, humor, history, travel, family, sex, beautiful women and the outdoors.”
…
A 1957 collection of cartoons from Esquire carried a blurb about those days by Dedini that still resonates for his son. It seems to sum up the gusto Dedini found in life.
“(He wrote) ‘With a small group of paisanos we meet in Doc’s old place and study wine, jazz and philosophy,”’ his son said, reading from the book. “That really fits. I like that.”
Dedini married his wife, painter Virginia Conroy, after they met studying art in Los Angeles. Their marriage lasted more than 60 years.
Dedini may have painted bawdy cartoons for Playboy every month that, as his brother-in-law said, divined the “essence of female femaleness,” but he was very much a Tory during the sexual revolution the magazine trumpeted.
“In his own relationships he was very conservative,” Carey said.
…
For nine years, his cartoons were the centerpiece of a campaign for Mann Packing Co.’s broccoli. A retrospective show on his career in Salinas last year was aptly called “From Babes to Broccoli.”
Dedini, the hard-working humorist, wasn’t thrilled with the show’s title, but the professional in him acknowledged: “It’s all right. It works.”
That’s what Dedini did, too. He worked and worked hard. And he always made deadlines.
“He had a heavy work ethic,” Carey said. “He knew that was the way things get done.”
Said Lorenz of his dealings with Dedini for The New Yorker: “He was tough to edit because he didn’t need much editing. I never asked him to redraw, which at The New Yorker is quite unusual.”
Dedini once dismissed the illustrative side of his art, saying millions of people can draw but a good gag — a caption that distills the drawing’s humor — is the elusive side of cartooning.
“That’s not true,” Lorenz said. “While a million people can draw, very few can cartoon well. To be a cartoonist you have to be a stylist, and that’s not easy to come by. It transcends any technique.”

Still, Dedini was a very good “idea man,” Lorenz said. “He had a wide-ranging imagination.”
Urry said one of the joys of her job was looking at Dedini’s cartoons that Playboy never published. “He was very funny,” she said. “I think it was wonderful he came down to earth for us.”
Dedini is survived by his wife, Virginia; his son, Giulio, of San Luis Obispo; his brother, Delwin, of King City; four nieces and one nephew.
Services for Dedini will be held at 1 p.m. Jan. 21 at All Saints Episcopal Church, Ninth and Dolores, in Carmel. The Paul Mortuary of Pacific Grove is in charge of arrangements.

Another Playboy/New Yorker career combination, like that of the late Rowland B. Wilson. There aren’t a lot of magazines that feature single-panel cartoons anymore, I’m sure, and it must give NYer cartoonists a chance to have a different kind of fun. (Playboy cartoons, like the rest of the magazine, are endearingly tame, don’t you think? They never change; they’re a fixed art form with infinite small variations.)
R.I.P.
Update: Here’s the Chicago Tribune obituary.
Photo above is from Christopher Wheeler’s pbase, an amazing resource for images of cartoonists that I must return to.
Dedini’s New Yorker cartoons [Cartoonbank.com]
Photo of Eldon Dedini [by Michael K. Hemp; Dedini is standing in front of his Cannery Row mural]
Eldon Dedini images [Google Images; includes magazine illustrations, some New Yorker and Playboy cartoons, a mask, photos, etc.]

From an obituary of Richard Avedon:

“We’ve lost one of the great visual imaginations of the last half century,” said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker.

Avedon’s influence on photography was immense, and his sensuous fashion work helped create the era of supermodels such as Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford (news). But Avedon went in another direction with his portrait work, shooting unsparing and often unflattering shots of subjects from Marilyn Monroe to Michael Moore.

“The results can be pitiless,” Time magazine critic Richard Lacayo once noted. “With every wrinkle and sag set out in high relief, even the mightiest plutocrat seems just one more dwindling mortal.”
…
“If a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it’s as though I’ve neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up,” [Avedon] said in 1970. “I know that the accident of my being a photographer has made my life possible.”

Coming back from dancing, an essential art I discovered by accident, I read this and thought both of that and of poetry, which it’s easy to neglect and impossible to replace. Men do die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. Happening on the Avedon obit also made me think of Peter Jennings, whose death I’m finding too sad to ponder. I liked Danny Schechter’s reflections, though. As they’ve done before with breaking news and in light of the extra lag from the double issue, www.newyorker.com has a quick update and a link:

Peter Jennings, who anchored ABC News from 1965 until his diagnosis with cancer earlier this year, died at age sixty-seven this week. Last year, Jennings joined his fellow network news anchors Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw in this conversation with The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta, who spoke with the three men about the past, present, and future of television news.
…
[Link]
Audio Q. & A.
The Three Anchors
Posted 2005-02-28

This week in the magazine, Ken Auletta profiles Dan Rather on the eve of his departure from the “CBS Evening News.” On October 2, 2004, Auletta moderated a panel discussion with Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Peter Jennings, in the Celeste Bartos Forum of the New York Public Library, as part of the sixth annual New Yorker Festival. Here, in three parts, is a recording of that conversation.

Perhaps appropriately, an Ad Council popup asking “Have you been a dad today?” is blocking my view of the Jennings links. National Fatherhood Initiative, indeed. When there was no TV below 14th St. on September 11 and the following days, there was still Peter Jennings. How was that? Remember that ’50s movie The Next Voice You Hear…? Jennings wasn’t a god, but his tired voice filled those nights. Giuliani got a lot of mileage for showing up, but it was Jennings who reassured us that even if the world was ending, he’d stay on air till it was done. I wonder if Remnick will write the piece; I can’t find a link or even a reference to the old Talk about Bloomberg’s smoking ban, but I think Remnick was responsible (I’ll check later, but please write in if you remember). Even if not, I loved that the story contained both stern echoes that smoking is awful for you and blatant wistfulness for the lingering charms, the portable fire and easy talk, in the world of cigarettes. That Talk made me understand why people smoke beyond the facile “It’s addictive.” Dwindling mortals stand all over the city, poisoned and glamorous.