The Third Policeman

New Home

2006-04-18T09:18:00.000-07:00

Please find me now at Daily Kos Diaries. Thanks for reading.

I have seen the best minds of my generation . . .

2005-11-01T17:14:00.000-08:00

. . . self-importantly contemplating the nature of crap . . .

More adventures in Criticism

2005-10-27T17:02:00.000-07:00

I feel sorry for Robert Kraft, who wrote to the San Francisco Chronicle, roused from his obvious world-wearniess by a poignant contrariness over the San Francisco Opera's recent premiere production of John Adam's "Doctor Atomic."

This is the kind of 'criticism' that, made in public, only displays the 'critics' cloth ears and dense head. Not everyone is going to enjoy "Doctor Atomic," but on it's own terms, it proposes dramatic ideas then fulfills them with wonderful music and excellent staging. It is powerful, gripping and very moving. It is opera, and more important it is new opera, a living work about a living subject.

And that will rub a lot of people the wrong way. Many opera-goers, especially those who enjoy catching up on the sleep during the performance, are there for the seemingly objective recreation of a particular period to which we no longer have any connection. They may enjoy the music and the singing [I hope the do, as long as they're awake], but the have no idea that there is a story being told, and that the music and singing and sets and blocking are meant to tell that story. It's a rather deracinated view of the art, and frequently inclined towards socio-economic prestige rather than actual love of the opera. Perhaps Mr. Kraft suffers from this malady?

I say this because the sound and fury with which the opera begins signifies quite a lot, none of it mysterious. Among other things, there is the enormous technical and industrial effort to build the atom bomb, there is the development of tension which underlays the work, as it moves towards the first test of the bomb, and of course there is the context of the work and our daily lives, which is that the building of the bomb has given us the means to destroy all humanity. And that goal has been a popular human past-time through the ages.

The work is entirely creative, not least the great stage design, with a horizon and a vanishing point upstate, and the model of the bomb itself, which is such a powerfully made object that a scene involves merely presenting it to the audience, suspended in air, while the music plays. Opera, being a drama of interior life, depends on the characters singing to express their inner states, and unfortunately Mr. Kraft finds this arioso style trying. So much then, for him, for Monteverdi, Handel, Mozart, Rossini, Verdi, etc. ad nauseum. He certainly can't hear the arias very well; Oppenheimer's astonishing aria that ends act one is not "full of touching harmonic progressions," it's a modern setting of Elizabethan melody, in the minor key, with a descending bass and perfect cadence. This is simple, almost cliched, which is what makes it so extraordinarily powerful; this simple music, and John Donne's passionate words, are being sung by Oppenheimer about the atomic bomb, his work on it, what he thinks and feels about it. This is all supported marvelous staging, where Oppenheimer peforms a kind of tortured, stumbling dance.

But perhaps Mr. Kraft has s more avant-garde tastes. That's cool with me. But then he complains that the choral tribute to Vishnu "in the finest fashion of Andrew Lloyd Webber." I'm sure now that Mr. Kraft has never actually heard Andrew Lloyd Webber, because it's actually in the finest fashion of Phillip Glass and "Ahknaten." But being a snob means never having to hear, or know, anything. Poor guy.

Where are the critics when you need them?

2005-10-25T18:31:00.000-07:00

On Altercation, Sal Nunziato from NYCD gives a brief rave review of the new Brad Mehldau CD, "Day is Done." While a rave is deserved, this is not good criticism by any stretch. The record is excellent, I think Mehldau's finest, by Sal's reasoning is not help to the curious music buyer.

The key is the attribution of Mehldau's "Largo" as a masterpiece. Not by any stretch. That CD is a failure, but an important and interesting failure. Brad Mehldau is a jazz musician, one of the finest contemporary pianists. He uses a lot of pop material as the basis for his expression, as jazz musicians have done since Louis Armstrong started singing. That pop material has always been contemporary to each musician, so while Miles recorded "If I Were A Bell," Mehldau plays his own version of Radiohead and Nick Drake songs, and exceptionally. "Largo" was an experiment in making instrumental pop music. It's not a jazz record, and it's not a successful pop record, but "Day is Done" could not exist without it.

After "Largo," he came back with another trio CD, "Anything Goes." This is a knotty, sometimes difficult set and also very good. But I don't imagine a lot of pop listeners who though the previous CD a masterpiece found much too like on the latter one; it's very much a jazz record and makes no concessions whatsoever to the listener's taste. Now, on "Day is Done," Mehldau has brought it all together. The big change is at the drums, where Jeff Ballard replaces Jorge Rossy. Ballard is most definitely a jazz drummer but one much more comfortable with contemporary pop music beats, including ones usually produced electronically, than Rossy, who was very straight-ahead in jazz terms. Ballard gives the pianist a steady beat that has both a rock feel and a feathery touch, and this really sets the trio to flying. Mehldau's method is to take apart a tune from the inside out, which he does on the solo track of "Martha My Dear," rewriting the harmony and rebarring the meter. Sal hear's a changed melody, but that's just a by-product. There's a difference in ears between pop and jazz, and like the pop critics who think Cassandra Wilson is a great jazz singer, Sal just can't hear what's going on. But take Mehldau's idion and add a punchy rythmic attack and you have something exciting and satisfying, which is the whole album. The listener flys through exhilerating versions of "Knives Out," "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" and the title track, while a lovely "Alfie" and swining "No Moon At All" at the close tell us where we've always been, in jazz. A great CD.

Disagreeing with the Doctor

2005-09-14T17:10:00.000-07:00

I was prompted to write this by Eric Allterman's praise of a NY Times Sunday Mag article I myself worked through Monday [scroll down to "And Tony Scott's piece . . ."].

The article is about two small, new literary magazines, The Believer and n+1, and covers, in the increasingly dull he-said/she-said style of writing that is infecting pretty much every department at The Times, some meaningless quality dispute or argument between the two. Something like the guys at n+1 think they're cooler than the guys at The Believer. Yeah, vital stuff. I don't know, it not only seems so meaningless, but the guys at n+1 seem like a bunch of snots and A.O. Scott seems like an adult pathetically pandering for some intellectually hip cache; he discusses the hilarity of an obviously dull and sophomoric essay titled "Against Exercise." Tony, if you want to be hip, start listening to Kurt Elling.

I've not read n+1, but curiously enough [in the sense that The Times constantly stoops to promotion and PR], there's an accompanying essay in the Times Book Review by Benjamin Kunkel, an editor of the mag, about something he calls the Terrorist Novel that he is assured had a heydey during the 1990's and about which he writes a meaningless, dull and stultifying piece that could be titled "Against Critical Thinking." Now, I've not read a lot of recent novels, but I think I would have caught on if there had been a boom in Terrorist Novels.

If an argument must take place, I'll fight for The Believer. It's a little jejeune, but they have a sense of humor over there, and at McSweeney's too, although the kewl kidz at n+1 describe that as an "orientation to childhood." Fuck you twerps. n+1 does not imply progress, which you claim to believe in, but instead is a counter for endless reiterations of a closed-ended loop in a computer program. An apt metaphor for what they're all doing around the editing table. Poor Don DeLillo, he doesn't deserve his followrs.

Where's Rudy?

2005-09-02T16:32:00.000-07:00

Does anyone think Rudy Giuliani has been grabbing people by the arm this week and telling them "thank God George Bush is our President?" Just askin' . . .

Enough About You

2005-08-15T11:21:00.000-07:00

I should know by now. After the last Johnathan Franzen piece in The New Yorker, I told myself not to read another thing by him. Because I had, by then, read enough about him; his resentfulness at his family, his failed marriage, his failures with girlfriends, his failure to get Oprah to understand him, his failure to prove to others how great William Gass is . . . I may be wrong on that last one, maybe he disliked William Gass. There was something he wrote previously about the pretentiousness of literary critics in which he revealed his own pretentiousness . . . but then again it's all about Johnathan Franzen.

But when my issue of August 8 & 15 came, I opened it to find an article by him about birding, "My Bird Problem." This is something I've taken a cautious amateur interest in, so I began reading. Too late! Yeah, it's about birding, but it's about Johnathan Franzen birding, so it's about his mom and dad and ex-wife and girlfriend, etc., etc., etc. Wow, was I fooled. Never again, no more Franzen.

Part of the shame of it, for me, is that I admire his writing. He writes clearly and with the kind of energy and muscularity that keeps me reading, moving forward. This is all the more pernicious, of course, because once I realized that this was another story about Johnathan Franzen [and again, why would I be surprised?], I felt compelled to keep reading through both the influence of the style and in hopes of getting to more stuff about birding. But now I feel I know more than I ever need to know about Johnathan Franzen. Sucker.

But Jack Handey was hilarious . . .

High-Profile Prosecutor to Run Against Clinton - New York Times

2005-08-09T17:41:00.000-07:00

Nice to see the Times actually asking questions to a Republican candidate, but, dear readers, keep a sharp eye peeled for the telling detail. During the 2004 Presidential campaign, the Times felt it vital to speculate about Theresa Heinz Kerry and cosmetic surgery. Now, if you've seen Jeanine Pirro, with her face so tightly compressed that it looks like it's going to implode, you know from cosmetic surgery.

Singing Aerobics Instructors

2005-07-12T15:42:00.000-07:00

Interesting article, but I don't care what this guy claims, Alicia Keyes is still a singing aerobics instructor. Sounding pitches doesn't make music 'musical.' And the bogus use of the opening bars of Beethoven's 'Moonlight Sonata' on her first album neither makes musical sense nor proves anything about her ability to play the piano, it's just showing off/snobbery. But is the radio host he speaks of Christopher O'Riley, who made these records? He also plays Bach and Stravinsky wonderfully, musically, with skill and taste, and his arrangements for piano of Radiohead [which only a superior pianist could pull off technically], show the musical power and sophistication, the sheer musicality, of the originals. Alicia Keyes arranged for piano? Oh, barf.

The Weak Shall Inherit the Earth

2005-06-24T16:58:00.000-07:00

This story about a Christian university trying to turn home-schooled students into tomorrow's political leaders begs many questions. The obvious one is how will people who willfully isolate themselves from American culture - and of course think they know everything - react when presented with the needs of voters who have to interact with actual society? This at a school where even hearing the notion that George W. Bush might lie causes consternation. But to me, the question is; does this class of American Christian conservatives require it's male members to emasculate themselves?

Check this out: . . . and for a junior like Ben Adams, who sent out a nine-page e-mail to the entire student body before the spring formal reminding the girls to dress modestly. “Lust is sin,” it said. “It is sin for you to tempt us. It is . . . unloving. Unsisterly. Un-Christlike.” Ben Adams is a callow, scared weakling, training to be a future leader of America, someone living in fear of being tempted by women because he has no inner strength, discipline, will power, nor much of a conception of individual autonomy. 'Temptation' is not some kind of supernatural mind control, it is something that requires a willing partner. A woman cannot tempt a man who does not want to be tempted by her, i.e. who is attracted to her and wants to see what will happen. Temptation is a dance that a man and a woman choose, choose to perform with each other. A man who must admonish women not to tempt him is a man who is deeply lusting for just that and is too weak or immoral to take any responsibility for what he himself desires, instead demanding that he be saved from himself by the very objects of his desires. Sounds like a big-government conservative to me, or at least a baseball owner . . .

This is objectionable and pathetic, but where does it come from? Fear of women is nothing new among the smug, ignorant, weak and cowardly, but what is the theological basis? Is this a matter of dogma in any way, or merely pin-head culture? Yes, Eve tempts Adam with the apple, so does this make all women temptresses before whom men are powerless? Did Adam have a choice, or was his decision preordained, i.e. no decision at all, and therefore people who think they are living biblically accept it as a given that men have no autonomy before women? Yet these same 'people of faith,' including the students at Patrick Henry, believe that in a marriage a woman must stay at home and be wife and mother, no more, that is her dogmatic duty. So man controls the marriage, is the head of the household, yet underneath actually believes that he has no autonomy from his wife. Fuck, no wonder there's so many divorces in the Bible Belt.

Ode to Joy

2005-06-16T23:12:00.000-07:00

Joy, beauteous, godly spark,
Daughter of Elysium
Drunk with fire, O Heavenly One,
We come unto your sacred shrine.
Your magic once again unites
That which Fashion sternly parted.
All men are made brothers
Where your gentle wings abide.

Outside the concert hall after the sublime resonance, a mendicant playing atrocious blues on the harmonica, bus fumes, grab a taxi after waiting for others who came before, and some guy swears at me, even though he started calling for one after us. All men are brothers? How do I get back to Elysium from here?

He who has won in that great gamble
Of being friend unto a friend,
He who has found a good woman,
Let him add his jubilation too!
Yes-he who can call even one soul
On earth his own!
And he who never has, let him steal
Weeping from this company.

Ludwig van, how did you make this work that become stranger and more profound to me after each listening, after two decades or more, counting now in the hundreds? Until the Ode, it’s a series of fragments and gestures with seemingly no means of support except momentum and willpower. That’s part of the excitement; it has to keep moving itself forward because it’s about to fly apart at the seams, wreak havoc among the musicians and audience. Who has made music this dangerous, even thought they tried so hard in the 20th century?

All creatures drink of Joy
At Nature’s breasts.
All good, all evil souls
Follow in her rose-strewn wake.
She gave us kisses and vies,
And a friend who has proved faithful even in death.
Lust was given to the Serpent,
And the Cherub stands before God.

You can hear Furtwängler lead the Berlin Philharmonic in this music, March 1942, in concert. Things were going well for Nazi Germany then, perhaps Hitler and Goebbels were in the usual seats up front? No matter. The orchestra in Nazi Berlin plays, the audience in Nazi Berlin listens, the Nazi German radio broadcasts the concert across Europe. I’m sure Allied intelligence listened in. The chorus sings that all men are brothers. And how can you not believe that they believed it, because the music making is powerful and sincere and deeply felt and beautiful. How did you make this work so strange, Ludwig van? Perhaps it’s because you couldn’t hear it.

Requiscat in Pacem, Maestri

2005-06-16T14:16:00.000-07:00

There are, sadly, two obituaries of important musicians in today's Times. This week has brought the passing of conductor Carlo Maria Giulini and composer David Diamond. The former was more well known and has the greater space given; a discerning poet of a musician, which makes him an eccentric with today's cultural attitudes, we have recordings which demonstrate his artistry. He led the one indispensable reading of the problematic and great "Don Giovanni." Tommasini mentions Giulini's recording of "Figaro," which is excellent but not my personal first choice - his greatest opera recording is Verdi's great, difficult and dark "Don Carlo." There is also a superb Bruckner 8th and a good but mannered Mahler 9th [which seem to be currently out of print]. I would say the ideal testament to his music making is a great collection of French music, featuring "La Mer.' On this CD one can hear that ideal combination of care, purpose and musical flow that marks the conductor at his best. Hearing these pieces gives the sense that this is exactly how they are supposed to sound.

The loss of Diamond is uncanny for me; coincidence has it that I've been reviewing and culling my CD collection, and have reached the "Ds" and so the last two nights found me listening to a CD of the composer's 2nd and 4th symphonies [originally on Delos, now reissued on Naxos]. This is a great set and the perfect place to start for anyone interested in Diamond's work. He belonged to a group of American composers known primarily for their symphonic output and their teaching, spanning the decades from roughly the 30s to the 60s, including Roy Harris, William Schuman, Walter Piston and Peter Menin. These guys wrote great music, great American music. Their work is immediately distinguished as their own voices, but still of a specific style, an American sound that was not the faux-populism of Copland but was instead a remarkable and enjoyable synthesis of muscularity, rhythm, rich harmonies held in by tight, unornamented structures, appealing to the ear and the intellect, serious but not pretentious, available to any interested listener but never pandering or nationalist. Of this informal group, Diamond was the most lyrical and with the greatest darkness in his heart. He creates beautiful, ravishing sounds, as in the opening bars of Symphony 4, but often they seem to be conveying regret and loss along with their surface colors. His Symphony 2, written when in his mid-twenties, is a powerful and moving work but also one filled with the same type of unrequited doubt and despair that can be so overpowering in late Bruckner, to whom Diamond was compared by Schoenberg. I lay in bed last night listening to this piece, hearing that sensation of having doubts about everything, except for the knowing as an absolute certainty that there are no answers. Diamond frequently expresses the dark night of the soul, without providing the light, and in its humanity lies the great, powerful beauty of his music.

The Sound of American Dreams

2005-06-03T23:41:00.000-07:00

America has an ideal sound, a type of music that, like other features of the idea of America, is something caught in glimpses and gestures, in the ever-passing history of listening, enough to make one aware of the chasm but how things are and what they could be. Recordings give us an eternal record of this idea and so it lives in devotees, just as the general ideal of America lives in those who actually trouble themselves to read the Constitution and other writings of the intellectual founders of America. A small, small band of elitists or fanatics, then, depending on the company.

As for the sound of America, the music of America, the exemplars of the 20th century are what we mainly have, since that brought us recorded and reproduced music, a history not just of ideas in the abstract notated on staff paper but of an actual sound, a wish, an attitude, most importantly a style. Perhaps the name that comes to mind most immediately is Aaron Copland, who self-consciously created a pseudo-Americana in his ballets “Appalachian Spring” and “Billy The Kid.” This is accomplished music, especially the latter piece, and it is idealized, but it is also mythologized, connected much more to story-telling than in the making of the cultural idea of what it means to have a living American sound within each citizen. While Copland’s music is populist, it is not popular, and it’s the relatively vulgar streets where Americans live and do their business that need to be scoured for traces of this sound. And it’s there, or actually used to be there and everywhere. Now it lives inside of a select few musical artist and their listeners. I saw such an artist make his own American sound recently, his own and a demonstration of how a synthesis could be made of two other greater makers of music, Duke Ellington and Frank Sinatra, fleeting bits of the imagination of America.

Kurt Elling is not just the leading jazz singer of his generation; he’s one of the leading jazz musicians of any era. His talent is broad and deep; he’s a spectacular singer with refined technique and power, a thrilling performer, a probing and exceptional lyricist, a serious artist with a great sense of humor and by necessity something of a literary critic. He doesn’t just sing standards and adaptations of pop tunes from Glenn Miller to Steve Miller; he is maintaining the art of vocalese, which is the setting of original lyrics to previously recorded jazz tunes and solos. So when he sings “Moonlight Serenade,” he precedes the melody with his own lovely lyrics sung to a Charlie Haden bass solo. On record and in concert he frequently recites brief poetic or prose passages while the band plays on, or even takes an existing poem and makes it into a song, like no one else in jazz except for the departed Steve Lacy. In concert, Elling did this with something new, singing Theodore Roethke’s ‘The Waking,’ accompanied only by the bass, an enticing and mysterious poem and performance.

The singer frequently makes use of modern American poetry; it’s part of his creating a corner of the imagined idea of American culture. The tradition of jazz and other American arts makes a vast plain of ideas available to him, an unbounded prairie of the mind that, unlike the mythical West, never closes. Elling described this vista singing the tune of Keith Jarrett’s long, slow introduction to “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” using his own lyric describing night on the endless plains, a couple, a thunderstorm, love and parting, and then the standard itself, instantly evocative of Sinatra who created not just an enormously influential manner of singing but an entirely new American idea; modern urban loneliness, the solitary figure pressed among the happy crowd on the street or in the bar, surrounded by so many human beings but unable to share the thoughts and the emotions of the moment with anyone. This is the implied context that an artist can place himself within while expressing his own ideas, and Elling did just that, connecting the lyrical myths or rural and urban loneliness, isolation and alienation that are the darker parts of the secular American belief in individual achievement.

Then, at the first encore, he brought before the audience the other great creator of the urban American dream, Duke Ellington, singing his own lyrics about going out in the city, then reading some of Ellington’s own words about cosmopolitan night life and the people who inhabit it, words that like all else he created were elegant, witty, sharp and very personal while never quite telling you much about the person himself. They would have made a good description of the music. Then Elling delivered a powerhouse and deliciously soulful “Come Sunday,” one of the greatest and most soulful American songs, and the imaginative picture expanded to include not just the hip and elegant and sophisticated, but the working and the struggling to, and their own dreams that make up this fabric. Sound is the thread; that sophisticated and earthy sound of both Ellington and Sinatra, artists who experienced so much of life at its human core and whose expression is the essence of the American idea, which is truly a cosmopolitan one. That is, anyone who shares an idea, not a skin color or place of birth, is an American. Ellington and Sinatra had a particularly urban sound, because the great cities of American are where the idea is lived out, where millions of people of different colors and different origins share it. And in that moment when Kurt Eliing sang Ellington, that dream was in the singer on stage, the young, white Midwesterner, brilliant artist in this truly American art, created by Americans who, though not here by choice, had roots deeper in this country than most others could claim, and whose dreams make this music and show that the American dream is their dream, and it, like the music, is something that anyone can share, as long as they believe in it. It’s been decades since Ellington and Sinatra collaborated on an inimitable record, but they came together in this concert in the mind and pipes of Kurt Elling, who added his own little touch, and like a mad scientist of jazz moved that idea of what we wish for in this country a little bit further down the road.

Backing Bill Maher

2005-05-25T14:38:00.000-07:00

Why is David Prather, from The Huntsville Times, pointing out the obvious:

"Bachus says Maher's comments "undermine the effort for national security." How? Is al-Qaida watching Maher on Friday nights on HBO for inspiration? Are terrorists TiVo-ing the program for recruiting propaganda? Is it Maher, or a growing national uncertainty of purpose, that is keeping military recruitment low? It's absurd to blame Maher."

. . . when no one on the networks or in the major papers can bother to take on step beyond merely writing down such lame assertions?

"Galloway and the mother of all invective"

2005-05-18T12:23:00.000-07:00

Huzzah! You won't see much of this on TV, or read much in the paper, but what a thrill it was to see George Galloway shed the phony decorum and give the liars and cowards in the Senate exactly what they deserve. The sham of Norm Coleman's investigation into Iraq Oil for Food would never be revealed by 'professional' journalists, but now the patsy refused to play along - that is news!

What I especially love are these comments to Snitchens: "You're a drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay," Mr Galloway in formed him. "Your hands are shaking. You badly need another drink," he added later, ignoring Mr Hitchens's questions and staring intently ahead. "And you're a drink-soaked ..." Hoo Hoo!

Good timing too, because Snitchen's smugness is unbearable this week. With 'pedantic exactitude' [his own term and usual method], he lectures us all that those fighting the US and the inchoate Iraqi government are all 'jihadists,' no matter what their exact goals, mainly because they stand in opposition to Snitchen's own ideas, which by definition are 100%, eternally correct. Who does this remind me of? Why, Islam Karimov, Dear Leader of Uzbekistan whom, as an ally of the US in the GWOT, preserves 'democracy' by branding any opponents 'terrorists' and boiling people alive. If he just called them 'jihadists,' Snitchens would most likely be telling us how noble a ruler Karimov is.

James Wolcott: Dirk Diggler to the UN?

2005-05-11T17:18:00.000-07:00

. . . it would help to explain the moustache . . .

Wolff in Cheap Clothing

2005-05-11T13:48:00.000-07:00

My copy of Vanity Fair came yesterday, so I read this article myself, or in spite of myself; Michael Wolff is a dull writer and idiotic thinker, but the premise of the story, that conservative pundits are funny while liberals have no sense of humor, struck me as so Quixotic that I had to read his thoughts.

Well, just because someone has a thought doesn't make it a good one. Jack Shafer has his own criticism, because Wolff specifically goes after Slate, but this is shitty thinking and writing all on its own. Wolff starts his premise by decrying the well-known wit of David Brooks, now stifled with his move to The Times. Please, enough about "Bobos in Paradise" already; Brooks' way is to create an instantly cliched idea, support it with absolutely no facts or research and then beat it to death with humor that only, well, Michael Wolff finds funny.

As exceptions to his 'rule,' Wolff does mention Al Franken, John Stewart, Michael Moore and a few other 'funny liberals,' and then 'proves' his rule by comparing conservatives obsessive self-identification as such to classic Jewish humor [what . . .], the knee-slapping humor of conservative talk radio [ . . . the . . .] and finally, by name, claims Roger Ailes and Anne Coulter are funny [ . . .fuck?!]. Thank you Mr. Wolff for showing us what you consider the merits of your case. Menken is vomiting in his grave . . .

Why Surrealism?

2005-05-06T15:05:00.000-07:00

Thank you Ted Turner - Turner Classic Movies almost makes my monthly cable bill worth the price! Last night, I got to view two Bunuel movies new to me, 'Viridiana' and 'The Exterminating Angel.' The latter struck me as a great masterpiece and unbelievably resonant. Here's from TCM's description:

A group of socially prominent guests arrive for a formal dinner party but find themselves unable to leave the drawing room after the meal. Some unexplainable force prevents their escape and as time passes the social order begins to break down. The guests give in to fear, superstitions and irrational acts as the disasters mount . . .
Early in the movie it struck me that the guests were, for our time, the chummy, clubby fools who pollute our airwaves and our editorial papers with the self-reinforcing, smug assumptions about how things are and should be. They're all a circle of friends who only talk to each other, stick with each other's ideas either absolutely yay or absolutely nay, use each other as entire sources for research . . . a pseudo-intellectual, incestuous cluster-fuck. And these tools know nothing other than their comfortable lives, and can't conceive that any person, American or not, would not have the advantages and priveleges they so easily take for granted. Why, here's one today:

First, many educated people seem to be getting their news from Comedy Central. Say what? As any author will tell you, the best TV book shows to be on have long been Don Imus, Charlie Rose, C-Span, Tim Russert on CNBC, "Today," Oprah and selected programs on CNN, Fox and MSNBC. They are all still huge. But what was new for me on this tour was the number of people who also mentioned getting their news from Jon Stewart's truly funny news satire, "The Daily Show." And I am not just talking about college kids. I am talking about grandmas. Just how many people are now getting their only TV news from Comedy Central is not clear to me - but it is a lot, lot more than you think.
Guess who? Why, it's globe-trotting columnist Thomas Friedman, who knows so much about the world . . . enjoy the dinner party, Tom. At least in the movie, the outside world is protected from the guests. We have no such luck.

Sturch

2005-04-27T19:13:00.000-07:00

From a friend, don't know the source:

SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE VANISHES, REPLACED BY NEW ENTITY CALLED STURCH
Will Offer Salvation, Motor Vehicle Renewals on Sunday
The separation of
church and state, long considered a hallmark of American democracy, vanished
early Sunday morning, replaced by a new institution called sturch.
Scientists at the Clausen Observatory at the University of Minnesota, who
for years have been monitoring a widening hole in the wall separating church and
state, said that the wall disappeared entirely on Sunday morning shortly after
8:00 (EST).
"We first noticed the hole in the wall developing about four
years ago," said the University of Minnesota's Davis Logsdon. "But now it's
pretty much no wall and all hole."
While the exact shape and dimensions of
the new church-state entity, sturch, remain to be determined, President Bush
today installed as its official leader the Reverend Bill Frist (R-Tenn), the
star player in this week's "Justice Sunday" broadcast.
At a formal
swearing-in ceremony at the former White House, now called the Big White
Cathedral, Rev. Frist said that jettisoning the wall between church and state
would benefit all Americans "except those who are anti-faith, and they know who
they are."
He added that by combining the two traditionally separate
institutions, sturch would allow congregants to seek salvation and motor vehicle
renewals on Sunday without leaving their pews.
As for the longstanding debate
over taxing places of worship, Rev. Frist said, "Since sturch is part of the
government, it will be collecting taxes, not paying them, thank you very
much!"
Elsewhere, newly-engaged actors Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner
requested that the media stop calling them "Bennifer," saying that they
preferred to be called "Afgarn."

Spank You Very Much, Professor!

2005-04-26T13:19:00.000-07:00

Excellent words from Juan Cole, although I must be a Luddite because I don't know who this Matthew Haughey is, although I can say that his taste in music is ostentatiously bad, as only that of a self-conscious hipster can be . . .

Why I Gave it Up

2005-04-25T12:25:00.000-07:00

I've been reading the Sunday New York Times since I was a teenager. My dad used to pick up a copy after church every Sunday, when I was in college I'd go to the library after lunch and read it, when I lived in New York City I loved being able to pick it up around 9pm Saturday night, and get an early start. I've been living in California for almost 13 years now, and have still be reading it, either buying copies at my corner grocery or subscribing, as I've done for the past year or so.

But that ended Sunday. I cancelled the subscription last week, didn't pick up a copy for myself. It was pretty refreshing! I'm about to add a big expense, so I'm looking for ways to pay for that, and despite my previous hopes the quality of the paper has continued to decline under Bill Keller, especially the arts coverage, and the supposed innovation of installing Daniel Okrent as the Public Editor has been a joke; he seems to exist to protect the newspaper from it's readers, and he writes so poorly, in that enervating Times style. However, this has nothing to do with a political perspective on the paper's quality, whether liberal or conservative.

The Times is the cliched paragon of that meaningless straw-man, the Liberal Media. The Times has its political bias, but being Liberal or Conservative is not it, and critics who can only think on those terms are too feeble-minded or self-interested to grasp the obvious truth. The Times, like the Washington Post, CNN, etc., is biased towards Established Power. In New York City that means biased towards Real Estate Developers, those who know them, who benefit from their political power and who can afford to own the homes they build. In Washington, that means biased towards entrenched political power [which does not necessarily mean the Presidential Administration; the fanstasies of Whitewater and Chinese Nuclear spying were invented by long-standing powerful sources on the right, Clinton was the one without those same type of roots]. Episodes like the publication of the Pentagon Papers are the rare exception that focus the mind and make one think they are the rule. Not so. The Times will eventually turn against the worst perversions of the Establishment, but because the paper and its subjects are friends, it will always do so when everyone else has first. This attitude is best described by Josh Marshall, writing about David Broder. And the Times' own expression of its bias can be found in yesterday's magazine section. To their credit, though, they still publish Frank Rich.

Bloggermann - MSNBC.com

2005-04-19T13:00:00.000-07:00

This story is tooooo good! Nice to see that there is still 'journalism' in the sports world!

Something Truly Scary

2005-04-15T11:02:00.000-07:00

Go to here: http://www.zabasearch.com/, and enter your name . . .

Best Face Forward

2005-04-15T10:58:00.000-07:00

Does anyone, except the people who love to be on TV and the media that loves to cover them, really expect Senate confirmation hearings to matter? The phony questions, the phony outrage, the phony humility . . . what's wrong with being honest? Why not make John Bolton ambassador to the UN? After all, he represents the true face of American success; bully those below you and brown-nose those above you. This is a 'values' administration, after all, so let them show those values proudly to the world.

Someone Was Lying . . .

2005-03-28T17:36:00.000-08:00

. . . Bill Tierney, or God. Take your pick. More evidence to judge by here.

Limbo at Club Delay

2005-03-24T11:57:00.000-08:00

[I wasn't planning on writing about poor Terry Schiavo, but I responded to an email this morning and it became a good start to a post that I have been thinking about, so here goes . . .]

This column in general may be sensitive, but I don't find this one to be so. It's posturing and disingenuous over this matter in the same way of the Media-Political Industrial Complex; political figures speaking only to political journalists, political journalists speaking within an orderly and well-defnined context that mostly ignores the actual facts. The rabbi is no less ghoulish than Tom Delay, Bill Frist and George Bush, in that he's exploiting this matter to fit it into his own pre-judged political discourse, his bread and butter, in other words.

The three facts all parties to the Schiavo case agree are true are that she
is alive, she is innocent and she is mute. Everything else is in dispute.
One group is arguing that rational individuals can decide to refuse medical
treatment, even healing treatments, if they are unhappy about the quality of
their life. Terri's husband is saying that Terri wanted this. The other side is
arguing that she did not want this and that her parents are willing to care for
her. I believe the issue is what we as a culture will do with living, innocent,
mute people in our midst, and no court can rule on that.

This is wrong and dishonest. There are no facts that are in dispute, it is the acceptance of those facts from which the conflict grows. Her brain is destroyed, leaving only the Hind Brain, or Lizard Brain, which keeps her heart beating and lungs pumping air. She has no thoughts, ideas, senses, experiences, memories. When her parents claim she's conscious, that's what they believe, that doesn't make it so.

If this is society's decision, society has decided that in these cases the husband has primary custody, and the courts, and therefore society, something like 19 times, have accepted by the highest standards of fact that the poor woman would not want to be kept alive like this. And she is being kept alive, she is not living.

> In many right-to-die cases, the patient is on life-support systems, so
> all that needs to be done to allow them to die is to remove these
> medical obstacles to death. However, in this case Terri Schiavo is
> not on any life support systems. In this case, in order to live she
> only requires hydration and nutrition; and it is a big stretch for
> many people to label food and water extraordinary means. It is one
> thing to let a person die in peace who is already dying. It is one
> thing to remove an obstacle to death. It is quite another to cause
> death.

He is absolutely wrong on the facts, and in a disgustingly sophistic way [for a discussion of actual facts, go here]. Terri Schiavo was indisputably on life support. Not only is it obvious that for a person unable to function mentally and physically, i.e. unable to even chew, drink or swallow, a tube shoved down their esophagus for food and water is life support. Not only do the state and Supreme courts recognize this, society again, but so does the American College of Cardinals. He tries to change the terms by going from calling the feeding tube lie-support to extraordinary means, so he doesn't have the courage to call a spade a spade nor to stick with the actual situation to 'prove' his point.
Then the easy, politically approved boilerplate about abortion and euthanasia, to emphasize his concern, than the wrestling over a moral choice. Except his moral choice is something other than this exact matter. Here's my obviously immoral, secular way of thinking about it: what makes a human being a human being? What is the soul, can it be located? I don't know the answers, unlike the GOP and the good rabbi and their ilk. But I can use this event to work towards the answers.

I know consciousness is one of the key elements in human existence, and I know that consciousness, regardless of its origin, is seated in the brain. Terri Schiavo has lost her human existence; she is, bluntly, just a lizard now. We are so lost in her morphology, and so self-involved that because she looks like us, she must be like us too. But she's not, she's actually less than a lizard now, because a lizard is mobile, can feed and support itself and even make certain decisions. Terri cannot make decisions, she has no free-will, she has no mind. What kind of life is that? Her life is supported artificially, as even the Cardinals would say, and unlike a baby she will never grow or change to support herself; the life-support is an ends, not a means. She is being kept alive as an object, and those who seek to keep her alive [other than her parents and family who's love is evident] find her a useful object for their own ambitions. Tom Delay has publicly stated that she is a gift from God, to himself, to help him fight against the investigations into his own material corruption. Is this the culture of life? Those who are fighting to maintain her life-support have embraced those who are exploiting her life for the sake of the own political arguments and power. Shame on them, including the Franciscans who are standing by the Schindlers. Their faith is sincere, but they are parties in this exploitation of what they consider to be a human being and they seem blind to that.

One of the Schinder's lawyers made a bizarre argument in court that removing the life-support would mean Terri would spend more time in Purgatory, and the secular court couldn't allow that. Excuse me, but she's already in Purgatory! If she is innocent, than her destination is Heaven, why is she being held back from that destination by those who seek secular, material redress. Self-identified Christians are the ones who seem desperately afraid of death, of the end of material existence, even though I thought they accepted that death was ordained by God and that life is eternal, beyond the existence of the flesh. And that articial life-support was contrary to natural law. But when it comes to the iron fist of power, so much for belief. And that is what the discourse over Terri Schiavo is all about, power. The moral questions have already been agonized over by her husband and society.

I'm not breaking any new ground by pointing out how Americans are afraid of death. It also belies the current propoganda over the supposed foundation of this country on Judeo-Christian valuse, and the Ten Commandments; this Schiavo fiasco, this desire to turn her into a Carnival attraction or a political prop, rather than allow death, proves, in the action, that these self-identified Christians are really Materialists, recognizing only the mechanics of the flesh, like so many Daniel Dennetts. If the soul and spirit meant anything to them, if they truly were people of faith, they would value the release of the soul from the unsustainable husk of a body that has lost all it's human capabilities. But no, to them the body is all things. They need to listen to some pieces of music, the 9th symphonies by, respectively, Anton Bruckner and Gustav Mahler.

Both of these are works about death, uniquely in the case of Bruckner and of a piece with Mahler's corpus. They begin with the premise, seemingly unimaginable to Americans, that death is the ultimate, unavoidable conclusion to life. I know, it's shocking! But without this implicit acceptance, the two composer's could not have made their works.

In the right hands, Bruckner's symphony is exalted and magnificient. It is the work that made me listen to Brucker long enough until I finally "got" him. Many think Bruckner the greatest symphonic composer, many think he was incompetent. I used to be in the latter group, and while I don't think I'll join the former, I now find Bruckner wonderful. He is an odd case, physically and nationally part of the great tradition of German music, yet his methods were at odd with the essence of that music. Unlike traditional ideas about the symphony, based on structures that evolved out of the confluence of the Enlightenment and the Western sense of linear time, Bruckner's music does not develop in the sense of a logical argument, nor in a linear sense as well. His sense of time is circular, Eastern. A Bruckner symphony is made of remarkably dramatic gestures, harmonies that drift so gently to far-away places that one rarely notices the journeys, massive blocks of these events juxtaposed and repeated. The repeats serve as a form of spiritual meditation. Bruckner was an intensely devoted Catholic and a great organist in the church, and if one listens for the spirituality rather than the argument in his work, one has unlocked the door.

But this is a real, human spirituality, not the therapuetic kind. It can be savage, despairing, even terrifying. His 9th is a case in point; a massive opening movement that wavers between magnificence and utter darkness, a scherzo that alternates from a threatening, even bludgeoning dance-like quality to an almost frantic sweetness. Finally, a slow movement, a real talent of the composer. The symphony was not meant to conclude with the third movement, but Bruckner died before finishing a projected fourth and final movement. His accidental finale, al tempo adagio, is a shimmering, lovely piece that seems in awe of a beauty it can barely comprehend. It ends quietly and gently. This, then, is a Hegelian dialectic of death, the confrontation with the end, often fierce, the mix of present and past experiences flowing by, and the acceptance, in true joy, or a transformation which is not an end. And it is so powerful. How very different than the spectacle blanketing cable news this week.

With Mahler, death is everywhere, as it was everywhere around him in his own life. While he completed his own 9th, he died before he ever heard it played. This is death and life more immediate, rougher, both more sophisticated and common than in Bruckner's work, as Mahler's musical and personal expression range far wider than Bruckners unique, but personally narrow path. This new recording from Micheal Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, part of their cycle of live performances, is one of the greatest I've heard. Even more than Bruckner's, this is a work of struggle and acceptance . . . except not quite. The sprawling first movement begins ever so gently and quietly, builds quickly to a tremendous, sustained chord and hints at a Wagnerien magnificience, before collapsing into darkness, hints of chaos . . . only to rise again, and collapse again . . . we hear a dark, staggered fanfare in the low brass, answered by a sharp tatoo on the tympany, a totemic burst Leonard Bernstein likened to the sound of Mahler's own failing heart. The movement ends with a gentle, satisfied sigh, but the stage has been set. The music has presented an omnious horizon, struggled against, and seems to find satisfaction for the moment as it literally catches it's breath.

Next are two dance movements. First, a Landler, more rustic than a line-dance, and shoved into a symphony. It's brilliant, full of energy and satiric wit and almost flies off the handle, like a beau spinning his girl so fast that he threatens to toss her into the crowd. The music still finds joy in life, and like all of Mahler's work seems to be thinking not so much of the future but of the past, happy days that will never return. The second scherzo is something quite different; it's a demonic rond that jerks us back into the present and reminds us what the work is really all about. Which is now the final movement, like Bruckner a long adagio, but very unlike Bruckner in character. It is full of slow, long, rich, beautiful melodies in the violins, but while this may be grace, there is still a struggle going on, a final ranging against the dying of the light. The music collapses and rises, as in the first movement. Then, in the last few pages, we only hear the violins, 1st and 2nd sections in conversation, playing a phrase that is not quite a melody, a short turn that begins on the tonic chord but doesn't quite reach a resolution. Back and forth it goes, with brief pauses, ever quieter, ever quieter, until finally one final phrase, barely there and simply ending, without really concluding . . .

It's as if Mahler could not really find the conclusion, and perhaps realized he didn't need to. The music speaks of living until one dies, going with a life until it is death's time. Mahler doesn't embrace death, I think because he was such a vital man, but he doesn't shrink from it and does finally accept its coming. The music doesn't end, death ends it.

A bunch of whining, quivering girly-men . . .

2005-03-24T11:44:00.000-08:00

. . . you know who I'm talking about, the people who ask for special-rights and special treatment . . . the American right, of course . . .

Songs of Himself [revised]

2005-03-18T17:02:00.000-08:00

I am that rough and simple person.
I am he who kisses his comrade lightly on the lips at parting, and I am one who is kissed in return.
I introduce that new American salute.

Behold love choked, correct, polite, always suspicious.

Behold the received models of the parlors--What are they to me?
What to these young men who travel with me?

These lines by Walt Whitman are set in a song by Leonard Bernstein called "To What You Said," and can be heard sung by the great artist Thomas Hampson on his wonderful recital CD, To The Soul, which collects 20 more songs by various composers made out of words by Whitman [currently out of print?]. It is a great song by one of the great, and greatly American, musicians, collaborating posthumously with the American poetic voice. There is no one other than Whitman who described and embodied American ideals so well.

And now we have a new CD of setting of Whitman, Fred Hersch's adaptation of Leaves of Grass. As high concept this is brilliant; combining the great American voice and jazz, the great American art. Hersch's ensemble boasts some of the finest contemporary jazz musicians, including Ralph Alessi, Tony Malaby and arguably the world's greatest contemporary singer, Kurt Elling. With all this, the work is a disappointment, a pleasant failure, but a complete failure still.

The responsible party is of course Hersch – the voice that speaks in the music is his, not the poet’s, and that is the beginning and the end of the failure. Or perhaps the failure began with the commissioning bodies, the Guggenheim Foundation and The Estate Project for Artists with AIDS. This also indicates much of the problem.

Hersch is a pleasant if second rank jazz pianist. He’ll please you with lovely melodic playing, a quasi-Impressionist harmonic style, a comforting overall mood. He won’t startle you with odd dissonances, unstructured improvisations, nor will he play too fast or slow or swing very hard. Unlike some of his peers, he’s not deeply rooted in the blues or tradition like Jason Moran, doesn’t have the same sense of intellectual inquiry of Brad Mehldau, nor even the style, wit and charm of Bill Charlap. So how did he end up with Whitman in his hands? Hersch’s main claim to fame is being an out gay man in jazz – an HIV positive one too, unfortunately – when jazz has long been homophobic and all gay musicians up until Gary Burton have been in the closet. This announcement, featured years ago on NPR, made him that radio station’s jazz musician of reference, the one they could turn to whenever jazz was the momentary topic. It’s been a boon to his popularity, but hasn’t added much to the quality of his music-making.

His apposition to NPR goes beyond his public status; as an example of diversity in coverage, Hersch fits the NPR political style perfectly, and his music fits the NPR aesthetic style as well. The station creates an aural cocoon, a comforting space designed to reassure it’s listeners that someone shares their concerns, finds the same things heartwarming and tragic, gives them, like too much else in American, exactly what they want to hear, rather than what they need to hear. Does nothing to shake the foundations of its safe space. The sound of NPR is blandly pleasant, and listening can be an essential badge of a particular, Blue-state, socio-economic lifestyle. It's just was wary of a certain kind of indeceny as others. The real Whitman would be indecent to them, and I think some real, vulgar jazz would be too. And listening to Hersch can make on think they are listening to jazz, when they really may not be; he doesn’t swing much or get down at all.

And the music for Leaves of Grass doesn’t swing at all. It doesn’t have to, it doesn’t have to be jazz per se, but it shouldn’t be the same bland pleasantness that it is. It should be faster and slower, louder and softer, and it never is. It should startle and shock even while ultimately saying profound, beautiful things, as Whitman did. The piece should give us with Whitman, swinging and getting down, but it doesn't. He was a poet of the body, and that went well past the I sing the body electric cliché; he was a poet of the heart and mind, the eyes and hands, the mouth and anus, the poet of running and yelling and eating and shitting and fucking. Except I’m putting it a little too nicely for his language which, while not currently being heard on Deadwood, is that show’s grandfatherly spirit, expressing American speech as simultaneously formal and foul. In a note from the composer, Hersch writes of reading "When I Heard At The Close of the Day" and how the poem had a 'huge, validating impact on me, a young gay man just coming out." Strangely, there is none of this in his piece. Granted, 600 pages of poetry has to be drastically pruned to make for an hour or so of sung concert music, but so much has been left out that I'm not sure what could be made Whitmanesque out of the lines and poems Hersch chose to work with. He states he choose, after much internal debate, to leave out the Civil War poems, the New York poems and the Calamus poems. This is like filming the story of Christ and leaving out everything except the Crucifixion. Oh, wait . . . Hersch's choice to restrict himself to "poems that conveyed universal and inclusive sentiments" gives us just that, sentiments of the most anodyne kind. Whitman had a profoundly inclusive sentiment, but it was physical as well as philosophical and spiritual, and taking the physicality out of Whitman, the muscularity, the sensuality, leave's us with Ol' Walt, a charming old man with sweet, unobjectionable aphorisms. Amidst all the songs of all-encompassing acceptance of all races, sexes and social-classes, and the joy in the sky and the sun-rise, when Elling finally gets around to a little lust, singing about how "my lovers suffocate me," it sounds both refreshing and a little embarassing; here we finally hear some Whitman, and he sounds out of place with himself.

Whitman was the great inspiration for the Beats who broke free from bourgeois society. And now, with this tragedy, the echt-bourgeois spirit of NPR and Fred Hersch has made Whitman pretty and listenable for all of us. This is not completely wrong, as Hersch’s setting of the lovely “The Sleepers” is gorgeous and apt, but only up to a point - it illuminates the problems. The poem contains lovely sentiments about families asleep, and also "gray-faced onanists," the insane, murderers and their victims. But that kind of ecumenicism is beyond the current bounds of decency, so Hersch trimes those lines and leaves the poem as sentimental pap Only the pretty lines are left for pretty music. Hersch loves Whitman too much, in the wrong way, he loves Whitman’s prettiness when Whitman was never merely pretty, only completely beautiful. On the Hampson CD, when the virile baritone sings achingly to another “be not afraid of my body,” he understands Whitman, and the beauty of what bourgeois society, the received models of the parlors, finds merely course, or distasteful. Hersch’s piece is completely tasteful. So much so, that in the performance in San Francisco on March 6, the ensemble not once broke out of the boundaries of the composed piece to commit acts of jazz! But NPR has its listeners, and pleasant seems to work for many – there was a standing ovation which I had predicted to myself a day before. There was just no Whitman.

At this point I can’t resist the meaningless indulgence of wondering what another musician would have done with this same commission, because Whitman and jazz almost need to be together. They are natural twins of American aesthetic ideals. Steve Lacy spent decades putting poetry to music, but we lost him last summer, and his aphoristic style would have puzzled the audience that Sunday. Archie Shepp’s fierce politics and intellectual earthiness probably would have frightened them, while Uri Caine’s brilliant recontextualizations would have been too abstract. But one can dream. Whitman deserves proper treatment, and America needs more of Whitman, the real Whitman, not 'decent' version.

Bobo's World

2005-03-01T16:39:00.000-08:00

I've finally put my finger on it, David Brooks thinks and writes like a precocious 8 year old; he knows about as much about the world as an 8 year old child, has the same kind of sober, childlike delicacy of thought and, of course, thinks that the ideas that exist in the shallow recesses of his mind are the only ones that exist.

So today Bobo expresses his concerns over separate checking accounts for married couples as problematic in American society because . . . um . . . oh yeah, here it is, marriage is a countervailing institution to the market forces of American society. Well, get the Deparment of Homeland Security on this right away.

It's easy to mock Brooks, but it's important to do so as well. I mean it; the implicit premise is the malodorous qualities of the market society, which Brooks describes as "Public life [which] is individualistic. It's oriented around goals like self-development, self-advancement and personal happiness." If marriage and family is needed to countervail that, and I take for granted that marriage and family are good things, than public life is problematic. But the problematic public life Brooks describes, what he calls "our market democracy," is the one he and his smug, so-called conservative chums also proudly promote as the ultimate 'Conservative' American goal and value. It is the so-called liberals who seek to make the public life more communitarian, an original Conservative goal that I think is worthy, through the modern tools of regulation. For which they are smeared as socialist, anti-American, blah blah blah yadda yadda yadda. But since regulating the public life hurts someone's pocket book somewhere, and since the de facto #1 American value, especially for so-called conservatives, is $$$, they have to weadle and whine and troll themselves through people's private lives, rubbing their thighs and wringing their hands, as they seek to regulate the bedroom, the personal checking account. Conservatives love regulations, it's people they hate.

They Can Hear You

2005-03-01T14:59:00.000-08:00

Here's a great site, SpeakSpeak.org, where you can voice your own 'outrage' over these continued nonsense complaints about indecent on TV. The supposed outcry boils down to a few people mass-emailing the FCC over anything that offends their delicate sensibilities, while yet changing the channels faster and faster, seeking more outrage, like Blanche DuBois getting all moist over Stanley Kowalski. At SpeakSpeak you can send off your own email to the FCCs, pre-written by the site, but one which you can customize yourself, as I did mine with the following addition:

Further, as a citizen and a believer in American ideals and responsibility, I am
outraged by your continued paternalization of those viewers who seek out offence
in every program. You are demonstrating by your continued actions that you have
no respect for the concept of personal responsibility, and risk the offence of
every conservative in America who understands that viewers are responsible for
their choices in deciding to watch particular TV programs, and must bear the
consequences of their reactions. They can always change the channel, or turn it
off. Stop treating them like children!

Hunter S. Thompson, Outlaw Journalist, Is Dead at 67

2005-02-23T13:46:00.000-08:00

The link's title says it all right there. Except the obituary is merely adequate. It's been hard finding real ideas about what Thompson was all about, and why he leaves us a huge hole. This is a good, personal perspective, but the ones at Salon, surprisingly, were awful, trivial; querying Cintra Wilson, Sonny Barger and Beng-Fong Torres means all they could see is Thompson's hipster celebrity, not his fault. The worst testimonial has to be today-to-power supreme Christopher Hitchens even making a statement.

With Thompson gone, who is left to be truly irreverant? Hitchen's himself is reverance personified. Irreverance is one of the real American ideals, and Thompson was more of a real American than most who claim that title; gun lover, drunk, sports fan and bettor. Does that leave any other great American pastimes untouched? And Thompson's irreverance was merely to see bullshit as it was, and call it just that:

"This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it - that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable."
-- Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail

That quote is 32 years old now. And still true. From 2003:

"We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world -- a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us . . . . No redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we'll kill you.

"Well, shit on that dumbness. George W. Bush does not speak for me or my son or my mother or my friends or the people I respect in this world. We didn't vote for these cheap, greedy little killers who speak for America today -- and we will not vote for them again in 2002. Or 2004. Or ever. "
-- Kingdom of Fear

Drudging With The Best of Them . . .

2005-02-18T12:28:00.000-08:00

Considering MoDo's general obsession with sex, I was disappointed that she didn't ask the question about Jeff James Guckert Gannon that really matters, the one question that no one seems to want to ask: what male White House staffer was Jeff James Guckert Gannon topping in order to get his press credential which allowed him to suck, er, suck-up to the President?

I imagine the White House is a hot-bed of sex, especially gay sex. I can't think of any other explanation for why American conservatives are so obsessed with cocks and gay sex. I'm sure that's why Alan Keyes kicked his daughter out of the family, because her presence probably had him thinking about sex more often than he already does, which seems to be every waking minute of the day. It seems to be the one thing more important to him than that wonderful political slogan, "Family." He's going to have to wait in line to get an excorcist though, but he probably thinks Catholicism is witchcraft anyway . . .

P.S. This goes deeper than I thought. Based on this report, it would seem Jeff James Guckert Gannon was topping someone pretty important in the White House. Does anyone know if Karl Rove's wife is just a beard? Hey, just wondering . . .

Oh So Validated

2005-02-04T17:13:00.000-08:00

The Third Policeman is quite pleased to have his own observation that people believe what they want to believe confirmed by Science!

First Amendment no big deal, students say

2005-01-31T14:14:00.000-08:00

Ah, youth! Decadence, it's not just for old farts anymore . . .

Where's Scalia?

2005-01-28T12:41:00.000-08:00

Mr. Go-Fuck-Yourself living just that . . . he must have thought he was going duck hunting again.

Celebrate

2005-01-27T13:44:00.000-08:00

It's Mozart's birthday today, so go listen to The Magic Flute or some of the late Piano Concertos, nice reminders of the Enlightenment on our slow slide back to Medievalism.

The Culture of Death

2005-01-27T11:40:00.000-08:00

What could be a better example? American political society, our ruling class, is so in love with death that the LA County DA thinks it's just to seek the death penalty against a suicidal man. Punishment obviously has nothing to do with it, because how do you punish someone by giving them what they want? It's all about the killing.

Listen Up

2005-01-26T14:46:00.000-08:00

The greatest radio station in the world is WKCR, 89.9 on your New York City FM dial. This is a station that plays jazz, the great American art form. It plays classical, it plays new and experimental music, it plays mambo, reggae, poetry, Indian ragas. It plays the greatest practitioners and examples of every kind of music that exists on earth.

It's not a public radio station, and has no paid staff. That is, they are all volunteers, and unlike Public Radio in general today it is NOT Talk Radio. It should also not be confused with KCRW, which is a cute station in SoCal that specializes in the charming, benignly shallow eclecticism of quirky pop and "world" music that is pop in different languages. And although it is based at Columbia University, it is not one of the college rock hordes. It plays music, great music, America's music.

So go listen, and help out. They are deeply in dept and fund-raising, something they only do in case of emergencies. Without retiring their debt, the bandwidth will probably be gobbled up by Clear Channel or the like. And that would frankly be a terrible, awful tragedy. What lonely outposts are left in this country that are trying to give back to this same country its own most beautiful things? It's like watching your kids die in a way. So go listen, and help out; their celebrating improvising guitarist Derek Bailey's 75th this week, the only place in the world you'd hear of it . . .

What To Do

2005-01-18T16:56:00.000-08:00

Not ready to celebrate with a delirious orgy of self-congratulation and a big "F*ck you" to each and every poor sap in Iraq? Then try a couple alternatives; wear black [The Third Policeman has a nice new shirt to test-drive anyway], don't buy anything other than absolute necessities, and, if you must shop, here's something both cheap and worthwhile, and you can share it with your friends. Bill Moyers puts it best.

Free Advice

2005-01-17T13:48:00.000-08:00

Shortly before the close of 2004, I wrote an email to Nancy Pelosi with some heartfelt suggestions on policy. I've yet to get any response from her or her office, but then again, why should I, since I'm merely an American citizen, a voter, and one of her constituents, i.e. without an "Inc." attached to my name, I'm of no importance whatsoever.

So, here it is, my suggestions for her. Perhaps if the two people who ever read this blog would like to forward this to their Congressperson, we might get a movement going:

Dear Congresswoman Pelosi:

I've just been recently struck with an idea for legislation that seemed, at
least to me, so effectively both practically and politically that I thought I
should pester you gently with it. I'm urging you to draft a bill that
would pay cash directly to married couples who either have children born to them
or adopt children, and the amount I propose is $25,000 per couple, each year
until all their children have reached the age of majority, regardless of the
number of children as long as there is at least one.

If I may explain my reasoning in brief before you find this too nutty, the
idea is, bluntly, to put the true American value of money where the 'moral
values' mouths have been yammering of late. This idea is as pro-family and
pro-marriage as can be, more so than enshrining bigotry in the Consitution.
By paying couples who have children, the Federal Government explicitly
values marriage and encourages procreation, two human activities that are
supposedly threatened. Paying cash to families helps relieve economic
pressures and makes it easier for a family to attempt to keep a parent at home.
Better child-rearing results, with obvious long-term benefits to American
society.

The details of procreation and adoption are important; children born as a
result of techniques like in vitro fertilization or through the use of fertility
drugs would not be counted when determining the benefit. This is for a
perhaps ugly political reason; by excluding the former,
embryo-creation/destruction/stem-cell fundamentalism is taken out of the
argument completely, and by excluding the latter, the Catholic Church would have
no doctrinal objections. This has the benefit of giving those who love to
use 'family' as a political club the real choice to start actually paying for
their values or arguing against them because they actually prefer the
dollar.

This amount is also relatively affordable, especially compared to costs
that reflect very few values. In the US there were 3,174,760 live births
in 2002; if $25,000 was provided for each birth, the total would come to a bit
under $80 billion. Considering what is spent on absolutely valueless and
worthless things like National Missile Defense, not an unreasonable amount, and
the actual figure would be less than that because the benefit is paid per
family, not per child. But again, what pundit or politician lording it
over moral values could argue against this? What is more valuable, a
military system that doesn't work that is supposed to protect us against a
threat that doesn't exist, or helping American families remain a unit,
encouraging the birth of children, developing new citizens who will work and pay
into Social Security, etc. I think the benefit is sound on its own, I
think it's far less than earthshattering to think of paying families, and
passage of such legislation would be good for the country. And I think
politically it's good for the Democrats because the party can actually do
something legislatively about 'moral values,' rather than just spew the usual
palaver, and the Republicans would either have to go along or start to show what
I feel they really value, which is money for me and misfortune for thee.
Thank you for your time, and I do hope you'll give this some serious
thought.

Regards, and best wishes for the New Year,

Those Who Forget Pop Culture Are Condemned to Repeat It

2005-01-14T12:25:00.000-08:00

Jesus' General admires Borat! It's surprising other uber-Patriots don't, considering how much they love the idea of new Death Squads. And it's not just the punditocracy that doesn't know what's happening in America . . .

Judge Orders Removal of Evolution Stickers

2005-01-13T14:46:00.000-08:00

While I applaud the outcome, this story demonstrates everything wrong about the struggles in America with schools teaching Darwin's Theory of Evolution:

1. The judge in the case says: ``By denigrating evolution, the school board appears to be endorsing the well-known prevailing alternative theory, creationism or variations thereof . . ." Like most Americans, this judge has no clue what a theory is. A theory is a proposition meant to explain a fact or phenomenom, which is then tested to ascertain its validity; a theory must be falsifiable. Creationism is not a theory because it is not falsifiable, it is dogma, belief. Darwin's Theory has been tested to that solid satisfaction of scientists, Creationism is there to believe or not. Put it to the test, and what happens?

2. The story goes on to note: The stickers were added after more than 2,000 parents complained that the textbooks presented evolution as fact, without mentioning rival ideas about the beginnings of life, such as the biblical story of creation. Evolution is fact [see #1 above], but it is fact in regards to the origins of species, it is agnostic on the beginnings of life itself, a subject it never once addresses. That is another subject altogether. But it is so greatly misunderstood that not only are the ignorant parents in fear of it standing as an alternative to their dogma but the AP cannot even explain what it is to their readers.

3. The story ends: A school district in Dover, Pa., has been locked in a dispute over a requirement that science students be told about ``intelligent design'' -- the concept that the universe is so complex it must have been created by some higher power. See #1 and #2; intelligent design may be such an idea, but the creation of the universe has nothing to do with Darwin's Theory, and intelligent design is not a theory because no one who espouses it will ever put it to any test. Can you imagine American fundamentalists questioning their own beliefs? That's what scientists do, and what dogmatists fear.

For No Reason At All

2005-01-12T13:06:00.000-08:00

I'm a lover of Da Ali G Show, and whenever I talk about it, people express their amazement that Ali G actually gets people to appear for his interviews. After the first season, though, I lost my own astonishment over just that because I realized that the people he interviews [including Sam Donaldson, Andy Rooney, Newt Gingrich, Gore Vidal and Pat Buchanan] know nothing at all about pop culture in America. And except for Vidal, I'm certain they know nothing about high culture in America either, which means they know nothing about America, although that doesn't stop them from telling us all what we're supposed to think and how we're supposed to live. Here's hoping Ali G sits down with George Will next season.

Another item of pop culture they haven't a clue about is Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, another one of my favorites. Last night's new episode, "Ray S," was beautiful and moving. I'm not kidding. The Guy, Ray Steele, married with a baby girl, is a Private [in the Reserves?] who is going to be sent to Iraq any day for a minimum year and a half tour of duty. This is no ordinary makeover situation. The Fab 5 fix up the family apartment and produce a real wedding ceremony for them with family members, but the most important thing they do is help the family with their coming separation. They gave them fabulous gifts, things that are really going to help them; a video camera and two laptops so they can keep in touch and Ray can watch his baby girl growing up from thousands of miles away, a $5,0000 JC Penney gift card for mom, a year's supply of groceries from Peapod, a year's worth of clothes for their baby girl, a waterproof bag, top-notch sunglasses and shoes for Ray, along with plenty of underwear, soap and sunscreen. It was really moving to see them pull out these things, because although everyone's spirits were warm, this is serious stuff to help with serious needs.

Then, at the end of the reception, Ray stole off with his wife to give her a piece of sentimental but sincere and apt jewelry, something that will symbolize their distance apart. It was really heartbreaking because the unspoken thought is that Ray may not come back at all, or not even in one piece. Which inevitably leads one to wonder why this is so, why are we fighting a war in Iraq. I don't think anyone really knows, or at least no one can say. I'm not talking about the excuses for the war, I'm talking about the reasons for it. There are none, no reasons whatsoever. Queer Eye is not asking that question, but by showing these wrenching human scenes, they are getting closer to the idea than our so-called "journalists."

Read Eschaton

2005-01-10T18:40:00.000-08:00

Yes, I may eventually have a few more ideas of my own, but I think about what Atrios wrote often, and he put it exactly right, naming names.

It Can't Happen Here?

2004-12-19T09:03:00.000-08:00

A survey conducted by Cornell University finds that 44% of Americans believe that other Americans, those who faith is with Islam, should have their civil liberties curtailed. In other words, the Consitution only applies to some Americans, not all. I'll say it again, America is a great idea we may yet fulfill, but it's a long way off.

The wretched, sickening results speak for themselves, but there were interesting features inside the numbers; self-identified Republicans and 'religious' people were more in favor of restricting the Constitutional rights of Americans, while those who paid more attention to TV news live in fear of terrorist attack:

While researchers said they were not surprised by the overall level of support
for curtailing civil liberties, they were startled by the correlation with
religion and exposure to television news.

"We need to explore why these
two very important channels of discourse may nurture fear rather than
understanding," Shanahan said.

Here's your answer Mr. Shanahan, ignorance. The Republican/religion alliance breeds it as a matter of strategy, to maintain secular power, and TV news encourages it as a matter of principal; it's less trouble and less costly to propogate ignorance than enlightenment. Oh, and Christmas is also in danger, apparently almost as much as Social Security. And it couldn't happen with 'journalism.'

Happy Holidays.

The end of the world

2004-12-17T17:07:00.000-08:00

Actually, a quite nice little article from The Economist. I don't think the people behind The Rapture Index are going to be reading it though. Too bad, because they have Elliot Abram's ear. Do you think he reads The Economist?

If I Were Mayor .. . .

2004-12-16T17:41:00.000-08:00

I love reading stories like these, especially the part where Major League Baseball finds it "wholly unacceptable" that they, a business, should be expected to pay 50% of the cost of building a new stadium. 50%? 50-friggin'-%?!? If I were Mayor, I'd tell baseball in my town "actually, you've got to pay 100%." The only, only way I would consider giving public money to a team, or any other business, is if the public got a share of the revenues. Toss that out to an owner and then check their underwear for stains . . .

Now, I love baseball more than the next guy. And I also know what baseball is, a sport, a game. MLB however is a business. And like a lot of American businesses, free-market, free-enterprise types, they have their hands out faster than a bellhop at the Ritz, looking for the latest public handout, rifling through the pockets of citizens for changet to support their businesses. The best way to support a baseball team is to buy tickets and go to the games. But building stadiums with public money? That way, you don't have to buy tickets, because you're paying already, paying the money you earn to a baseball team. I'm offended by the gall of it, and I'm also offended about how business people like to act like they're so tough and hardnosed, when they are really just a bunch of panty-waists whining for a hand-out. I'd like to slap them like JJ Gittes does Evelyn Mulwray in Chinatown. I wish these owners would try a little free-enterprise someday, I hear it's a good idea in theory. Here in San Francisco we are modestly blessed by a fairly enlightened ownership group that build their own stadium [Yes! It can be done!], and not only have turned a profit every year since they moved in, but have fielded a consistently competitive team as well. Must be all that cheese and chardonnay out here in the Blue waters . . .

A Good Week . . .

2004-12-16T16:22:00.000-08:00

. . . it's been a very good week for the Fantasy-based community, the best one I can recall in quite awhile.

First there were the rewards for a job well done; you know, the "slam-dunk" case on BLTs and putting all those ex-Iraqi soldiers on the streets with no jobs, but with guns. With Freedom being On The March, responsibility must be rewarded.

Then, there was Pere Ubu's economic conference, where the deficit was talked about so much that it seemed to disappear all by itself.

Finally, there was the latest success in testing another feature of one of the Federal governments most successful jobs programs of all times. The program is passing out billions of dollars to worthy recipients, as it was designed to. And that makes American stronger.

Oh, and don't forget Christmas is under attack . . . I keep telling people that Jews are going to be the next targets. My, won't that be lovely . . .

If you're a holiday shopper, you must read this

2004-12-15T11:54:00.000-08:00

Just doing my part to spread the valuable discovery made by Timothy Noah at Slate.

The Conscience of a Conservative

2004-12-14T16:54:00.000-08:00

An excellent, true viewpoint from Pat Buchanan's The American Conservative [thank you Julia]. And refreshing too - I don't think I've read anything from an American conservative's perspective since 9/11 that actual took the trouble to do some moral reasoning and critical thinking together. Claiming someone who disagrees with you is immoral is easy, actually thinking about moral ideas is hard. A good example is J.C. Watts who stated "Character is simply doing right when no one is looking" as he voted to impeach Bill Clinton, and while no one was looking fathered out of wedlock children. So, like I said, refreshing.

But depressing too. The type of government we are edging towards is oligarchy, and a feature of oligarchy is that no one involved in it can ever fail. That is, no matter how much or how often their decision turn out to be wrong, the will constantly fail upward since, protected by the oligarchy, there are no possible consequences to getting something wrong. Witness yesterday's ceremony, where the Medal of Freedom was awarded specifically for results of the administrations Iraq 'policy.' In our world, this is Marx brothers material. In the oligarchy, this is the only 'reality' that matters. Cue the Ron Suskind article . . .

. . . and the Rich Lowry's of the world, the administration's ass-lickers, calling for the nuking of Mecca, Iraq, the Arab world in general, this toadying to power, whispering the sweet nothings of genocide in the ears of Pere Ubu and his courtiers . . . after a century that proved the infinite capacity for man's inhumanity towards other men, these pampered, smug scum in suits eagerly calling for murder, because it's what they believe the objects of their secular, cultish affections want to hear . . . they are parasites on the soul of humanity, they prove the banality of evil and it's existence as a quality in all man. They are qualing, fearful, cheap imitations of people . . .

I still think most of us are made of better stuff - that should keep us out of Beltway cocktail parties.

The New Republic Online: Zeal of Approval

2004-12-14T13:17:00.000-08:00

Looks like Bob Novak has the cilice cinched a little too tightly. Can my Catholic reader[s] chime in on the supposed brilliance and fame of Rocco Buttiglione? And please, please tell me the Church is not going to pick up the pitiable, laughable mantle of 'we're victims because we're christians.'

Real 'Media Bias'

2004-12-13T18:26:00.000-08:00

In this story from today's NY Times about DoD ideas on strategic disinformation, this sentence pops up early:

Critics of the proposals say such deceptive missions could shatter the Pentagon's credibility, leaving the American public and a world audience skeptical of anything the Defense Department and military say - a repeat of the credibility gap that roiled America during the Vietnam War.

And here we have a perfect example of actual media bias, common to the Times. It is neither 'conservative' or 'liberal,' terms which have no inherent meaning. Instead, it is a bias towards established power, wherein what powerful people and institutions say is swallowed whole and repeat without a hint of critical thought or evaluation. What discerning, sane person would say that the DoD has any credibility at all at this point in time? This is just such profound nonsense in the Times that it pretty much explains Whitewater, Wen Ho Lee, the slavish republication of 'tips' from Ahmed Chalabi and hints from the Pentagon. The DoD can say anything it wants, and no one outside this country will believe it. So go ahead, knock yourself out.

One possibility that strikes me is that this story is written in some code solely for other journalists; i.e. if the DoD starts/keeps spreading misinformation which we report, we, journalists, might start doubting the truth of what their saying. A few years and many thousand lives too late, of course, but hey, this is all about professionalism and ethics. One hopes, but one doubts also. The way The Daily News and Newsday were wiping their asses with the Times over the Kerik story leads me to think that not only is the Times completely satisifed covering Washington by acting as slavish stenographers and Karl Roves butt-boys, but they can't imagine there is any other way. Sad.

Music List Continued

2004-12-10T13:25:00.000-08:00

More good music from the past year or so . . .

In the field of opera recordings, the 'or so' is required to stretch the terms and include an extraordinary and truly historic performance recording of Beethoven's "Fidelio." The set documents the actual performance of the opera's production that had led to the exquisite and famous studio recording led by Otto Klemperer and with almost the same cast. While sacrificing some sound quality, the live performance overpowers the studio version, not least because on stage Jon Vickers appears as Florestan, and the opening note of his famous aria grabs the listener by the lapels and does not let go. The overall drama and intensity of the recording surpasses most of the opera performances I've witnessed in person, and immediately after the climax, as Klemperer cues the Leonore Overture 3 to bring the work to its conclusion, the audience is literally overcome with applause and sounds ready to rush the stage and hoist the cast on their shoulders. This is one of the great recordings and a testament to the vitality and importance of historic, recorded sound.

A new, 'old' recording of "Le Nozze di Figaro." I say new old because it is a recent release performed in period style, led by the conductor Rene Jacobs. This is the real masterpiece that Mozart left us with, a drama that succeeds on many levels, with music that is the full perfection of Classical style. While period recordings are often a matter of combining the listener's particular taste with the didacticism of the conductor, this one is pure pleasure, not the least in the chamber size sound, the stimulating roughness of the strings and woodwinds. Jacobs approach is the opposite of grand opera, which is inappropriate to Mozart, and he combines an excellent cast in an ensemble, much like the orchestra. This one gets better with each listening.

Other recommended classical recordings are a reissue of two of Wilhelm Furtwangler's greatest performances, which means they are two of the greatest classical music performances; the problematic Schumann Symphony 4 and Haydn Symphony 88. His Haydn performance is justly famous, but the Schumann is fantastic as well. Furtwangler takes a very deliberate pace with each movement and the sense is of the music unfolding itself, leading us on. The conductor had the unique talent of combing slow pace with a flowing tension and he works wonders on the CD. There's also the recording of the Bostridge/Andsnes collaboration for "Winterreise" that I've praised previously.

There is a wonderful collection of Debussy piano music on the budget label Naxos, and the same label has the single finest Christmas music CD, Christmas masses and short instrumental Noels from Marc-Antoine Charpentier, to my mind the most beautiful and sensual composer of the French Baroque. Both are beautiful CDs.

In jazz, this record came out fall of 2003, but it's new to me this year; "In What Language?" A challenging, dynamic, powerful CD that actually makes art out of politics, a rare thing. This work is a collaboration between the mostly spoken monologues of Mike Ladd and the driving music of Vijay Iyer, and it's a work that demands your attention. It doesn't aim to please, and means to tell you something important about fear, cosmopolitanism, racism and personal identity. And no, it's not the least bit pretentious. Not the least.

But I know few are going to listen to those records. Here's some more popular choices . . .

Along with the continuing Rhino Elvis Costello re-release project, great for any fan, his new record "The Delivery Man" gets him back on solid ground after the wan failure of "North." Over the decades, as Costello has aged, his approach has gotten less self-conscious and more personal. His songs don't try to impress with cleverness anymore, they're more him trying out ideas and styles that he simply enjoys. The records may still be nice and loud, like "This Year's Model," but they have a grown-up relaxed charm to them too.

Another grown-up is the true American Genius Tom Waits, who brought out "Real Gone." The sound is in the style he began pioneering on "Bone Machine," but that doesn't mean he's consolidating or repeating himself. Waits is pioneering a music that seeks to get down to the plainest, simplest core of where songs, and the desire to make music, come from, and the sound seeks that primitive ideal, but this is music made from the most sophisticated mind and taste. Not for everyone because it's far from everyday, but it makes it's own kind of harsh, rumbling funk.

Finally, the CD that has made the strongest impression on me this year, Phil Kline's "Zippo Songs." This is a set of songs setting words inscribed on Zippo lighters by US soldiers in Vietnam. That cycle is combined with the brief and chilling 'Rumsfeld Songs,' from words by our very own Secretary of Evil Glibness. The music is small and self-contained, sung with cool focus by Theo Bleckmann. This is political art again, with the emphasis on art, and the great strength of the work is the simple quietness with which Kline has written the songs and in the way the musicians perform it; the idea and music speak clearly and powerfully for themselves. The CD is mesmerizing and affecting.

Answer: 1,185

2004-12-09T13:57:00.000-08:00

Question: How many days from September 11, 2001, did it take Thomas L. Friedman to figure out who the enemy actually is?

Pimping the List

2004-12-07T13:11:00.000-08:00

Someone told me it's Holiday time? Time for the 'best of' lists? Is that right?

I am seeing these lists this week, which has started to snap me out of the pleasant glow of Italy, where the holiday is far more spiritual than material. But when in Rome . . .

This strikes me as proper duty, to help guide my loyal reader [is there more than one?], in matters of the highest taste! To whit: in no particular order, and in only a partial sense, Some of the Better Recordings released in approximately the Last Twelve Months.

"Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus" by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. This is a satisfying, exhilerating record. I've seen much critical opinion that Cave has been in a rut since "The Boatman's Call," but after listening a great deal to that highly-praised record, I say that's where the rut began. The hipster appeal of that record is obvious, as it is the appeal of Cave himself, a literate, thoughful crooner who builds from a genuine foundation in rural American blues refracted through the energy and real anarchy of punk-rock. He has a great sound, a great style, and "Boatman's Call" would be a great record if it was not so musically monotonous. The nature of most music with popular appeal is that it is just not musically sophisticated enough to sustain one single idea over the course of an entire record. So the CD does fail for me.

The new double album is altogether different. It's varied in style, dynamics and tempo and full of verve. Cave is not breaking new ground but rather perfecting what he has been doing for almost 20 years that he's achieved a real sense of mastery and ease. Everything flows forth from him and the band, relaxed and unselfconsciously, and that last is necessary for Cave, because his complete reimagining of Orpheus, as a musician who's unceasing playing kills birds, Eurydice herself and so angers God, "who's big in heaven," that he casts the singer down to hell, would be so much ironic cliche if Cave didn't have the charm and wit to carry it off. It's both astonishing and satisfying.

As I listened to it, I wondered if this CD would draw more self-consciously Christian listeners. Cave is a real and un-ironic Christian himself, something which his fans, many of them from the punk and goth subcultures, seem to have no issues with. Nor should they, for it is an integral part of his work. But where are the Christian Nick Cave fans? There was an article in the NY Times Sunday Mag back in September, about Biola University, a fundamentalist, evangelical school near Los Angeles, that began with a teacher playing Nick Cave for his Intro to Mass Media class. The students tuned out, rejected the music, even though Cave is singing literally, devotedly about Christianity. I was puzzled when I first read this - Cave is giving them what they profress to want and believe in - but as the article continued, I grasped the situation better. Cave may be telling the students what they want to hear, but not in the style they demanded. The students, and the university in general, are not just trying to learn from a particular dogmatic position, they are also trying to reject much of the world around them. And rock in general is part of that world. They have their Christian faith, their faith in Jesus and the Bible, and they also have an equally powerful worldly faith in the rejection of Modernity. A big, daring outing for the students involved praying for the courage to enter a Starbucks and order coffee and sit amongst 'non-believers,' i.e. people who did not believe exactly what the students did.

I'm not aware of anything in the Bible or about being a Christian that requires rejecting Modernity, but it is prevalent in American conservative Christian circles, and of course identically so in fundamentalist Islam around the world. Modernity is the enemy and must be fought through the organs of government or the organs of violence. This strikes me as a tragic distortion of faith, a subjugation of it to material concerns of political power, and a danger for all of us. After all, Modernity has been around for almost 200 years, and it's not going anywhere. I hope. The true and worthy Conservative values of Modernity like emancipation and freedom, free discourse and inquiry, the rejection of hereditary rule, and even the belief in the chimera of progress, these are ideas we need to hold and believe in everyday, these are good ideas that benefit all of us. These are moral values of the highest order and it does seem an odd and unlikely turn of events that Nick Cave, former frontman of one of the loudest, most racuous punk bands ever, would be protecting these from a vanguard of good, Christian cadres. Modern times . . .

. . . more to come.

. . . They're actually being patriotic . . .

2004-12-03T13:13:00.000-08:00

I'm shocked, shocked to discover that any of the genus American Conservative listens to jazz. Actually, I am shocked. Now, if they really were the ultra-patriots they claim to be, they'd be listening to jazz as a matter of course, since it is one of the pinnacles of home-grown American culture. But of course they're really not listening to jazz, because it is, as Art Blakey said, "an intelligent person's music." That must be why they're so bent out of shape by a line in Barber's song taken from Sophocles . . .

Twister

2004-12-02T17:12:00.000-08:00

This should be some showdown, the ultra-patriotic fantasists vs. the DoD, which they so fetishize, which, for its own sake, has to deal with reality. . . here's the report.

Immaterial

2004-11-26T16:47:00.000-08:00

I disagree with Atrios as he argues against boycotting the materialism of the Christmas season. The most persistent experience I brought back with me from two weeks in Italy was the contrast between seeing two holiday displays and 200 ravishing paintings of the Annunciation. The least of Christmas is the gift-giving, which is itself symbolic. Italians certainly celebrate the holiday, it's a more integral part of their daily lives than here, and because of that they don't feel compelled to buy buy buy buy. That also means no news stories about how much consumers are purchasing. Not everything should have a price.

Late Dispatch From Europe

2004-11-23T10:58:00.000-08:00

The Third Policeman's trip is winding to a close, and he's feeling that pleasant exhaustion of doing pretty much nothing but walking, eating and seeing some of the most beautiful paintings [Titian's Assumption and a Bellini altarpiece in Santa Maria dei Frari in Venice, and Martini's frescoe Maestà in the Museo Civico in Siena], and churches and paintings in churches in the world. Since my first full day here, when I visited the Sistine Chapel, I've wondered how someone could possibly choose, or stay with, Protestantism after seeing that kind of thing. I believe I have solved that mystery, at least on a personal level. Last Saturday, while in the Museo Accademico in Florence, surrounded by the exquisite, mysterious beauty of hundreds of late-Gothic, early-Rennaissance religious paintings, I heard one American Male telling his wife and two kids that a painting of the slaughter of the innocents was "Satan trying to kill Jesus." Well . . . yes . . . how nice not to even deal with one side of an issue, how nice to have no issues at all, no questions, doubts, no fabric of the soul, in other words. And you can have it too, with American Protestantism! Order yours today.

Yes, here I was back in Rome today, overhearing some other good American Protestants walking down the street, the immediate quote being "Three WalMart stores and this town would be out of business!" Well . . . no! Does he really think there are enough Americans who would come to Rome to shop at WalMart? I didn't see that guy while I was watching the moon float in the sky by the Pantheon on this mild November night, nor while I was taking one last look at Bernini's fountain of the four rivers in the Piazza Navona. That Bernini, what a genius . . . in the Bassilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, someone had laid flowers at the marble slab engraved with his name . . .

Ciao!

2004-11-14T10:58:00.000-08:00

The Third Policeman is writing from Italy, land of history and culture. I'm not going to bore you with details of the journey or do much recommending [except for the Galleria Borghese in Rome and the National Gallery of Art in Perugia, which may not be that well known and are extraordinary], others do that better. What strikes me here, the main idea, is that of civic life.

I read recently, can't remember where but it was some newspaper or web-based article, in re the election that the suburbs and their values had triumphed, and that suburbs were superior to cities in terms of culture and values because they had more families with children and more diversity, especially compared to seacoast cities with major ports. To this I have to say, what the fuck is that politicized, nonsensical, idiotic political sloganeering? Rome proves the point that cities are superior through two simple ideas, Palazzos and fountains. The Palazzos are the large and small areas for public gathering, restricted only to foot traffic. The Roman model is of course exceptionally beautiful, like the Piazza Navona with its Bernini fountains which are treasures of Western culture. But any public space is important, they bring people together, on foot. All kinds of people, because all kinds of people live in cities, especially port cities which draw visitors, immigrants and people who come from another place and end up elsewhere. And it is the mix of people that creates the mix of culture, and it is people in limited space in cities who have to learn to live together. In the suburbs the vast lawn, the car, and the frequent lack of sidewalks keep people off the streets and apart. That is a bad direction for the human condition and easily brings out the "I've got mine, screw you" attitude on the rise in newly Nationalistic America.

The other important items are fountains, which supply drinkable water all throughout Rome. They are there in niches off the street, where one stumbles upon them. Often they are charmingly designed, but they exist because the city decided long, long ago that its citizens should be able to get a drink of water when they needed one. What other city does this, and what suburb would even think of it?

And to sum it all up, last night in Rome I stumbled across a Pro-Palestinian demonstration, led by the Italian Communist party, in the Palazzo di Poppolo. What a mix of people in that vast space, a lot not paying attention [even the carabinieri looked bored in their riot gear]! But that is what the Palazzo is for, bring people together. And as the speakers spoke [wishfully I should add], about bringing down Berlusconi, Blair and Bush, I realized that the idea of America really seems lost now, I hope not permanently, and that its just all Nationalism now, and cretinous at that. Ciao tutti.

Naive and Sentimental Music

2004-11-09T17:39:00.000-08:00

It opens with street sounds: pedestrians and a passing bus, murmur of voices. Presently, a boy's voice is heard, repeating "Missing," followed then accompanied by the reading of names, and the distant, worldess singing of a chorus. It is the beginning of On The Transmigration of Souls, a piece by John Adams commemorating the dead of 9/11 and commissioned, performed and recorded by the New York Philharmonic. This is a piece of American art.

This is a work that performs a ritual without being ritualistic or staged itself. The main focus is on the words, the spoken narrative of names, the chorus quietly singing lines taken from the sad flyers posted all over Manhattan by people vainly hoping to find lost loved ones. The orchestra supports all this, mostly quietly, but developing to an organic and powerful climax as the chorus just about shouts out, urgently, "light sky life." It is very moving in a private way that allows us to come to terms, in our own way, with our own feelings. It offers no guides, suggestions or methods, merely the intimacy of the human voice and the simple words of people. A powerful work, it opens a door for us, but that's all, we must do the rest, which is how it should be.

This from the same composer who's choruses of Palestinians from his opera The Death of Klinghoffer were struck from the stage by the Boston Philharmonic in their concerts immediately after 9/11! It's not that Adams was a poor choice, but that an organization had already quailed at the prospect of actually having listeners think and feel. Quailed out of fear of offending, when the offense had already been performed and taken, out of some bogus music-as-therapy idea that edgy nerves should be soothed by sweet sounds, when it is infamous deeds the must be attended. The decision is even more absurd when one considers Adams current status as the unofficial national composer, as Aaron Copland was before him. While sounding very different, their works are both based on the foundation of rigor, craft, ideas that are often challenging but with a sound that draws in the ear. Adams furthers his status by consciously placing himself in the true American tradition created by Charles Ives.

On and after 9/11, I found myself, found because it seemed an unconscious choice, listening over and over to Charles Ives' 2nd Orchestral Set, which concludes with a movement titled "From Hanover Square North, at the End of a Tragic Day, the Voice of the People Again Arose." In it, Ives as capturing a memory of standing on the platform, waiting for the train, amid a crowd of people shocked at the news of the sinking of the Lusitania, when, on the tune of a hurdy-gurdy grinder rising from the street below, the people began spontaneously to sing "In the Sweet By-and-By." It is mysterious and powerful because it offers no answers, only questions. The distance between the Ives and Adams new piece is very short, and Adams forges the link by writing a trumpet line that is a conscious response to Ives great work of existential conceptual art, The Unanswered Question.

At the end of that week, I attended the San Francisco Symphony, a concert of the Mahler Symphony 6. This is not a work of comfort, it is deeply tragic and ends with an almost literal depiction of dirt being tossed on a coffin lid. All credit for the Symphony for going forward with this challenging work. They included in the program an extra note pointing out that works of art don't seek to sooth, they ask questions. And this performance, magnificent, driven, absolutely grim and completely gripping is what finally made me feel like a human being again because it is a very human work, regarding human emotions in all their confused states. When terrible things happen it is the strength of the art we should crave, art with an understanding of the tragedy of human nature, not some specious theraputic quality. The Boston Phil failed to offer what we needed in 2001, the SF Symphony gave it to local audiences, and now John Adams has given it to us all.

McSweeney's Internet Tendency

2004-11-09T16:48:00.000-08:00

Read it, I say. I'm a little late jumping on the McSweeney's band-wagon, but I was hooked by their beautifully produce comics issue, and the cover on the latest one compelled me to grab it immediately. Subheaded "At war for the forseeable future and he's never been so scared," [the spine adds "At war for the forseeable shitbrained future" and "We're praying as fast as we can"], is a drawing, unmistakable, of President Pere Ubu, dressed like a boy, appearing penitent as he sits there with both legs having been amputated . . . the caption indicates he is saying "I am so, so sorry." Appropriately grim for grim times, as are the first two stories, which are pretty incredible.

While I've got a long-planned music post to finish, sometime, I'm also going on vacation for two weeks, but hope to post the occasional travel entry. See ya!

The Echo Chamber

2004-11-08T13:16:00.000-08:00

The Third Policeman does love his validation. Last week, I wrote this comment:

Republicans know how to take advantage of ignorance and create it as well. "No Child Left Behind" and Head Start will never be fully funded because giving Americans the minimum of education so they can hold a service job, but nothing more to stimulate curiousity or independance, creates a permanent "Red" voting class.

And today in Slate, Laura Kipnis writes:

Here's an interesting little factoid that I share at the risk of sounding,
once more, elitist. (Sorry.) The United States ranks 14th out of 15
industrialized countries in per capita education spending. If we have an
electorate incapable of thinking rationally about its own interests, who confuse
politicians with old movie heroes, don't know much about history, and lap up the
administration's lies about Iraq even after they've been repeatedly exposed as
lies by the media, this might have something to do with never having been
educated in the fundamental skills of critical thinking. (Note that Bush's much
touted No Child Left Behind initiative, favoring rote learning and standardized
testing, is the formula for an even more intellectually pacified and credulous
electorate.)

But corporate America doesn't require an educated or critical
citizenry. Quite the contrary. What it requires is a passive work force narrowly
trained to perform specific occupations for decreasing wages, who will then
overconsume lavishly in their leisure hours. It all works out rather well: Job
dissatisfaction is placated by an endless succession of consumer crap (creating
new jobs—though probably overseas—making more crap); intellectual boredom is
assuaged by a steady diet of media crap (thanks to media deregulation); and any
remaining critical stirrings are mollified by supersize portions of tasteless
crappy food (thanks to an unregulated food industry). The result: a stupefied,
overstuffed citizenry glued to pricey entertainment centers, whose national
hobby is ridiculing Europeans for wanting shorter work weeks, resisting American
imports, and denouncing the disastrous American policy in Iraq.

Which reminds me of my days of a college graduate with a good Liberal Arts education trying to find a job. It was not until 12 years after graduation that I had a regular full-time job, at a salary, with benefits. The American Dream . . .

Refreshing Perspective . . .

2004-11-05T12:34:00.000-08:00

. . . from a very smart writer, Katha Pollit. She admits she doesn't know what to do. Thank you, Katha! I'm not really sure either, when faced with this:

"Maybe Bush won because of some other factor . . . as exit polls showed the majority of Bush supporters [think] that Bush is a liberal: for example, that he favored the Kyoto Accord on global warming (51 percent), labor and environmental standards in trade agreements (84 percent), the nuclear test ban treaty (69 percent), and the International Criminal court (66 percent)."

New America

2004-11-05T12:16:00.000-08:00

It's not Vietnam that we can't stop fighting, it's the War Between The States. The linked map is amusing, but it immediately made me think of 1860.

Some Democrats Blame One of Their Own

2004-11-05T12:06:00.000-08:00

Hmm, I was able to spot this trend at least a day ahead. Even Salon is paying catch-up. Always trust The Third Policeman!

Oh Baby, Turn Me On!!!!!

2004-11-05T12:02:00.000-08:00

Call Now, 212-875-7000 . . . seriously, this is great, better enjoy it before it's banned.

The unteachable ignorance of the red states. By Jane�Smiley

2004-11-04T17:17:00.000-08:00

Jane Smiley speaks for herself, of course, but this line should sit in the memory for a while:

"The error that progressives have consistently committed over the years is to underestimate the vitality of ignorance in America."

Absolfuckinglutely right. Republicans know how to take advantage of ignorance and create it as well. "No Child Left Behind" and Head Start will never be fully funded because giving Americans the minimum of education so they can hold a service job, but nothing more to stimulate curiousity or independance, creates a permanent "Red" voting class. It's not pretty, but it's smart and it works. On the values front, this Administration is a Potemkin Village; knock it down and torch it.

It's All Local

2004-11-03T16:46:00.000-08:00

There are many advantages to living in San Francisco, and a few disadvantages, one of them being some parochail qualities, especially the self-congratulatory smugness many Bay Area people have about their own superior intelligence. Take me as an example: I in no way knew that the most pressing issue facing our nation was that of loving, long-term, same-sex relationships. Who knew? Mea maxima culpa . . .

But seriously, this one is pretty good. On Tuesday SF voters had the usual parade of ballot propositions to consider, one of them being Proposition J, a sales tax increase. This was defeated by the voters. These same voters passed Proposition O, by a landslide. This latter Proposition takes the sales tax increase of Proposition J and dedicates it to low income housing, seniors, the homeless, etc. Except that Proposition J was defeated, which means . . . oh never mind. The semi-tragedy of it all was the defeat of a Proposition to issue bonds to pay for supported housing, an integral part of Mayor Newsome's homeless plan, much reviled for ideological reasons locally [he's been called a "Fascist" here, amazingly enough] but so far, incrementally, succeeding. Now he's going to be blamed for the restoration of the Dauphin . . .

New Yorkers Are the Best

2004-11-02T17:09:00.000-08:00

So long Jimmy, thank you for putting the screws to your truly brain-dead colleagues! Beautiful.

Last Dance

2004-11-01T15:19:00.000-08:00

This needs to start with a caveat: I don't agree with Lee Siegel's conclusion, mainly because I don't want to agree. And that's a problem because when it comes to his argument, I'm overwhelmed with it's brilliance:

"I hope I wake up Wednesday morning with egg on my face, but I believe that Bush is going to win the election tomorrow handily . . . He is going to win partly because if even half the country favors Bush and Co.'s transparent and verifiable stupidity, mendacity, fanaticism, and thuggishness, then that is what this country deserves. . . . Most of all, he is going to win because mendacity seems to have become normalized as just another tactic of the avid American self.

"Yiddish proverb: "A fool can throw a stone in the water that it takes ten wise men to retrieve." I recalled it while watching Laura Ingraham "converse" on "Larry King Live" with Bob Graham . . . , Lindsey Graham . . . , and Bill Richardson . . . The toothy, wide-eyed, perpetually grinning Ingraham would emit some barely coherent distortion of the truth, and the other three would spend five minutes laboring to answer her in some coherent, accurate way, while she just sat there grinning away, enjoying the ripples she'd caused. When Alfred Jarry's famous dadaistic play, Ubu Roi, seems to provide much of the script for public life, you are going to get a president who in reality is the precise inversion of his appearance. This smiling, self-acknowledging, winking gap between appearance and reality is now a cultural style. Images whose dishonesty is an open secret are now cherished as the antidote to flawless-seeming images that you just know are full of trickery and deceit but can't be sure.

" . . . And we spend much of our time--many of us, anyway--relishing the open, amiable lies of a Bush as--incredibly--the honest antidote to the appearance of earnest virtue and social consciousness of a Gore or a Kerry--appearances that you just know are full of trickery and deceit because ... well, because they just have to be. That's another reason why Bush is going to win.

. . .

"And Bush is going to win because journalists who have been riding high on the war-wave for the past year and defending Bush's every disastrous move in Iraq, and attacking Kerry's every criticism of Bush's disaster, now wish to show everybody that, in fact, it was critical, independent thinking all along that led them to their brave--and timely--conclusions. Now they are going to vote for Kerry; i.e. for the very antithesis of the man whose cause they took up for four years. Christopher Hitchens, once an original and brilliant writer, and now someone whose incomprehensible yet highly entertaining arguments are like mutterings you overhear rather than prose you read, even pulled off the neat trick of writing in The Nation that he would vote for Bush and in Slate that he would vote for Kerry. (He later wrote that Slate misconstrued him, and that, anyway, this crucial, thrilling, fateful election is actually a "depressing and trivial election campaign"--such contrarian declamation is standard Oxbridge style.) In the same revealing and useful Slate survey of its regular contributors' political views, Paul Berman, who currently writes with a weird, self-enclosed, self-congratulatory air, informs us that he would vote for Eugene Debs if he could. Eugene Debs. After several years of arguing for relentless, permanent war, Berman would vote for Eugene Debs, who was jailed for his pacifism during World War I. More stones, more ripples, more commotion.

. . .

"Finally, and most of all, Bush is going to win because the entire country seems to be engulfed in the rising ordure of reality television, in which the open lie of carefully orchestrated combat and ordeal is presented as "reality." Not to mention all the humiliation of other people, which is presented as entertainment. In the Spanish-language "Green Card," illegal Mexican aliens are invited to eat worm-filled burritos for the chance of, maybe, retaining a lawyer who will, maybe, get them a green card. This sort of nastiness The New York Times' television critic Alessandra Stanley calls "amusing if cruel." (If you can't declaim in true Oxbridge style, you can at least affect upper-class British insouciance.) The ugly social attitudes that lurk behind political liberalism are another reason why the ugly social attitudes that wink and smile in the forefront of contemporary political conservatism seem like such a relief to some people."

Um, wow. I've felt intuitively that reality shows express a lot of ugliness in America, like that coming from some Bush voters in Ohio: "we don't want any faggots in the White House!" "Kerry's a terrorist! Communists for Kerry! Go back to Russia!" [No Child Left Behind might help that young man with his history]. "I think Kerry is the anti-Christ, he scares me." My favorite is this:

"I'm definitely gonna vote for him," Karnes said of Bush. "Because he's been the president for four years and nothing bad has happened since Sept. 11. He's kept me alive for four years." If Kerry becomes president, he said, "We'll be dead within a year."

It starts to make sense; he and is ilk [including the woman who proclaims "we are the way it should be!"] see Bush as a King Arthur type figure. With their magical thinking, they feel that as long as he is president, we will be protected. This conveniently ignores Bush's inability to protect anyone on 9/11, but then people believe what is easiest for them to believe. With this magical thinking, the Bush corpus, in office, is the land and as long as he is well so we all are. Failure to elect Bush is like the King without a sword, the land without a King. This also explains the emotional concept behind the trope that criticizing Bush is criticizing American soldiers - since Bush is the magic King, the soldiers too are part of his extended corpus. It fits snugly into the contemporary American conservative belief statism and autocracy, and is wonderfully pagan as well, although Kerry is of course the anti-Christ. Perhaps if he stopped going to church, like Bush . . .

One last thing to read, and read it fast because it won't be fresh long. It does serve to hammer home the magical thinking even more severely, and it's the perfect bookend for Lee Siegel's thoughts. It merely takes an interest in the facts and logic and rational thought to note that the words of the Administration have little relationship to reality, nor even to their own previous and future statements. It's a frustrating puzzlement among many how their fellow citizens cannot seem to grasp or accept that the world is not flat, the night is not day. But if a taste for reality TV means an embrace of the corruption of the very meaning of reality, then it all becomes clear, but no less disturbing. At least until tomorrow, we have a President opposed to the Enlightenment, a difficult enough thing to accept considering it's 2004, but worst of all is that there are tens of millions of American opposed to it as well. Medievalism, it's the new black,

Ma Dottore, sono Pagliacci io . . .

2004-10-30T11:39:00.000-07:00

It's nice to be able to laugh about things, in spite of it all. Bill Maher's show on HBO has become a necessary salve, something I deeply miss when it's not on the air. I know every Friday evening I can tune in and laugh about the most awful, outrageous things; a Home Shopping Network style fake ad for an metal collar that goes around the neck to prevent beheadings . . . and with a convenient cell-phone holder! Or Bill appearing as Koby Teeth and singing about his patriotic outrage over those "weapons of mass destruction related program activities . . ." A couple weeks ago, he pointed out that the Dauphin is really a girl; an ex-cheerleader whining about how John Kerry's words hurt other people feelings, and last night pointing out that the most horrible thing on the new Bin Laden video was his "out of nowhere dig that Mary Cheney is a lezbo!" Thank you Bill!

Being able to laugh like this means no one can tell you what you're supposed to be thinking or feeling. Must make an autocrat gnash his teeth for the days when Ari Fleischer could explain that the Administrations view was that "Americans need to watch what they say, what they do," inspired by none other than Maher himself! But it's not only those in political power who seek to convince Americans not to think, just as egregious was Oprah telling us all that the dead from the WTC, the Pentagon, and the field in Pennsylvania were "all angels now." Really? Even Mohammed Atta? This type of treacly balm is meant to wipe away troubled thoughts, when troubled thoughts and real, hard thinking are called for.

But laughing means thinking and can perhaps even ease the trouble a bit. When one can laugh about these things, while thinking, one has conquered the distress and is ready to move to more thinking and action. And to a great extent this has moved into the mainstream of popular culture, and this is good for all of us. The late-night jokes about the transmitter Bush wore to such 'success' during the debates are easy; harder, more vital and funnier is Maher himself available to the millions of HBO subscribers, and the perceptive and hilarious diary of PFC Ricky Gonzalez, by Douglas McGrath, in Vanity Fair. Also in that magazein is Neal Pollack, with his brilliant, perfectly tuned parody of Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens, although the later has probably permanently removed himself as a target for satirists; this past week he endorsed Bush in The Nation and John Kerry on Slate, thereby making a bigger fool of himself than any other part possibly could. There's also this neat set of Halloween costumes, which are shocking and mirthful, which is perhaps the only way to approach our times. So laugh clown, laugh.

And good luck to us all.

You Must Vote. It's the Law; Almost the Right Idea

2004-10-29T11:09:00.000-07:00

I think the Australians have this almost right. Voting is a citizen's obligation, and if one wants to weart the self-satisfied mantel of patriotism. I feel that voting should be made legally mandatory, despite the carping of the writer; his objections are the usual flaccid CW of the pundits, usually having to do with how terrible it would be to inconvenience and American, what a blow against Freedom! Yeah, get a job.

The corrolary is that anyone who tries to suppress votes in an election is a treasonous, seditious un-American bastard who should be thrown in prison.

"I believe in the promised land"

2004-10-28T16:51:00.000-07:00

Bruuuuuuucccccccce! Don't you all think it's about time I start listening to Springsteen again? Julia used to do an AWESOME imitation of him, what say she? Come on people, tell me what the best records are!

Freedom is On the March . . .

2004-10-28T16:49:00.000-07:00

Perhaps 100,000 Iraqis now free, for all of eternity . . . ?

Cat Can Sing

2004-10-26T16:48:00.000-07:00

So, the engineered pop product known as Ashlee Simpson had a malfunction on SNL? I don't know why anyone is surprised; products designed for a short shelf-life, with planned obsolescence, are prone to mechanical problems. The law of averages would have led me to expect this to happen more frequently, but perhaps we'll get caught up soon.

What's weird, and I can't figure out, is what Ashlee's 'manager-father' said, while claiming the root of the malfunction was acid-reflux:

"Just like any artist in America, she has a backing track that she pushes
so you don't have to hear her croak through a song on national
television."

Now, maybe language has passed me by, but Ashlee Simpson an ARTIST!?!?!?!? Don't artists create things, or present their ideas about things, rather than being themselves products? I'm awfully confused then about how I would describe Ian Bostridge.

I had the great good fortune to see the partnership of Bostridge and Leif Ove Andsnes perform Schubert's "Die Winterreise" last night. It was extraordinary, spellbinding. Beyond his ability to sing [and there was a touch of luster lost from his beautiful voice because of a cold], because this music has been sung before by many beautiful singers like Fritz Wunderlich, Peter Pears and Dietrich Fischer-Diskau, was how he sang. He was not singing about the young man, his heart shattered, wandering through an empty, snowy night, he was that young man, spitting out words of scorn, caressing those of tenderness, pacing the stage, leaning against the piano for comfort, leaning away, almost crouched in pain. The songs are mercurial, moving from passion to despair in myriad and immediate ways, and Bostridge embodied this, so inside the music was he. Even now the memory grips and moves me, especially the concluding song, where the young man sees a lone, pathetic organ grinder, a scene of surrender and desolation, and Bostridge left the heady beauty of his voice behind, leaving a dry, ghostly sound. The music hints at the end of material existence, an abandonment of hope, and the singer made that sound in his voice. There are times when I wish time would simply stop moving and sustain that moment eternally, that was one.

It is a great partnership, the singer and pianist, and they have produced a few Schubert CDs now. Andsnes makes everything sound deceptively simple, using a light, clear touch. Yet he holds the important pauses inside the songs to the moment of extreme tension. The two men did not create this music, but they produce it anew, they make it live in front of an audience with just hands and lungs. They are true artists.

Nowadays I admit that is a rarefied art; how many people will buy this CD, see the concert? A few thousand, maybe. Millions saw Ashlee Simpson's operating system, or whatever the hell it is, crash on Saturday. It's not the size of the audience, it's the work that matters. There's a particular artist, and he really is an artist, who I do not find personal pleasure in, but he has his own things to say, and now he has said something that is pretty f*cking incredibly powerful. It is art, and I think you had better see it.

Good luck to us all.

"Are world events really a laughing matter? They are if you're CNN . . ."

2004-10-18T17:41:00.000-07:00

Read as Jon Stewart eviscerates abusers of the public trust . . .

The Morality of Your Vote

2004-10-18T11:54:00.000-07:00

I had a conversation yesterday about the upcoming election that has left me with a lacerating sense of unease, above and beyond the usual distress. The issue was whether a Catholic can morally vote for John Kerry; this has been hounding one, and one campaign only during this election season and has been kept alive by the American Bishops, who earlier decided pro-choice Catholic politicians were not entitled to communion, and lately have publicly proclaimed 'vote for Bush' commands to Catholics. The criteria for this moral judgement are gay-marriage and most especially stem-cell research and abortion. And with the honest and actual hope of shocking and offending some Catholic voters out there, I say this stance is purely a political sham and debases the very idea of morality by supporting the one, actual immoral candidate for The White House.

Any person who is against abortion and believes that the GOP and Bush are pro-life in works and deeds is a fool; willfully blind perhaps, naive, shallow or even a craven toady to the powerful. I don't care. I hope these words trouble and hurt, they should. This is an important question of morality, one that effects the lives of others, and for the Bishops, and Archbishop Chaput as a particular example, to pronounce and decide on this as an issue of morality beggars disbelief. They are merely doing the bidding of those in political power . . . for what? For purely secular, sectarian and materialistic goals? Are they really this naive and callow? That would be the best I could say, that they are a bunch wheepy children who do not deserve posts of leadership. Perhaps they are looking for more gravy-train cash from the White House. They certainly have not thought-through the morality of the issues and problems.

The foundation of this is the idea of the fundamental dignity of human life. This is then matched with one of two slogans; pro-life or pro-choice. How perfectly American; simplistic, convenient, something once can slap on their bumper and that takes care of it all. Except that ease and materialism solutions are deeply antithetical to the actual question of morality. Pro-life and pro-choice are political slogans, they are not moral actions or policies, not even political policies. Slogans are easy, moral choices and actions are hard. And morality is expressed in deeds, not words. So, the deeds of the two candidates:

Since Inaugation, 2001, the President has been personally responsible for roughly 14,000 wasteful deaths; John Kerry has been responsible for roughly zero.
After declining under pro-choice Clinton, abortions under pro-life Bush have been rising.
What both Kerry and Bush have seriously done since 2001 to halt abortions; nothing.

So obviously, John Kerry is the immoral candidate who cares not about the dignity of human life - one can tell because he has the wrong slogan. And so the GOP waves the pro-life red flag in front of voters who think not more than a bull does, shoving them along into their pens like good obedient cattle, while doing nothing, nothing at all to put a stop to abortion. The sham law that was passed was just more of the same, designed to be unconstitutional. The ultimate goal of controlling the Supreme Court and overturning Roe v. Wade is more of the same; if that does happen, it will not put an end to abortions, just put more people in prison. Abortion is a complex social issue, not a simplistic legal one. Why, just look at the abortionist Tom Coburn-R, Oklahoma, running for Senate. This is waving that red flag, but nauseatingly cynical; they are exploiting the dignity of life they seek to protect for the sake of votes. If the Administration is so deeply troubled by the destruction of embryos for stem-call research, why has it done nothing whatsoever to halt in-vitro fertilization, the process that produces all those extra embryos that are destroyed anyway? When faced with the actions insulting the dignity of life, they turn away. But then human life is cheap and easily exploited by this administration, not just in economic terms but literally so. 3,000 dead on 9/11 exploited for political gain, 14,000 dead and counting in Iraq to quell an electorate and prove a feeble, ignorant, intellectual proposition . .

Moral issues are both vital and difficult, they require actual thought and analysis, honesty and concern. But it's the American way to reduce complex moral issues into bite-size commodities. That's why the public turns towards self-identified moral leaders for guidance. But they've swallowed the tasty morsel as well, and are on the front lines waving that flag; Kerry immoral, Bush moral, vote for the moral person. Just don't look down at the pile of bodies they're standing on. I wish the voters would think for themselves on this, actually think, but this is America, after all. But if I've stung anyone into thinking, then you can call me every low and awful name in the book, I will have deserved it.

The Captive Mind Now

2004-08-30T12:48:00.000-07:00

I had not intended, originally, this blog to be so focused on political things. I had been entertaining the idea for awhile mainly because of the how much I value culture. But the distress over contemporary political events was the impetus, and the continuing problematic nature of political existence has maintained that momentum. But I have been feeling it waning, because I'm feeling more and more a sense of wonderment about the awful, truly awful absurdity of it all. What more can be said about the corrupt nexus of politicians and so-called journalists than this recent item from Slate? And if it was the willful we-know-everything ignorance of the Administration that put them on a literally treasonous course in giving Ahmad Chalabi and Osama bin-Laden everything they asked for, then what can possibly be added in commentary to the new spy problem and the smug enablers who want to put us all in danger? When it comes to pointing out the self-serving drivel that passes for 'thought,' others do it much better than I. And what more can be said about Christopher Hitchens? He's now trying to appropriate the legacy of another dead, and superior, writer. It's literary ambulance chasing and demonstrates through its own means that he has nothing to think or say, no other purpose but to toady along with the rest of his 'class.' Sorry, Hitch, but you're just too dull! He and his colleagues are caught in a trap of their own making, and ultimately all that can be done is pity them and their steadily shrinking skulls.

So, I'm going to try and mostly say goodbye to all that. Because there's other things out there that, like the universe itself, have their own lives separate from our trivial and material concerns; cooking, vistas, Mozart operas. Civilization. I hope it endures, despite the best efforts of the establishment to destroy through their willful ignorance. I feel I need to carve out a small corner of it here, be truer to Montaigne's words for contemplation. But keep reading the good guys; Salon, Slate, Josh Marshall, Juan Cole, Bob Somerby. I'll be back soon.

Chapter II: Bush to Urge Court to End Independent Political Ads

2004-08-26T13:15:00.000-07:00

Wherein the Dauphin ignores the question of the Swift Boat Liars libel against Kerry, which benefits the Dauphin, to the 'enforcement' of a non-existent statute in the McCain-Feingold bill which the Dauphin opposed. In other words, changing the subject by performing a complete flip-flop on an issue. Watch the Media-Political Industrial Complex ignore the flip-flop and dutifully follow the mechanical rabbit.

How Political 'Journalism' Works

2004-08-26T12:03:00.000-07:00

Breaking news story about President George W. Bush having carnal relations with a pig. Details here. Unnamed officials from the Bush are expected to issue denials. Neither side has released records that get to the whole truth of the issue.

There, I've just done what reporters at major newspapers and TV networks are paid to do. See how easy!?

Moral Cowardice

2004-08-24T15:57:00.000-07:00

Josh Marshall on the Dauphin: "Moral cowardice is more complex. A moral coward is someone who lacks the courage to tell the truth, to accept responsibility, to demand accountability, to do what's right when it's not the easy thing to do, to clean up his or her own messes. Perhaps we could say that moral bravery is having both the courage of your convictions as well as the courage of your misdeeds.

These Charges Are False ...

2004-08-24T14:32:00.000-07:00

At first you'd think this LA Times editorial is denouncing the enabling of another smear campaign in the press. But you'd be wrong. It starts with this: "But the canons of the profession prevent most journalists from saying outright: These charges are false."

And there's the problem, brilliantly expressed on The Daily Show. If journalists can't point out what is objectively true and objectively false, why do their jobs even exists? If these are the canons of journalism, then the profession is emasculated and bankrupt at its core. If the Dauphin claimed the Earth was flat, The New York Times would dutifully publish that assertion, as well as opposing views, framed as a purely political debate and never once pointing out the Earth is round. The Mony Python gang could not have imagined this.

The LA Times editorial goes on to prove its own falseness by making an equivalency between the Swift Boat Liars, who are knowingly, objectively, demonstrably lying, which is legally libellous, and "MoveOn.org, which is running nasty ads about Bush's avoidance of service in Vietnam." They are not equivalent in any way, but I assume the canons of journalism do not allow that to be said either. As the Times itself writes, smear someone and "[t]hen sit back and let the media do your work for you." Nice job, LA Times.

Telling it like it is

2004-08-23T17:59:00.000-07:00

Wherein Josh Marshall calls the President, rightly, a coward. Good for him. Not to mention a flip-flopper at least thrice now on campaign finance reform who obviously never even bothered to read the McCain-Feingold bill which he opposed every step of the way . . . how fucking resolute.

Holiday in Cambodia

2004-08-23T17:48:00.000-07:00

More actual reporting, by the reliable Fred Kaplan. It's been tough to add to the blog because the libelous attacks on Kerry from the Swift Boat Liars are beyond shameful, aided by people who should know better, like Bob Dole, and with the usual 'News' networks carrying their water. I'm waiting any day now for a revival of the Bush sniffed cocaine stories . . . oh, that's right, those were cheap and uncalled for. The only people who get smeared are the ones who put their lives on the line for their country. Congratulations, super-Patriots, we can see the fear in your faces.

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

2004-08-20T17:32:00.000-07:00

The Third Policeman has urged me to comment on Deal Hudson's spectacular fall from grace. I too read the article in the National Catholic Reporter, and it gave me a feeling of physical revulsion and deep sorrow for everyone involved. The Third Policeman suggests that what occurred was date rape; I would say it was something more serious, because it wasn't exactly a "date" that the parties involved were on. The truth is that the woman involved was young, troubled, and vulnerable, and the man a respected and charismatic (and married) professor who took advantage of her state and violated her. He did the right thing by resigning his tenure.

I am in no position to judge Deal Hudson's soul. I do not know whether Hudson repents of his abusive behavior, but I would bet that he does, if only because such behavior must have seriously compromised the rest of his life -- his family and his faith, not to mention his job. The fantastic thing about the Christian religion is that when you repent and are absolved, what you did no longer matters. Or maybe I should clarify: it no longer matters if you, to paraphrase the old form of the Act of Contrition, firmly resolve with the help of God's grace to confess your sins, to do penance, and to amend your life. In the early church, confession was made in community once a year, and penance was geared toward real rehabilitation and reconciliation of the penitent with the offended parties and the rest of the community. The problem when a tinhorn moralist takes a public fall is that to them who have shown little mercy, little mercy will be shown.

Deal Hudson is a convert to Catholicism who has pushed the Bush abstraction of "compassionate conservatism." But he is not known for having shown compassion towards other sinners, not unlike his colleague in spectacular falls from grace Bill Bennett. We're all sinners and we're all going to fall, but when one has confessed and been absolved, the natural result is conversion, a change of heart, a turning toward God's grace and a desire to seek it and to do His will. God's will is not that we condemn other sinners. The great prayers of the Catholic Church remind us constantly that WE are at fault: "Forgive us OUR trespasses"; "Pray for US sinners now and at the hour of our death." We have little understanding of sin in our culture, and even less of forgiveness. The black community accepted Clinton's contrition and welcomed him back "into the community" after his fall, over which many white tongues clucked. Well, he was sorry! He screwed up and he knew it! Talk about horrific falls! But he was sorry and he sought forgiveness and reconciliation. I accept that. That takes courage and humility, two important qualities lacking in Deal Hudson's preemptive apologia in the National Review Online. Where is the love, Deal? People who live in glass houses and all of that.

The visionary anchoress Blessed Julian of Norwich wrote in the late 14th century: "when the touch of the Holy Ghost brings contrition, it turns the bitterness [of sin] into hope of God's mercy; and then [the sinner's] wounds begin to heal and the soul begins to revive into the life of Holy Church." I pray that all of us, Deal Hudson included, will know that grace and will do penance and amend our lives! If we want to build God's kingdom on earth, we need to take a closer look at the Beatitudes (see Matthew, Ch. 5). If I understand it right, Jesus is not saying that the Kingdom of God is made up of equal parts unbridled greed and punitive moralism.

That's my $.02 for what it's worth.

How a Philosophy Professor With a Checkered Past Became the Most Influential Catholic Layman in George W. Bush's Washington

2004-08-19T17:42:00.000-07:00

Yes folks, this is the kind of guy who has been making a living these past few years telling us all how we're supposed to behave, and that 'it is a "lie that a person's private conduct makes no difference to the execution of their public responsibilities."' That's Deal Hudson, thrice-married, arguably a date rapist, aiding and abetting underage drinking, indulging in body shots on co-eds. I think what says the most about his stellar 'character' is that after taking advantage of this young girl is that the place he took her to lunch to have the politically necessary talk warning her against talking was McDonald's. Classy. This one is begging for posts from Julia!

But is Deal Hudson Still Allowed Communion?

2004-08-19T12:02:00.000-07:00

The Republican obsession with the male member claims another one of their own. Probably for the best anyway, as even the Dauphin himself whined to the Pope, Catholic voters are not dutifully lining up behind him.

Bush Assails Kerry on Missile Defense

2004-08-18T11:01:00.000-07:00

This is so far beyond satire that Evelyn Waugh couldn't have even considered it. President Bush reaffirmed his administration's commitment to building an antimissile system, accusing opponents of the program of "living in the past." Yes, the past of the cold war and ICBMs, rather than the present, of asymetric threats, which don't include ICBMs. Keep it talkin', Bubble Boy!

Bush Assails Kerry on Missile Defense

2004-08-18T11:00:00.000-07:00

Billiken crowd jeers Keyes, cheers Obama

2004-08-17T12:27:00.000-07:00

Back home after a great long weekend in beautiful Chicago, where the Dodgers took 2 of 3 from the Cubs at Wrigley. My buddy B and I decided to skip the Billiken parade for baseball, but I'm almost sorry we missed this: Another man briefly grabbed Keyes' arm and advised Keyes, "Take your [expletive] back to Maryland." That says it all!

. . . And Right On Schedule!

2004-08-11T17:24:00.000-07:00

Ask, and ye shall receive. I wondered when Christopher Hitchens would speak up on behalf of his once again besmirched Master, Ahmed Chalabi, and he has obliged! And oh what a fine wine it is. Can we officially say Hitch has now become complete self-parody, and is completely unaware of it? He masquerades as a voice of conscience, yet he's Chalabi's' 'intellectual' bag-man, servile to a Master with no conscience whatsoever. The sacrifice of lives to the ends of Chalabi's personal power are different in scale and success from those of Stalin, whom Hitchens is eager to criticize loudly and publicly, but matters of degree are irrelevant when deciding the rightness of those ends, and murder is still murder, mass political or otherwise.

And boy has Hitchens gotten terrible at 'journalism.' He's always been so smug about the most minor errors of fact, and yet in committing the osculum profanum, his certainty about this:

We were asked to believe, last May, that a drunken CIA agent had blabbed about
the Iranian codes to Chalabi, who had then hastened to warn Tehran. That's
bullshit if ever I have heard it: Chalabi doesn't pour drinks, for one thing,
and the CIA station in Baghdad hated him like poison.

has left him with his pants around his ankles. This is exactly wrong. It was a drunken defense department official alleged to have passed this information, as the parade of DoD functionaries before a polygraph this spring demonstrated. These types are of course Chalabi's best friends, Feith, Wolfowitz, et. al., next to Hitchens, that is. It also didn't happen in Baghdad. But the whisky-addled scribe doesn't even know what the story is. It's bullshit, you fucking idiot, because you made it up.

Hitch is also willfully unaware of the Chalabi's counterfeiting project under his INC banner and thinks all the phony dinars found in Chalabi's home were collected as souvenirs. Oh, that's rich! It's a combination of 'I don't know how that got there, officer,' and 'I wasn't using it for anything.' If this is the best that Chalabi can do when it comes to aid in the press, he is in a pile of shit. Expect new leaks to Judith Miller any day now.

P.S. For the two or three of you who read this, I'm off to Chi-town for a nice, long weekend. Godspeed and good luck to us all.

Heads Will Explode

2004-08-09T17:07:00.000-07:00

How can they not? In the Media-Political Industrial Complex, especially inside the Administration of the Dauphin, only one Grand and Simplistic Idea can be held at one time. If you doubt, just watch and read how political 'debates' are carried out. More than one idea, especially if the are both Right yet in complete opposition to each other . . . well, heads will surely explode.

Read the story in Salon today. Consider this bit:

Kasim Hilas told a CID investigator that he witnessed a harrowing incident one
night on Tier 1A. "I saw the translator Abu Hamid fucking a kid," Hilas stated.
"His age would be about 15-18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they
covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard screaming I climbed the
door because on top it wasn't covered and I saw Abu Hamid, who was wearing the
military uniform, putting his dick in the little kid's ass. I couldn't see the
face of the kid because his face wasn't in front of the door. And the female
soldier was taking pictures. Abu Hamid, I think he is Egyptian because of his
accent, and he was not skinny or short, and he acted like a homosexual (gay).
And that was in cell #23 as best as I remember."

So, which way can it go? On the one hand, there is the desperate need among the MPIC to use every word in the fucking English language to apologize for torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib without one of these moral paragons, these beacons of righteousness, saying that this is wrong, that this is evil. Witness Trent Lott:

NYT: You recently created a stir when you defended the
interrogation techniques at Abu Ghraib.
Trent Lott: Most of the people in Mississippi came up to
me and said: 'Thank Goodness. America comes first.' Interrogation is not a
Sunday-school class. You don't get information that will save American lives by
withholding pancakes.
NYT: But unleashing killer dogs on
naked Iraqis is not the same as withholding pancakes.
Trent Lott: I was amazed that people reacted like that.
Did the dogs bite them? Did the dogs assault them? How are you going to get...
information that will lead to the saving of lives?

So, torture good! Yet, a mercenary paid for with your tax dollars and mine raped a teenage boy. Hmmm, I thought homosexuality was bad, Trent Lott. This is best expressed by Tom Coburn, Republican candidate for Senate in Oklahoma and currently, believe it or not, head of the presidential AIDS commission:

The gay community has infiltrated the very centers of power in every
area across this country, and they wield extreme power. ... That agenda is the
greatest threat to our freedom that we face today. Why do you think we see the
rationalization for abortion and multiple sexual partners? Thats a gay
agenda.

Well Tom, the gay agenda has obviously made it's way into the war on terror, and a big and awful way. So have some courage Tom, Trent and all your asshole buddies, use the example of some real men who decided what their beliefs were and held them true and bravely. Condemn that very gay interrogation technique! But keep using the dogs!

Really, I'm curious to see how they can possibly square this. Raping a boy has got to be the 'radioactive' stuff Rumsfeld quivered over in his testimony, giving Congress full warning. How long does it take for this bunch of moral pygmies to work up the strength and say this kind of thing is wrong? They are so eager to defend America against the Protocols of the Elders of Zion . . . er, I mean the Gay Agenda, that you'd think they'd be tripping over themselves to get on camera and condemn this kind of abuse. And doesn't the easy-bashing of child rapists make a politician look tough on crime? But maybe, just maybe, if they condemn this specific case of torture, some goober or screaming idiot might think they were condemning the war in Iraq, and thereby doubting the infallibility of the Dauphin. And that won't do. This is the death of shame, not the easy frat-boy sloganeering.

Quite the opposite. These awful people who love to tell us all what is Right and How We Should Live spend a lot of time 'thinking' of ways to turn the objectively Wrong into the Politically Right. The most recent exhibit, Michelle Malkin. Her new book is going to be getting a lot of attention and I'm not going to bother getting into the historical details she's discussing, because I honestly don't care. I'm not going to read this tendentious nonsense - I've read a few of her columns and she writes so badly that they should be distributed at Abu Ghraib for their insidious and grating effect. And on this I am close-minded; the internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry during WWII was Objectively Wrong and Objectively Stupid. Revisionism on this point is a bad-faith exercise in meaninglessness, because the premise, the very idea that internment holds any value for our contemporary conflicts is so massively and obviously stupid that I am astonished it was even entertained, much less published!

Here we are, in the midst of a vast and vital war of ideas, trying to represent the actual ideals of America, which are self-evidently worthy, to a suspicious and hostile and volatile region. And like it or not, we have to suffer with the presentation of Iraq as an idea as well, because it's not going to go away. Killing people to give them democracy had better fucking work. And now we have Michelle, with her perfect American narcissistic egotism that says what I think and feel is what everyone else does, so scared that she argues we should put American Muslims, and people in America from Muslim nations [which could include Michelle herself, being from the Philippines, where Terry Nichols may have learned to build effective bombs from Islamic terrorists], into Internment camps. For what, the duration? The duration of what? The camps should really play well in the Islamic world, that's an idea about America that will resonate beyond anything Michelle can dream of in that hard little pea-sized fossil that rattles around in her skull like an arcade game. And once all these people have been interned, what happens next? The idea of America is going to be worthless on top of the previous Abu Ghraib massacre. This would mean giving up the war on ideas, because there is no fucking way in hell this country could put people in camps and then get the rest of the world to think good things about American democracy, no matter what the Dauphin may say. The only thing left would be to kill pretty much everyone in all those countries connected to the people in the camps. I don't want to even contemplate anything that awful. But being Michelle Malking means never having to think anything through. Jean fucking GOP D'Arc.

Chalabi Says Charges Are Part of Conspiracy

2004-08-09T12:09:00.000-07:00

Now he's he going to get out of this one? We've declared that Iraq is their own sovereign nation now, picked Allawi as the Prime Minister. In the eyes of the US, the Iraqi government is legitimate, so that makes these indictments legitimate. To argue against them is to argue against that very legitimacy, to imply that this is all a Potempkin facade. So what's it going to be? What are the neo-cons going to claim about their boyfriend, if anything at all? I can't wait for the next Christopher Hitchens prattle!

Iraq Seeks Arrest of Ahmad Chalabi (washingtonpost.com)

2004-08-08T12:37:00.000-07:00

But will they also arrest Perle, Wolfowitz, Woolsey, Francis Brooke? Our are those character witnesses?

The Big Tent

2004-08-06T11:57:00.000-07:00

The Dems had pro-life speakers at their convention, yet don't expect the GOP to present those views at theirs, although those ARE their views. New candidate James Hart also represents the GOP, but I don't think there'll be any pro-eugenics speaches in NYC.

The Seattle Times: Abdullah: the prince who keeps on giving

2004-08-05T12:02:00.000-07:00

This story mentions the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments in the Media-Political Industrial Complex over the total of $190,000 in gifts that Bill Clinton had received in his eight years in office that he was taking with him into private life. Now in 2003 alone, one individual, Crown Prince Abdullah, gives the Dauphin $127,600 in gifts. One person, in one single year, gives gifts amounting to 67% of all the gifts from all individuals amassed over two terms. And with Abdullah's $55,020 worth of gifts in 2002, his total of $182,620 extrapolated over two terms would come to $730,480. From ONE PERSON!!! But what's giving between royals, after all?

With this country's strategic relationship with Saudia Arabia, based in part on historical comity between the House of Saud and the Bush family, representing an on-going danger, one would expect some expression of anguish, moral outrage or even mild concern in some, any corner of the MPIC. But not a peep. I wouldn't mind so much the bending over backward to protect the Dauphin and the eager, shallow smearing of Kerry over the most tendentious nonsense if they would at least admit that, professional speaking, they are not journalists. But oh! the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments if anyone, like Michael Moore, dares to suggest that the news is not being reported properly or comprehensively. How dare he! The outrage! Ah, I need a drink already . . .

Halliburton Settles S.E.C. Accusations

2004-08-04T11:42:00.000-07:00

Josh Marshall writes about this very well, and finds it easy to use the word 'fraud,' which is exactly what the issue is; Halliburton defrauded its investors while Dick Cheney was CEO and earning extra money based on the fraudulent action of the corporation. I just want to add that the profits Halliburton was, and is, earner, come from the public trough, your tax dollars and mine, which have helped make the Vice President an extremely rich man, easily the largest Welfare Queen in civilized history.

Iraqis on tour banned from Memphis hall

2004-08-04T10:45:00.000-07:00

Doesn't seem like the folks in Tennessee are feeling any safer . . .

Reports That Led to Terror Alert Were Years Old, Officials Say

2004-08-03T11:11:00.000-07:00

On the positive side, it looks like in another few years Homeland Security will get through the intelligence reports back-log and can start worrying about current threats . . .