2. The Go-Betweens, Oceans Apart


This still stands.

1. The Hold Steady, Separation Sunday


So does this*.

EDIT: The link isn't working, so just scroll down to the bottom of this page to the December 7 entry...if you got the patience.

"It got us good"

My review of Brokeback Mountain, which I admired enormously and left me stumbling dumbfounded for most of the Christmas holiday. It's not a great film, though: damn, does that Ang Lee dig repression.

4. Kanye West, Late Registration


At least he's got the good sense to over-orchestrate his songs when his ego threatens to humble him before the eyes of impatient critics. Jon Brion should sell his mellotron to Aimee Mann as a parting gift.


3. M.I.A., Arular


One of the year's most gratifying sights was watching teens who wouldn't know Sri Lanka from Sirhan Sirhan go apeshit over "Bucky Done Gun" and "Galang." The kerfuffle over her politics has never captivated this listener. Only those beats -- those dizzy, dizzy beats -- and M.I.A.'s exuberance -- an exuberance born of sorrow and death -- signified beyond the pre-release polycultural condescension (and post-release; read this recent horror of a blurb in SPIN's year-end countdown).

6. New Pornographers, Twin Cinema


What I wrote here still holds up. If you don't agree, have fun with your Destroyer, Zampano, and Neko Case records.


5. LCD Soundsystem, s/t



I'm now having second thoughts about ranking it so high. Most of the previously released singles leave me cold (even "Yeah"); and the genre exercises just sorta sit there ("Movement" is rank mid'90s Moby). Still, here's your chance to listen to every dance, trance, and electro trend of the last 10 years, sped up, slowed down, schlocked up, for your pleasure.

8. The Rolling Stones, A Bigger Bang


In which four reprehensible plutocrats remember that they're also, um, in a rock band and should play like one. Their best since Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), if not Monster.


7. The Mountain Goats, The Sunset Tree


Imagine all the shit that's most revolting about autobiographical songs cycles. Now write and record them with surprising instrumental embellishments, narrative clarity, and a cold ruthless eye. David Copperfield meets Dazed & Confused, and it's a wonder that John Darnielle seems like such a nice person.

Best of 2005

I stole this idea from Miccio. Two a day, taken from my Village Voice Pazz & Jop ballot:

10. Kate Bush, Aerial



Having made my peace with Bush's rather stiffjointed motions towards ecstacy (chugging power chords don't achieve liftoff even when she's howling "I wanna be up, up, UP on the ROOF!" like she's still wants to take her shoes off and throw them in the lake), I relaxed and accepted this woman's version of middle-age domesticity. From dreaming of washing machines to Renaissange madrigals for her son to the subtle smarts of her sound (she makes the best case for the virtues of self-production), this is still plenty weird.

9. Spoon, Gimme Fiction



Unduly impresssed by Britt Daniels' previous excursions into tuneful opacity, I was prepared to like this record before forgetting it in December. What I did forget was how seductive tuneful opacity can be when garnished with bits of ugly guitar squalls, with Daniels' increasingly confident vocals atop. Flaunting the encyclopedic knowledge of all things rock that is de rigueur for canny aesthetes these days, Daniels is more comfortable doing "Rocks Off" ("Sister Jack") than "Emotional Rescue" ("I Turn My Camera On"). For canny aesthetes, this is a real achievement.

Score one for secularism!

And now for some good news:

HARRISBURG, Pa. – "Intelligent design" cannot be mentioned in biology classes in a Pennsylvania public school district, a federal judge said Tuesday, ruling in one of the biggest courtroom clashes on evolution since the 1925 Scopes trial.

Dover Area School Board members violated the Constitution when they ordered that its biology curriculum must include the notion that life on Earth was produced by an unidentified intelligent cause, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III said. Several members repeatedly lied to cover their motives even while professing religious beliefs, he said.

Bah, humbug

This morning while walking to my car I noticed that I was the only person in my building with neither a wreath nor a Christmas tree. (My mom bought me a poinsetta, but it's looking rather wan and forlorn on my terrace).

What a relief then to read this by Christopher Hitchens on Christmas:

This was a useful demonstration of what I have always hated about the month of December: the atmosphere of a one-party state. On all media and in all newspapers, endless invocations of the same repetitive theme. In all public places, from train stations to department stores, an insistent din of identical propaganda and identical music. The collectivization of gaiety and the compulsory infliction of joy. Time wasted on foolishness at one's children's schools. Vapid ecumenical messages from the president, who has more pressing things to do and who is constitutionally required to avoid any religious endorsements.

He ends with a cheerful "God damn them everyone."

Recent nonsense

Blogging has been non-existent this past week, thanks to a stack of papers to grade (done) and a three-day vacation (done, alas). Let's try to catch up.

Stylus and Pitchfork has released its list of the 50 best albums of the year; I've written the New Pornographers blurb for the former.

I'll post my own list shortly; there's a couple of albums I've recently bought which I'm still assessing (Spoon, Lee Ann Womack) for Pazz & Jop purposes.

As for movies, I loved Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, & The Wardrobe, unwieldy title and all. Still on the list: Syriana (sorry, Phoebe), Brokeback Mountain.

Hitch on Macca

It's refreshing when Hitchens plays nice on occasion, as he does here on the late Eugene McCarthy.

And now, for more fun...

At last: Stylus' Top 50 Singles of 2005 is posted, generating the usual boring controversy. The top 20 is the most entertaining I've read yet (by which I mean that most of the songs square with mine). I've got blurbs on "Hung Up" and "Bucky Done Gun." A few notes:

* I wish I'd heard Lee Ann Womack's "Twenty Years and Two Husbands Ago" and the Futureheads' "Hounds of Love" cover earlier. (thank god for Pazz & Jop).

* My "Mr. Brightside" vote was for the Jacques Lu Cont remix.

* "We Belong Together" would probably be in my top 10 today.

* I know shit about Robyn. Wasn't "Be Mine" released in 1995?

Anyway, my Stylus list:

01. The Killers – Mr. Brightside
02. Kelly Clarkson – Since U Been Gone
03. Gorillaz feat. De La Soul – Feel Good
04. Madonna – Hung Up
05. Snoop feat. Justin Timberlake and Charlie Wilson – Signs
06. M.I.A. – Bucky Done Gun
07. Alicia Keys – Unbreakable
08. Annie – Heartbeat
09. Basement Jaxx – Oh My Gosh
10. 50 Cent – Just A Lil Bit
11. Ciara feat. Missy Elliott – 1-2 Step
12. Interpol – Evil
13. LCD Soundsystem – Daft Punk Is Playing in My House
14. Kelly Osbourne – One Word
15. Mariah Carey – We Belong Together
16. Franz Ferdinand – Do You Want To?
17. The Killers – All The Things That I’ve Done
18. Kanye West feat. Jamie Foxx – Gold Digger
19. The Pussycat Dolls feat. Busta Rhymes – Dontcha
20. Rob Thomas – Lonely No More

CCR were bigger than Jesus

In a commentary spotted with inspired toss-offs comparing Blender and Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest songs of all time, Scott Woods is generous enough to quote Phil Dellio on Creedence Clearwater Revival:

"I think that among people in my general demographic--rather than give an age bracket, I'll just say anyone who remembers hearing 'Up Around the Bend' while it was still on the charts--there's more goodwill towards Creedence than virtually anyone from the era. Maybe anyone, period--you'll see the Beatles get knocked around now and again, but I don't know that I've ever come across a truly negative word said or written about Creedence Clearwater Revival. They were brilliant, they owned Top 40, and they came and went in the blink of an eye..."

Based upon my conversations with both my student coworkers (most of whom are at least 10 years younger than me) and my contemporariers, this is true (it doesn't hurt that our boy/Dorian Grey wannabe Stephen Malkmus prefers chooglin' when he wants to deepen his elegantly-wasted pose). Three days ago I relistened to the evergreen Chronicles -- the only CCR I own besides my mom's scratched 45's of "Green River/Commotion" and "Proud Mary/Born On the Bayou" -- for the first time in years, and I was struck by how CCR managed to sound like they'd mastered the implosiveness we expect from classic punk (eight years before the fact) and the chops to flaut decidedly un-punk guitar textures, in tunes averaging a length of a two and a half minutes. Like the proto-punk he was, John Fogerty was a closet sentimentalist (he's stuck in Lodi with that damn green river, no matter how many friendly creatures he sees lookin' out his back door), but before he sought comfort in Americana tropes ("Centerfield") he was too bitter to become complacent; every whisper was a threat, every grapevine mouthed imprecations.

And they were the most popular American singles artists between 1968 and 1970.

Lester Bangs: John Lennon, rot in peace

I've heard lots of mawkish crap on the radio today about John Lennon. As a palliative, here's Lester Bang's obit:

You always wonder how you will react to these things, but I can't say I was all that surprised when NBC broke into "The Tonight Show" to say that John Lennon was dead. I always thought that he would be the first of the Beatles to die, because he was always the one who lived the most on the existential edge, whether by diving knees-first into left-wing adventurism or by just shutting up for five years when he decided he really didn't have anything much to say; but I had always figured it would be by his own hand. That he was merely the latest celebrity to be gunned down by a probable psychotic only underscores the banality surrounding his death.

Look: I don't think I'm insensitive or a curmudgeon. In 1965 John Lennon was one of the most important people in the world. It's just that today I feel deeply alienated from rock 'n' roll and what it has meant or could mean, alienated from my fellow men and women and their dreams or aspirations.

I don't know what is more pathetic, the people of my generation who refuse to let their 1960s adolescence die a natural death, or the younger ones who will snatch and gobble any shred, any scrap of a dream that someone declared over ten years ago. Perhaps the younger ones are sadder, because at least my peers may have some nostalgic memory of the long-cold embers they're kneeling to blow upon, whereas the kids who have to make do with things like the _Beatlemania_ show are being sold a bill of goods.

I can't mourn John Lennon. I didn't know the guy. But I do know that when all is said and done, that's all he was--a guy. The refusal of his fans to ever let him just be that was finally almost as lethal as his "assassin" (and please, let's have no more talk of this being a "political" killing, and don't call him a "rock 'n' roll martyr"). Did you watch the TV specials on Tuesday night? Did you see all those people standing in the street in front of the Dakota apartment where Lennon lived singing "Hey Jude"? What do you think the _real_--cynical, sneeringly sarcastic, witheringly witty and iconoclastic--John Lennon would have said about that?

John Lennon at his best despised cheap sentiment and had to learn the hard way that once you've made your mark on history those who can't will be so grateful they'll turn it into a cage for you. Those who choose to falsify their memories--to pine for a neverland 1960s that never really happened _that_ way in the first place--insult the retroactive Eden they enshrine.

So in this time of gut-curdling sanctimonies about ultimate icons, I hope you will bear with my own pontifications long enough to let me say that the Beatles were certainly far more than a group of four talented musicians who might even have been the best of their generation. The Beatles were most of all a moment. But their generation was not the only generation in history, and to keep turning the gutten lantern of those dreams this way and that in hopes the flame will somehow flicker up again in the eighties is as futile a pursuit as trying to turn Lennon's lyrics into poetry. It is for that moment--not for John Lennon the man---that you are mourning, if you are mourning. Ultimately you are mourning for yourself.

Remember that other guy, the old friend of theirs, who once said, "Don't follow leaders"? Well, he was right. But the very people who took those words and made them into banners were violating the slogan they carried. And their still doing it today. The Beatles did lead but they led with a wink. They may have been more popular than Jesus, but I don't think they wanted to be the world's religion. That would have cheapened and rendered tawdry what was special and wonderful about them. John Lennon didn't want that, or he wouldn't have retired for the last half of the seventies. What happened Monday night was only the most extreme extension of all the forces that led him to do so in the first place.

In some of this last interviews before he died, he said, "What I realized during the five years away was that when I said the dream is over, I had made the physical break from the Beatles, but mentally there is still this big thing on my back about what people expected of me." And: "We were the hip ones of the sixties. But the world is not like the sixties. The whole world has changed." And: "Produce your own dream. It's quite possible to do anything...the unknown is what it is. And to be frightened of it is what sends everybody scurrying around chasing dreams, illusions."

Good-bye, baby, and amen.

-Los Angeles Times, 11 December 1980.

The Hold Steady: The wages of sin or Sin City?

The Hold Steady's Separation Sunday is one of the two or three best records of the year, and I urge all the cranks who read this site to either buy a copy or bother me about burning/sending via YSI a copy. Best described as a loquacious Bob Mould fronting members of Thin Lizzy and Boston, the Chicago band recorded a quasi-concept album in which a character voiced by singer/guitarist Craig Finn recollects his inglorious youth in a crap suburb, where he and his buddy meet a junk fiend named Holly who's the object of pity and amusement. Finn's songs are meta-narratives, informed by borrowed riffs from classic-rock, in which Holly's mordant rationalizations of her substance abuse eventually lead her into the arms of the Catholic faith with which she's always held a somewhat ambivalent relationship ("She climbed the cross and found she liked the view," Finn says in "Crucifixion Cruise").

In an intelligent dismissal of SS, Josh Love argues that SS belongs firmly in the tradition of a film like Sin City, in which women are madonnas and whores, indiscriminately, but still trapped in the amber of the male gaze:

The gender qualifier is critical here—both Rodriguez/Miller and Finn put girls in the middle of their sordid tales, but their experiences are markedly different from those of the men. Sin City undeniably flirts with misogyny in its perpetual cycle of (scantily clad, perennially battered) feminine helplessness and masculine rescue, and while Finn’s narratives aren’t nearly so narrow, the film’s male-female positioning does help us read Separation Sunday and understand why it comes off unfair and even a little chickenshit.

"Hate" is too tepid an adjective to adduce my reaction to Sin City; "detested" is closer: vacuous gymnastics written and directed by men still enthralled by an adolescence in which film noir tropes were the closest thing to wisdom they absorbed. Josh is too hung up on the dicta of rote feminism: Holly is offensive because she's created by a male imagination which conceives of women strictly in passive terms. While I will cede that Finn rarely implicates himself (his regret is more subtextual than you'd hope), and the anthemic "Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night" sounds rather gaunche out of context ("but I can take you to a place where you can save yourself/and if you don't get born again/then at least you'll be high as hell"), SS's adherence to the tone of demotic virtuosity concretized by fellow Chicagoan Saul Bellow (okay, Nelson Algren) steers the album past the stylized tableaux which denoted Sin City's identification with the forlorn anti-heroes keeping the cities safe from sin.

Moreover, Finn devotes the whole album to her point of view. Josh forgets that film noir provided actresses with the juiciest parts in old Hollywood. Like Gloria Grahame in Crossfire or In A Lonely Sleep, Holly is a fully-formed character: witty, fatalistic, possessing a welcome sense of self-parody, and loves music (she knows the words to "Running Up That Hill"!) In SS's centerpiece "Stevie Nix" she's perceptive enough to note the posturing that's part of the narrator's nerd appeal ("You remind me of Rod Stewart when he was young/you got passion, you think that you're sexy and all the punks think that you're dumb"). And, sure, you can argue that her musical tastes confirm the Otherness of Women more definitively than Simone de Beauvoir hoped; but you try to look tuff gnarls Kate Bush and Stevie Nicks in the eye and tell them they're beguiling male fantasies composed of equal parts poesy and mystification.

Separation Sunday's subtext is obvious: Craig Finn's life was saved by rock 'n' roll and Holly's wasn't. But it doesn't mean that Finn's the better person for it. In the bleak irony of coda "How Resurrection Really Feels" (itself an allusion to Neil Young's "Walk On," a wry dismissal of the expectations of Those Who Know Better), Finn admits, in a voice devoid of affect, that the sexy mess Holly "looked strung out but experienced/and we all got kind of curious." I mean, what the fuck -- village tricycle or gang-rape victim? Either way, chilling -- and far from the eschewing of responsibility for which Josh blames Finn.

What a treat to end a year in which Kate Bush's Aerial (a response from the abbey, so to speak) battles it out with this hunk of Born To Run-style parodic Mariolatry.

(Now I need to hear from Hold Steadiers, of whom there are plenty.)

Can he be a bigger prick?

From How-can-I-be-more-of-a-schmuck Joe Lieberman:

Lieberman, whom the Bush administration has praised repeatedly for his war stance, defended the president. "It's time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge he'll be commander-in-chief for three more years," the senator said. "We undermine the president's credibility at our nation's peril."

Thanks for the reminder, Joe. The minority party--the party that keeps you in office!--should not be bothering those who control every branch of government with dissent, or parliamentary procedures, or checks and balances. It's downright unpatriotic. And it disappoints the president when we question him like that.

Also

Everyone should go see Match Point. It's terrific. It's a lot like one half of Crimes and Misdemeanors, but with an English cast--except for Scarlett Johannsen (yeah, that's misspelled)--and no neurotics, which shows an amount of range I, at least, didn't think Woody Allen had.

Wikipedia controversy

Talk of the Nation had a very good segment on the Wikipedia/John Seigenthaler today which showed Seigenthaler as the crazy, out of touch old coot that he is.

(The first caller's question was particularly illuminating: "why didn't you edit the entry yourself?" Second caller: "I thought we were supposed to take Wikipedia with a grain of salt." Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia who lives in St. Petersburg, FL: "You are supposed to take Wikipedia with a a grain of salt, just like you're supposed to take everything with a grain of salt.")

No encyclopedia is perfect. Britannica contains mistakes; as well as questions of bias and scope. Wikipedia has far more erroneous information that Britannica and the established encyclopedias, but it makes up for that with the ability to be edited in real time--traditional encyclopedia's relevance is inversely propotional with the time elapsed since press time—and its mammoth amount of content. Compare, if you will, Wikipedia’s “squelch” entry with Merriam Webster’s.

I just don't know what Seigenthaler's bitching about. Every midlevel bureaucrat working in government in the '60s has been linked to the Kennedy assassination, some in more reputable publications that wikipedia. How this merits a column in USA Today and New York Times coverage I'll never understand.

You should also check out Esquire's piece on Jimmy Wales, part of their Best & Brightest feature, in this month's issue. Sadly, it is not online.

This is absolutely my favorite story of the day:

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - People who have an alcoholic drink or two a day may have a lower risk of becoming obese than either teetotalers or heavy drinkers, a study published Monday suggests.

Researchers found that among more than 8,200 U.S. adults, those who said they enjoyed a drink every day were 54 percent less likely than non-drinkers to be obese. Similarly, those who drank a little more (two drinks per day) or a little less (a few drinks per week) had a lower risk of obesity than teetotalers did.

"Washing ma-ch-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-n-n-n-e...."

At last: the first review to grapple with the Kate Bush mystery that doesn't descend to this thread's obscuratism and inappropriate high-art analogies (most of the time; I can't support the allusions to The Waves and Sylvia Fucking Plath). At least Marcello doesn't avoid wooliness; the subtext of his review is, "Yes! This album is beautiful, enigmatic, and fucking ridiculous. I will be too!"

A couple of things

Now that I've taken the LSAT, I should have a good amount more time to post and tend to the blog in general.

I'm working on a new design that's close to being finished. One of the big things will be a left sidebar for advertisements. Also, I'm trying to convince Philip Brooker to design the banner and help me out with the overall design theme, which would be very cool.

Please visit the new list of Miami blogs that I included. I'm trying to create or at least bring together some kind of blog community in South Florida. I'd like to start organizing a weekly outing, maybe Wednesday nights, for bloggers to congregate.

This just in: old men should not listen to the Neptunes.

As I get older, I prefer it when aging musicians stick to what they know: De La Soul and Van Morrison and Kate Bush and the Go-Betweens working out their kinks, Thomas Hardy composing one more versified variation on the sophomoric fatalism to which he clung as others cling to God and King, like that. No doubt it's not as adventurous as checking out what the kids are listening to, but then you get Earthling (which, hey, I once defended), that Pat Boone thing, and every Joni Mitchell album of the last 25 years.

On his latest John Cale jumps off a building and goes splat. Well, Justin disagrees. But we're more fun to read than Black Acetate is to listen to.

Type "Doctor Doom" and "Galvatron"

Thanks to Alex for this story. Apparently Wikipedia is not as accurate as people think. As I always tell my students, the Internet is no substitute for, you know, an actual dictionary and thesaurus.

But I'm assuming that Skeletor really did "[come] from the dimension called Infinita. He is a blue-skinned, skull-faced warlord who rules the Dark Hemisphere of Eternia from Snake Mountain with an iron fist."

Princely fare

Lately I've tried to squelch any cronyist tendencies, but this On First Listen article by Nick Southall warms the heart the way that good critprose should. Since Prince, like New Order, the Beatles, Tribe Called Quest (and a handful of others) are artists whose pleasures I can't consciously resist, it's difficult to learn about someone else's experiences without condescending to them (i.e. "do you mean you've NEVER heard Sign 'O' The Times or Brotherhood?"). Southall approach is so guileless that when he finally understands why you love "The Cross" you want to tickle him.

Bush called to jury duty

He could postpone his service by letting McLennan County officials know that he'll be on vacation in December.

Me on the new Stevie Wonder in Seattle Weekly.

Red Mountain, Brokeback River...same story

The first review of Brokeback Mountain in a mainstream publication. J. Hoberman realizes that Ang Lee's adaptation of the E. Anne Proulx story is the culmination of a genre rather than its end:

The western has always been the most idyllically homosocial of modes—and often one concerned with the programmatic exclusion of women. This is hardly a secret and thus the true cowboy love between tight-lipped Ennis and doe-eyed Jack precipitates the not-so-latent theme of early-'70s oaters like The Wild Rovers and The Hired Hand—not to mention Andy Warhol's hilarious disco western Lonesome Cowboys and its more conventional Hollywood analogue Midnight Cowboy. (Conventional up to a point, that is: Midnight Cowboy not only made a gay fashion statement but included Joe Buck's incredulous cri de coeur, "Are you telling me that John Wayne is a fag?!")

David Thomson detected a similar repressed homo hysteria in Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, in which Robert Redford and Paul Newman can barely contain their delight in each other's company:

She knows that the real romance is those two handsome boys and their endless conversational double act. And she is obliged enough to Sundance for going through the amatory motions with her (because men were still gentlemen in those days), but she knew what Sundance's little moustache meant all along. We all knew - same way we all knew when "W' slapped "Brownie" on the back and told the world what a good job he's done. The message is clear: some guys just have no sense when it comes to being with other guys

Speaking of containing delight, neither could Phoebe. Would she care to post an early draft of her review?

Palpatine issues Order 66

In the Vatican's newspaper, Monseigneur Tony Anatrella outlines the Catholic Church's new position on homosexuality and its effects on humankind It's made me chuckle to myself all day:

In no case is this form of sexuality a sexual alternative, or even less, a reality that is equivalent to that which is shared by a man and a woman engaged in matrimonial life

So "this form of sexuality" is "even less" viable as an equivalent to marriage? Let the purges begin.

Krauthammer re torture

Charles Krauthammer's recent column on the McCain torture amendment bears careful reading; it's far more balanced than what we might come to expect from the likes of The Weekly Standard. Here's his proposal:

Begin, as McCain does, by banning all forms of coercion or inhuman treatment by anyone serving in the military--an absolute ban on torture by all military personnel everywhere. We do not want a private somewhere making these fine distinctions about ticking and slow-fuse time bombs. We don't even want colonels or generals making them. It would be best for the morale, discipline, and honor of the Armed Forces for the United States to maintain an absolute prohibition, both to simplify their task in making decisions and to offer them whatever reciprocal treatment they might receive from those who capture them--although I have no illusion that any anti-torture provision will soften the heart of a single jihadist holding a knife to the throat of a captured American soldier. We would impose this restriction on ourselves for our own reasons of military discipline and military honor.

Outside the military, however, I would propose, contra McCain, a ban against all forms of torture, coercive interrogation, and inhuman treatment, except in two contingencies: (1) the ticking time bomb and (2) the slower-fuse high-level terrorist (such as KSM). Each contingency would have its own set of rules. In the case of the ticking time bomb, the rules would be relatively simple: Nothing rationally related to getting accurate information would be ruled out. The case of the high-value suspect with slow-fuse information is more complicated. The principle would be that the level of inhumanity of the measures used (moral honesty is essential here--we would be using measures that are by definition inhumane) would be proportional to the need and value of the information. Interrogators would be constrained to use the least inhumane treatment necessary relative to the magnitude and imminence of the evil being prevented and the importance of the knowledge being obtained.

The question is, would one trust this administration with not just enforcing these standards, but understanding what "the least inhumane treatment" is? Would John Yoo or Alberto Gonzalez have clarified this?

No more biopics!

Sorry, but Capote, Ray, and Walk The Line have little in common. Capote is the best of the three. By concentrating on one episode in the title character's writing life, director Bennett Miller and screenwriter Dan Futterman shun the layers of apocryphal nonsense which have attached themselves to Capote as firmly as Capote himself did to the likes of Bianca Jagger and Nancy Reagan. We have a film in which the creators, with little cant and with great delicacy, give the title character the space to condemn himself for his own bad faith. In its attention to the often violent collisions between the artist and his environment – is creation a mimetic process or one requiring the artist's intervention to produce the desired results? – Capote says more than 8 1/2.

Walk The Line is more like Ray, only not as good. Where Taylor Hackford showed the legend making music, James Mangold shows us a one-dimensional, pill-poppin' basso who incidentally wrote and performed some great songs; it was a Lifetime movie with spiffy production values. At no point is the Cash persona deconstructed; Mangold, his screenwriter, and Joaquin Phoenix really did believe The Man in Black bullshit (in Ray, we do see Ray Charles as the calculating sumbitch he was canny enough to become when it suited his purposes).

Finally, the film's creators ignore the most interesting character. In Reese Witherspoon's hands, June Carter sparkles with a vitality and wit that Phoenix's Cash never approaches. Like Miller's treatment of Harper Lee in Capote (played with quiet avidity by the amazing Catherine Keener), Carter's marginalization upholds the fallacy to which every man succumbs when he produces a film about a Tex Bad Boy: art is for boys.

But Elvis' legs were never this perfect

Madonna now has 36 Top 10 hits, tying Elvis' record.

For your pleasure, vol. 1

If I believed in God, I'd thank him for these tunes; and ask him to help my readers find them:

The Mekons, "Only Darkness Has The Power" (1989)

Singer-guitarist Tom Greenhalgh spends the night in bed with his girlfriend. When morning comes, he's afraid to leave, for reasons he's too frightened to articulate. "I'm not going to explain myself, it's not that important to me," he says, the tremor in his voice quite audible through a skein of ugly guitars. Of course, articulating fear and rage is exactly what one expects from these members of the class of '77; this is the only song in which punks admit their mission's impossibility – and it comes 12 years too late. "Do you trust me to tell the truth? Do you trust me?" Greenhalgh croons, before the chorus circles him once more, and the ugly guitars scare him under the covers again.

Madonna, "Gambler" (1985)

Little-known gem, eclipsed by the success of "Crazy For You" on the otherwise forgettable Vision Quest soundtrack. This is Madonna at her most slatternly, her lower register drawing strength from the synthesizer and drum machines making an unholy racket. It's also more convincing pseudo-satire than "Material Girl." Only Shakira could get away with this today (and kinda does, on "Don't Bother"). Why haven't any of Maddie's umpteenth compilations ever included this? Because she doesn't want to show Lourdes her dirty panties.

Karyn White, "Romantic" (1991)

Another obscurity, "Romantic" was the biggest hit for Karyn White, going to #1 on the Hot 100 in the fall of '91. Before "Romantic" she scored three top 10's, none of which get much airplay anymore except on urban quiet-storm stations ("Superwoman," "Secret Rendezvous," and "The Way You Love Me"). Like fellow neglected late '80s/early '90s R&B songstress Jody Watley, White was at her best when she eschewed self-expression and allowed producers to set her innocuous voice in a boisterous setting -- in this case a Jimmy Jam-Terry Lewis song and production stitched from Alexander O'Neal and Janet leftovers. One of the last new jack swing hits before the Top 40's acclimitization to hip-hop sent every diva except Mary J. Blige and Mariah Carey to the clearance bin.

Kelly Osbourne, "One Word"

Here's the reason why this song and Visage's "Fade To Grey" -- the piece from which it draws its chords, melody, and Old Europe here-by-the-Seine vibe -- flopped in the States. We Yanks have zero patience for anomic limeys with asymmetrical eyeshadow playing synthesizers and quasi-limeys with asymmetrical eyeshadow playing with our notions of what respectable celebrities do.

Ah, it's just too exhausting to really care

The Likud party is all about peace. From The Financial Times:

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's former finance minister, yesterday denounced his long-time rival Ariel Sharon as a "dictator" a day after the prime minister quit the Likud party to form a new centrist movement to stand in the next elections, scheduled for March 28.

There's more.

The Likud party, which Mr Netanyahu hopes to lead, would move away from the "one-man rule of Sharon, who apparently doesn't recognise democracy and is setting up a party of puppets", he told Army Radio.

And of course, buried in the story's penultimate paragraph:

Meanwhile, Israel yesterday approved the construction of 350 new homes in one of the biggest settlement blocs in the West Bank, Maale Adumim. The Palestinians say such expansion, opposed by the US, encroaches on land they need for a future state.

I'm thinking of posting everytime Israel approves new settlement developments. I don't understand how anyone could seriously mouth the words "Israeli withdrawal" in reference to what they did in Gaza.

From the National Journal:

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

I am a formalist!!

Thank you, Josh, for helping me realize what I am.

You knew this was coming

At first, the Vatican's declaration that it will not tolerate sexually active homosexual clergy seems beside the point; heterosexual clergy can't be sexually active either. But this move bespeaks an attempt by Pope Benedict XVII to initiate a Palpatine-like purge of anyone with gay metachlorians:

In September, Vatican-directed inspectors started visiting all 229 American seminaries. Part of their mission is to seek any "evidence of homosexuality" at a time when some Catholics have put forward the highly contested premise that gay priests were more likely to be responsible for criminal behavior such as serial, same-sex molestation.

Of course, the Church's unyielding devotion to the questionable psychology which links pedophilia with homosexuality is a large part of the problem.

And the Vatican can't be too keen on this development.

Often foolish and quite consistent

Re the new Madonna, Confessions On A Dance Floor: I'm still hung up over "Hung Up," the ravishing "Sorry" is her best second single since "Deeper & Deeper" if not "Express Yourself," the allusions to her influences and her own work are subtle and sometimes winningly deployed (my favorite: the "Papa Don't Preach"-meets-"Die Another Day" strings on "Forbidden Love"), and the infamous "I Love N.Y." has beats and stereo effects that Annie wishes she could afford. Finally, while Stuart Price gets the cred for Dance Floor's post-trance yumminess (the album is the aural equivalent of the fluorescent hand-me-down's Madonna wears on the cover), it's his co-producer who shapes these things into songs with indelible vocal melodies (her best, most unremarked talent).

I agree with Thomas: the album thumps rather too eagerly. We miss "I Deserve It" and "White Heat" and "Waiting" and "Candy Perfume Girl": the decent filler and leaden ballads she insists on including and nevertheless add flavor and getsalt (the self-titled debut did the best job of hiding them: one per side, short and painless). Its most eccentric moment is the sample of Hebrew prayer adorning "Isaac," a dandy bit of exotica which should please "Desert Rose" fans. Dance Floor's consistency is wearying and worrying. If Maddie's Kwicky Kabbalah can purge her muse of impurities with such ruthlessness, then Tom Cruise joined the wrong cult.

Honey, would I lie to you?

My review of the new Eurythmics comp, which you should buy only if you can't find a copy of their 1990 Greatest Hits (you're not checking your used CD store often enough) or are reluctant to own Touch or Be Yourself Tonight (in which case, you're a fucking loon).

El Comandante – sick?

The Miami Herald quotes CIA sources revealing that Fidel has Parkinson's.

That Teddy...what a bear

Just to show that the Bush administration doesn't have a monopoly on torture, here's an excerpt (as quoted in Edmund Morris' superb biography Theodore Rex, as rich as a novel) from the testimony of an Army officer to the Sesnate Committee on Military Affairs in 1902, which convened to hear testimony of the abuse of Filipinos by American soldiers during the occupation:

A man is thrown down on his back and three or four men sit on his arms and legs and hold him down by either a gun barrel or a rifle barrel or a carbine barrel or a stick as big as a belaying pin...is simply thrust into his jaws...and then water is poured onto his face, down his throat and nose...until the man gives some sign of giving in or becoming unconscious...His suffering must be that of a man who is drowning, but who cannot drown.

This was known as "the water cure." Sounds like waterboarding away.

There is a difference. The Roosevelt administration swiftly condemned the torture. He instructed his Secretary of War Elihu Root to dispatch this cable: Great as the provocation has been in dealing with foes who habitually resort to treachery, murder, and habitually resort to treachery, murder and torture againstn our men, nothing can justify or will be held to justify the use of torture or inhuman cruelty of any kind on the part of the American army."

Whereupon Roosevelt ordered the court martial of the general who allowed the torture to happen.

Bush-whacked again

Whoever thought that 12 years of silence would tame Kate Bush's eccentricities should return to their Tori Amos records. No review I've read of Bush's Aerial has acknowledged how weird this record is. Fathomlessly weird. A weirdness that's as much shaped by domesticity as it is by Romantic and Gothic fiction. There's a murky song about Elvis on a cliff which sounds as if he's singing from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean ("King of the Mountain"), another about a housekeeper who gets an orgasm while washing her boss' clothes (the chorus is -- all together now -- : "Washing ma-c-h-i-i-i-i-n-n-e..."), and one in which Bush's laughter duets with a flock of twittering birds. The latter is found on Aerial's second disc, titled A Sky of Honey (the first is, of course, called A Sea of Honey).

I don't want to get all Second Sex on you, but no man could have created, let alone populated, a world like this, in which feminine responses to desire are given the aural and compositional space commensurate with their strength. Actually, maybe there is someone: Kid Rock's sonics often match his lyrics. If you're thinking that this comparison dishonors Bush, you're giving her too much credit. Explain the difference between a teenage girl keeping a journal with a flowered cover and whose ravishing entries are written in green ink, and her male classmate boasting about the size of a girl's tits to his buddies.

Is this twaddle any good? Stay tuned.

This is why Anthony Lane is so goddamn funny:

The hint becomes a yodel toward the end, as Matthew Macfadyen strides grimly through a wet meadow, at some ungodly hour, with Keira Knightley squarely in his sights. He has donned a long coat, which sways fetchingly in the mist; obviously it was copied from a Human League video of the nineteen-eighties, but I’m damned if I can remember which one. For her part, Knightley has been crisp and quick throughout—more girl than woman than seems fit, perhaps, and a boyish girl to boot, but ready and able to hold her own in any rally of wits. Now, like the queen in “Aliens,” she extends her famous underbite and gets down to business.

--review of Pride & Prejudice

It's Miller time

The Washington Post has a great interview with newly-ex New York Times reporter Judith Miller which sheds a lot of light on her character, including extensive quotes from Miller herself, her friends and fellow NYT staffers past and present -- some effusive in their praise, others highly critical. The picture the article paints is a fair one and draws the reader into the middle of the two, extreme perceptions of Miller that have been thrown out by the media since the Valerie Plame scandal erupted. The first is that of Miller as journalistic martyr sworn to protect the First Amendment with cape billowing in the wind. The other paints Miller as an attention-hungry harpy that is less reporter and more shrill seductress slithering through sources and the legal system to mislead the nation about WMD, the war in Iraq and the truth behind the Valerie Plame affair.

The end result is a manic, insecure and energetic woman that is desperate to remain in the public eye. As the story points out, Miller kept a detailed "jail journal" on the off chance she could score a book deal. And despite numerous awards (Pulitzer, Emmy, DuPont), found her work edited for bias on numerous occasions by the Times editorial desk. She was fervent in her pursuit of "the great story," but equally questionable in how she got there (I still think "entanglement" is the right way to describe her relationship with Scooter). But, like I said, it's not a black and white situation. I suggest giving the story a read and forming your own conclusions.

Graphic novel reviews

My latest graphic novel reviews are up. Registration required!

It had to happen.

A review of the worst album I've heard this year.

What's love got to do with it? Absolutely nothing

I don't agree with Justin's take on The Ronettes' "Be My Baby". Aggressive, yes. Voracious too ("For every kiss you'll give me/I'll give you three"); and thanks to Ronnie Spector's slightly flat vocal she's the embodiment of every 16 yr-old girl who wished her boyfriend would crawl thru her bedroom window instead of dropping her off for the night. For the guy on the other end, it's flattering to date a girl with this insatiable a sexual need, but it's also unpleasant and creepy, which is probably producer Phil Spector's (and Ronnie's husband) point.

Thus, when Justin asserts that "`Be My Baby' echoes the recent past without anticipating the changes to come...hardly a feminist highpoint, even if Ronnie did sing the hell out of it," I think he's too hung-up on academic definitions of feminism. The drumbeats that echo into eternity, the wan backing vocals of the other Ronettes, the string section -- female teenage angst had never been flattered with such grandiosity. But he demurs:

Her economic offer places her in a subservient position (emotionally and physically), and her plea sounds more like a male fantasy of female desire than it does an honest proclamation of a woman's right to want.

I give Spector more credit. His production and arrangement, by virtue of its meticulousness, actually legimitizes Ronnie. We may not want her as a girlfriend, but at least she's a human being, with recognizable passions. (To Justin's credit, he seems aware of the paradoxes and acknowledges at a later point, after a rather good interpretation of how Ike Turner exploited wife Tina, that there's "something problematic" about reducing Tina [and Ronnie too?] to "an archetype.")

Let's look at another great artist: Eddie Money. Remember his Top Five hit from 1986? You can all sing "Take Me Home Tonight." Betcha it was the first time you'd ever heard Ronnie Spector, appended to coo, rather wobbily, the chorus of her biggest hit. Besides his no doubt benevolent gesture to give a childhood icon some work, what on earth was Money thinking? Consider: hoary, white, mulletted he-men don't usually allow their women a chance to speak their minds, even when, in this case, all they're doing is validating the male singer's grotesque egoism. "Take Me Home Tonight" recontextualizes "Be My Baby" as the plea for subservience of Justin's nightmares.

The members of the interpretive community of Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish's dreams would include both the audience and the context in which the song is recorded, as well as its form (which, of course, leads us to formalist and structuralist interpretations, and too much thinking about what I wanted to forget about grad school).

What I finally think about Madonna's "Hung Up,"(along with thoughts on Gorillaz feat. Shaun Ryder, Depeche Mode, Mariah Carey, and others):

The decision to sample the best ABBA song of all time may smack of desperation from the producer of this year’s most haunting remix (that’s Stuart Price and “Mr. Brightside”), but the source material becomes putty in the hands of the greatest dance artist of all time, whose silly accent and ever-more-irrelevant lyrics are no longer encumbrances. It’s clear now that Madonna embraces Kabbalah because it provides her with so many fungible mantras and taglines; and since great dance music is composed of nothing but mantras and taglines she sublimates her once-considerable charisma into pure will-to-power – an evolution that would have been a horror if it had happened to Whitney Houston. It can’t last forever: as a dance artist approaches 50, time goes by so slowly, slowly. Even so, I’m relieved she loves bass sequencers as much as she loves God.
Score: [10]

Imagine a mash-up of "West End Girls" and "Lucky Star"...

Apparently there are two rather obvious allusions to Pet Shop Boys music on Madonna's forthcoming Confessions On A Dance Floor. This PopJustice interview with producer Stuart Price (aka Jacques Lu Cont, creator of the marvelous remix of "Mr. Brightside") explains how and where.

The Pet Shop Boys have hired Trever Horn (!) to produce their new album, due next spring.

The end of gay culture = it's about time

This recent essay by Andrew Sullivan takes for granted that gayness is a culture, rather than (perhaps?) a construct created by like-minded sexual iconoclasts looking for solace. Since the icons and argot of gay culture have no totemic value for me -- I'm a member of the generation, after all, that grew up in the wake of the sacrifices made by his -- I am more inclined to not just accept but revel in the confounding of sexual divisions which the Internet and the so-fucking-what attitude of the next generation (like my students) have wrought, both of which have been genuine palliatives. Sullivan:

Slowly but unmistakably, gay culture is ending. You see it beyond the poignant transformation of P-town: on the streets of the big cities, on university campuses, in the suburbs where gay couples have settled, and in the entrails of the Internet. In fact, it is beginning to dawn on many that the very concept of gay culture may one day disappear altogether. By that, I do not mean that homosexual men and lesbians will not exist--or that they won't create a community of sorts and a culture that sets them in some ways apart. I mean simply that what encompasses gay culture itself will expand into such a diverse set of subcultures that "gayness" alone will cease to tell you very much about any individual. The distinction between gay and straight culture will become so blurred, so fractured, and so intermingled that it may become more helpful not to examine them separately at all.

I can only say, as he comes to each wistful, reductive conclusion, "AMEN!"

By the way, I command my fellow sodomists to respond if they disagree with my conclousions.

PS: Kudos on the Pet Shop Boys epigraph.

Isn't he lovely?

My review of the new Stevie Wonder, for your delectation.

Mysterious Skin

One of this year's best films was just released on DVD. Searching, empathetic, and even a bit frightening, Mysterious Skin shows what happened when the lives of two boys on the same Little League team (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbett) molested by their coach intersect when they enter young addult hood. The greatness of Mysterious Skin lies in director Gregg Araki's willingness to accept a creepy fact barely alluded to in other recent films about child abuse (One-Hour Photo, The Woodsmen): the victims just may enjoy the sexual contact.

I'm no fan of Araki's past films, which are without exception amateurish and puerile (The Living End, The Doom Generation, Nowhere); but there's a grown-up quality and a pathos I would never have expected (and you all know how I love being wrong). For example: Araki's acceptance of his characters' ridiculous passions (third-rate TV shows about UFO's, Slowdive records) is refreshing, worthy of My Own Private Idaho-era Gus Van Sant. We find out what it's like to live in a small Kansas town in which you've fucked everyone at the bar. Elizabeth Shue's promiscuous mom isn't a trailer-trash stereotype; she's an older woman who loves sex and her boy in equal measure.

Finally, it's also got the film music I've heard this year: Harold Budd's minimalist score – ominous bleeps and unexpected swells – underpins every scene.

Panic on the streets of...well, everywhere.

Morrissey, with new producer Tony Visconti (of David Bowie and Marc Bolan), is prepping a new album, tentatively titled Ringleader of the Tormentors, for a spring release.

Husker Don't?

And speaking of refreshing, this take on Husker Du's purportedly epochal New Day Rising goes from boredom to ecstasy to exhaustion as unpredicably as the Husker's own "Games." I was always a Flip Your Wig fan myself. And prefer Sugar anyway.

It's those damn Beatles again

Refreshingly stupid take on Beatlemania, inspired by the publication of Bob Spitz's exhaustive The Beatles: The Biography (which, of course, I'll read eventually). The stupid part consists of the Ringo jokes:

If you said "Ringo Starr" around a person of moderate intelligence, he would assume you were making a hilarious joke about the lovechild between Kenneth Starr and a VHS cassette containing the 1998 horror film Ringu.

Did you know Machiavelli is a frequent guest on "The O'Reilly Factor"?

Some rather intelligent remarks about strategist/self-promoter Dick Morris courtesy of Jonah Goldberg:

I know some folks around here are friends or friendly with him. But I am consistently amazed people take him as seriously as they do. He is brilliant, but he is also a deeply amoral pragmatist. The problem with analysts like him is that their insights are only useful when self-interest isn't in play. Since they have loyalty to no larger ideas or principles, they can be acute observers of politics. But such Machiavellianism is also a hindrance, because principles and a moral vision also help us notice when we're letting our self-interest intrude. When they are absent, self-interest reigns supreme.

And he has dreadful taste in hookers.

And the Lord said,

"stop your farcical aquatic ceremonies."
From The Waco Tribune-Herald:

Mourners filled the pews of First Baptist Church on Sunday night to grieve the death of the Rev. Kyle Lake, who was electrocuted earlier in the day as he prepared to baptize a new member at University Baptist Church.
Lake, 33, was stepping into the baptistery, a small pool used for baptisms, as he reached out to adjust a nearby microphone, which produced an electric shock, said Ben Dudley, community pastor at University Baptist Church. Several doctors attending the service because of Baylor University's homecoming rushed to help Lake, who collapsed, Dudley said.

As long as she can still take her shoes off and throw them in the lake...

Kate Bush's Aerial, her first album in 12 years, is, according to a New York Times profile, "split between a group of individual songs (the first CD, subtitled 'A Sea of Honey') and a suite (the 42-minute 'A Sky of Honey')." It reminds me of her best -- and most uneven -- album, Hounds of Love. I love my favorite Kate Bush songs to death (the aggessively feminine ones), and have no interest in many others (the aggressively witchy ones). I wish she had cleared more songs for dance-floor finagling a la "Cloudbusting" for Utah Saints' "Something Good," which is the greatest song ever written.

What say you?

Scooter goes down

I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, is formally indicted by the grand jury. The charges: one count of obstruction, two counts of perjury, and two of making false statements in the course of an investigation.

Capote vs In Cold Blood

In my first published film review in 6 years, I praise Capote for being almost everything In Cold Blood is not: searching and compassionate. Watching this movie did not make me like Truman Capote's writing appreciably, by the way.

Calling all lovers of paisley and owners of big sunglasses...

Some of my earliest music listening memories involve Jeff Lynne productions: that magical first Traveling Wilburys album, George Harrison's Cloud Nine, Roy Orbison's Mystery Girl. I knew even then that Lynne was a shitty dresser, and it was no surprise when Paul McCartney, eight years too late and three after bad-mouthing him, hooked up with him hoping for a hit (it kinda worked); but as long as I didn't have to listen to any ELO hits beside "Evil Woman" and "Xanadu" I could forgive his missteps. Here's my attempt at justice.

More hurricane nonsense

I'm back. Awakening Sunday morning around 5:30 after a fitful sleep, I turned on the TV just as Hurricane Wilma was making landfall. Then the shit really hit the fan -- a fan which kept spinning for almost four hours. At one point I sought refuge in the bathroom, afraid that one of my bedroom windows was going to blow. No damage to my property, but the storm's effects are unexpected, enormous, and slightly wearying to recount in this post-Katrina world. This is a pretty good recap.

Finally, I must be the only one in three county area of which South Florida is composed who has power.

Finally: a review of Liz Phair's Somebody's Miracle as sharp as mine. Hee hee.

Here we go again...

Thanks to Hurricane Wilma, posting will be light for the next couple of days. It's only appropriate that a hurricane season this absurd requires a name most commonly associated with a cartoon character.

"We are left to weight the balance of irony and forgiveness."

The always reliable David Thomson on A History of Violence, still my favorite movie of the year. Favorite excerpt:

Quite deliberately, I am not telling you the story of A History of Violence. That's because it employs a formula you've seen before, but gives it a radically new rhythm, one in which the atmosphere of the title is not just the energy that renews the country and which makes it safe and dangerous again. This film is a preparation for the uncertainty of the last few shots.

Thou shalt not resist ABBA

Then there's Madonna's new single, "Hung Up," about which I'll say little, except it's much more irresistable than it has any right to be, since it's, in essence, a sample of my favorite ABBA song* dolled up in club beats, mixing-board fader nonsense appropriated from Kylie Minogue's superior "Love At First Sight," and Maddie's increasingly helium-centric vocals. Is it better than "American Life'? Well. It's the difference between soy lattées and a bad hit of ecstasy.

*The ABBA song is "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)."

Truthiness

My colbertphilia continues. Dana Stevens has a slightly-too-automatically-cautious-but-still-good review of The Report's first episode.

Last night's show opened with a funny, if slightly overlong, segment called "The Word"—an obvious spoof of Bill O'Reilly's nightly "Talking Points," in which bulleted summaries of Colbertian wisdom appeared down the right-hand side of the screen as the fake anchor enjoined his audience to stop thinking so darn much. "Check gut," read one directive, as Colbert raged against not only the "word police over at Webster's," but against knowledge-gathering in general: "I don't trust books. They're all fact, no heart." Colbert concluded this segment with a kind of mission statement for the show to come: "Anyone can read the news to you—I promise to feel the news at you."

And.

The interview will be a tough segment to pull off on an ongoing basis; it's neither a sincere one-on-one conversation, as on The Daily Show, nor an Ali G-style stunt in which the interviewee has no idea he's being mocked. Where will Colbert's bookers go to find interesting and willing guests? Celebrities looking to promote a new book, record, or film may fear being made fools of, and even the most oblivious of self-loving blowhards (the real-life versions of the character Colbert himself plays) will get that the show's aim is satirical, and likely refuse to appear. Tonight's guest, Lesley Stahl, will presumably be as game to ridicule her own profession as Phillips was. But once The Colbert Report has cycled through the roster of self-deprecating news anchors, where will it go from there?

Also, check out Phoebe's blog for more Colbert links, followed by some nonsense about hockey--ignore that part.

Remember when Russians were threatening?

Well, now they're having trouble scaring off the Norwegians.

Grief literature

After reading this and Dennis Lim's essay, I got curious about Joan Didion's new A Year of Magical Thinking, "a meticulous chronicle of a wretched spell that began on December 30, 2003, when her husband, John Gregory Dunne, died of a massive coronary in their Upper East Side apartment while their only child, Quintana Roo, lay unconscious in an ICU nearby, stricken with pneumonia that had quickly developed into septic shock."

Didion helpfully includes her husband's autopsy and daughter's CT scan.

Since Didion's prose is at its best rather steely, I doubt the results are as morbidly exploitative as it sounds.

I've circled Didion for years; the only recent book of hers I've finished is the essay collection Political Fictions (the home of the most unruffled, meticulous account of how the right-wing conspiracy created Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr and eventually impeached Bill Clinton I've read). A recent essay, "The Case of Theresa Schiavo," is also impressive. Miami remains a pungent read, a reminder of just how grisly living in South Florida was in the 1980's. Anybody read A Year of Magical Thinking yet?

That's what I call magic!

From Ananova:

David Copperfield says he plans to impregnate a girl on stage - without even touching her.

Yeah, but can he chew gum and play guitar at the same time?

'Open wide baby bird 'cause mama's got a big fat nightcrawler of truth'

I'm too tired to post anything of much value or complexity, but I will say this, The Colbert Report (or col-BEHR RAH-pohr) is the greatest piece of satire I can remember right now.

But Julian, your song is a crashing bore...

A rather frenzied singles roundup (it was done at the last minute). I'm shocked that the new Strokes song really sucks.

A party of many?

Roger Ailes has a very good post in which he essentially identifies the Miers nomination as a turning point for the Republican Party towards a Democrat style—though far more vicious, almost cannibalistic—of fragmentation and constant critical review from Republican bloggers and conservatives on the fringe of mainstream power.

The scuffle over Miers has exposed the right bloggers jockeying for (mostly imagined) positions of power once the Bush Era has ended. In 2004, there was no leadership fight within the Republican Party -- Bush was the unchallenged (though illegitimate) incumbent. The 'nuts did not have to back one candidate or another and ride his* coattails to glory. Back in 2000, most of the 'nuts did not exist as bloggers. So 2008 will be the first Presidential election in which the 'nuts will have to select a primary candidate and battle their fellow 'nuts who choose another contender.

He goes on to write:

The Miers battle is just a trial run for this ideological shakedown, and the 'nuts risk revealing their impotence if Bush's pick is approved despite their wailing. In any event, I'm looking forward to the day when the 'nuts start Swiftboating their fellow Republicans, and themselves.

Ready, aim, fire.

* Yes, his. It's the Republican Party.

Though Roger’s fantasy would be fun to see materialized, he’s overlooking several things. The first one is that modern American conservatism has relied on some form of another of McCarthyism to remain in or retain power. I can’t think of any conservative president of the post-World War II area that didn’t make his campaign and subsequent presidency about the fighting the “threat of” something or other—a perpetual war for perpetual peace. (A possible exception might be Eisenhower denouncing the very real threat of the military industrial complex, but that was in his farewell speech.) And Bush right now has nothing to fight against. He’s beaten terrorism into incognizance and the more he tries to rally the troops with Iraq talk—as he tried to do with that Stanislavskian satellite chat with soldiers—the more apparent it becomes what a failure of a commander he has been.

And the other factor that Roger overlooks is that the Supreme Court is difference. Bush could have appointed Browny, or Browny’s horse to head FEMA, and conservatives would not have cared. The court however has been a constant force of liberal democracy and a thorn on the conservative side.

Miers definitely shows the escalating weakness of the Bush administration within its party, and the power vacuum that it will leave, could possibly create much bickering, but I doubt it’s as permanent as Roger foresees.

blogging in Miami

Does anyone read blogs by people in Miami? Or know of any? I read one once by a Cuban guy that was kind of funny, but didn't have much staying power.

I'd like to try to work out some kind of community. No reason why all bloggers should live in Philadelphia or DC.

Let me know.

DOGS & CATS LIVING TOGETHER...MASS HYSTERIA!!

Andrew Sullivan, losing his marbles:

I fear we are close to the moment when our intellectual capabilities as human beings overtake our moral capacity for self-restraint. We are becoming too smart for our own good. We know too much, and have too much potential for massive destruction for major shit not to hit the fan relatively soon.

And the Academy Award goes to...

W for outstanding achievement in acting. From AP via Yahoo!:

It was billed as a conversation with U.S. troops, but the questions President Bush asked on a teleconference call Thursday were choreographed to match his goals for the war in Iraq and Saturday's vote on a new Iraqi constitution.

This is rather striking isn't it? (pun inteded)

More singles

Nothing outstanding in this week's singles roundup (except for a guitar hook on Ashlee Simpson's "Boyfriend" I'd love to hear sampled). Death Cab for Cutie once more prove that dreadfulness creates its own aura of respectability, in this case bolstered by sub-Bernard Sumner lyrics and a song title that evokes Pauline mysteries.

"P.S. No more public scatology"

The George W. Bush-Harriet Miers correspondence rivals that of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson's in its depth of vision, thoughtful engagement with constitutional issues, and pellucid wit. The thread title, taken from one of Bush's letters, would make a marvelous domain name.

I've never given a shout-out to Anthony, who in the last three years has amassed an extensive biliography of album and film reviews memorable for their freshness and originality. A casual glance at his archived reviews will reveal an imagination crowded and abuzz with impressions inspired by the albums and movies he's absorbed. I've always admired critics for whom clarity of thought is inseparable from the risk of looking foolish (Lord knows I lack this virtue); it's a tribue to Anthony that he rarely does look foolish. (He also does a stunning karaoke version of Maxwell's cover of the Kate Bush tune "This Woman's Work.")

I wish he posted more often nowadays. Now that he's publishing in the Miami New Times, I must start invading his turf.

Passion play

Excellent, woeful Rich Lowry essay on the inherent hypocrisy of the President's endorsement of Harriet Miers on her religious merits:

The White House and its allies have long argued that it is wrong to bring a judicial nominee's faith into the discussion about his merits, and any attempt to do so amounts to religious bigotry. When it was suggested that John Roberts's Catholic faith might be an area for inquiry in his confirmation, White House allies recoiled in horror.

Now the White House tells conservatives that Miers will vote the right way because she's a born-again Christian. This is the chief reason that some prominent Christian conservatives are supporting her, in a blatant bit of right-wing identity politics. They apparently believe her religious faith will determine what she thinks about the equal-protection clause, the separation of powers, and other nettlesome constitutional issues. As sociology, there is something to this — an evangelical is more likely to be conservative than a Unitarian — but to place so much weight on Miers's demographic profile, rather than her own merits and judicial philosophy, is noxious and un-American.

But don't worry: As soon as Democrats try to probe Miers's evangelicalism, these Republicans will be back to saying her faith should be off-limits

Christopher Hitchens said as much in a recent essay. Those confirmation hearings -- if Ms. Miers gets that far -- should be a hoot.

Carl Hiassen: Sage for the ages

Carl Hiassen ruins a compulsively readable Miami New Times story chronicling Miami in the big bad 1980's (when snowfall was illegal and quite common) by interjecting crabby remarks about the alleged soullessness of the decade:

Hiaasen, moreover, is wary of anyone trying to romanticize the bad old days. "There are no deep truths there," he says of that period. "It didn't produce a single great novel, a single memorable piece of rock music that I can recall, and damn few movies that are worth watching twice."

Let's see: Born in the U.S.A., The Prague Orgy, Let It Be, Scarecrow, Blue Velvet, Purple Rain, She's So Unusual, any Madonna or New Order single, Run DMC...you get the point. OK, it was a grisly period (hell, I lived through them), one from which we're still in many ways recovering; but Hiassen need not turn into one of the septugenarians decomposing on the porch of a South Beach hotel in 1982.

Too cold blood

Anyone who's read In Cold Blood want to give me encouragment? A hundred pages later, I'm unconvinced by its greatness. Capote's chunks of details fail to accrete into a Balzacian totality; his style seems a rather unglamorous form of fetishization (Which is some kind of achievement, actually). Most of what I've read is dull: it's like being on an ocean liner and watching waves lap the portholes.

Daphne Merkin fails to mention that Capote mastered this form of mummified hybridization to such an extent that, like James Joyce and Ulysses, he closed the door on his own followers. Who could (or want to) duplicate his achievement? Moreover, to claim that Capote came off better than "today's scoop-obsessed and elasticized [WTF?] journalistic standards" is wishful thinking; Capote lived with the consequences of his bad faith for the rest of his life, and probably hastened his death.

All the same, I can't wait until Capote opens in South Florida. Care to provide a review, Madame Flowers?

Cast a cold eye on death

Short interview with the old sinner Gore Vidal, now 80. Still emitting that charming air of patrician self-righteousness which manages to rankle on occasion (especially if you disagree with him), he seems resigned to his contrariness; having written about history for so long he's now ready to join it. Also: the more aloof he is, the more moving. When asked about the death of Howard Auster, his companion of 40 years, in 2003, he says:

For a year after his death, Vidal barely ate. "I became anorexic." I am so surprised that we sit for a moment in silence. How did he pull out of it? He smiles, witheringly. "I ate something."

Regarding his reputation for never admitting to a mistake, he demurs:

"Yes, I do. I think it's because I speak in complete sentences. That's considered un-American."

Note the beautiful austerity of the photograph; he looks (deliberately?) carved in marble.

Blowjob queens galore

Here's the Liz Phair review, and here's this week's singles rundown. This week's winner: Gretchen Wilson, Lil Kim, and Keyshia Cole

Polyester bride or blowjob queen?

A much fairer hatchet job on Liz Phair than Pitchfork's 2003 evisceration of her eponymous album, but still clueless. The weaker songs don't sound like Nickleback to these ears; "Wind and the Mountain," the album's best track, is hardly "we're-gonna-get-you-through-this Dr. Phil crap" (plus, the writer is unaware that Dr. Phil's method is You-will-listen-to-me-and-maybe-you'll-get-through-this). Since the release of 1998's whitechocolatespaceegg (her best album? I think so) Phair's great gift has been to marry reassuring chordal structures and melodies to increasingly conflicted riffs on domesticity, and while Somebody's Miracle isn't at that level (or at the level of its predecessor), the good songs are as surprising as the kind Amy Rigby churns out at such an alarming pace.

(Fans still want their blowjob queen back, though. Today the general manager of the university radio station lamented Liz's movement popwards. "I stopped caring when she hired The Matrix," he said, eyes tearing up. Keep in mind: he must have been 11 years old when Exile in Guyville was purportedly reminding him that he wasn't ever going to date women like the protagonists of "Divorce Song" and "Fuck and Run," so if he's thinking of stoning this painted bawd he'd best drop those rocks.)

Look for my review tomorrow.

George Will vs George Bush

In the most scorching philippic ever directed against a Republican president, George Will blasts the president's nomination of Harriet Miers:

In addition, the president has forfeited his right to be trusted as a custodian of the Constitution. The forfeiture occurred March 27, 2002, when, in a private act betokening an uneasy conscience, he signed the McCain-Feingold law expanding government regulation of the timing, quantity and content of political speech. The day before the 2000 Iowa caucuses he was asked in advance — to insure a considered response from him — whether McCain-Feingold’s core purposes are unconstitutional. He unhesitatingly said, ‘‘I agree.’’ Asked if he thought presidents have a duty, pursuant to their oath to defend the Constitution, to make an independent judgment about the constitutionality of bills and to veto those he thinks unconstitutional, he briskly said, ‘‘I do.’’

In essence, he's just called Bush impulsive and stupid.

My favorite line: "Under the rubric of ‘‘diversity’’ — nowadays, the first refuge of intellectually disreputable impulses..."

The right aflame

Looks like Harry Reid's finally demonstrated political savvy. The right and far right are outraged over the prez's nomination of White House Counsel Harriet Miers to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on SCOTUS. Here's Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol (aka, courtesy of James Wolcott, as the Cheshire Cat, thanks to his habit of smiling and twinkling even after being told his mother was raped by polar bears):

I'M DISAPPOINTED, depressed and demoralized....

I'm depressed. Roberts for O'Connor was an unambiguous improvement. Roberts for Rehnquist was an appropriate replacement. But moving Roberts over to the Rehnquist seat meant everything rode on this nomination--and that the president had to be ready to fight on constitutional grounds for a strong nominee. Apparently, he wasn't. It is very hard to avoid the conclusion that President Bush flinched from a fight on constitutional philosophy. Miers is undoubtedly a decent and competent person. But her selection will unavoidably be judged as reflecting a combination of cronyism and capitulation on the part of the president.

And that's just the first paragraph. Ignore the use of the passive-voice ("her selection will unavoidably be judged") and it's about as explicit an expression of Kristol and his ilk's disgust as we're likely to get.

Happy birthday, Phoebe. I'd have joined you guys if I wasn't barfing the camarones enchilados I ate for lunch.

A History of Violence

Go watch A History of Violence, the best film I've seen this year (so far). It's more shallow than ts defenders have claimed; David Edelstein's review is the only one which acknoledges that the film is in essence an exploitation film with de luxe filigrees ("Guilty pulp," he notes. "Here, you have your cake but choke on it, too."). Still, Straw Dogs it ain't. David Cronenberg's direction is his most assured since 1991's Naked Lunch, reminding me more than once of Fritz Lang's work in The Big Heat, another entry in the guilty pulp genre, lurid and bracing, with unpleasant things to say abou the relationship between violence and sex, and Lang's best American film.

As for acting, bouquets all around. Viggo Mortenson makes the transitions between cornfed Midwesterner and gangsta like the pro I never expected him to be; he's one example of an actor who knows how to move in character, a talent forgotten since the death of Burt Lancaster. Maria Bello quivers and rages with an intensity she's never quite shown before (her greatest moment: the look of disgust she gives Mortenson after their tryst on the stairs). As for William Hurt - well. If this had been a play, I would have given him a standing ovation. Imagine Sonny Corleone played by Margo Channing. His ham-on-rye-with-spicy-mustard performance summons the pity, terror, and comedy that the film's schematic, over-explicit script (its weakest element)

Do they really expect to be taken seriously?

Wayne Studer, Ph.D, hosts an invaluable site on all things Pet Shop Boys. Besides a host of fascinating lists detailing all kinds of Neil Tennant-Chris Lowe arcana, there's a serious analysis on 10 things the PSB did to kill their American popularity (they scored a number-one hit and four Top 10 followups before disappearing completely from the Top 40 after 1988). I particularly love Reason #3: Neil Tennant yawning on the cover of 1987's Actually:

3. To summarize, Americans don’t like it when their stars yawn. At least not unless they’re not yawning at something that they themselves would think is boring or "uncool." They especially don’t like them yawning, it would appear, directly in their faces, perhaps even at them. Chris's odd expression—halfway between a vacant blank and a scowl—didn’t help matters, either. They’re even wearing tuxedos. Rock stars do not wear tuxedos, unless they’re getting an award from the President, and not always then. "Just what are these guys about, anyway?"

Alicia 'n' Amy

My review of the wonderful new Amy Rigby album (curious to know what Matos, a Rigby fan, thinks); and here's my take on the marvelous new Alicia Keys song, which no one on the Singles Going Steady staff liked much because they're ugly and stupid:

Unbreakable” is the track in which Alicia Keys finally earns those premature raves. The production’s a killer – vamping electric piano, icy muted trumpets, subterranean bass, and live (!) drums – but Ms Keys is the star. Reining in the melismatic affectations which had suggested she believed all those reviews comparing her to Dionne Warwick or something, Keys shows a relaxed command of the vernacular (dig how she sassily enunciates “technical difficulties” without technical difficulties) worthy of early ‘70s Aretha: the Aretha of “Rock Steady” and “Daydreaming.” Embodying a black middle-class dream that has room for Ike and Tina and Oprah and Steadman, she’s human enough to yield to temptation and wise enough to work it out.

The abuse continues

More reports of detainee abuse. This one comes from Captain Ian Fishback, who describes abuses by soldiers in the 82nd Airborne Division. These include: beatings of Iraqi prisoners, exposing them to extremes of hot and cold, more delightful stacking of prisoners in human pyramids, and depriving them of sleep at Camp Mercury near Falluja. It gets better:

Captain Fishback, speaking publicly on the matter for first time, said the investigators who have questioned him in the past 10 days seemed to be less interested in individuals he identified in his chain of command who allegedly committed the abuses.

"I'm convinced this is going in a direction that's not consistent with why we came forward," Captain Fishback said in a telephone interview from Fort Bragg, N.C., where he is going through Army Special Forces training. "We came forward because of the larger issue that prisoner abuse is systemic in the Army. I'm concerned this will take a new twist, and they'll try to scapegoat some of the younger soldiers. This is a leadership problem."

Fishback has sent a letter to Senators John Warner and John McCain, the two senior Republicans on the Armed Services Committee. Now will the Honorable Bill O'Reilly pipe down about how the ACLU aids and abetts terrorists?

Oh happy day

DeLay is finally indicted:

A Travis County grand jury today indicted U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay on one count of criminal conspiracy, prompting the Sugar Land Republican to give up his leadership post in Congress.

"I have notified (House Speaker Dennis Hastert) that I will temporarily step aside from my position as majority leader pursuant to rules of the House Republican Conference and the actions of the Travis County District Attorney today," DeLay said in a statement.

The charge, a state jail felony punishable by up to two years incarceration, stems from his role with his political committee, Texans for a Republican Majority, a now-defunct organization that already had been indicted on charges of illegally using corporate money during the 2002 legislative elections.

Guilty as charged

This is why I love my friend Thomas. The bastard bought and reviewed the Barbra Streisand-Barry Gibb album Guilty Pleasures. And now that he's done both, it means I'm absolved from doing either.

I believe in Meth

And so do faith-loving hostages:

Ashley Smith, the woman who says she persuaded suspected courthouse gunman Brian Nichols to release her by talking about her faith, discloses in a new book that
she gave him methamphetamine during the hostage ordeal.

Smith did not share that detail with authorities at the time. But investigators said she came clean about the drugs when they interviewed her months later. They said they have no plans to charge her with drug possession.

In her book, "Unlikely Angel," released Tuesday, Smith says Nichols had her bound on her bed with masking tape and an extension cord. She says he asked for marijuana, but she did not have any, and she dug into her illegal stash of crystal meth instead.

Smith, a 27-year-old widowed mother who gained widespread praise for her level-headedness, says the seven-hour hostage ordeal in March led to the realization that she was a drug addict, and she says she has not used drugs since the night before she was taken captive.

Unanimous = fun

In spite of my genuine encouragement of dissent, I'm churlish enough to feel vindicated when people agree with me. In this case it's Robert Christgau in his latest Consumer Guide, who loves the new Amy Rigby and especially Stones albums as much as I do.

A nation kneels before Zod

I know where my vote is going:

Vote for your ruler
When I first came to your planet and demanded your homes, property and very lives, I didn't know you were already doing so, willingly, with your own government. I can win no tribute from a bankrupted nation populated by feeble flag-waving plebians. In 2008 I shall restore your dignity and make you servants worthy of my rule. This new government shall become a tool of my oppression. Instead of hidden agendas and waffling policies, I offer you direct candor and brutal certainty. I only ask for your tribute, your lives, and your vote.
-- General Zod
Your Future President and Eternal Ruler

Originally posted at The Great Curve.

Kennedy Agonistes

I hate the Kennedys. It's got a lot to do with hagiography like this, which court pages like Theodore Sorenson and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. served to a suppliant press and a public willing to believe in golden gods. This review of JFK nephew Christopher Lawford does perform an essential task: revealing that the Kennedy clan/junta is the house of Atreus and Thebes, with Hamlet, King Lear, and Hotspur all rolled int one:

Their legacy still means something, even now, after all the humiliations and conservative counterassaults. They were not really even a dynasty, like the Bushes – their enemies made short work of that ambition. But at least for those of us in blue-precinct America, the Kennedy name is a distant trumpet that still sounds out the best of what our country stands for. When white-maned Teddy again takes the lead in confronting a Manchurian Supreme Court nominee, when Caroline Kennedy invokes her father's legacy in her books, when Bobby Jr. rallies a crowd to stand up against the poisonous pillaging of corporate polluters, we're reminded once more of why principled progressive leadership matters.

If you need quick Pepto-Bismol, consult Gore Vidal's "The Holy Family" (found in his superb collection United States: Essays: 1952-1992) and Seymour Hersh's The Dark Side of Camelot.

Don't follow leaders - watch your parking meters

David Greenberg explains why hippies must die. Also: why Bob Dylan is smarter -- and dumber -- than hippies.

On Dylan

From a review of Martin Scorsese's new documentary, Bob Dylan - No Direction Home:

The only analogy that makes the slightest sense to me, is William Shakespeare. In the recent book, Will in the World , by Stephen Greenblatt, Greenblatt tries to explain how a rural boy from Lancashire, son of a drunken glove-maker, without a literary education or the sophistication of the court, could go to London and become the world's greatest playwright within a couple of years. Scorsese is doing the same thing for Dylan. Again, there's just no rational explanation. Shakespeare too, borrowed from the tradition plots, bits of text, lines that he heard in the street, other playwright's characters. He consumed the tradition and then took it to a higher place of integration, and that's what Bob Dylan did too.

Nostalgia...

Neil Gaiman in a recent Time Magazine interview:

I always loved, most of all with doing comics, the fact that I knew I was in the gutter. I kind of miss that, even these days, whenever people come up and inform me, oh, you do graphic novels. No. I wrote comic books, for heaven's sake. They're creepy and I was down in the gutter and you despised me.

I miss the old days when people who were into comic books were gutterfolk and creeps. With the advent of much Hollywood sound and fury, comics have attained a modicum, albeit minor, of respectability. It's just not the same, anymore...