Neither a Ford, nor a Lincoln -- just a lemon

I feel for those star reporters recalled from European vacations to cover the deaths of Saddam The Terrible, Chevy Chase's most immortal impersonation, and black America's greatest avatar. Flipping through the main cable channels this afternoon was an exercise in vertigo. Were Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Michael Jackson at Saddam's funeral? Why was Henry Kissinger bowing before James Brown's coffin?

Happily, I provoked only one argument with my parents this holiday weekend: I maintained that Gerard Ford, while an avuncular sort who looked splendid sporting a pipe, performed an act of unimaginable condescension to the American public in pardoning Richard Nixon. It's insulting that we had to be spared the horror of Watergate, as if we were nine year old children again, prevented by our moms from catching Children from the Corn. Timothy Noah delineates how Ford unwittingly created a situation in which later conflagrations of justice were allowed to flare, only to be dowsed by a properly administered presidential pardon -- like the one George H.W. Bush issued to Caspar Weinberger right before the 1992 elections. Besides, Noah argues, we're so enamoured of our former prez's (witness the Princess Di-esque outpouring of grief for a commander in chief every commentator has been at pains to point out was "one of the commen men") that Nixon would very likely have escaped prosecution anyway. Ask Teflon Will and Slick Ronnie. Or whatever their names are.

If you're feeling extra churlish, the catalogue of shame that Hitchens itemizes is enough to render Ford positively ghoulish. I knew about the Warren Commission, East Timor, and the Mayaguez, but was horrified to learn about the Kurdish rebellion against Saddamn in part funded by the U.S. that was abandoned at the last minute, thanks to the expediency of petrodollars -- only the first time the U.S. would betray the Kurds.

An unusually torpid South Florida movie season has prevented me from posting a top ten, not when Children of Men, Pan's Labyrinth, Little Children, Venus, and The Painted Veil have yet to open. I did see The History Boys: Richard Griffiths reprises his corpulent gay lech from Withnail & I; the boys are clever, if not very pretty, least of all the object of so much lust.

Gerald Ford, dead today at the age of 93

Merry Christmas

As Andy remarked in his last post, it doesn't often snow in Florida for Christmas. Which is why this live Pet Shop Boys performance of a written-to-order holiday number neatly sums up the yuletide spirit. Notwithstanding its other pleasures, this clip also represents a golden opportunity to soak up Chris Lowe in Father Christmas drag.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

Well, no. On my run to Pace Park this morning I passed a couple of out-of-towners--probably Canadians--chain-smoking and videotaping each other, pointing to the background as if to say "can you believe this weather in Christmas time?" I think that's why the holidays sneak up on me every year; there's just no way to tell. (Though a Sirius channel has been playing Christmas music for over a month now.) The only indicator that it might be winter somewhere in the world right now is my brother, who just got back from a semester in London, constantly calling me to complain about how hot it is down here.

Anyway, I'll likely won't be able to post again till next year. I'll be getting my share of winter weather slumming around Budapest and Prague for New Year's. I'm calling it a fact-finding trip into the Post-Soviet, civil law system, and integration into the EU, but, really, I'm just going to get drunk and ogle Eastern European blondes.

Happy holidays, everyone.

really, how much alliteration can one man take?

I think it's because South Florida newspapers love alliteration that I hate it so. When I was working for the Herald and the Sentinel, I quickly figured out that any headline or story with alliteration would always make it to print. (Look at today's Herald, I guarantee there are like five headlines with alliteration, and I haven't even read it.) Newspaper people just happen to think it's clever. To me, it's slightly less unimaginative than simple rhyme schemes. And it's bleeding into the blogosphere. Look at some of the names of Herald blogs: Dolphins in Depth, Dre's Dish on Dade--triple alliteration!--Sunflower Seeds, Cuban Connection, Miami Music, Changing Channels, Crazy for Critters. For the love of God, somebody make it stop.

Terminus

At last: Stylus' year-end album list. I've got blurbs on the Yeah Yeah Yeah's and Scritti Politti. Also: a reminiscence of a year spent loving Ne-Yo and Justin Timberlake more than available men.

1. V/A - Journey Into Paradise: The Larry Levan Story
2. Scritti Politti - White Bread, Black Beer
3. Ghostface - Fishscale
4. Bob Dylan - Modern Times
5. Sonic Youth - Rather Ripped
6. Yeah Yeah Yeah's - Show Yr Bones
7. Basement Jaxx - Crazy Itch Radio
8. Tom Ze - Estudando on Pagode
9. Pet Shop Boys - Fundamental
10. The Rapture - Pieces of the People We Know
11. Justin Timberlake - FutureSex/LoveSound
12. Thomas Mapfumo - Rise Up
13. R.E.M. - And I Feel Fine: The Best of the I.R.S. Years 1982-1987
14. Jenny Lewis & The Watson Twins - Rabbit Fur Coat
15. Hot Chip - The Warning
16. TV on the Radio - Return to Cookie Mountain
17. Pearl Jam - s/t
18. Prince - 3121
19. Arctic Monkeys - Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
20. Ne-Yo - In My Own Words

An Obligatory, Preliminary Best (And Worst) of Film

In eager anticipation of a more thorough list by Alfred ;-) I humbly submit my 10 favorite flicks of the year. No fear of the lowbrow here (I did watch "Talladega Nights" twice.)

There's no rank or research here- if it was good enough to stick in my mind, it's below:

TOP TEN
1- "Borat"- A comedy of almost unprecedented vulgarity, "Borat" was a Roscharch test: Cruel punishment of the unwitting? Brilliant political satire? Balls on your face (literally) laughathon? You take your pick, but nothing else this dumb, offensive, endearing, revealing, and fucking hilarious had come my way in ages.

2- "A Scanner Darkly"- An anti-drug thriller screened through a tripping camera, more people needed to see Richard Linklater's adaptation of the Philip K. Dick novella. Maybe it was the anti-adult-animation bias, maybe the anti-smart-sci-fi bias. God knows that, unfortunately, it wasn't an anti-Keanu bias. (See "The Lake House" below.)

3- "L'Enfant"- This uncomfortably affecting Belgian drama about youth, poverty, and the weight of children on the unweary it's, like eavesdropping on teenagers, disheartening, scary, and necessary.

4- "Volver"- Almodovar's late streak continues. Yes, in my eyes, it IS a streak, and "Bad Education" was great. If it disappointed sligtly, it only goes to show how much we've come to expect from Pedrito. "Volver" is even better. No other film maker is as adept at tip-toeing the line between hysteria and catharsis.

5- "The Departed"- Scorcese does no wrong. Nicholson does wrong more entertainingly than anyone else. Leo convinced me he could kick someone's ass, and if that isn't movie magic...

6- "Cars"- The old-fashioned Disney animated musical has been gnawed to death by
hateful direct-to-video sequels, (Jesus, did anyone need "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame 3: Little Hunchy's Adventures"?). But Pixar keeps upping the visual ante. "Cars" wasn't as emotional as "Finding Nemo", or as exciting as "The Invincibles", but the glint of the virtual sun on virtual chrome left reality in the dust. You won't find racing this thrilling in "Talladega Nights..."

7- "Talladega Nights"- ... which incidentally, was pretty damned funny. The "baby Jesus" rant? Sasha Baron Cohen in his second greatest role of the year? Shake And Bake? Gary Cole? The cougar? Come on, you laughed. At two hours, it was longer than any stupid joke deserves to be, and it was almost avant garde in its disregard for plot, but, for a clean dumb time, it sure beat "American Pie 5: Eugene Levy's Gambling Problem."

8- "Leonard Cohen:I'm Your Man", "Dave Chapelle's Block Party", "Neil Young's Heart of Gold": Three documentary/ concert/ tributes that have little in common except that they are all testimonies to how underserved music on the big screen is. Yeah, I know, "Dreamgirls," "Idlewild,' blah blah... Haven't seen those.

9- "Pusher 3": The last (maybe) installment in the great Danish trilogy finds likable Serbian drug dealer Milo trying to drop his own habit, orchestrating a huge party for his ball-busting daughter, unloading an unexpected shipment of ecstasy, cooking for 45 guests, and then matter of factly descending into murder and dismemberment. Like "The Sopranos" with subtitles. Except better than that makes it sound.

10- "Fearless"- Jet Li's retirement party has more ass-kicking than any other retirement party since my grandpa's.

Underrated:
"Lady in the Water": It's easy to hate M. Night Shyamalan. His name is hard to pronounce, he has an ego the size of Alfed Hitchcock, his movies are so preciously constructed that one feels tempted to bully them down, and his dialogue can be sheer torture. A Shyamalan scene goes something like this:


A: (looks stoic) "I wanted to say hello. (pause.) To you."
B: (looks stoic and about to cry) "Is that what you meant to say? I will answer equally, with a similar greeting."
A:"Very well. I will accept that. If that is what you desire to convey."
(Pause. Characters stare at some oddly colored wallpaper for two minutes)
A:"Is that all that will be said between us?"
(Now the camera is only capturing B's armpit and A's crotch.)
B:"Yes. Except perhaps that..."
(B looks away. He's about to show some emotion. Restrain.)
A:"Do not to be afraid to speak. Fear is the killer of all that mankind has produced. The killer of goodness." (Mystical strings are heard.)
B:"I only fear... that we may not make contact with each other before..."
A:"Before..."
(Three minute static shot of B narrowing his eyes.)
B:"Before the darkness."
(Audience snores.)


BUT he does have ambition and imagination, and those are extremely rare in Hollywood.
Also, this movie stars Paul Giamatti. So come on. Worth a watch.

"Clerks 2": It was funny, allright? And a damn sight better than anything Kevin Smith's done since "Chasing Amy." But fans of "Clerks" have since moved out of their parent's basements, so this went a little under the radar. The geek jokes were true, (if tried), and... "Pillow pants"? I know you laughed.

"Lucky Number Slevin": Lucy Liu and Josh Hartnett not sucking should be enough to earn this a rental. The plot was too damned pretzely, and the gangsta dialogue so sharp it cut right through most people's suspension of disbelief. This one was easy to dismiss as bad Tarantino, but it's actually more like "not as good as usual" Tarantino. It might surprise you by not sucking nearly as much as you think it does.

The batch of computer animated cartoon comedies: "Cars," "Open Season," "Barnyard," "Over the Hedge", "The Ant Bully," "The Ice Age 2," "Happy Feet," "Monsterhouse,": It really was more than any post-pubescent person could keep up with, but the surprise is that all of these movies had sharper dialogue, better characters, and just LOOKED better than the large majority of their live action counterparts. My theory: it's harder to shoot a bad scene when you're literally creating it from scratch. The camera can't quite be accidentally off-centered, can it?

Overrated:
"Little Miss Sunshine." Actually, I must have gotten my version of "Little Miss Sunshine" mixed in with something else, because all the critics claimed it was "riotously funny", and what I saw had maybe three ok chuckles. I liked the movie fine at first as a family drama, but the more I thought about it the more unlikely its family seemed. And a second viewing on DVD reveals so many absurdities: Yeah, it's funny when the cop sees the porn, but I cannot believe he wouldn't investigate the GLARING CORPSE-SHAPED SHROUD in the van. And how exactly did Greg Kinnear talk those strangers into lending him their motorcycle? And are we to believe that Toni Collette's caring mom had not for a moment looked at her daughter's rehearsals, or outfit, or song choice? What about the fact that Alan Arkin's vulgar-but-good-and-NOT-creepy grandpa had for months being teaching his grand-daughter how to strip? That goes unaddressed. And how is it that the Nietzche-reading son would scorn his father's Nietzchean "winner takes all" mentality? Or that anyone would logically expect to maintain a strict vow of silence until AFTER becoming a pilot? After all, not many anti-social non-talking weirdoes are accepted into flight school. In fact, the more thought one gives to the movie, the more contrived its cliches appear.
Er, after writing all that, I'm not even sure I liked it after all! ;-)

Hideous:

"The Fountain": Darren Aronofsky's "Requiem for a Dream" is one of my all time favorites. I went into "The Fountain" hoping to adore it, ignored all the negative press, opened my mind wider than (insert slutty starlet)'s legs. I have seldom thrown more good will in a movie screen's direction. But I failed. This movie just sucked in every possible way, from the ridiculous, and unparseable, New Age plot, to the unmemorable dialogue, to the yucky color palette. Worse, it was embarrassing. Hugh Jackman was serviceable, as he was in "Scoop," another of the year's sucky ones. The difference between those movies: While Woody Allen has obviously sleepwalked through most of his latter oeuvre, and I doubt he himself thinks greatly of them, Darren Aronofsky LOVES his material and you can tell in every frame. It's like having a friend who's blindly in love with the Elephant Man, and you're trying to be nice and not puke during your double dates.

"The Da Vinci Code": "The Passion" crowd sure needed a counterpoint. This should have been a big blockbuster about the Church's murderous legacy, organized religion's absurdities, and Jesus' sexuality, (yeah, the J-Man probably liked to get it on with that sexy Magdalene ho.) So how exactly did "The Da Vinci Code" end up being so damn polite and sleepy? Tom Hanks looked more life-like in "The Polar Express."

"The Lake House": Keanu Reeves. Sandra Bullock. So it was just like "Speed," except very very slow.

"Pulse": The PG-13, J-Horror-rethread trend, as exemplified in "Pulse," needs to go away. I thought I could watch Kirsten Bell quietly wash dishes for hours, but I was wrong.

I might as well throw in a really REALLY hideous movie called "Feast" in here: it was this year's Greenlight Project. Only reason I don't really add it it's because I feel dishonest about reviewing a movie I couldn't bring myself to finish watching. Thirty minutes in, I walked away in contempt.
(Note to "horror" film-makers: The green/red filters to signify techno/moldy/dusty/rusty/gory have to stop. The scratched celluloid technique too.
Exception to the rule: Rob Zombie. I am NOT kidding. "House of a 1000 Corpses" and "The Devil's Rejects" are true horror greats, and will earn a cult in time.

"Material Girls": Hilary and Haylie Duff star in... Actually this one is self-explanatory, and a perfect nadir. Yes, I watched the whole thing, but the circumstances were tragic.

Does anyone remember laughter?

It’s been a year of redemption for me and the musics, as several bands and artists I’d written off as overrated or underwhelming delivered finely transformative statements that forced me to relocate into their camps. Junior Boys, TV on the Radio, Jenny Lewis (the last Rilo Kiley record was a minor letdown), Hot Chip and even to a lesser extent Joanna Newsom, all made good on overeager coronations that had thus far proved mostly undeserved in their careers.

LCD Soundsystem belongs in that category as well. The debut showed signs that James Murphy’s flagship act was already capable of mastery (“Daft Punk is Playing at My House,” “Tribulations”), but much of the rekkid reeked of stale scenester snark and lazy classic-rock appropriations.

Well, the jaded quips and bald rips remain, only this time the jokes are less self-serving and the mimicry’s much more fun. Going from scamming Pink Floyd to biting Bowie is trading up in my book, though there are also exquisitely explicit nods to gooey New Wave (“Someone Great”) and lockstep post-punk (the title track) as well. The aforementioned “Someone Great” is indeed absolutely dazzling, positively heartbreaking in its willful absentmindedness. I can understand why everyone’s loving this song right now, though I’m not quite as crystal on why its immediate successor, “All My Friends,” is garnering equal raves. We’re all aware it sounds exactly like Secret Machines, right?

As I’ve suggested, Murphy’s hyper-aware banter is a little more bearable on The Sound of Silver, and he even made me chuckle once with that line in “North American Scum” about Europe being the place where “the buildings are old/and you might have lots of mimes.” Still, the fact remains that Murph’s not nearly as comical as he thinks he is. Toby Keith and Trace Adkins are still way funnier.

In fact, it got me thinking about how rare it is that a piece of music actually (intentionally) makes me laugh out loud. I get plenty of ROFFLES from TV, movies and reading (well, mostly from the internets). Certainly I recognize the limitations of the medium, but it’s hard for me to recall the last time a song (intentionally) inspired any healthy guffawing. Possibly System of a Down’s “Vicinity of Obsencity,” though I’m not entire convinced that belongs in the “intentional” category. Or maybe it was the answering machine skits on The Mind of Mannie Fresh. I know, I’m a 14 year-old. Either way, I had a tough time coming up with anything from 2006.

The Queen: on the dole

As my enmity towards this season's awards wheelbarrow The Queen grows, with Helen Mirren pulling it through the predicted furrows, I'm looking for any chance to read a disparaging review. Jane Dark nails the film's overdeliberate quality (without any of the fun and malice of director Stephen Frears' other tightly scripted ensemble The Grifters). While it's true that Frears got his start in TV, he has never succumbed to TV-movie values so helplessly:

That's what "well-made" means, most often, and it's exactly the problem; it's as if the film were trying to make the case for "the art film" being every bit as rigid and determined a genre as anything Hollywood could come up with. At least Hollywood films have the courage of their lack of conviction, and the capacity thus to be excessive, muddled, absurd. There is no moment nor gesture in The Queen that escapes its fate as crudely telegraphic (at the beginning when he's just an uncertain commoner, the quite short person playing Tony Blair wears football jerseys; you can tell he's come into his own because from that moment on, he wears suits!); as a mechanistic part of the parallel plot structure (which guy in the PM's camp is like which guy in the royal retinue? We'll never figure it out!); or as broadly symbolic (the noble old stag being harried in its solitude across the vast spaces of Balmoral, a stag eventually slain not by an aristocrat but a mere businessman hunter up from the City — this noble old stag with which the Queen is obsessed — stands for...the Queen!)

As for Helen Mirren, she did the tight-lipped thing far better in PBS' "Prime Suspect"; and if you want to see her at her uninhibited best, re-screen The Long Good Friday, Excalibur (her Morgan Le Fey was not, unhappily, studied by Cate Blanchett's pixie in Lord of the Rings), and even the underrated The Mosquito Coast, in which she transformed the tiresome part of the long-suffering wife into a cauldron of simmering resentment and repressed sensuality. It's a testament to Frears' dull good taste that we register Mirren's intelligence as Queen Elizabeth, but there's a sizable coterie which chooses not to separate intelligence from charm and sex. How frustrating that this is the role for which Mirren will be forever known.

Boobies!

The wet smack of kisses on cheeks. Breast and ass shots that would get a straight director booed. An acceptance of telenovela melodrama as a domestic inevitability. Thanks to an excellent cast, Volver exerts a stronger tug on the memory, especially in its rather chilling delineation of our familial responsibilities. While it's obvious that Irene (Carmen Maura) loves daughter Sole (Lola Dueñas), it's somewhat monstrous for Americans of a certain age to accept the phlegmatic manner in which Sole takes care of her mother as if she had no life of her own except as the proprietor of a clandestine beauty parlor. Despite the ease with which this sixty-year-old woman slips under the bed or gets off on the smell of her own farts, Maura's Irene is far from likable, a pre-Franco anachronism casually indifferent to how she upsets her daughters' lives, and unwilling to confront caretaker Agustina (Blanca Portillo)'s sexual ambiguity (Portillo, shot and lit like Falconetti's Joan of Arc, gives a finely shaded performance as a woman made insufferable by charity).

Singles!

It's that time of year. Stylus has published its 50 best singles of the year. My ballot:

01. Ne-Yo - Sexy Love
02. The Killers - When You Were Young
03. Gnarls Barkley - Crazy
04. Escort - Starlight
05. Justin Timberlake feat. T.I. - My Love
06. Mary J. Blige - Be Without You
07. Nelly Furtado - Promiscuous
08. Madonna - Sorry
09. The Fray - Over My Head (Cable Car)
10. Beyonce - Irreplaceable

(Naturally I'd keep fiddling with the list if left to my own devices)

Shameless Plug

One of my stories is being featured on an Amazon.com competition... along with a hundred others, so veeeery much doubt it will win. Still, why not vote for moi? In the Christmas spirit.

VOTE

It might be a diversion from the AGI Pinochet storm of a few days ago, which...COME ON! Some people are just blatantly evil, no matter what political pap you're being fed. Pinochet was one of those. Right-wing apologetics suck.

Love and death on 90210

Marisa Meltzer's article on the first season of "Beverly Hills 90210" strikes the right note of repulsion and affection. I don't know how much credit producer/writer Darren Star's attention to the Billboard Modern Rock tracks deserves in assessing the show's ultimate aesthetic worth, but let's just say that hearing Concrete Blonde's "Joey," the Pet Shop Boys' "So Hard," and Soho's marvelous, too-long-forgotten "Hippychick" (my introduction to The Smiths!) introduced this high school junior to levels of melodrama and subtle subversion which made that important year's discoveries all the more interesting. Keying an epochal instance of Dylan Walsh's Byronic angst to R.E.M.'s "You Are The Everything" -- by far the most haunting song on the otherwise misbegotten Green -- was a stroke of genius. It was easier to forgive Star or whoever for promoting Jeremy Jordan's "Right Kind of Girl," but at that point Donna and David were hogging all the important stories anyway, and Shannon Doherty's sui generis Brenda Walsh was sidelined. Here was a girl worthy of emulation: masculine, erratic, waspish, and unworthy of pallid Dylan. When John Hurt exquisitely pined for Jason Priestley in Love & Death in Long Island, I was tempted to snort. Brenda was gayer than Brandon ever was.

Stoned and dethroned

If nothing else, World Trade Center reminds us that Oliver Stone can direct action sequences. Buried 20 feet below the earth and covered by seemingly tons of rubble, New York City Port Authority officers John McLoughlin (Nicholas Cage) and Will Jimena (Michael Peña) are helpless as fiery embers rain down upon them. We also marvel at a very pregmant Maggie Gyllenhaal's ability to run down a staircase and into roomfuls of Hispanic in-laws without breaking a sweat.

A shame he forgets that we love Stone for his nutball paranoid fantasias. There's something deeply suspect about a Stone film devoid of insinuations, threats, windbag rhetoric, and Donald Sutherland in a trenchcoat muttering National Security Council secrets at 500 beats per minute. I understand why conservative and liberal critics wept with gratitude when WTC contained no bewigged Colin Farrell-as-Prince-Valiant or J. Edgar Hoover snogging the kid from "My So-Called Life." As his coddling of Fidel Castro and enshrinement of John F. Kennedy demonstrated, Stone isn't so much an apologist for power as he is a devotee of men in power performing civic duties for the delectation of a docile, misty-eyed body politic. Example: Gordon Gekko can keep his wife and kids and Long Island mansion as long as he shares mistress Daryl Hannah with a bovine Charlie Sheen (I suspect Stone twice cast Sheen in the hopeless role of his proxy because he genuinely did see himself as a kid as stupid and inexpressive as Sheen, and in a sense wishes he still was). Shorn of subtext and conflict, McLoughlin and Jimena are daguerrotypes whose sensitivity to only the most primal of emotions (they miss their wife and kids) makes them interchangeable with the hijackers in United 93 praying to Allah. That risible film purported to re-imagine one chapter in the September 11 story as Airport edited as if it was a Pontecorvo movie; give Stone credit for shooting a more resonant Towering Inferno. Casting Gyllenhaal and Maria Bello as the worried wives is another plus. Let's remember that most Stone heroines have the libidinal charge of a Scotch tape dispenser – unless you're Sissy Spacek, on whom the assassination of Robert Kennedy produces a reaction analogous to the consumption of two dozen oysters. Stone, World Trade Center reminds us, is a patriot and a good man, in that order, and if it isn't he'll remind you again, on FOX News if necessary.

The closest he comes to creating a batshit-crazy leitmotif in the manner of the endless Zapruder stills of JFK's head getting blasted open or the Indian in Natural Born Killers is a hallucination of the Sacred Heart of Jesus seen by Jimena before he's rescued. The soundtrack swells. The voice of Ronald Reagan ("silver water over peach fuzz," wrote Edmund Morris) gently reminds him that while the Man Upstairs always deserves his due, the only being deserving of worship is a man's wife.

Can you blame him?

I don't think I can blame Bill Nelson for meeting with Syria's Bashar Assad despite objections by the State Department and the White House. However, one of the quotes in the story seemed a little politically contrived.

Assad "clearly indicated a willingness to cooperate" in controlling its border with Iraq, Nelson told reporters in a conference call following the meeting.

Nelson needs to be very careful with his words. There's a long history of American officials being played by foreign strongmen. Of course, Assad is going to show a willingness to do anything; he must be delighted that a U.S. senator is defying the administration that has Syria in the doghouse. He'd probably show a willingness to play patty cake with Ariel Sharon's vegetative carcass if Nelson had asked.

Nelson needs to recognize that this is a long shot of a diplomatic move, and try to appear slightly more conflicted about the visit.

But the actual act of meeting with Assad is commendable. The United States needs all the help it can get in Iraq, and that includes coercing Syria by whatever means necessary. If the Bush administration is unwilling to do that, so be it. Maybe it's up to the Democratic Congress to embarrass them into doing it.

Write your own caption

Palestinians can now sue for Israeli abuses

I've been meaning to post about this all day. A unanimous Israeli court threw out a law forbidding Palestinians from filing claims for damages caused by Israeli quasi-military operations. This is revolutionary on its face but it's also a sign that Israelis are no longer seeing Palestinians as an enemy neighbor, but as an occupied people devoid of access to a court system, or any rule of law, or individual rights.

I don't know if this holding will stick, but if it does, it'll give the Palestinians something of a voice in court, and a stage to legitimize evidence of their status as an oppressed, permanent underclass. The ruling would also deprive the Israeli government of one of its favorite weapons in the information war--labeling its critics as anti-Semites. But again, I seriously doubt the holding will not be thwarted somehow.

In other news from the yet-another-reason-why-there's-no-way-we-should-leave-Iraq camp, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia warned Dick Cheney that if the United States pulls its troops out of Iraq, the Saudis would fund Iraq's Sunnis in their fight against the Shiites, funded by Iran.

Watch it, Iran

In an interview on German television, Ehud Olmert listed Israel as a nuclear power, which everyone already knows, but the country doesn't talk about.

"Iran openly, explicitly and publicly threatens to wipe Israel off the map," Olmert said. "Can you say that this is the same level, when you are aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as America, France, Israel, Russia?"

What's funny is that he also added Russia to the list of responsible nuclear powers.

Olmert's getting a lot of heat from political enemies who say that his comments give legitimacy to Iran's nuclear research--after all, if Israel has nukes, why not Iran--which is kind of wrong. The world has known since Vanunu, the poor bastard who got 20 years in jail for leaking Israel's nuclear secrets, that Israel is a nuclear power. And the U.S. for years has vetoed, without any explanation, every attempt by the IAEA to look into Israel's nuclear arsenal. No need to worry Israel, your "secret" is safe with us.

No state funeral for Pinochet

Here's the AFP story.

I say throw the fucker in a landfill somewhere. That's about as much of a funeral as he gave his victims.

More Pinochet: the right responds

Posters at The Corner have been publishing various ambivalent obits all day. Tim Graham's remarks on a mellowing Pinochet relaxing his grip causes him to sniff at the left's similar relief when Deng Xiaoping went to commune with his ancestors; it's a post which should please our colleagues at Babalu Blog.

I prefer this rather more sensible one by Goldberg:

I certainly think that supporting a Pinochet-type outside of the context of the Cold War would be much more difficult to defend and would ultimately probably be indefensible. And, even in such a context, I by no means think the US should have simply a blanket policy of my enemy's enemy is my friend. This is partly a moral point and partly a practical one. Our support of Saudi Arabia has proved that such logic carried on indefinitely creates very real problems, both morally and strategically.

(Somehow I don't want to drag Jeane Kirkpatrick's authoritarian vs totalitarian dictatorship meme into this all over again, although since she died recently too, why not...)

Finally, here's a essay by William Buckley himself, composed at the point at which Pinochet was about to be arrested by the World Court.

quickly, more on Pinochet

The New York Times has a good digest of Chilean bloggers' posts on Pinochet's death. The comments on it are pretty entertaining, too.

Oh, happy day

I can't sleep so I'll blog about Pinochet. Fair enough? I'd like to think so.

You'd think there would be a simple formula about, if anything, mass murdering, anti-democratic autocrats. But not so. Just like every single Kashi-eating, soy-milk-chugging democrat should have cheered when Saddam Hussein was captured--yes, I understand that wasn't so because stupidity transcends the Republican party--no one should be making excuses for Augusto Pinochet. But people still defend the fucker. And they are so reasonable that they tried to burn Santiago down today. The argument--if you can call it that--is that Pinochet brought Chile back from the economic abyss of Communism and modernized the country. But while that may be somewhat true, how does that excuse killing thousands of dissidents in soccer stadiums and disappearing the bodies? I've read Milton Friedman; I'm almost certain that wasn't part of his philosophy. Economic turnarounds are possible without mass executions, and if they are not, well, they're likely not worth the human rights violations.

Over at Babalu Blog, some blogger named Ziva is heartbroken that the mainstream media--that single-minded cabal of Jews and homosexuals--mentions that Pinochet's victims will never see justice carried out but to this blogger's recollection, no similar line has appeared in any story about Castro falling ill.

I feel like I've been stabbed in the heart; not once in the months since fidel went into the hospital have I read one word from the MSM about justice for castro's victims. Not once....

Yeah, that's cute. While Ziva's research is almost as bad as his rationale (the same service that he's quoting from--the Associated Press--moved a story devoted to Castro's victims not too long ago) that's beside the point. You know who also probably felt like they'd been stabbed in the heart, people who were actually SHOT in the heart in a firing squad put together by Pinochet's goon squads. I'm sure they feel almost as bad as you do, Ziva.

Fidel Castro is without a doubt the worst dictator the Western hemisphere has ever seen. But that doesn't make Pinochet a cuddly grandfather who just wanted to better his country's economy. And to use one AP story as the only basis for some cutesy, misguided media commentary is kind of dumb anyway. Who knows. I'm hoping Ziva is just suffering from heartburn.

It's Business Time

It may be that I think this is the funniest thing in the world because of law school delirium. So I'll need a second opinion.

And this one's damn good too, again, delirium notwithstanding.

Guess who's back

I stumbled upon this accidentally, but, wow, this is great news: Robert Christgau's Consumer Guide is now on MSN. The usual surprises: he loves the new Rapture album as much as I do, loves the Idlewild soundtrack a lot more than I do. Discoveries: Maria Muldaur, a Pet Shop Boys track on that Elton John Christmas album that would have made Fundamental more wonderful (if upset its gestalt). Delights: he really loves crunk.

Rhymin' Simon

Thanks to Thomas for this Marcello-alluding post devoted to Carly Simon's "Why," the best non-hit (domestically, of course) of her career. I'm not as besotted with it as they are. The slightly atonal warble darkened by an almost electronic sheen turned those big seventies hits that Mom loves into scary polyurethane soul (it made perfect sense that she scored a mild comeback in the eighties thanks to songs featured in polyurethane director Mike Nichols' films). The synthetic filigrees of the Chic Organization circa 1981 would seem to fit her as snugly as those Jane Fonda-esque leotards she then sported; but I sense distance not commitment, detachment, not ambivalence. Chic understand enough about their client not to palliate her patrician self-regard. If Diana Ross' hologram soul at least radiated spunk, Simon radiates the dilettantism of a Marin County parvenue. In the days of Spandau Ballet and Flesh + Blood-era Roxy Music, of course I know why "Why" was a bigger hit in England.

Niggardly distinctions

Blogging on musical matters will be light in the next couple of weeks as year end lists are compiled and final thoughts assembled. I'll concentrate on film and books.

Christopher Hitchens is uneven these days; although subjects for his sclerotic eloquence would seem to crowd his vision, he confines it to critics of the Bush administration's Iraq policy. When he aims his photon torpedoes at smaller fry seemingly unworthy of his princely (self-) regard, the results are often quite satisfying on a formalist level, and frustrating on the world-historic one. This column on Michael Richards and popular culture's kneejerk condemnation of the word "nigger" would seem to answer an irritating ILE thread begun a few months ago (too bad I can't cite it) and college deans. It's worth reading though for this:

Now, the word niggardly can pass out of the language and leave us not much poorer. But the meaning of the verb to discriminate is of some importance and seems to me to be worth fighting over. It is odd, when you think about it, that we accuse racists of "discrimination." This is the very thing of which they are by definition incapable: They think all members of certain groups are the same.

As the recipient of several doleful glares when I used "niggardly" in a newspaper critique not too long ago, I sympathize with Hitchens' pat Orwellian reversal.

Clipse hath no fury

Like Josh, I'm not hearing a masterwork when I play the Clipse's Hell Hath No Fury, despite a half dozen plays. Pharrell's limitations never seem more obvious than when he's propping lame raps with vaporous melodies and attenuated percussion cha-cha-cha, although tracks like "Hello Cruel World" and "Keys Open Doors" redeem their musty tropes. The tragedy here is one in which two young men of obvious intelligence enact coke fantasies but whose ambivalence undercuts their performances; they're too principled to yield to bad faith. Comparing Hell Hath No Fury to Ghostface's superior Fishscale is instructive: Ghost's baroque, allusive, elusive wordplay matches the baroque, allusive music, whereas the spareness of Pharrell's arrangements reveals the poverty of Pusha T and Malice's tough talk.