We've had seven years to fix this

And yet... a story just moved by the AP reports that Florida voting machines are still not entirely tamper-proof:

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Florida's optical scan voting machines are still flawed, despite efforts to fix them, and they could allow poll workers to tamper with the election results, according to a government-ordered study obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.

At the request of Secretary of State Kurt Browning, a Florida State University information technology laboratory went over a list of previously discovered flaws to see whether the machines were still vulnerable to attack.

"While the vendor has fixed many of these flaws, many important vulnerabilities remain unaddressed," the report said.

The lab found, for example, that someone with only brief access to a machine could replace a memory card with one preprogramed to read one candidate's votes as counting for another, essentially switching the candidates and showing the loser winning in that precinct.

Let me clarify; it's not that easy. To get to the memory card one would have to unscrew the case, which is kind of hard to do without drawing a lot of attention. But I'm not even comfortable with chances of it happening being that small. What happens when voting machines are being transported to the polling place? Are these things constantly being watched?

I hate that I'm sounding like a bad Mel Gibson movie--that narrows it down, right?--but voting is one of our most important rights; it is preservative of other rights, in fact. If something in this world needs to be absolutely tamper-proof, it's these damn machines.

heck of a job

70 percent of Americans think Congress is right to investigate Alberto Gonzales. And 51 percent think the Bush administration is more corrupt than previous administrations.

Via TPM.

Gunrunning

According to the White House, its arms deal with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel is meant to counter Iranian power in the Middle East, and that country's desire to build a nuclear arsenal. For example, part of the deal with Saudi Arabia, for example, calls on stricter enforcement of trade restrictions with Iran.

I'm not sold by that.

Someone in the administration or the relevant departments has to understand that further arming Iran's neighbors will only strengthen its resolve to go nuclear. A confrontation between Iran and Saudi Arabia or Egypt would never get to the point where the new weapons would make a difference. I doubt even Israel would dare attack Iran on the eve of its developing a nuclear weapon. We've seen how much pressure Iran can exert on Israel via Hezbollah, and it's safe to assume their power has since grown. Beyond that, it would seem a little counter intuitive for Israel to go along with a huge arms deal with the Saudis and Egypt. Ehud Olmert even said at a cabinet meeting that Israelis “understand the need of the United States to support the Arab moderate states, and there is a need for a united front between the U.S. and us regarding Iran.” But then you read this:

Mr. Burns said that under the plan American military aid for Israel would increase to $3 billion annually over 10 years, from $2.4 billion now.

Matthew Yglesias also points to an interesting point made by Brad Plumer. The Saudi Royal family keeps "the size of the national army and air force to the barest minimum" for fear of a coupe. Have the Saudis all of the sudden decided to change this policy?

So what's behind the arms deal?

The only answer I can up with is that it has nothing to do with Iranian power in the region as a whole, but with Iranian power in Iraq. The administration needs the Saudis' help in Iraq, starting with collaboration with the Maliki government. It makes no sense to me that the administration needs to spend billions of dollars in military aid in order to keep Sunnis and Shiites at each other's throats. But that does seem like a reasonable price to get them to work together.

First Ingmar Bergman

Now Antonioni.

Redemption?

Kenneth Starr's law firm gives more to Clinton than Republicans.

Goodnight

How hard is it to debunk libertarianism?

Not very. It can be done in about a page.

Via Ezra Klein.

Tupelo Honey

Walk score

Walk Score, a very cool tool that lets you type in your address and figures out the walkability of your neighborhood depending on proximity to coffee shops, grocery stores and so on, rates my apartment in Midtown Miami a 60 out of a 100. My place near Dupont Circle in DC gets a 98.


Miami has a long way to go. Maybe once they finish this, the Miami score will go up.

Via Critical Miami.

Morning

Straight talk express.

Looking for Lincoln

This weekend, my parents come up to DC, which they'd never visited before. I've spent the last couple of days showing them around. I took them to most of the cliche places: Mount Vernon, Vietnam wall, the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial... The Lincoln Memorial is by far my favorite DC monument. Like Nixon, I've gone in the late night and sat quietly by the huge, 19-foot statute. (And like Nixon, I may not have been sober at the time.)

Every time, I read his second inaugural address engraved on the marble wall, and try to imagine him--lanky, awkward, freakishly tall yet benign and strong--giving the speech. The end of the speech, "with malice toward none, with charity for all..."--the non-idiot's precedent to Bush's "uniter, not a divider" incoherence--always made me wish for many more Lincolns in our presidential future. This time around, I focused on several sentences which I probably looked over in the past because I didn't remember ever reading them.

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.

Yes. In these times of indiscriminate religious invocation and overreach, we are in need of another Lincoln, or at the very least, we must make use of his wisdom.

Everything I've read of Lincoln--most recently Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals--details a humble, down-to-earth man with a strong hold on basic convictions in a world gone mad. (Again, possibly the precedent to Bush's pretensions, though the White House communications people likely have something to do with that.) One anecdote tells of a supporter of the North telling Lincoln they should pray God is on their side, and Lincoln responding they should instead pray that they're on God's side.

Another has a political opponent in a Congressional race polling members of a congregation by a show of hands, or some such device, whether they're going to heaven. When Lincoln, who was present, fails to respond, the questions turn to him and the opponent asks where Lincoln thought he was going, heaven or hell. Lincoln coolly responds, I'm going to Congress, and walks out.

Yes, let's pray for many more Lincolns.

You'll laugh, you'll be terrified

Max Blumenthal has the rare gift of both making you laugh and scaring the shit out of you simultaneously. Check out his latest video, "Rapture Ready" on Christians for Israel.



I know this makes it three video posts in a row, which I really don't like doing. In fact, I don't think I've ever done it. But this does include all the bad things in life that must be actively mocked--fanatical Christianity, fanatical Zionism, Rick Santorum, Joseph Lieberman...

"stuff happens"

I really want to see this.

Friday dog blogging

It's a blog off

Yep. There's a nice brouhaha going down between Rick at Stuck on the Palmetto and the fanatics over at Babalu Blog--which I don't link to because I care about your brain cells--over Rebecca Wakefield's interview. I don't totally agree with Rick on Oscar Corral. I think he gives him too much credit for standing up "the goons and bullies that slink through the back alleys of Little Havana." That is his job, and while Oscar deserves credit for other things, that is not exactly one of them.

Plus, the characterization is something of the cultural stereotype Oscar does a decent job of debunking in his reporting. I know plenty of people who live in Little Havana who find the stuff on the extremist right-wing, Cuban-American blogs and radio stations just as offensive as the rest of rational world.

I am also uncomfortable with the fact that Rebecca Wakefield runs with that whole wide-eyed reporter talking point. Oscar might think the Herald is a "fortress of truth", but there's a daily section in the paper called "Corrections and Clarifications" which begs to differ.

But let's face it, compared to the egotistical, delusional nostalgia and reactionary politics that go down at Babalu, Rick's post sounds like Cartesian logic to me.

Luckovich on Gonzalez

Great cartoon.

Words can't describe this

Josh Marshall is totally right. Bush can't fire Gonzalez because he could never find another clown to lie for him so shamelessly.

a couple of things

I was finally able to bring AGI back to fully functional status. I'm going to be making some substantial changes to the blog in the next couple of days. Most notably, it's going to stop being a group blog. As you know, Alfred Soto, who blogged in this space for two years and practically kept the blog alive, has started his own blog. And my work load right now--even though we're in the middle of a huge anti-war campaign--is not so much that I can't blog regularly. I am still looking for some guest bloggers who would like to contribute sporadically. So if you would like to blog for AGI, let me know. And stay tuned, I think you're going to like the upgrades.

Morning

Who's supporting the troops now?

In sharp contrast to last week's Max Blumenthal's video of College Republicans coming up with ridiculous, minor medical conditions to excuse why they support the war but can't serve themselves, today we hear that Obama's foreign-policy adviser has been called up by the Naval Reserve.

Barack Obama is losing his top foreign-policy adviser to active military duty. Mark Lippert, who has helped to write every major Obama foreign-policy speech and is known as “an expert at nailing down details,” has been called up by the Naval Reserve. He’s in training now but says his orders don’t specify where or how long he’ll deploy. This will be the first tour for the lieutenant junior grade, who signed up for the Reserve about three years ago.

Take notice of the fact that Lippert, who has a master's from Stanford, signed up for the Reserve three years ago, while both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were raging.

Sen. Sununu: no way I'd let Bush campaign with me

All but 25 percent of Americans agree.

That's low

Bush's approval rating is at 25%.

In the meantime

Here's a video called jetBlows, made after jetBlue decided to drop its sponsorship of the Yearly Kos conference due to pressure from Bill O'Reilly and Michelle Malkin.

In the words of John Aravosis, "jetBlue can go fuck itself."

Via AMERICAblog.

Technical difficulties

We're having some technical difficulties here at AGI. I hope to have the site fully operational very soon. Thanks.

Envoi

Blogs are self-indulgent; blogs force posters to write tortured autobiographical narratives; blogs inhibit thoughtful extended writing.

These are just three of the objections I raised almost three years ago when Andy told me that he was starting one of these things. Persuading me taxed his powers (and he wasn't yet in law school). I was so embarrassed by my first entry that I didn't post it myself: he did it for me after I'd emailed it to him. Although I'm grateful that there's enough interest in my work to encourage my leaving the nest, I still owe Andy immeasurably for boosting my confidence.

Meanwhile you can find me now at Humanizing The Vacuum. I'll cross-post a few entries now and then. AGI, thanks for the memories.

afternoon

If there's anything I hate more than a Republican...

it's a College Republican (with video).

NYT gets it right

This morning's New York Times rips Republicans a new one for their total lack of spine:

Republicans have the right to filibuster under centuries-old rules that this page has long defended. It is the height of hypocrisy for this band of Republicans to use that power since only about two years ago they were ready to unilaterally ban filibusters to push through some of Mr. Bush's most ideologically blinkered judicial nominees.

[...]

The Iraq war stands apart as a watershed issue -- a downward spiral that the public increasingly sees as a colossal waste of the nation's blood and treasure.

In postponing real action to September and beyond, Republicans laughed off the all-night debate as a "slumber party" of "twilight zone" theatrics by the Democrats. In fact, Bush loyalists seem trapped in the twilight zone, ducking their responsibility to represent constituents by applying credible pressure on the president to come up with an end to his sorry war.

Makes you wish we had a parliamentary system and could call a no-confidence vote at any time.

How Murdoch had a hotline to the PM in the run-up to Iraq war

From The Independent, via News Hounds:

Lance Price, Mr Campbell's deputy, called Mr Murdoch 'the 24th member of the [Blair] Cabinet'. He added: 'His presence was always felt. No big decision could ever be made inside No10 without taking account of the likely reaction of three men, Gordon Brown, John Prescott and Rupert Murdoch. On all the really big decisions, anybody else could safely be ignored.'

I almost don't want to believe that.

What a waste

You know how they say youth is wasted on the young, well, as it turns out, super-fast internet access is wasted on the old.

From Kos:

Dizzee: temptations in Technicolor

Having survived second-album-syndrome, Dizzee Rascal delivers his most confident release to date. It's almost silly to write excitedly about Maths + English now that whatever NPR-created aura of exoticism has dissipated, but the indifference with which this has been greeted offends me a bit. We do things a bit differently in America, unlike the British music press' fervent devotion to one-album ephemerality; I expect a bit more. The most depressing concert I've attended in my life was Dizzee's Miami show in April 2006. In a club with a dancefloor capacity of 250 I counted – no joke - 16 fellow revelers.

Anyway, M+E shows a Dizzee whose at last found a musical correlative for his swollen paranoia, which remains his great subject (accusing him of being repetitive on this count is like accusing Jay-Z of egomania). His flow relaxed, syllables enunciated, he's more approachable, as if resolved to say his peace and let the arrangements rough you up for a change. Sound effects, like the knives-as-percussion on opener "World Outside," remind him and us that he needs this world as much as the rest of us, even if it's closing in. On a purely musical level, it's my favorite album of the year; Dizzee's evolved from the spartan ethos of, say, Eric B & Rakim's Paid in Full to the multi-colored approach of Let The Rhythm Hit'Em. As Marcello remarks, "Da Feelin'" practically begs to be a summer anthem (indeed, it's Dizzee's version of DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince's immortal "Summertime"), and beside the rush of "Flex," a hybrid of "Britfunk, electro, and purple Unique 3" that Marcello is right to say is a complete success, the album's middle stretch begs the question of what this guy can do for an encore.

Well, not much. The "industry" serves as target and inspiration: it fucks him over ("Hardback"), threatens his identity ("Where's Da G's"), or fattens him to the point of satiety ("Wanna Be"). For the first time the duds – retreads like "Hardback (Industry)" and "U Can't Tell Me Nuffin'" – represent scantily developed ideas unsalvaged by Dizzee's enthusiasm. I cringed when I saw a song titled "Suk My Dik," then relaxed when I realized that this was funnier and faster than anything he'd previously attempted ("Bubbles" does the same trick with Boy in Da Corner's "What U On"). Once in a while we hear the Sega/Nintendo beeps on which his first two albums relied, but they serve as reminders of troubles he can't forget, habits he can't break. Speaking of the industry, two tracks demonstrate that if he can't beat them, he'll join them. The presence of Arctic Monkey leader Alex Turner on "Temptation" is crucial; here's another young guy who can't sort out his girl problems and whose own group's popularity has ebbed back home (not so's you'd notice though). But Turner's chorus adds aphoristic emphasis ("Temptation leads like your naughty mate/The one that used to get you in bother/The one you can never bring yourself to hate") to Dizzee's grim accounting of sin and forebearance ("Temptation" is Biggie Smalls' "Juicy" told from the point of view of a friend who failed to benefit from Biggie's sudden largesse). As for all-around gadfly Lily Allen's cameo on "Wanna Be," she mocks Dizzee exactly as you'd expect – she'd giggle at his obsession with size if she'd let him. Comfortable with conflict, ever smutty, ever present, he mocks his manhood with more swagger than his American counterparts.

Gallup poll

Bush's approval rating by quarter of his presidency.

Somebody get the limbo stick.

Oops

A great correction from the UK's Daily Mirror:

BIG Brother's Carole is a sexual health worker, not a sex worker, which usually means something rather different (Page 33, July 13).

Perhaps there's not much difference between the two.

Rock in the afternoon

Yay!

Unlike J. Edward, I'm rarely tired of my opinions, not when I'm about to work out, have Henry Adams and Anthony Powell to read, and a pot of frijoles negros waiting for my invisible touch. But I recognize the attraction in retelling verities.

In no order, my favorite albums ever, as of July 17, 2007:

Prince, Sign `O' The Times
Alexander O'Neal, Hearsay
Pet Shop Boys, Behaviour
Rosanne Cash, King's Record Shop
Pretenders, Pretenders
Public Image, Ltd, Second Edition
The Go-Betweens, Tallulah
Pavement, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
Bob Dylan, "Love & Theft"
DJ Shadow, Endtroducing...

In their own words

This reminder comes via Think Progress.

Remember when Senate conservatives threatened to unleash the "nuclear option" which would have done away with the filibuster in the Senate?

Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS): “[Filibustering] is wrong. It’s not supportable under the Constitution. And if they insist on persisting with these filibusters, I’m perfectly prepared to blow the place up.”

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) spokesman: “Senator McConnell always has and continues to fully support the use of what has become known as the ‘[nuclear]’ option in order to restore the norms and traditions of the Senate.”

I wonder which Republican senators are going to be holding off the vote.

Decision 2008: Obama girls v. Giuliani girls

if you're in DC...

You should be here tonight.

If you're not, you can find an event near you here.

Islamic creationist

Further proof that religious fanaticism and ignorance, be it Christian or Muslim, is all the same shit.

Plan of dettack

I've been hearing rumors for days that if you drive by the Pentagon you'll see the lots packed to capacity. A retired lieutenant colonel I work with says it can only mean one thing--the boys over there are working overtime on a plan for withdrawal. This story in today's Washington Post seems to confirm that.

The screwball of our discontent

Although in the minority, I like David Denby's work. As the most slavish Paulette (i.e. Pauline Kael acolyte) around, he managed to duplicate her snide dismissals and talent for limning a character or situation when Kael's own enthusiasm was ebbing (it's like a discophile enjoying Change in 1981 after Chic's hits had dried up). I even own Great Books, an earnest account of Denby's return to NYU to study the classics; in grad school and beholden to formalism, its petulant refusal to acknowledge the value of gender studies was as welcome as Henry James' prefaces (that's where the analogy ends). When Greil Marcus wrote his own snide dismissal in 2004, I thought it unfair: he'd picked Denby's curdled, rather embarrassing narrative about his own agonistic relationship with Kael. Easy target, I thought.

Denby's latest exercise in sincere befuddlement finds modern romantic comedy wanting beside -- you guessed it -- the triumphant silliness of the screwball comedies of the thirties and forties. The problem isn't with his premise; most intelligent filmgoers are probably as depressed by the privileging of "high concept" ideas over actual, you know, scripts. No, Denby is troubled by the preference of the contemporary filmgoer for slackers over the bejewelled playgirls and brilliantined boys that populated the movies of Ernst Lubitsch, Gregory La Cava, and Howard Hawks. Although Denby is smart enough to accept that the social context which allowed for this sort of milieu has vanished (indeed, never existed in FDR's Depression-racked America), he's repelled by our embrace of Judd Apatow's stoner heroes. He won't even give us the benefit of the doubt -- he thinks we adduce Seth Rogan's antics as proof of our resistance to the values of classic thirties screwball. He's in love, in short, with a myth; and if there's anything we've learned, myths can occlude the finest judgments:

As fascinating and as funny as Knocked Up is, it represents what can only be called the disenchantment of romantic comedy, the end point of a progression from Fifth Avenue to the Valley, from tuxedos to tube socks, from a popped champagne cork to a baby crowning. There’s nothing in it that is comparable to the style of the classics — no magic in its settings, no reverberant sense of place, no shared or competitive work for the couple to do.

Is he kidding? "No reverberant sense of place" (like Rogan's apartment and sister-in-law's house didn't smother us in their smothering verisimilitude)? The clue's in that rancid polarity, "from tuxedos to tube socks," as if we could choose, as if Knocked Up didn't articulate a discomfort of which Bringing Up Baby and My Man Godfrey were incapable -- a real tapping into the Zeitgeist that Denby himself acknowledges ("the picture is unruly and surprising; it’s filled with the messes and rages of life in 2007")*. The second clue is Denby's dew-eyed elevation of those Woody Allen films of the late seventies. Certainly they're as ambivalent and messy as Knocked Up, but Denby upholds them as avatars of grace and elegance -- "they took romantic comedy to a level of rueful sophistication never seen before or since." Given Denby's roots in the upheavals of seventies cinema, I'm shocked he didn't cite Paul Mazursky's freewheeling, overloaded comedies (Blume in Love, Next Stop, Greenwich Village, or An Unmarried Woman) as better examples.

Since Denby's incapable of the dialectical play that distinguished Kael (or, hell, Lubitsch), he must distinguish, grindingly, like a scold you nevertheless can't help but pity, between "sophistication" and "adolescent stupor." That he really loves Knocked Up -- that he senses that Apatow's film is on to something, tapping into something inchoate in American heterosexual relations -- is unmistakable; but his brain, dulled by the whiff of pot smoke and the sight of Rogan and Paul Rudd in tube socks, has to punish his instincts. You can sense his delight in snapping, like a hippo, at what he thinks is a salient demurral: Apatow has no idea what to do with his female characters. Leslie Mann, he writes, is "not a lover; she represents disillusion." But she's a supporting character. Does Denby hold Eve Arden in Stage Door or Ruth Hussey in The Philadelphia Story-- both used as much for their talent for bitchiness as their ability to incarnate archetypes -- as examples of three-dimensional womanhood? (Were I to mention faggoty Kate Hepburn foil David Wayne in Adam's Rib Denby's righteous head would collapse).

This article, with its wasted space devoted to summarizing His Girl Friday and Adam's Rib as if the reader he was trying to address hadn't already seen them, does Denby no favors. Remember: Greil Marcus rather nastily wrote, "Nothing will ever rescue him from mediocrity" in that hit job. I fear that results like this are inevitable when you try to explain zeitgeists and such to an ageing audience -- you sound like a tabby stepping on piano keys.

*Knocked Up is probably the most lacerating film about modern romance I've seen in recent years. I like it more than any film I've seen since 2002.

Second cartoon of the day

In case you're wondering, that's Rep. Ray Lahood with W. as a monkey on his back.

Morning

Sunday night rock

Quotes of the day

As for me, by the blessing of indifference, I have simplified my politics into an utter detestation of all existing governments; and as it is the shortest and most agreeable and summary feeling imaginable, the first moment of an universal republic would convert me into an advocate for single and uncontradicted despotism. The fact is, riches are power, and poverty is slavery all over the earth, and one sort of establishment is no better, nor worse, for a people than another. I shall adhere to my party, because it would not be honorable to act otherwise; but as to opinions, I don't think politics worth an opinion. Conduct is another thing: -- if you begin with a party, go on with them. I have no consistency, except in politics; and that probably arises from my indifference on the subject altogether.

-- Lord Byron

A society which was really like a good poem, embodying the aesthetic virtues of beauty, order, economy, and subordination of detail to the whole, would be a nightmare of horror, for, given the historical reality of actual men, such a society could only come into being through selective breeding, extermination of the physically and mentally unfit, absolute obedience to the Director, and a large slave class kept out of sight in cellars.

...The peasant may play cards in the evening while the poet writes verses, but there is one political principle to which they both subscribe, namely, that among the half dozen or so things for which a man of honor should be prepared, if necessary to die, the right to play, the right to frivolity, is not the least.

-- W.H. Auden

That's how it starts...

Slate's Hua Hsu has written lots of good stuff; here's his latest, a brief exegesis on the song of the moment, LCD Soundystem's "All My Friends." The number of high-profile covers in recent months (Franz Ferdinand and John Cale [!]) suggests that anyone over thirty understands the song's tremendous tug on memory and desire. By itself "All My Friends" is marvelously affecting; on the album, it forms a devastating diptych, following as it does another tune whose punch is also cumulative, "Someone Great." Being over thirty sensitizes you to what Wallace Stevens once called "the malady of the quotidian" -- the day begins, you eat breakfast, go to work, come home, read or watch TV, go to bed, to begin the cycle anew. Intimations of mortality slip in through the chinks. It can strike you suddenly, and not at all like the kerpow described in bad novels. You think, I'm thirty-three, I was twenty-three ten years ago. What else has changed? What's changed is the pace; the devotion to pleasure from the age of eighteen till your late twenties is as unwavering as the piano line that anchors "All My Friends." This trick, along with LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy's youthful bark, honors the track's insistence on keeping the bloom on this remembrance of things past -- drugs taken, lovers laid, friends enjoyed -- intact even when Murphy's words undercut the swirl of instruments.

These revelations -- one can hardly call them epiphanies, the existence of which is Joycean bullshit anyway -- may trigger a review, involuntarily, of a moment of pleasure. The discrepancy between how you interpreted it at the time and how you regard it now will cause a silence as blinkered as the one Murphy uses as a Maginot line dividing the verses "That's how it starts" from "The way it does in bad films." The silence makes the last line inevitable. The impact of "All My Friends" is a corrective to the ageist snark of 2002's "Losing My Edge," which I always thought was overrated anyway. "All My Friends" uses irony in the most sophisticated manner; it suggests that the absorption of all the influences he lists in "Losing My Edge" required the weight of Murphy's own experiences to reach critical mass.

The video, by the way, is quite effective in its own right: Murphy, dressed like a doleful David Lynch wearing Peter Gabriel's "Shock the Monkey" face paint, struggling mightily to keep his composure as his band raises a helluva din behind him. The way it does in bad films.

Romanticism with a stink

I'm at the age when Manhattan provokes the response J. Hoberman confessed to feeling on its first run: admiration and contempt. While I can accept that every character except Mariel Hemingway is an asshole, I'm not sure Woody Allen can. His ambivalence towards his own creations almost de-stabilizes what he puts on screen. I've softened on this film, but I still don't know what the hell J-Ho's talking about in passages like this: "Allen's visual rhetoric was equal to his writing." The dialogue just ping-pongs, and thanks to Gordon Willis' gorgeous compositions the characters remain not just static, but frozen, like those dreaded moths caught in screens about which Annie Hall's Alvy Singer complained when he went to the country (well, if you consider Long Island "the country"). No scene exemplifies this more cringingly than the one in which Allen's Isaac Davis fights with best friend Yale (a blank Michael Murphy) in a college classroom: Yale hurls one bit of psychoanalytic twaddle after another while Allen ripostes with increasing desperation (with friends like Murphy it's best to talk to yourself). This isn't "character development," it's autocracy -- the Allen character always comes off smarter than anyone onscreen; but even then he lets the audience off the hook by undercutting his cynicism with the mooncalf innocence of Mariel Hemingway, who urges him at the film's end to have more faith in people. Out of the wisdom of babes, etc.

Surely Allen sensed that in 1979 this hoariest of literary cliches would seem more loathsome in a city that only recently defaulted on loans, survived a blackout, and was about to be convulsed by the AIDS epidemic. Allen is intelligent enough to illuminate the contradictions in his vision, but not nearly nuanced enough as a writer or director to deconstruct them, not in the way that a Jean Renoir, Robert Altman, or (hell) Paul Mazursky might have. At worst Manhattan is comfortable with being merely a lively daguerrotype of NYC life in the year when New Wave broke. That it goes far -- much farther than most comedies would in the sterile eighties -- but stops short of offending speaks to Manhattan-as-a-subculture's sense of its increasing cultural marginalization; you would think that, having nothing to lose, Allen would pull no punches. New York would never again be so sure of its grasp on the popular imagination, despite the fact that this grasp depended on a Gershwin-themed past that no longer existed (let's not forget Woody's own attitude towards punk when he made his stand-in grimace when Dianne Wiest insists on taking him to CBGB's; the eighties were almost as sterile for Allen aesthetically as they were for Hollywood). The other boogieman around the corner -- a grinning, impressive non-entity named Ronald Reagan -- would inspire a counter-insurgency devoted to boxing the ears of perceived liberal avatars like Allen.

However, I can't say enough about Diane Keaton here. In only the second real character performance of her career (ignore the frozen-food rendition of Ingmar Bergman that was Interiors the previous year), she's at home with the contradictions that Allen, Murphy, and Allen and co-writer Marshall Brickman's script can't embody. Hyper-intelligent, verging on shrill, capable of surprising warmth, Keaton incarnates every country boy's idea of what a City Girl must be like. More than her epochal work in Annie Hall, this is the performance for which the Academy should have honored Keaton with an Oscar. She bridges the distance between the sourness of Allen's conceptions and the romanticism of Willis' cinematography and Ira Gershwin's music.

You can't make this up

How delicious:

Presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have signed on to debate issues pertaining to LGBT Americans on the queer-centric Logo Network, according to a Logo press release. The one-hour event will be broadcast live on August 9 from Los Angeles and feature copanelists Melissa Etheridge and Human Rights Campaign president Joe Solmonese.

Asking Melissa Etheridge to participate on such a panel is like asking Ralph Reed to chair a panel on "Religion in the Public Sphere."

Interpol Schminterpol

My first acquaintance with Interpol took place in 2003, when I had to review their South Florida show for The Miami Herald. It was a muscular performance, but gross too, like those pictures of Arnold Schwarzenegger flexing in the seventies. I liked "Evil," "Obstacle 1," and "Slow Hands" well enough; they reminded me of Duran Duran's inscrutable art-pomp circa 1984. I'm not sure what can save them now – a new stylist? Whatever. This was tremendous fun to write.

I'm mystified that, as music reviewing becomes increasingly democratic, confusion still exists about the critic's function. Is it so hard to accept that an editor says, "We got the Interpol album. Would you like to review it?" and that, yes, critics are supposed to bring their biases?

How low can you go?

A new USA Today/Gallup poll reminds us that the country really, REALLY doesn't like W, and Americans' loathing of him continues to grows.

Bush's numbers hit an all-time low on the Gallup poll with 29 percent approval rating. That makes him one of the most unpopular presidents in Gallup's history. More interestingly, however, is that 36 percent of Americans want him impeached, and that 53 percent say he will be mainly responsible for the problems faced by the next president.

On Scooter Libby, Bush also gets low marks. Sixty-six percent of respondents say he should not have intervened.

So what do you think? How low will his numbers go? Take a guess, winner gets an AGI t-shirt, if we're still around a year and a half from now when he leaves office.

Good night, boys and girls

Ted Stevens wonders why he's being investigated

From AP:

For his first three decades as a senator, Stevens was poor by Senate standards.

In 1997, his largest assets were his savings in the Senate Credit Union, worth between $100,001 and $250,000 and three $50,001-$100,000 investments. One was in JLS Properties, which owned two properties in Alaska.

But after 1997, the year that Stevens became chairman of the Appropriations Committee, he began to leave the Senate's poorhouse.

Stevens' business partners in JLS were Alaska developers Jonathan Rubini and Leonard Hyde. The partnership initially invested in an office park near the Anchorage airport and a two-story office building.

Late in 2000, the year of the home renovations, Stevens showed he was willing to intervene for a business partner. He helped Rubini keep a $450 million contract with the Defense Department for housing on Elmendorf Air Force Base near Anchorage.

Stevens said he got involved only when the project stalled because of the military's concerns about the contractor's financial backing by local lenders.

"It was a competitive bid and I don't get involved in competitive bids, that's for sure," Stevens said. "But I did get involved in raising a question of whether (the lenders had) a sufficient surety for a bid by an Alaska contractor on a federal contract."

While Stevens says he was a passive investor in JLS, his assets — including high-rise office buildings — soared.

In 2004, Stevens made a change that hid many of his assets. He sold JLS investments and other assets, and placed most of them in a blind trust worth between $1 million and $5 million.

The senator was granted an extension to file his disclosure report for 2006. It will be made public in mid-July.

Yes, we're all flabbergasted.

Another reminder that Ian McEwan, in novel after novel, has delineated with great delicacy the penumbra of sexual heat in which a couple finds a temporary but powerful respite. The scenes from Atonement which linger most impressively in the mind concern the determination with which Cecilia and Robbie, stinking of sex, stand against the humiliated Briony. Like Hardy, Yeats, and Larkin (in its absence, of course), he understands eroticism the older he gets (between Black Dogs and Atonement lies a gap that's measureless and impressive nonethetless); their work refutes any notion of premature artistic obsolescence.

Independent Cuban journalist gets 15 months for covering protest

From Editor and Publisher:

CHICAGO After spending a year in jail without charges, independent Cuban journalist Armando Betancourt Reina was sentenced to a 15-month prison sentence last week after a five-hour trial on charges of "public disorder," the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported.

CPJ, citing an interview with Betancourt Reina's wife Mercedes Boudet Silva and other family members, said the charges stemmed from his coverage of a May 23, 2006 protest against the eviction of several people in Camaguey. Local police arrested him at the site, accusing him of participating in the protest, which his family denies.

Since then, he had been held without charge in a Camaguey prison, CPJ said.

Betancourt Reina, a reporter for the independent news agency Nueva Prensa Cubana, will be credited for time served, his wife told a Miami-based Web site that follows Cuban affairs.

"It is outrageous that Armando Betancourt Reina should have spent more than a year in prison without charge for reporting on a story that the
authorities did not want covered," CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon said in a statement. "It is doubly outrageous that he should now be convicted on a bogus charge and sentenced to 15 months in jail. He should be released immediately."

Cuba is holding 25 independent journalists behind bars, nearly all of them since a crackdown in March 2003.

Where were Ultravox and Status Quo?

From what I saw of Live Earth, Rob Sheffield's column nails it. I'd say the entire thing was as uneven, sartorially challenged, and ponderous as the first disc of the 1985 Live Aid show – yes, the one with the British horrors. However, it took Duran Duran jsut 22 years to atone for a misbegotten performance; too bad they did it without Andy Taylor. They should have asked Madonna to lend her increasingly muscular guitar chops – a more charitable move than her donation of "Hey You" to the cause of "environmental awareness."

there's a thought

Conyers has an interesting theory on the reason behind Libby's pardon:

WASHINGTON - The Democrat probing President Bush's decision to erase the prison sentence of a former White House aide said Sunday there is "the suspicion" the aide might have fingered others in the Bush administration if he served time.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers spoke of "the general impression" that Bush last week commuted I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's 2 1/2 year sentence in the CIA leak case to keep Libby quiet. The White House said Conyers' claim was baseless.

Conyers, D-Mich., has scheduled a committee hearing Wednesday on the matter.

Patrick Leahy is right though. The hearings, and calling on Libby to testify, would be useless at this point since he would just take the fifth and has no incentive to rat on anyone else. Like Leahy said, "His silence has been bought and paid for..."

Sunday morning rock

Chipotle in the 305

That's right. There's one opening in North Miami Beach.

Fred Thompson: flipflopper

Freddy T., who insinuated Cuban migrants were terrorists after he courted their vote, has just added another flipflopping credit to his political resume. According to the LA Times, the presidential tease is a recent convert to the anti-abortion crusade.

Fred D. Thompson, who is campaigning for president as an antiabortion Republican, accepted an assignment from a family-planning group to lobby the first Bush White House to ease a controversial abortion restriction, according to a 1991 document and several people familiar with the matter.

A spokesman for the former Tennessee senator denied that Thompson did the lobbying work. But the minutes of a 1991 board meeting of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Assn. say that the group hired Thompson that year.

His task was to urge the administration of President George H. W. Bush to withdraw or relax a rule that barred abortion counseling at clinics that received federal money, according to the records and to people who worked on the matter.

Yes, Thompson's people deny that it ever happened. But read the denial and it's obvious that they're not being totally sincere.

Thompson spokesman Mark Corallo adamantly denied that Thompson worked for the family planning group. "Fred Thompson did not lobby for this group, period," he said in an e-mail.

In a telephone interview, he added: "There's no documents to prove it, there's no billing records, and Thompson says he has no recollection of it, says it didn't happen." In a separate interview, John H. Sununu, the White House official whom the family planning group wanted to contact, said he had no memory of the lobbying and doubted it took place.

"Thompson says he has no recollection of it"? That's political speak for "it happened but we're going to say it didn't until you have better evidence." You would think a republican wannabe candidate who is so vocal about his stance on abortion would be able to come up with a more staunch denial of whether he ever lobbied for against restricting it.

Freddy T., you're going to make a great republican candidate.

UPDATED TO ADD: SOTP has a great post, also with great comments, about Freddy T's comparison of Scooter Libby with Bill Clinton.

An honest account of being a McCartney fan, even if I disagree with Sean Nelson's designation of great versus good versus shit Macca albums (I love the 1986 curiosity Press To Play inordinately). I'm not a fan, but of all the records to which I've listened since May, Memory Almost Full shows up in my Heavy Rotation folder on my iPod most often -- a fact that, considering my record of vilifing friends who followed the artiste's career more devotedly than I have, appalls me. Nelson's half right. It's more than "almost good," more on the side of "really good," despite the lengths to which Starbucks has gone in recent weeks to blasting it (I hate their coffee, love their toffee bars). It is, as Nelson points out, angry and fun, and "feels contemporary without being dressed up in fashionable sounds." Whether McCartney's career can be shown to have an "arc" or whatever other assumption one makes about artists with more consistent careers is something I'll leave to his acolytes, but I'm not erasing "House of Wax," "That Was Me," or "Ever Present Past" any time soon.

In typical New York Times style, I can't tell whether this article in today's Fashion and Style section is sincere. Beginning with the tired trick of describing a scene only to upset expectations (or, in this case, boring stereotypes to which no one with, say, friends has ever been exposed), the reporter breathlessly tells us that a crowd of twentysomethings in "thrift-store inspired clothes and abundant tattoos" represents a new group of librarians ("or, in some cases," we're helpfully told, "guybrarians."), some even with "pink-streaked hair," distinguished by their "passion for pop culture, activism and technology."

So: another example of branding by the Gray Lady, which never met an enclave of any kind that it couldn't market and sell. These librarians -- the article goes at great lengths to show that the new kind aren't "bespectacled women with a love of classic books and a perpetual annoyance with talkative patrons," as if these were bad things -- belong to web organizations like Librarian Avengers (“`looking to put the ‘hep cat’ in cataloguing'”), meet for multicolored martinis, and attend panels hosted by the American Library Association with titles like “Future Friends: Marketing Reference and User Services to Generation X.” They model themselves after -- get this -- Parker Posey in Party Girl, the cinematic equivalent of orthodontal work. Poor Maria Falgoust is made to look ghoulish in a photo designed for MySpace hepcats. The only hint of social activism of the kind the reporter drools over comes in an innocuous remark about the Patriot Act.

I know a few people in the "library field." Liberals, sure. "Hip," perhaps. Drinkers, absolutely (they might balk at blueberry vodka and cranberry juice). They also delight in shushing patrons and reading Tolstoy.

The woes of neo-post-disco divas

I want to embrace the Kathy Diamond album, really. It's got all the right signifiers of pleasure: subterranean bass runs, bongos, ear-catching beats -- in short a steady groove, with an abrasive cutaneous layer that reminds me of those Material records from the early eighties, on which New York boho types like Bill Laswell and Jody Harris farmed out ostentatious post-disco to the likes of Nona Hendryx and Bernard Fowler. But from Evelyn King to Shannon to Taylor Dayne to Tom Breihan's beloved Crystal Waters, steady grooves have always benefitted from a compelling presence atop, below, or barreling through. "All Woman" comes closest to delineating a real woman, but it remains an approximation; these days holograms can be as sultry, lustrous, and present as the real thing. Since Diamond's barely there, producer Maurice Fulton proves himself less resourceful than one would like. The songs aren't raw exactly, but they do simmer longer at too low a temperature. Material weren't all that great either.

quick note

Sorry for the light blogging this week. I've been in Miami for less than a week, trying to get everything ready for a second-half-of-the-summer internship in DC. I leave tomorrow. I hope to do a lot more blogging from there.

Fourth of July rock

Ferryesque, Pt.II

I don't know why Bryan Ferry picked such a predictable crop of Dylan songs. I'd like to be mean and hint that it's probably because he's heard no new records in 30 years, but this wouldn't explain why 1997's funereal "To Make You Feel My Love" made the cut. Maybe he heard Billy Joel's version (he certainly didn't hear Garth's).

Soccer interlude

Team USA just lost to Paraguay after playing like ass for 90 minutes. Argentina is one thing, but losing to a country with the word gay in the name is a little shameful.

In other news, it looks like Fernando Torres is making the move to Liverpool, which is good, 'cause he deserves a better team than Patetico Madrid.

Write your own caption

Sunday night rock (with a cause)

1997: A year boomers and popists can be proud of

I can't remember what made my top ten list of 1997. Although I was the arts editor for my college paper, I (briefly) assigned more reviews than wrote them. Radiohead's OK Computer was released in the U.S. roughly ten years to the day, but even then I wasn't too fond of it, or of Bob Dylan's Time Out Of Mind (that year's Pazz & Jop poll winner). Janet Jackson's The Velvet Rope got too much credit for opinions on bondage and lesbianism as dilettantish as Rhythm Nation 1814's political commentary. Pavement's Brighten The Corners, Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott's Supa Dupa Fly, and Sleater-Kinney's Dig Me Out, however, remain touchstones (I didn't even listen to those Yo La Tengo, Biggie, and Arto Lindsay records until the following year); and, although I'd bought Tusk that February, I must credit The Dance for transforming me into a rabid Fleetwood Mac fan despite its irrelevance as a musical statement. I'm sorry I loved David Bowie's Earthling; I'm pretty sure it made my list.

In this retrospective, David Browne posits 1997 as a crucial pivot: the beginning of pop music's Roaring Twenties, an era characterized by ten million-plus sales of N'Sync, Backstreet Boys, Britney, and Eminem albums. I've tried to ignore Browne's pissy equivocations, like when he refers to this era as one "which only the most hard-core Justin Timberlake fan would recall fondly" or lets stand without comment a record company apparatchik's wheeze that 1997 "was a repudiation of all that 1967 San Francisco rock credibility" (a better repudiation would be to take the latest issue of Rolling Stone and crap all over it). The list of number ones that year corresponds with my recollections: 1997 may have been a pivot, but the big hits were a monochromatic bunch. We got artist-of-the-year Puff Daddy holding the Top Five hostage for more than nine months, a Hanson one-off they never duplicated, a Spice Girls one-off they hope to duplicate in 2008, and the second time Elton John's lugubrious tribute to another dead airhead hits the Top Ten, now riding on the coattails of yet another lugubrious tongue-kiss of a ballad. I don't remember those as well as the first stirrings of a 1983 revival, inaugurated during the early summer when Blur's "Song 2" and the first of Third Eye Blind's wonderful trifecta of hits ("Semi-Charmed Life") made the cars go boom. You had Sugar Ray's "Fly" channelling Dexy's Midnight Runners, Chumbawumba's "Tumbthumping" summoning "Rock the Casbah" -- geez, even Toni Braxton got into the act; "Un-break My Heart" has more in common with the histrionics of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" than with, I dunno, Anita Baker. Fisher-Price trip-hop like "Six Feet Underground" has as much in common with Romeo Void and the Human League as it does with Tricky.

In other words, even though I prefer the next two years, 1997 was pretty good pop-wise and about what you'd expect on the Grand Artistic Statements side...but it's hard to tell from Browne's sorry essay. Is he writing to gratify the prejudices of The New York Times' aging boomer readers -- the ones whose kids won't touch a print copy (and, as this article makes clear, for good reason) of the newspaper? I can't tell if he's being ironic when he calls 1997 "the last golden age of pop" when he's holding his noise while describing how supposed excrescences like Spice Girls kept -- well, who exactly off the charts? What exactly are Browne-nian exemplars of sixties cultural values? What kind of alternative universe is he positing? Time Out Of Fucking Mind won Album of the Year at the Grammys, months after a Top Ten debut and platinum sales!

Obama raised $32.5 in the second quarter of 2007

Yep.