The records you should own; not a full top 10 since the others are still clearing my censor board:
1. Ghostface, Fishscale
2. Sonic Youth, Rather Ripped
3. Rosanne Cash, Black Cadillac
4. Pet Shop Boys, Fundamental
5. Mary J Blige, The Breakthrough
6. Gnarls Barkley, St Elsewhere
7. Prince, 3121
8. Pearl Jam, s/t
Yet to hear: TV on the Radio, the Hold Steady, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash.
Not convinced (yet): The Mountain Goats, Arctic Monkeys.
In these somber times, it's hard to even find solace in the theater of the absurd that is the Katherine Harris senatorial campaign.
The Herald has an almost comical story about the wicked boob going into a premature fit when she learned that crazy Joe Scarborough was being courted to run against her. (But in a world where Joe Scarborough is the sensible candidate, the rapture can't be far behind.)
Katherine Harris' floundering U.S. Senate campaign lost its high-level staff again this week and is groping for a message -- which doesn't surprise Republican insiders who trace the seeds of her trouble to the story of ``Joe's dead intern.''This wasn't any old Joe.
It was Joe Scarborough, host of the prime-time MSNBC show Scarborough Country and a former Pensacola Republican congressman who was courted last summer by national Republicans to run against Harris. But before he could announce he wouldn't, Harris called major donors and suggested Scarborough would have to answer questions about the strange death of a former staff member in 2001, according to two former high-level Harris staff members, a GOP donor and Scarborough.
''That was the first clue that something wasn't right with Katherine Harris,'' Scarborough told The Miami Herald in a recent interview, noting that a medical examiner found his staff member's death was natural and not the result of foul play.
From The Washington Note, which just earned a place on my blogroll:
Although I do not have independent confirmation, I heard the rumor from a well-placed source that Secretary of State Rice attempted to increase pressure on Israel to stand down and to demonstrate "restraint". The rumor is that she was told flatly by the Prime Minister's office to "back off".This may or may not be true, but it does fit with the general inference that Israel has bitten off more than it can chew this time, and it's on a runaway offensive that even the United States can't tolerate. (And yeah, I know of Israel's historical adroitness in biting off more than it can chew.) Nobody, except the most of committed of martial idiots, can believe that bombing the crap out of Lebanon will make Hezbollah give up the Israelis soldiers. And what happens if the soldiers are transferred to Syria?
An article in the NYTimes today on the current phenomenon of the slut and the significance of said word, states that a real-life Samantha Jones couldn't exist (a fearless, intelligent, and ultra sexy female sex fiend? Never!). The article furthermore quotes a young man in Albany saying he might date a slut, but never marry one. So basically, if the woman of his dreams has had a lot of lovers, he'll refuse to marry her, no matter how much he wants to?
I think we should embrace sluts rather than shun them. What's to dislike, anyway? I honestly don't see why being a slut is such a bad thing; the problem is that we give them a bad rep. Notice, additionally, how it's only women who sleep around who get a bad rep.
Come on, people. Double standards are so passé...
Christopher Hitchens, incensed (when is he not?) by what he calls demagoguery on the right and hypocrisy on the left, can't understand the Beltway's obsession with "independent counsels" to investigate so-called press improprieties. And he's perplexed as I am by this Valerie Plane nonsense. As usual I dig his elegant weighing of antitheses:
There is no neat fit between press freedom and any "right" view of the war. In Abraham Lincoln's time, newspapers printed disclosures that they hoped would aid the Confederacy. In World War II, the Roosevelt-hating Chicago Tribune gave away the crucial fact that the United States had managed to decode the cable traffic of imperial Japan. Yet the First Amendment survived. The Bush people will make a huge mistake if they continue with their campaign against the news media. But the New York Times in particular should admit that, by endorsing the costly and futile intrusions of Patrick Fitzgerald, it helped to fashion a whip for its own back.As for the Perils of Valerie and Joseph, the known facts are so confusing that for any one of us to do more than speculate would be foolish. All we do know is Joseph Wilson has given conflicting information.
Good editorial in today's New York Times.
Yet surely the repeated lesson of recent history is that inflicting pain and humiliation on Arab civilians does not make them angry at the terrorists who provoked the violence. It makes them angrier at Israel.
So the best thing to come out of this thing crisis is it's forced CNN into something resembling fair and balanced coverage--even if, it appears, they have some station requirement to say "Israel's right to defend itself" every 10 minutes or so--giving both sides relatively equal time.
One of us should say something about Syd Barrett. Here are two intelligent obits (e by Mike Powell and Jody Beth Rosen, respectively) which avoid the batshit-genius tag that bedeviled the poor sod (the evidence suggests he suffered from a kind of schizophrenia, although all the acid he dropped obviously didn't help).
Since Pink Floyd often elicited little other than benumbed concentration as a lad I'm no position to offer the encomium that Barrett's odd accomplishments deserve; but listening to those early Pink Floyd singles I was struck by their concision and wit. This is where Rosen gets it wrong: Pink Floyd's oddness is at least as memorable as The Who's volatility. You never feel like the sky's going to crack when listening to early Pink Floyd, but the experience is akin to eavesdropping to a guy as he enacts his caprices: you're stimulated by the priviliged view and disgusted by what you see. Imagine being Blue Velvet's Jeffrey Beaumont watching, from your privileged view in the closet, Dorothy Valens coo ridiculous children's songs to her little boy instead of gasping as Frank orders her to perform all kinds of perversities.
Barrett could also, if so moved, write about the quotidian like a young man who'd possessed just enough of his senses to get a taste for it, and love it (the two obits I cite above note how uneventful Barrett's routine had become; he sure deserved it). To praise (or dismiss) Barrett as a penny-ante surrealist overlooks the degree to which great surrealist art depends upon observing the genuine weirdness of our parents, our neighbors, our living rooms, ourselves; tangerine trees and marmalade skies are just stupid.
Ignore David Poland's ad-school prose and hyperventilations ("And there is the great feeling I have walking away from the screening room. This movie will play and play and play and play"); this is a compelling case for Michael Mann's Miami Vice, although the photos of Colin Farrell in espadrilles had already sold me.
Mystifingly overpraised at the beginning of the year by critics who should know better, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is written and directed with the grace and skill of Alfonso Bedoya's holy-frijoles sombrero wearin' wetback from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Guillermo Arriaga, whose screenplays for Amores Perros and 21 Grams proved that needlessly convoluted plots can be as one-dimensional as any B-movie, wrote this variation on Sam Peckinpah's near-great Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia; Tommy Lee Jones makes his directorial debut and plays the main character, a rancher travelin' to Mexico with the title character's body and the Border Patrol killer (Barry Pepper) who killed him. We know the Border Patrol guy is slimy cuz he fucks his wife doggie-style while cooking broccoli and watching a soap opera (should I tell you that its dialogue "ironically" comments on the action we're seeing?) and punches Mexican women in the face before haulin' their brown asses to jail. Jones' direction evinces none of the wit with which he's delighted us after 30 years of acting in nonsense or worse. We don't know what draws Estrada and Jones' rancher; we assume they're intimate because Jones -- his cinematographer bathing the scene in honeyed light -- shows him pictures of his kids before they fuck a couple of whores in flophouse bedrooms (say this about Arriaga: he's mastered the rhythms of third-rate Richard Ford, with a soupcon of Cormac McCarthy's penetrating view of women and Raymond Carver's flair for sexual blight). This is the kind of film in which the young woman whom Pepper punched saves his life after he's bitten by a rattlesnake. Meanwhile Jones and her family sit in a circle, peelin' husks off corn. Would that The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada have learned: it leaves the corn intact.
The track listing for Bob Dylan's Modern Times, released in late August. I deplore his slatternly way with prepositional phrases.
Thunder on the Mountain
Spirit on the Water
Zeitgeist on the Prairie
Tempest on the Tundra
Bungle in the Jungle
Lightning on the Creek
The Wind That Shakes the Barley
Beyond the Horizon
Crash on the Levee
Ain't Talkin'
Care of Atrios, this has apparently been around for a while, but I'd never heard it.
Welcome to Dean's Jungle
It appears that Joe Biden, who was supposed to campaign for Joe Lieberman in Connecticut today, will not be showing up because he missed his train.
It's sad that it's come to this. Is football the only thing attractive enough to boys anymore? Gee, um, what about academics? I thought that's what college was about. Silly me!
I'm sure glad New College of Florida isn't one of the institutions that feels the need to add sports to attract male students. New College attracts students because of its rigorous curricula and the freedom it offers to create your own. We're 60-40 and, except for the shortage of straight boys (which truly isn't a big deal), we have a wonderful community and a fabulous time. I'd say we're too much for jocks to handle. Especially since the only real, if unofficial, sports team we have is the girls' soccer team.
Apparently I'm 33% Middle Eastern and too intelligent to be a journalist. Er, 'kay. The web site isn't particularly specific about how it calculates results, and I can't help wonder if there's some rampant racism involved. Thank you, FaceAnalyzer.
In today's column, Andres Oppenheimer quickly touches on a good point about the Latin-American left, and that is, how old and retrograde it is. I keep thinking that there are moderate progressives somewhere down there, but I can't think of any in recent memory. And the voters are noticing, in the Mexico election, for example, younger voters went with Calderon by a decent margin.
Second, Mexico's left has to modernize because it is becoming the party of older people and rural dwellers in a country that is increasingly young and urban. According to exit polls by the dailies Reforma and El Universal, a majority of young voters supported Calderón, while a majority of older voters supported López Obrador.Among voters age 18 to 29, Calderón got 38 percent of the vote, while his leftist rival got 34 percent. Conversely, among voters age 50 and older, López Obrador got 37 percent of the vote, while Calderón got 34 percent, the Reforma exit poll shows.
This isn't very surprising when you look at the rhetoric that's coming out of Latin America's leftists leaders. There was a time when young people would have supported hacks like Chavez and Morales, solely on the merit of their vapid attacks, but times have changed, and now they have to rely on aging revolutionaries.
Which brings us to another very good point by Oppenheimer, in the latest elections in Latin America--Mexico, Canada, Peru, Colombia and Costa Rica--the winner has been the center-right candidate.Yoga!
"India seems to be willing to go to the mat over yoga.
That's because Bikram Choudhury, the self-proclaimed Hollywood 'yoga teacher to the stars,' incensed his native country by getting a U.S. copyright on his style of yoga four years ago."
My interest in yoga is right up there with my interest in non-Pixar car racing, but this sends the science fiction writer in me into overload. Basically, "Bikram" copyrighted his yoga, so that you can't teach it (or practice it) without sending dough his way. This, quite naturally, angered the Indian government, yoga being a centuries old tradition and one of their biggest exports, along with technicolor musicals that don't make a lick of sense.
And it angered me.
Think about it. Yoga is a physical exercise, something YOU perform with YOUR body. Coprighting Yoga is akin to copyrighting knuckle cracking- I take out a patent, and every time you crack your knuckles you should send me a dollar. Does that make sense? Can one person copyright what another person DOES?
Am I making too much of this? Let me drive the point home by referring you to the OTHER big physical Indian export, the Kama Sutra. Supposing I become a sexual therapist, copyright the Kama Sutra positions so that every time your agile self gets caught in one of them (probably by accident) you are breaking copyright law- unless you get a license that allows you to perform that kind of sex?
Is that not one VERY SMALL step away from copyrighting sex itself?
There's totally a horror story in there.
An article in the NYTimes today discusses the current, and increasing, gender divide at colleges. More girls are attending college and girls are graduating earlier than boys. Additionally, girls are getting most post-graduate degrees out there. Regardless, fields such as physics and engineering are still male-dominated. Not to mention that the world is still predominantly patriarchal and misogynistic, a "man's world." So give me a break.
I think that this "crisis" is bogus. I agree with the following statement, taken from the article:
"The idea that girls could be ahead is so shocking that they think it must be a crisis for boys," Ms. Mead said. "I'm troubled by this tone of crisis. Even if you control for the field they're in, boys right out of college make more money than girls ..."
Besides, nobody's pointing a gun at these guys' heads and forcing them to play Halo.
Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions a little bit--hence the question mark--but it seems that Hamas has forced Israel to the negotiating table. Not just with the prisoner swap, but by embarrassing Olmert and this whole nonsense of unilateral disengagement.
A couple of weeks ago Hamas was a terrorist organization and Israel would not deign to acknowledge it as the elected Palestinian government. And more interesting of all is that Hamas gained this status with violence, but not with terrorism.
Look at what they did, they killed two soldiers, and kidnapped another. Now, that's hardly an act of terrorism. Look at Israel's response now, which called 40 Palestinians, including children, destroyed millions of dollars in civilian installations and is now back to the terms Hamas initially dictated, a prisoner swap.
I've always agreed with Tony Judt that Hamas, like the IRA and to a degree ETA, will eventually reform and become more moderate, I think we've seen that started to happen. (You should definitely check out Tony Judt's essay A Road to Nowhere, which four years later, is still the defining treatise on modern Israeli-Palestinian conflict.)
In the end, there's just no asphyxiating Hamas into irrelevance. And the past few weeks have shown that.
A frustrating example of a movie whose director and cast wish the source material didn't exist, The Devil Wears Prada wants to have it both ways -- the world of high fashion is so mahvelous but Not If You Lose Your Soul -- and ends up as declasse as a Prada handbag bought in 2001. A shame, cuz this adaptation of the thin-as-a-tea-leaf 2002 bestseller has two of the year's best performances: Stanley Tucci as a fop who bears some rather nasty claws when cornered; and Emily Blunt as an acidulous coworker right out of a Billy Wilder film.
As for RoboStreep: most of my friends know that her startling technique, masterful ease in swallowing continental Europe in one gulp, and purported range impress me as much as a dog begging for a treat. Her best roles (with the exception of her superb lovelorn Italian woman in The Bridges of Madison County) have traditionally ones which either exploit her unyielding frostiness (A Cry in the Dark, Out of Africa) or allow her to loosen up (the overrated Adaptation; and rather good opposite, um, Rosanne Barr in She-Devil). Miranda Priestly, editor of Runway and fashion czarina, allows Streep to fuse both strengths. I've never enjoyed a Streep performance so much. Miranda's so terrifying that she doesn't see the point in raising her voice above a crisply enunciated whisper (J. Hoberman: "Streep is the scariest, most nuanced, funniest movie villainess since Tilda Swinton's nazified White Witch). Director David Frankel does right by taking Miranda seriously; never once does the movie crack a joke at her expense. And Anne Hathaway is a worthy pupil. She's an intelligent actress (watch her again as the shrewish, wise Texan hausfrau in Brokeback Mountain), uninhibited by her beauty. A shame the book and movie shackle her to a grunge-lite boyfriend with anatomically correct stubble who has to murmur variations on that perennial howler, "I don't know who you are anymore."
You know you've readjusted to Floridian heat when its fetid wetness moistens long-dried craters of Virginian sweat on your Gap T-shirt (the sunshine in the Land of Jefferson is less damp but more violent).
Anyway, after nearly five days of Beltway blues and Charlottesville's perplexing mixture of yuppie holistics and pastoral insouciance, I'm back in town, with fearsome tasks before me: taming a new group of college freshman; deciding between which used vinyl copies of Aretha's Who's Zoomin' Who? and Tom Verlaine's Dreamtime to play while eating my lambchops; and marveling at the ease with which litterateurs employ the loathesome metaphor of writing-as-journey (in this case, "into a place where I don't simply see 'the police' anymore when I look at a police officer, but I see a man, I see a woman," purred Marita Golden on NPR) as if this time the journey actually had a destination, and wasn't merely a traffic jam or -- worse -- a bottleneck, as it can be for the rest of us.
I had to rush this new design to accomodate some ads. I know it's rough but I'll be working on it through the next couple of weeks.
I've heard some negative comments about the banner already, and I'm not a big fan of it myself. I'll be working to change it. Let me know if you have any suggestions on how to better it, and the site as a whole. Thanks.
