Campeones

Sevilla won the Copa del Rey tonight, and no one in the city--except Betis fans--will be sleeping. I, sadly, have to study for next week's finals. I'll try to post pictures of the celebration tomorrow.

Having admired more than liked them (and sometimes my interest has failed to rise to even that), I'm pleased to note that Icky Thump is the White Stripes' best album yet. Loud, violent, and more emotionally inscrutable than ever, its pulse subsumes Meg's pathetic drumming and Jack's constricted guitar palette (forget what you read: squealing and plucking are the only tricks he can turn) into a giddily shameless ride through the last thirty years of popular culture. In Jack's world, Patti Page is bug-eyed Akim Tamiroff leering at Janet Leigh in Touch of Evil ("Conquest"); and since Led Zeppelin means shit to me, I can enjoy pretend that a make-believe Scottish border ballad like "Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn" would fit nicely on the second side of Led Zeppelin III. Ned Raggett reminds us that the Stripers are as much an art project as a band -- like, say, Wire. Right, and Wire wrote some horrible songs too. They had a penchant for novelty numbers too. Remind me whether they recorded one as poignant as "Effect and Cause."

HELP!!!

For the past few days my MacBook Pro has been shutting off immediately when I try to run it on battery power. The little battery icon says that the battery is fully charged and so does the little LED indicator meter on the battery itself. The Apple site offered some fixes but none seem to work. There are some certified Apple places in Seville, but I don't think I want to deal with the infamous Spanish efficiency a little over week before I go back home. I was really hoping to be able to do some work on the flight back. Any ideas?

Hala Madrid!

Well, I'm back from an impromptu hiatus. I spent the weekend in Madrid visiting relatives. I had hoped to get tickets to Real Madrid's final game and join in on the celebration, but the only ones I could find were going for about £300 (about $600) on a British scalping site. To the chagrin of my family there--all Real Madrid fans--I came back to Seville to watch the Sevilla game, which they lost. There was a small chance (if Real Madrid and Barca lost--small indeed) for Sevilla to win La Liga. Here's a picture from the game:

That's not a riot behind me, just soccer fervor. And here's the original Real Madrid fight song; be forewarned, it doesn't have the same effect when it's not being chanted by 80,000 raging fans.



And while on the subject of riots, apparently, mob justice is alive and well in Texas. Creepy.

Here's a truly sinister development: an elementary school in Oakland is teaching its student "mindfulness," or, as the article definies it, "stress-reduction techniques drawn from Buddhist meditations." I'm not opposed to dealing with hyperactive children, but this mixture of New Age psychobabble ("Practitioners tend to use sticky-mat buzzwords like 'being present' and `cultivating compassion,' while avoiding anything spiritual") and diluted religion only feeds my suspicion that we're not producing educated children -- we're babying them until they go to college, after which they embrace positive values and Paolo Coehlo.

"The power of negative hating"

A trenchant, thoughtful essay, whose impact on me as an uncertain seventeen-year-old was incalculable. It ran in the July 1992 issue of Details. The author's name won't surprise you.

(special thanks to Ned Raggett for reminding me of its existence)

---------------
If not for hatred, I wouldn’t be doing what I do now. I became a pop star because I hated football at school. I hated that whole attitude of being one of the crowd. Becoming a pop star was my revenge. Revenge for being bad at football. For not being athletic. For being mocked.

That’s the thing about negative energy, about hatred. It can be positive. It throws into relief all the things you know you like. It tells you, by elimination, what you’re about. Sometimes you can only define yourself by what you hate. Hatred becomes an inspiration; it makes you think, “What I’m doing now I totally believe in, and I don’t care what other people say.” Guided by hatred, you don’t have to follow the herd.

I hate the way people all like the same things at the same time. I’ve never understood it. When people are told about Coke – “It’s the real thing” – they should think, “No, it’s a hideous soft drink that is fantastically unhealthy to drink, full of sugar that turns into glucose that turns into fat.” They should look around America and think, “God, there are so many fat people here! Why? Because they all eat hamburgers and drink cola.” And they should hate the people who represent that. They should hate Michael Jackson for trying to foist Pepsi onto them, to make them fat victims of their own society. They should hate more. Hate Pepsi, hate Coca-Cola, hate Michael Jackson. Hate George Bush. And think about the alternatives. That’s another good thing about hatred. It makes you think about the alternatives.

Of course, these days it’s more fashionable to be positive. I hate positivity. The problem with positivity is that it’s an attitude that’s decidedly about lying back, getting screwed, and accepting it. Happily. It’s totally apolitical. It’s very, very personal and one-on-one. It’s not about changing society, it’s about caring about yourself. In fact, it’s totally about ignoring one’s economic role in society, and so it works in favor of the system. Just look at work years of personal consciousness theories have given us: those icons of the status quo, George Bush and John Major.

Positivity is fundamentally middle-class. It’s about having the time, the space and the money to sort out where your head is at. Therapy is just another side of positivity. It’s a leisure activity, a luxury for people who don’t have any real cares. It’s new age selfishness, the new way of saying that charity begins at home.

And positivity makes the world stay the same. Hatred is the force that moves society along, for better or for worse. People aren’t driven by saying, “Oh wow, I’m at peace with myself.” They’re driven by their hatred of injustice, hatred of unfairness, of how power is used.

That’s as true for pop music as it is for politics. I always feel the reason so much music comes out of Britain is because there’s so much hatred. You see or hear something and grow envious. Whereas if your positive reaction is, “Wow, that’s great,” you just sit back and think how great it is and you don’t do anything. You relax.

Luckily, I’ve never been a very relaxed person. When I look at pop music, I immediately hate things. I look at singers who say they are taking two years off to work for charity when, in fact, they’ll spend two years working on their album, and I hate them. Right now I really hate performers who make a big deal out of playing benefits and donating the proceeds from the sales of their records to charities. They could give plenty of money to charities and not tell anyone, but instead, they cash in on the fact. That’s not charity, it’s marketing. It’s about selling albums under the guise of a moral imperative. They say they’re trying to raise consciousness, as if being a celebrity gives them power and endows them with the answers to the world’s problems. But really they just want to be seen as heroes. I think it’s breathtakingly cynical and I hate it.

Another thing I hate, and another inspiration for what the Pet Shop Boys do, is the way people misunderstand pop culture. It annoys me that after more than twenty-five years, Top of the Pops, Britain’s most important pop-music TV program, changed the rules so that you have to sing live. Why? Because the people in control are the kind of conservatives who think that in the ‘60s, everything was much more talented than they are now. It’s all about Rolling Stone rock culture, which is essentially a fear of the new. Rolling Stone’s idea of a musician is Jerry Garcia, from the 60s. Look at all the ‘new’ artists – Curtis Stigers, Michael Bolton, Lenny Kravitz – all of them living in the past. I think you have to live in the future. Or at least in the present.

The Pet Shop Boys have always hated most of the prevailing attitudes and tried to do the opposite. Our hatred of what other people do has always helped us redefine our actions. To hate a lot of things is tantamount to really caring about others. If you like everything, you deal with nothing. When people hear Chris and me talking, they’re sometimes shocked by how negative we are. We’re constantly critical of everything, including ourselves. But I come from a generation that liked its artists to say what was wrong with our lives. I retain the old-fashioned belief that pop music is meant to be a challenge to society as well as an affirmation of it. And so I consider it my duty to hate things.

-- Neil Tennant

Now you can do the Wilbury Twist!

I think I've played my Traveling Wilburys record more often than any piece of music I own on vinyl. No one but the most hardcore fan should be surprised that I discovered the Beatles not through the "Red" and "Blue" comps, but through George Harrison's contributions to Volume One (which, incidentally, on smarts and esprit alone trump almost anything he's released solo since 1970). It feels strange to write about an album with which I'm so intimate. Mike's right about the first record: it's a mishmash, but a compelling one, made by people whose wits were either dormant (Dylan, Lynne, Petty) or they were themselves just plain dormant (Orbison). I like the third one a lot more than he does, but I think I appreciate craft more than he does. These guys were brain-dead for so long that I'll accept even context-free material when it's sung, produced, and played with such vigor (they'd return to their regularly scheduled contexts soon enough).

The Baker Act: You sit around gettin' older, and it's called love

After contributing heavily to this ILM thread about 1984, still the standard by which I judge any year-in-pop, I played the worn 12" of Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark," bought for $1 a couple of years ago (and for which I got a steady glare from the lol-indie cashier). On a hunch I followed it with a couple of other tracks manhandled by Arthur Baker that year: New Order's "Thieves Like Us" and the remix of Hall & Oates' last American Number One hit "Out of Touch." Surprisingly, I found the latter soulless and gimmicky -- a sterling pop act besotted with technology because their songwriting no longer demanded their attention. Where the album version of "Out of Touch" is diverting enough, the drum clatter and Mariana Trench cavernousness of Baker's remix exposed Daryl Hall for the dickhead he is (dickheads are tolerable insofar as they only stick around for a few minutes).

Besides a penchant for donating tracks to ailing R&B divas, Springsteen has little in common with Hall, but, still, I was still surprised when he and Bernard Sumner lined up emotionally -- a proposition that would rightly amuse Springsteen and cause Sumner to hoot in derision. It's got something to do with the way in which Baker foregrounds Springsteen's voice and guitar. As I wrote on the ILM thread:

It's more straightforward electric rhythm strumming than "Skunk" Baxter-esque prickly lead type of thing. There's a nice friction between the singer/songwriter trope of alone-ness and the frenetic rhythm; Bruce's ordinary-guy persona has never been more naked (he evokes Bernard Sumner, of all people: what's this human voice doing trapped in this machine?).

Treading carefully over the ever-shifting keyboard and drum programs of "Thieves Like Us," Sumner can hardly keep from falling, which is exactly the point -- it's called love, and "it cuts your life with a broken knife," singing these verses as if Bryan Adams hadn't chanted a variant a couple of years earlier, as if discovering them for the first time. Natality remains Sumner's great subject: as the new dawn faded for Joy Division the frighteningly ordinary guitarist (notice how spooked he looks in those early concert stills) became the frontman, as unable to hide behind affect as Springsteen. He got away with singing doggerel because he understood how we cling to doggerel in moments of crisis, or -- in the case of "Thieves Like Us" -- ecstasy. Sumner makes us feel his struggle with words; they often can't match the swirl of the music. If "Temptation" chronicled realization, "Thieves Like Us" is summation. Although Springsteen's music relies on other modes and tropes to create similar kinds of entrapment and release, he understands how verisimilitude -- the folksy "Misters" he can't resist interjecting on other songs, his slurs and growls, reliance on monosyllables -- grounds his narratives. And Sumner was listening. New Order's "Love Vigilantes," released the following year, strikes me as Sumner's attempt at a Springsteen ballad, complete with plainspeak, strummy guitar, and simple twist of fate sprung from the Boss' sometimes creaky determinism.

Did Baker know what he was doing? "Dance On Your Knees," the track preceding "Out of Touch" on Hall and Oates' Big Bam Boom, is a summation of a sort: of every trick Baker had mastered in 1984 (there's even a few bars that sound like New Order's "Confusion," surely no accident). Hall was always too much of a slickster to qualify as any kind of "authentic" soul man -- his vocal prowess bespoke facility, not ease, much less comfort -- and that's why the Baker mix robs him of his mystique. In 1984 Hall was too sated to evoke the isolation of Springsteen and Sumner; he was a superstar who didn't know that his latest multiplatinum certification would be his last. Rest assured: the other two would soon know what he felt.

WP continues to kick FBI ass

Remember that March report on FBI abuses of Patriot Act powers? Well, it's way, WAY worse.

An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism.

* * *

The vast majority of the new violations were instances in which telephone companies and Internet providers gave agents phone and e-mail records the agents did not request and were not authorized to collect. The agents retained the information anyway in their files, which mostly concerned suspected terrorist or espionage activities.

But two dozen of the newly-discovered violations involved agents' requests for information that U.S. law did not allow them to have, according to the audit results provided to The Washington Post. Only two such examples were identified earlier in the smaller sample.

* * *

The FBI also found that in 14 investigations, counterintelligence agents using NSLs improperly gathered full credit reports from financial institutions, exercising authority provided by the USA Patriot Act but meant to be applied only in counterterrorism cases. In response, the bureau has distributed explicit instructions that "you can't gather full credit reports in counterintelligence cases," a senior FBI official said.

* * *

FBI officials said the audit found no evidence to date that any agent knowingly or willingly violated the laws or that supervisors encouraged such violations. The Justice Department's report estimated that agents made errors about 4 percent of the time and that third parties made mistakes about 3 percent of the time, they said. The FBI's audit, they noted, found a slightly higher error rate for agents -- about 5 percent -- and a substantially higher rate of third-party errors -- about 10 percent.

Some perceptive readers might be wondering why FBI officials are using words like "knowingly" or "willingly" which outside of a legal context don't flow very well together, or at all. Well, it's because, I'm willing to bet, the criminal statute requires that someone "knowingly" or "willingly" collect the information in order to be criminally liable. Ah, FBI, your agents are dumb enough not to know the law they're in charge of enforcing, but at least your lawyers know how to keep them out of trouble. Priceless.

Cuban soccer players may have defected

I doubt these guys will be getting many lucrative contract offers like their baseball-playing comrades seeing as how their team just lost 5-0 to Guatemala--GUATEMALA?!--but anything beats living in Cuba.

Bush's numbers at record low for poll

But it's not all good news. While the NBC/WSJ poll did show record low numbers for Bush on that poll:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush's approval rating has dropped to 29 percent in an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released on Wednesday, his lowest mark ever in that survey, which also found only 23 percent approved of the job Congress was doing.

Bush's approval rating slid 6 points from 35 percent in April, NBC said, citing a decline in support within his own Republican Party. Sixty-six percent said they disapproved of Bush's job performance.

The poll also showed that Americans are not very happy with the democratic Congress either.

The latest poll also found Americans growing more discontented with the Democratic-led Congress, with 64 percent disapproving of Congress' job performance. Only 23 percent approved, down 8 points since April.

Sixty-eight percent believe the United States is on the wrong track. Only 19 percent believe the country is headed in the right direction -- the lowest number in nearly 15 years, NBC said.

One thing's certain; right now, every single presidential candidate's political advisers are calling on them to be the candidate for change.

Asshole of the day

Yes, Rep. Ron Paul, you're it. Here's what the GOP representative thinks of a bill seeking to keep guns out of the hands of mentally ill persons, like the Virginia Tech murderer:

The only dissenting vote in the short House debate on the bill was voiced by GOP presidential aspirant Ron Paul of Texas. He described the bill as "a flagrantly unconstitutional expansion of restriction on the exercise of the right to bear arms."

Dick.

House set to pass post-Virginia Tech gun bill

Well, it's a start.

More on the Cuban reality

My grandfather has always told me that being Cuban is a profession, not just a nationality. Being Cuban, and living in Cuba that is, entails that even the most insignificant, daily task, like getting a bite to eat, is made up of a long series of complications, some of which may even be absurdly illegal, for which they should award a college degree. A Cuban does not simply buy something, he has to conseguir, which roughly translates as to acquire through some alternative means. Sometimes, he has to inventar, to invent, this is when he really has to stretch the realm of the imagination, like when he has to, MacGyver-like, make replacement parts for '50s-era American cars from scrap metals and old Chinese bicycles.

Food is no different. The pathetically inefficient socialist system provides no places where a busy resident of Havana, like a university student, can get a snack on the go. Cubans have to resort to privately owned places, eschewed decades ago by Fidel Castro's economic retardation, they are the only things that run with any efficiency in the country today. Take Pizza Celina, for example:

Near the University of Havana, students line up at lunchtime outside a building with peeling pink paint to shout orders for pizza with tomato sauce and cheese for 8 pesos, which is about 38 cents. A little bit more buys a ham or sausage topping.

Minutes later, a basket on a rope drops for payment. Money collected, the basket comes down again, bearing hot pizzas, grease soaking through butcher paper wrapping. There is no soda, or napkins.

The basket-on-a-rope delivery method is popular among those who share and sell goods in apartment buildings without working elevators.

"We come here because it's good, it's fast and it's cheap," said Laura, a 20-year-old history student. Like many Cubans, she wouldn't give a last name, uncomfortable talking with a foreign reporter about an issue as political as food.

She said she often eats for less money at the university cafeteria, but the food there isn't as good as at the privately run Pizza Celina.

"This is a bit expensive for us but we come when we can," she said. A recent increase in the monthly government stipend for students, from 20 to 50 pesos (about $1 to $2.50), means she can now afford to visit the pizzeria once a month.

Laura lives on the other side of Havana, and it's impractical to go home to eat. There are few nearby places to buy cheap food, save for a nearly empty state-run vegetarian restaurant. "I've never gone in there," Laura says.

The AP has more here. There's nothing that hasn't been written about before, but the Cuban reality is so absurd and surreal that everyone outside it needs a constant reminder lest they forget it's anything close to a life of dignity.

On the other hand...

...good news! More Ozu films! The latest batch of exemplary Criterion transfers covers the last period of Ozu's career: 1956's Early Spring, Tokyo Twilight (1957), Equinox Flower (1958), Late Autumn (1960), and The End of Summer (1961). Most of these have never previously been available.

Ousmane Sembene R.I.P.

Unexpected - and died a couple of years after finally getting Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognition. It is shameful, by the way, that Moolaadé has sat in my Netflix queue since last August, "release date unknown."

Who dropped the gay bomb?

This may be the most delicious news obtained via the Freedom of Information Act:

A Berkeley watchdog organization that tracks military spending said it uncovered a strange U.S. military proposal to create a hormone bomb that could purportedly turn enemy soldiers into homosexuals and make them more interested in sex than fighting.

Apparently an Ohio Air Force lab conducted the reseach in the early nineties. The Onion's reporters couldn't have phrased this better:

"The Ohio Air Force lab proposed that a bomb be developed that contained a chemical that would cause enemy soliders to become gay, and to have their units break down because all their soldiers became irresistably attractive to one another," [Edward] Hammond [of Berkeley's Sunshine Project] said after reviewing the document.

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the tip.

Menendez to endorse Clinton

Sen. Bob Menendez is expected to endorse Hillary Clinton today. I would surf around Miami's extreme right-wing, Cuban-American blogs, but I think we can all anticipate their posts. By the end of the day, Menendez will be one of the last obstacles keeping the economic embargo on Cuba from toppling Fidel Castro, along with the government of Spain and the ghost of JFK.

What separation of powers?

Be forewarned, dear reader, that the following civics lesson is not for you, but for FBI Director Robert Mueller. In order for executive agencies, for example the FBI, to get extra funding for let's say a $40 million Gulfstream jet coveted by celebrities and CEO's that agency has to petition the Congress for the cash. Such petition might say something like:

"Due to the number of international terrorist attacks against United States personnel and facilities overseas, the FBI identified a need for an aircraft with long-range flight capabilities."

If the Congress, as the legislative arm of the American people, feels that is a worthy cause it will grant the money for the purpose stated in the agency's petition. Simple enough? Not to Director Mueller. Since 2004, Mueller has been using one such jet not to transport terrorism subjects, or detainees, or to quickly be able to send agents to far-away locations, but to get himself to such terrorism hotbeds like Kansas City to give a speech.

But I might be jumping to conclusions. The FBI may have many such jets and instead of just retiring them or let them fall into disrepair on an airstrip somewhere, better to have the director put them to good use. Nope. It turns out the FBI only has ONE of these jets. So, continuing with our theme, let's say the director takes the jet to fight terrorism in Salt Lake City, Utah with an articulately delivered speech, and a situation may arise where the FBI needs to get agents to a remote location within a 12-hour period, which apparently happens and was one of the reasons for petitioning Congress, they would be up shit's creek without a $40 million jet.

As it turns out, it's not even cheaper or more efficient for the FBI to use the Gulfstream to bus Mueller around. Mueller likes to fly out of Reagan National, so each times he takes the jet, the FBI needs to fly it from the small airfield where it is kept to Reagan, which costs an addition $1000 each time.

If you'd like to take a look at Mueller's travels, the Washington Post has a nice little graphic for you.

animal crackers

It's been a big day for giant animal carcass removal in South Florida. Stories here and here. Who could ask for anything more? And, on that high note, AGI bids you a good night.

Confidence in Gonzales?

These senators seem to think Gonzales is doing a "heck of a job."

Alexander (R-TN) Allard (R-CO) Bennett (R-UT) Bond (R-MO) Bunning (R-KY) Burr (R-NC) Chambliss (R-GA) Cochran (R-MS) Corker (R-TN) Cornyn (R-TX) Craig (R-ID) Crapo (R-ID) DeMint (R-SC)

Dole (R-NC) Domenici (R-NM) Ensign (R-NV) Enzi (R-WY) Graham (R-SC) Grassley (R-IA) Gregg (R-NH) Hatch (R-UT) Hutchison (R-TX) Inhofe (R-OK) Isakson (R-GA) Kyl (R-AZ) Lieberman (ID-CT)

Lott (R-MS) Lugar (R-IN) Martinez (R-FL) McConnell (R-KY) Murkowski (R-AK) Roberts (R-KS) Sessions (R-AL) Shelby (R-AL) Thune (R-SD) Vitter (R-LA) Voinovich (R-OH) Warner (R-VA)

Out of the seven senators who didn't show up to vote, five are running for president, and one keeps yapping about wanting to run because there's no other Reagan conservatives in the race, or some other such idiocy.

Glen Greenwald's been at the peak of his powers lately, exposing one crass example of Beltway privilege after another. That oleaginous, well-meaning hack Joe Klein is having a hard time of it lately: recently pillored by conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt (shit, if there's anyone playing Uriah Heep with greater skill on the talk show circuit these days, it's Hewitt), and now fisked by Greenwald for attempting to mitigate the impact of Lewis "Scooter" Libby's sentencing. The real charge for which the Beltway Boys should be convicted is incest:

There are many reasons why the political press fails to investigate and uncover real wrongdoing on the part of the government, but a leading reason is that they do not see lawbreaking as genuinely wrong or the lawbreakers as corrupt. These are their friends and colleagues -- their socioeconomic peers and, with increasing and disturbing frequency, their spouses and family memebers -- and while Important Bush Officials might be "guilty" of engaging in harmless and perfectly accepted political "hardball," they are never genuinely bad people engaged in genuinely bad acts. And they certainly do not belong in criminal courtrooms or prison.

G-Y-W-O for Y-O-U

Damn right

Judge Diana Gribbon Motz of the Fourth District Court of Appeals just became my favorite judge. Writing for a three-judge panel, she just handed down an opinion ordering the Pentagon to release Ali al-Marri, the only person currently held as an "enemy combatant" within the United States proper, from military custody. Or as she put it:

“To sanction such presidential authority to order the military to seize and indefinitely detain civilians, Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote, “even if the President calls them ‘enemy combatants,’ would have disastrous consequences for the Constitution — and the country.”

“We refuse to recognize a claim to power,” Judge Motz added, “that would so alter the constitutional foundations of our Republic.”

Amen. Here's more.

Will the Supremes overrule? Likely. But I'll enjoy it while it lasts.

"I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death"

The AP moved a very interesting, if superficial, story about a half hour ago on the death penalty. Apparently, a series of recent studies have shown that the death penalty is responsible for anywhere between three and eighteen less murders. (The conclusions are similar to those Isaac Ehrlich, whose study in the '70s helped reinstate the death penalty, but was later debunked by the National Academy of Sciences.)

The new studies compared states that ban the death penalty with those that allow it, and looked at the data over the years, trying to weed out other factors that would influence the numbers, like unemployment or poverty. Here are some resorts:

To explore the question, they look at executions and homicides, by year and by state or county, trying to tease out the impact of the death penalty on homicides by accounting for other factors, such as unemployment data and per capita income, the probabilities of arrest and conviction, and more.

Among the conclusions:

• Each execution deters an average of 18 murders, according to a 2003 nationwide study by professors at Emory University. (Other studies have estimated the deterred murders per execution at three, five and 14).

• The Illinois moratorium on executions in 2000 led to 150 additional homicides over four years following, according to a 2006 study by professors at the University of Houston.

• Speeding up executions would strengthen the deterrent effect. For every 2.75 years cut from time spent on death row, one murder would be prevented, according to a 2004 study by an Emory University professor.

While there are plenty of reasons to question the results of the study--it looked at overall homicide rates, not just those that could result in a capital murder conviction, for example--even if the results were unimpeachable, they're no argument for not doing away with the death penalty entirely, as I'm sure they will be used.

First of all, I reject the argument that excuses the most abhorrent crimes on the part of the state in the name of some minimal public welfare. The classic example is the childish hypothetical of whether you would torture someone if it helped stop a WMD from going off--a most ridiculous hypothetical, but, remember, the people using it are not particularly intelligent. We have some astounding numbers on the execution of innocents--so much for equal protection and due process--as well as studies detailing the cruelty of such "modern" methods of execution as lethal injection. Beyond that, there are times that the state just can't do something, regardless of how many benefits it might produce. Torture and capital punishment are some examples. Never mind the general hypocrisy of someone who advocates a utilitarian reason for keeping the death penalty, but doesn't support banning or regulating a right to buy handguns which would stop far more violent crime than executing several innocent dudes a year.

And I'm not even going to address the retributivist argument. If you think the state should be engaged in revenge, you are a fucking moron. And please don't come back at me with the stupid "if your daughter was raped and murdered you would want the person who did it executed too" curve ball they threw at Dukakis. Yeah, I'd want to rip the fucker's head off myself, but I also don't think the state should conduct itself like an grieving, irate father.

I personally feel disgusted to live in a country where roughly one third of its states still execute people, and keeps a federal death penalty statute. There's no other way of saying it. I really do feel a personal sense of disgust and complicity in the crime that doesn't go away. We can't just wash our hands off this or turn a blind eye. Every American is partially responsible for every person that is executed in this country, especially every innocent person.

It's not like I've paid any attention to the competition, but Memory Almost Full is certainly the best McCartney album of original material he's released since the collapse of the Berlin Wall (his best album would be 1999's Run Devil Run, featuring his cover of "No Other Baby," his most moving vocal performance since "Maybe I'm Amazed." It's better than you think, Scott). Now that he's licensed his catalogue to two of the biggest multi-national corporations extant I might be tempted to frolic in it with greater abandon. Incidentally, nothing on MAF moves me like 1989's "My Brave Face," whose soupçon of wit and self-effacement I credit to co-composer Elvis Costello anyway.

Humanizing the vacuum

Sasha Frere-Jones gives Spoon credit for evolving, but Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga still sounds like the work of a band that once "aped the work of astringent rock groups like Wire and the Pixies, which wrote songs with gnomic lyrics that were hard to parse and were sung over short, stinging guitar phrases." Although I liked Gimme Fiction a lot, it divided a lot of their fans but got credit from bandwagoneers like me because Britt Daniel unlocked his knock-kneed gait, even though he'd clearly copped his best moves from the Rolling Stones' "Dance, Pt. 1." It's not often that I credit a band's diehards for being the right first time, but I quashed most of my reservations two years ago because Gimme Fiction's surface seduced and sparkled so. Yeah, he'd learned to dance, but it was in the bedroom, to Genesis' Selling England by the Pound. Girls had fuck-all to do with it. Erecting a wall between yourself and the rest of the world is the mortal sin of too many Ameri-indie acts; Daniel's immense songcraft can easily seem like formalist dithering if you're not in the mood.

I hated Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga at first, repelled by its insufficiently ironic, too easily indicative title (Baby Britt needs a rattle and a good burping) and catchy tunes that stood at the podium and rested their case after too brief a summation. I resisted my attraction to Daniel's guitar tone, underrated vocal chops (at his best he sounds like a David Byrne-nified Nick Lowe), and the tricky rhythms he and Jim Eno came up with. Lines like "Bet you got it all planned right/Bet you never worry/Never even feel a fright" were a punchline for a joke it was easy for me to tell. But "Don't You Evah," the song in which you'll find said lyrics, collects all manner of acerbic relationship insights, with dandy guitar tones and a tricky rhythm too. "Black Like Me" is even better: channeling the acoustic menace of "The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine" and finding the ideal setting for the sound effects that Eno and Daniel love sprinkling on skeletal melodies. It's a sad evocation of summer tar, hot bedrooms, voices in your head, and girls you want so much that you have to break up with them. The song's not a release so much as a window, revelatory in context perhaps (I'm not sure why Daniel places it at the end of the album; there's no friction in the sequence). But it comes closest fulfilling the promise of his best line, one Daniel is too smart to throw away: "I humanize the vacuum." While I'm not yet ready to credit Spoon for "evolving" from "Dancing With Myself" to "Mirror in the Bathroom," there's churn in their slow burn.

Welcome to Dean's Jungle

As last night's debate reminded us, this is timeless.

Two savory reviews of biographies in tomorrow's New York Times: A.O. Scott on Zachary Leader's Life of Kingsley Amis and Bob Christgau on Joe Strummer. Christgau gives Chris Salewicz's Redemption Song a formalist thrasing; he's flummoxed by the author's subordinate clauses and inability to grasp the complexity of a figure as titanic as Strummer. Leader's book sounds infinitely more entertaining, not least because of Amis' own aesthetic wanderlust. This is the Amis whose amiably monstrous ego consumes most of son Martin's attentions in the latter's autobiography Experience. Scott:

Suspicious of the exclusionary difficulty of modernism, he was among the first to take a serious critical interest in popular “genre” literature, producing a scholarly study of science fiction (originally delivered as Christian Gauss seminars at Princeton) and two books about James Bond, and insisting to a skeptical Christopher Hitchens that the movie “Beverley Hills Cop” was “a flawless masterpiece.”

Bile: Not to be swirled around your mouth

To elaborate on what I posted elsewhere: there's no music more better suited to dressing for dinner and going to hang out with good friends than Donald Fagen's cover of Leiber-Stoller's "Ruby Baby" (found on his great 1981 solo album The Nightfly). This is what so much of the studio-rock of the period was aiming for; the Doobie Brothers didn't spend the better part of the seventies recording increasingly curdled ruminations on their own (or perceived?) decadence. In other words, Fagen needed a decade's worth of swirling bile around in his mouth before recording a record like this. Back to "Ruby Baby": has he ever sung with such empathy? Dig the electronic delay on his own harmony vocals as they wheeze, "When will you be m-i-i-i-i-i-i-ne?"