¿Hasta luego, Fidel?

Maybe soon!

So these movies I've seen:
Woody Allen's "Scoop." Pleasant trifle.
He's not dead and he likes Scarlet Johannson's boobies, but there's nothing to it. Unlike "MatchPoint", there's no new energy to it. "A Scanner Darkly". The book is even darker. But in whichever psyched-out state he is, Philip K. Dick has to be enjoying the resurgence of his vision. "Clerks II" was a fitting sequel. Pillow Pants made me laugh. You read the lengthier "Miami Vice" review. And is Castro dying? This is one of the crazy weekends.

My feet keep dancin'

Listening to Escort's "Starlight" for the first time after spending the weekend acquainting myself with Journey Into Paradise: The Larry Levan Story forced me to confront an adamantine truth: there can never be enough tracks with rhythm guitar scratchin' and squiggle-synths, with unforgettably anonymous vocalists atop for poignancy. Andy K's right: "The track ends up somewhere between "First Time Around" and "Here's to You" (Basement Jaxx's upcoming Crazy Itch Radio, the only album of theirs to which I've warmed sufficiently, is perhaps the culmination of this "organic-synthetic thing," accelerated and reconstituted into a spectacle of polyurethane frenzy).

The Levan comp -- as of now my album of the year -- features inexhaustible variations on the recipe cited above. I'm beginning to love this era of dance music: the demise of disco as an American commerical force caused its creators to return to the clubs, unchastened and hungry for new influences. In this context a classic like Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime" (especially when it shares disc space with Five Special's "Why Leave Us Alone," whose synth-bass hook Eno, Byrne, Jerry Harrison, et al appropriated wholesale) is kin to disco raveups of quasi-gospel intensity like crucial tracks by Chaka Khan and Womack & Womack. Obscurities (well, to me) like David Joseph's "You Can't Hide (Your Love From Me)" meld Imagination and Tom Tom Club into a permutation that's subdued but no less tinged with hysteria; and when Yaz's "Situation" makes an appearance it represents a evolution, not a termination.

Mel Gibson sure brings out the best in us!

Andrew Sullivan, who's been giggling all day over the Mel Gibson imbroglio, records this gem by David Frum. Podheretz, Lopez, Steyn, and the rest of NROWorld should write jokes for Stephen Colbert.

Yeah, it's been a sad day in Lebanon

So, does the United States support an immediate cease-fire? Nah.

I don't mind this survey

(Thanks, Matos)

Name 5-10 wistful/bittersweet songs that come to mind:

Pet Shop Boys, "The End of the World"
The Pretenders, "Hymn to Her"
Stevie Wonder, "All in Love is Fair"
Frank Sinatra, "What's New?"
Mary J. Blige, "Not Gon' Cry"

The 4 Best Songs Ever Written:

"Here Comes The Sun"
"When U Were Mine"
"Go Your Own Way"
"I Believe"

3 Current Favorites Songs:

Justin Timberlake, "SexyBack"
Sonic Youth, "Pink Stream"
Scritti Politti, "Robin Hood"

Classic Early Evening Drinking Music:
Any track off DJ Shadow's The Private Press

3 All Time Faves That Never Get Old To You:

R.E.M., "Losing My Religion"
Swing Out Sister, "Breakout"
Eurythmics, "Here Comes the Rain Again"

Song You Want To Play At Your Wedding:
Roxy Music, "To Turn You On"

Song You Want to Play At Your Funeral:
The Velvet Underground, "I'm Set Free"

4 Records You Really Dug from 2005:

The Hold Steady, Separation Sunday
The Go-Betweens, Oceans Apart
M.I.A., Arular
Spoon, Gimme Fiction

4 Favorite Records From This Year So Far:

Ghostface Killah, Fishscale
Basement Jaxx, Crazy Itch Radio
Sonic Youth, Rather Ripped
Journey Into Paradise: The Larry Levan Story

5 Good Angry Songs:

Bob Dylan, "Dirge"
Public Image Ltd, "Rise"
Marvin Gaye, "I'll Be Doggone"
The Go-Betweens, "Someone Else's Wife"
Outkast, "Rooster"

One of Your Favorite Lyrics:
"She's a vegetarian except when it comes to sex" -- ABC, "Unzipped"

5 Cover Songs Arguably Better Than the Original:

Tina Turner, "Let's Stay Together"
Paul McCartney, "No Other Baby"
Dolly Parton, "Save the Last Dance For Me"
Bryan Ferry, "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"
The Raincoats, "Lola"

Ironic Song to Brutally Murder Someone to in a movie:
John Lennon, "Clean-up Time"

Great Dance Song You Maybe Never Realized Was a Great Dance song Back in the Day:

Michael Jackson, "Billie Jean"

Good Albums To Workout To:
Donna Summer's Gold

Good Album to Clean The House To:
Eric B & Rakim, Follow The Leader

Good Dining Music:
Brian Eno-John Cale, Wrong Way Up

A Good Album To Have Sex To:
PJ Harvey, Is This Desire?

A Good Album To Put You In the Mood (that is Not Sade, Marvin Gaye or Barry White):
Wowee Zowee

Good Album To Sleep To:
Brian Eno, Discreet Music

5 Good Rock Songs That You Can Dance To:

The Beatles, "A Hard Day's Night"
The Velvet Underground, "Sister Ray"
Garbage, "Stupid Girl"
Gang of Four, "Damaged Goods"
The Breeders, "Cannonball"

4 Good Dance Songs (any kind):

Taana Gardner, "Heartbeat"
New Order, "Perfect Kiss (12" extended mix)
Madonna, "Into the Groove"
Underworld, "Born Slippy""

Songs That Are Too Damn Sad:

Joy Division, "Decades"
Neil Young, "Ambulance Blues"
Bob Dylan, "Buckets of Rain"
Prince, "Sometimes It Snows in April"
Fleetwood Mac, "Sara"
George Jones, "The Door"

4 Happy, Life Affirming Songs:

Pet Shop Boys, "I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing"
Bjork, "Violently Happy"
De La Soul, "Ego Trippin'"
The New Pornographers, "Use It"

5 Great Love Songs:

The Beatles, "All I Gotta Do"
Daryl Hall & John Oates, "One On One"
Psychedelic Furs, "The Ghost in You"
The Notorious BIG, "One More Chance"
Kate Bush, "Hounds of Love"

An Album Full of Tenderness:
Al Green, Call Me

Song To Cheer Up A Friend:
Lou Reed, "Turn To Me"

Song To An Ex That Isn't Meanspirited:
Pavement, "Type Slowly"

Song To An Ex That Is Kinda Meanspirited:
Bob Dylan, "Emotionally Yours"

Song to Listen to While in The Country Looking at Stars:
Air, "Cherry Blossom Girl"

Song to lose your Mind to:
Utah Saints, "Something Good"

Song To Cry In Your Pillow to:
Fleetwood Mac, "Brown Eyes"

Songs That Make You Feel Amped and Inspired:
The Jesus & Mary Chain, "Happy When It Rains"

Great Semi-Obscure B-side:
The Go-Betweens, "Casanova's Last Words"

Song That Makes You Miss Your Mom:
Carole King, "I Feel The Earth Move"

Tough Break-Up Songs:
The Mountain Goats, "First Few Desperate Hours"

So Happy It Makes You Wanna Skip:
Saint Etienne, "Who Do You Think You Are?"

Feel No Shame: Great Current Pop Songs:
Nelly Furtado feat. Timberland, "Promiscuous"
Madonna, "Jump"
Gnarls Barkley, "Crazy"

Album No One Would Expect You To Love:
most of Jay-Z's catalogue

Album No One Would Expect You To Dislike:
Pet Shop Boys' Release

Emo Album You Actually Like:
Does Jenny Lewis count?

Good, But Overrated Cause Of Indie Revisionism:
I support any revisionism in spirit.

5 Desert Island Discs off the top of your head (30 sec clock):
Alexander O'Neal, Hearsay
New Order, Technique
R.E.M., Murmur
Prince, Sign 'O' The Times,
Rosanne Cash, King's Record Shop

3 Contemporary Artists That Were Your Faves 10 Years Ago:
Sonic Youth, Sleater Kinney, Pulp

Fave Electronic Record You Own:
Endtroducing...

Fave Hip-Hop Record You Own:
A Tribe Called Quest, The Low End Theory

Hip-Hop Song You Know All the Lyrics Too:
oh, c'mon

Random Album You Loved In High School But Are Afraid To Admit It:
Shame is a useless emotion.

Album You May Have Listened To More In Highschool than Any Other Album:
Electronic, Electronic

If You Could Enter A Wrestling Ring to a Song It Would Be:
Pat Benatar, "Invincible"

Album To Clear A Room With:
Velvet Underground, White Light, White Heat

Before I forget

The very talented Emily Schmall, third blonde from left, had a story on the Herald's front page today. The subject, corsets. Sadly, the story did not include a photo of Emily in one.

Before Miami Beach embraced topless sunbathing and thongs, it was a quaint Southern town where no woman dared leave home without her girdle.

It was in this setting in 1959 that Fay Potter opened a corset shop on Lincoln Road.

Whether for a torsolette, garters or stockings, Miami natives and snowbirds alike flocked to Fay Potter Underfashions to be ''fit like a queen,'' according to an advertisement in The Miami Herald at the time.

The art of a corsetiere was in customizing a corset to the inward slope of a hip, the swell of the breast, and Fay Potter was nationally renowned for her art.

Now I can't get the phrase "the swell of the breast" off my mind.

Miami Vice: no Glenn Frey, no sleaze, no go

Featuring the best use of digital photography I've yet seen in a blockbuster, Miami Vice does for undercover vice cops what United 93 did for 9-11: its purported realism dessicates the material. Feature films aren't documentaries. Art is transformative; it's certainly not mimetic.

Writer/director Michael Mann's film is a model of intelligent pulp; and pulp it remains. Its virtues are considerable: a couple of killer sequences (one in a trailer park will become a model of its kind) guarantee that this will remain the most action film of the year. Because it plunges us right into the narrative the film forces the audience to work; a lot of the dialogue is cop jargon and shorthand. The unsentimental conclusion is just right. You'd have to go back to John Ford and Antonioni to find another director so adept at finding topographic correlatives for his characters' isolation (geography, however, stumps him: I couldn't distinguish between Cuba, Jamaica, Columbia, and the Port of Miami). Mann doesn't just eroticize locations: he teases ambiguities out of them that his actors often can't project.

What about those actors? The only thing Miami Vice has in common with the '80s show is its pair of star cops, one black, one white, with the splendid names of Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs. Mann dispenses with the show's animated pastel-hued sleaze. He replaces Don Johnson's wiseacre sneer -- a TV recreation of how you'd imagine Glenn Frey would flirt with a waitress on the Sunset Strip -- with the glowering unshorn visage of Colin Farrell, who whether called upon to act feral or suggest various shades of lust is as expressive as a can of asparagus spears. As for the mullet, facial hair, and satin jackets, who the fuck is he kidding? He ain't gettin' laid in Miami dressed like a $70 pimp. The increasingly interesting Jamie Foxx, allowed to mouth the film's scant crumbly wisecracks, can barely look at his co-star (David Denby: "He keeps staring at Farrell as if he wanted more out of him and were having trouble getting it"). A brief scene in the film's first third (in which he says "You don't need to go home" with perfectly modulated rue) and several scattered bits allow Foxx the cast's only opportunity to suggest that police work is dangerous when it isn't ridiculous (did it ever occur to Mann, in thrall to his revisionist frenzy, to cast Jamie Foxx as Crockett? The mind recoils at the squandered opportunity). Gong Li, with whom Farrell has zero chemistry, is insolent and challenging; when she sizes Farrell up you've rarely seen such withering contempt. A shame Mann doesn't know what to do with her after the second act; but you know Mann is clueless when he puts Gong's Isabel and Crockett on a speedboat to Havana for mojitos and shower-fucking (if it was that easy to get to Cuba, then I invite the entire AGI team to meet me at Dinner Key tomorrow morning). The wonderful Justin Theroux (the besieged director in Mulholland Drive and the sadomasochist in one season of "Six Feet Under") is in there somewhere, but you need bifocals to see him.

This is the film's most damning feature: Mann is a director so enraptured by his own fetishes that he disregards what to him are ancillary concerns. Like: repartee! Women who aren't Lauren Bacall-Joanne Dru knockoffs! Decent soundtracks! He still hasn't topped The Last of the Mohicans and The Insider in my book, but for all his pomposity I urge him to keep trying. Mann's a perplexing cat, alright. He's got the pulse on a classic American theme: populating his oeuvre with characters consumed by their jobs (is there another director to whom ringing cellphones were more important?). He's great when he's operatic (The Insider) or rewriting source material (Mohicans).

As for Mr. Farrell, the prognosis is grim.

Some more Middle East rantings

So yesterday some murderous psycho walked into a Seattle Jewish center and killed one person and shot another five, including a pregnant women. CNN reported he was an American of Palestinian descent. This was the Seattle PI’s headline, “I am a Muslim American, angry at Israel.” The shooting is rightfully being treated as a hate crime. Here’s some of the PI story:

On the eve of the Jewish Sabbath, a 31-year-old man claiming he was upset about "what was going on in Israel" opened fire at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle building, killing one person and wounding five women, one of them pregnant.

Three of the women were in critical condition Friday night with gunshot wounds to the stomach.

The gunman, brandishing a large-caliber semi-automatic pistol, forced his way through the security door at the federation, on Third Avenue downtown, after an employee had punched in her security code.

"He said, 'I am a Muslim American, angry at Israel,' before opening fire on everyone," said Marla Meislin-Dietrich, a database coordinator for the center. "He was randomly shooting at everyone."

While there’s little doubt that this guy’s actions were prompted by abstract outrage rather than an actual policy, it still illustrates the danger in equating Jewish people everywhere with the state of Israel—the single biggest, but not the only, purveyor of this irresponsibility. Here’s Howard Dean at it, and notice who’s reporting it. (Apropos, Peter Beinart had a pretty good editorial about the Democrats' pandering in trying to get to the right of Bush in the Washington Post yesterday.)

US Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean called Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki an "anti-Semite" on Wednesday for failing to denounce Hizbullah for its attacks against Israel.

"The Iraqi prime minister is an anti-Semite," the Democratic leader told a gathering of business leaders in Florida. "We don't need to spend 200 and 300 and $500 billion bringing democracy to Iraq to turn it over to people who believe that Israel doesn't have a right to defend itself and who refuse to condemn Hizbullah."

You know if our biggest problem in Iraq was that its prime minister turned out to be an anti-Semite, that whole adventure wouldn’t have been so much of a mess. When people start labeling criticism of Israel, or worse lack of criticism for its enemies, as anti-Semitism not only does it annul any chance for a real debate about the region, but it also puts Jews in danger of attacks from fanatics, like the maniac in Seattle. Tony Judt touches on this point, and many others, in this brilliant essay in Hareetz, which comes via Bitch Ph.D.

In short: Israel, in the world's eyes, is a normal state, but one behaving in abnormal ways. It is in control of its fate, but the victims are someone else. It is strong, very strong, but its behavior is making everyone else vulnerable. And so, shorn of all other justifications for its behavior, Israel and its supporters today fall back with increasing shrillness upon the oldest claim of all: Israel is a Jewish state and that is why people criticize it. This - the charge that criticism of Israel is implicitly anti-Semitic - is regarded in Israel and the United States as Israel's trump card. If it has been played more insistently and aggressively in recent years, that is because it is now the only card left.

The habit of tarring any foreign criticism with the brush of anti-Semitism is deeply engrained in Israeli political instincts: Ariel Sharon used it with characteristic excess but he was only the latest in a long line of Israeli leaders to exploit the claim. David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir did no different. But Jews outside of Israel pay a high price for this tactic. Not only does it inhibit their own criticisms of Israel for fear of appearing to associate with bad company, but it encourages others to look upon Jews everywhere as de facto collaborators in Israel's misbehavior. When Israel breaks international law in the occupied territories, when Israel publicly humiliates the subject populations whose land it has seized - but then responds to its critics with loud cries of "anti-Semitism" - it is in effect saying that these acts are not Israeli acts, they are Jewish acts: The occupation is not an Israeli occupation, it is a Jewish occupation, and if you don't like these things it is because you don't like Jews.

In many parts of the world this is in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling assertion: Israel's reckless behavior and insistent identification of all criticism with anti-Semitism is now the leading source of anti-Jewish sentiment in Western Europe and much of Asia. But the traditional corollary - if anti-Jewish feeling is linked to dislike of Israel then right-thinking people should rush to Israel's defense - no longer applies. Instead, the ironies of the Zionist dream have come full circle: For tens of millions of people in the world today, Israel is indeed the state of all the Jews. And thus, reasonably enough, many observers believe that one way to take the sting out of rising anti-Semitism in the suburbs of Paris or the streets of Jakarta would be for Israel to give the Palestinians back their land.

The reality is that Israel’s political culture, just like America’s after 9/11, is one that thrives on the fear of its citizens and a cult of victimhood. After all, the more Jews that are attacked abroad, the better Israel’s raison d’être starts to look.

a little autoerotica

Extremely light blogging today, as you may have already noticed. But I promise this will be a heavily blogged weekend.

I did want to quickly point out AGI's latest achievements. One of Alfred's posts was featured on the Village Voice's music blog page. And yesterday Maud Newton had this very nice post about the site.

The winter of discontent

With their customary intelligence and verve, the Pet Shop Boys prove that middle-age needn't be a deceleration, but a period when half a lifetime's knowledge deepens one's responses to calamity. The metaphors become more elaborate, the irony rueful; it's too easy for the aged to lapse into a kind of emotional fascism. When all else fails there's always the dance floor.

If anyone's interested in going to their show in October, let me know.

If you prick us, do we not bleed?

Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's Merchant of Venice moment:

“Is the value of human life less in Lebanon than that of citizens elsewhere?” he asked. “Are we children of a lesser god? Is an Israeli teardrop worth more than a drop of Lebanese blood?”

You really have to wonder if he was aware of the irony, and if he was, then I admire him even more.

First Lance Bass, now Bill Clinton

Or as Wonkette would have it "Coulter comes out against gay Clinton marriage. " Yes, she thinks Bill Clinton is gay.

Ms. COULTER: No. I think anyone with that level of promiscuity where, you know, you — I mean, he didn’t know Monica’s name until their sixth sexual encounter. There is something that is — that is of the bathhouse about that.

Barney Frank inches closer to his ultimate sexual fantasy.

the conflict escalates, what else is new

So I'm away for two days and the conflict escalates, big surprise there. The meeting in Rome proved to be a fool's errand, with the entire world as the fool thinking the rising civilian casualties could be enough for the United States to support an immediate cease-fire.

This is how the Finnish foreign minister put it:

"We agreed upon what we could agree upon, but that does not change the fact that the European Union has called for an immediate cessation of hostilities" while the United States has not.

And this is what Condoleezza Rice said, essentially the same thing she's been saying since this thing started:

"I have made very clear that I seek urgently to get an end to these hostilities, an end to this violence. We all want this urgently," Rice said in the news conference. But, she added: "We have to be effective. It means that we have to have a plan that will actually create conditions in which we can have a cease-fire that will be sustainable."

Look at the American position this way, they want more people to die now, so that other people don't die later. Does that make sense to you?

From Reuters we have this about the four U.N. peacekeepers killed by Israel.

DUBLIN, July 26 (Reuters) - An Irish army officer in south Lebanon warned the Israeli military six times that their attacks in the area were putting the lives of U.N. observers at risk, Ireland's Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday.

The strike on the peacekeers proves one of two things, either they were targeted by Israel, which is unlikely, or that Israel's strikes are that haphazard and irresponsible, and if they can't avoid killing unarmed U.N. personnel, then they certainly can't avoid killing civilians.

So much for the existence of an opposition party

That's that then:

Even as the fighting continues and the civilian casualties mount in Lebanon, sentiment in Congress is overwhelmingly on Israel's side. Last week, the House passed a resolution, 410 to 8, that went even beyond the Bush administration in supporting for Israel in its battle with Hezbollah militants.

A bid by the four House lawmakers of Lebanese descent to add language urging restraint against civilian targets was rejected in negotiations. The resolution's only nod to those caught in the crossfire came in a recognition of "Israel's longstanding commitment to minimizing civilian loss" and an expression of condolences – in the last sentence of a three-page document – "to all innocent victims of recent violence in Israel, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories."

This charmless band

I expect Mallory's impatience with the Smiths will get a lot of unnecessary attention. I disagree, but it's hard to argue with his assessment of the early records: listening to them "is like being pounded to death by a bag full of rose petals and peacock feathers."

As for Mal's belief in the aesthetic superiority of music recorded by black people, here's my take on one of the 1980's greatest singles: a blast of frosty cocaine breath.

P.S: To be fair, I doubt fans of, say, Husker Du, Orange Juice, the Go-Betweens, Aztec Camera, and a dozen more of my favorite bands of the period were listening to the Gap Band or Luther Vandross (although Duran Duran, New Order, and Culture Club themselves probably were). In the mid '90s I spent too many idle hours reading Blur like Balzac – a devotion which Toni Braxton and the Babyface hit factory deserved.

Beware of cavemen bearing missiles

Almost five years since 9-11 and we still haven't learned a thing about our enemies, James Wolcott argues. Sounding unnervingly like Bill O'Reilly – or the most intelligent neo-con in the room – Wolcott argues that our inclination to view al Qaeda, Sunni insurgents, and now Hezbollah as smelly cave-dwellers is precisely what has made victories over all three forces impossible (but it has made the Beltway Boys and its liberal and conservative consultants healthy, wealthy, and wise):

We still regard them as savage primitives of low cunning who sporadically lash out. Our commentators and military strategists suffer from a catastrophic failure of imagination, unable or unwilling to see the world through our enemies' eye and to think like them, assuming that our thought processes are superior, sufficient, and will prevail. Victor Davis Hanson's Western way of war always wins, except when it doesn't (Vietnam and, now, Iraq).

It doesn't help that nearly every Retired Military Expert on cable news spouts the same Rumsfeldian faith in technopower and the supremacy of Western intel (through spy satellites, unmanned drones, etc) and fighting capability, pointing at terrain maps as if grabbing landscape had much relevance in the era of Fourth Generation warfare. They still talk confidently about air strikes "softening up" pockets of resistance, with "mopping up" operations later to clear out the remaining riffraff.

Now it's Israeli soldiers' turn to sound stunned at the ferocity of Hezbollah fighters. I suppose these precision bombs will crush our Luddite foes.

Elsewhere, Robert Fisk describes the quandary which arises when you have American-made rockets killing Lebanese evacuees and missles of Iranian origin vaporizing Israeli citizens in Haifa.

Quickly

(Blogging will be as scarce tomorrow as today, for I'm going biking at Oleta River State Park.)

I really want to start a Drinking Liberally chapter in Miami. How many people would be up for it? I'm thinking we could get together at a place on the Beach, or maybe downtown, Mondays or Tuesdays. Anyone?

The fine line between boom-boom bap and crap-crap-crap

Two takes on the Scritti Politti conundrum: Sasha Frere-Jones and me. White Bread, Black Beer could use some beats; it wouldn't have violated Green Gartside's exquisite tonal control if he suggested that, even in the clutches of hermeticism, he still manages to dance around the living room.

EDIT: I wish I'd read Simon Reynolds' addenda -- he's thought about the album with unnerving scrupulousness. I don't deny that the intimations of real-life trauma -- "the kind of dance of the seven veils," he writes, "going on in the songs, a now-you-see-me-now-you-don't tease" -- to which Green alludes here and there are more gripping at present than his meta-games; but it's precisely his "feline self-caressing narcissism" that keeps me from diving beneath the shimmery beguiling surface. Plus, it bothers me that Green created this private record which hasn't a snow in sun's chance in hell of grazing the charts. Yeah, I know he tried this on 1999's Anomie & Bonhomie (what's up, Mos Def?), but since I haven't heard it I won't comment. Surely a polymath as conversant as Green can recast guitar-dominated emo-angst and Timbaland diva-grind -- 2006's most chart-friendly trends -- into something as familiar yet strange as "Perfect Way," "Wood Beez" and "Absolute" (I haven't played an older record this year as much as Cupid & Psyche '85) It irks me that Green's understanding of how one projects sincerity is as rockist as Paul McCartney or Thom Yorke's: he writes and produces every song, plays every instrument in sight. Mirrors compel when they reflect environment, not just the guy posing before it.

A coalition of the willing

Stolen from Maud Newton, who in turn took it from someone else.

A tragic sense of life

I suppose the right thing to do after you egg a nation to completely destroy its neighbor with impunity, providing them with the means to do so, throwing the Middle East into chaos, endangering the lives of 25,000 Americans, killing eight Canadians and more than 300 Lebanese, most of them civilians, would be to engage in some political profiteering. And who better to dance on the grave of the dead for political gain than Dick Cheney.

Cheney's visit to Tampa helped raise about $200,000 for the campaign of Gus Bilirakis, a state legislator who is running for the Tampa Bay area congressional seat his father, Michael, is vacating.

"Gus is going to remember that the first order of business is to protect the American people and to support the men and women who defend us in time of war," Cheney told the audience at a $500-a-ticket fundraising reception. "There's still hard work ahead in the war on terror."

Cheney said that as Republicans make their case to voters in the midterm elections, "it's vital that we keep issues of national security at the top of the agenda." He faulted Democrats in Congress who have pushed for a timetable for withdrawing Americans from Iraq, saying that would send the wrong message to terrorists.

"If anyone thinks the conflict is over or soon to be over, all they have to do is look at what's happening in the Middle East today," he said.

I suppose allowing Israel to bomb around 25,000 Americans does not enter into Cheney's understanding of national security.

A story just went up on the New York Times' website quoting several officials that said the administration, through Arab proxies, is trying to wedge Syria away from Iran, and also stop supporting Hezbollah.

In interviews, senior administration officials said they had no plans right now to resume direct talks with the Syrian government. President Bush recalled his ambassador to Syria, Margaret Scobey, after the assassination of Rafik Hariri, a former Lebanese prime minister, in February 2005. Since then, America’s contacts with Damascus have been few, and the administration has imposed an array of sanctions on Syria’s government and banks, and frozen the assets of Syrian officials implicated in Mr. Hariri’s killing.

But officials said this week that they were at the beginning stages of a plan to encourage Saudi Arabia and Egypt to make the case to the Syrians that they must turn against Hezbollah. With the crisis at such a pivotal stage, officials who are involved in the delicate negotiations to end it agreed to speak candidly about their expectations only if they were not quoted by name.

“We think that the Syrians will listen to their Arab neighbors on this rather than us,’’ said one senior official, “so it’s all a question of how well that can be orchestrated.’’

There are several substantial hurdles to success. The effort risks allowing Syria to regain a foothold inside Lebanon, after its troops were forced to withdraw last year. It is not clear how forcefully Arab countries would push a cause seen to benefit the United States and Israel. And many Middle Eastern analysts are skeptical that a lasting settlement can be achieved without direct talks between Syria and the United States.

And this from MSNBC: "The Israeli military takes a hilltop from Hezbollah." You know, if this wasn't so tragic, it would be hilarious.

South Florida's own Robert Wexler on The Colbert Report

Stylus' top 100 music videos, complete with overrated perennials and unexpected finalists (check out the number one). I've got blurbs on Peter Gabriel, Talking Heads, the Beasties, and R.E.M.

Very quickly, for I must eat

Here's a very good post by Lawrence Pintak, the director of the Adham Center for Electronic Journalism at The American University in Cairo and a former CBS Middle East correspondent, which far more artfully describes the American media's incompetence in covering the Middle East that I've been talking about.

Hype abounded. "This could be World War Three!" more than one reporter was heard to say. The same dramatic images were endlessly repeated, as if on a loop. Rumor was elevated to fact -- and the networks seemed proud of it. One CNN promo showed an unedited sequence in which a nameless photographer told Anderson Cooper, in northern Israel, that there was a rumor of rockets on the way. Cooper then turned to the camera and authoritatively reported, "The police say more rockets are coming."

...

There was little effort to identify the politics of many of the pseudo-experts who were trotted into the studios. Right-wing Lebanese Christians and representatives of Israeli-backed think tanks -- both with axes to grind -- were offered up as independent analysts. Anchors and reporters, meanwhile, frequently wore their politics on their sleeve. When an American woman trapped in southern Lebanon decried Washington's failure to stop what she said was Israel's brutal killing of civilians, CNN anchor Tony Harris snapped back, "That's not the view over here," and cut her off, saying he didn't have time to debate the issue.

...

NBC anchor Brian Williams made much of the fact that when he went on a helicopter flight with an Israeli officer to take a look at the fighting, "We got closer than we intended." Turns out that some shells landed in the distance. War is Hell, Brian.

Even more troubling was the fact that the Williams segment, along with reports by several other NBC correspondents, ran on Scarborough Country, an overtly politicized talk show, further blurring the line between news and opinion and muddying the waters of cable journalism.

Amid segments from such stalwart NBC correspondents as Martin Fletcher, there was Scarborough describing Hezbollah as an "Iran-backed terror group" and throwing former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak softballs like, "Why is it the more Israel is willing to give up to the Palestinians, the more your country comes under attack?" Meanwhile, conservative iconoclast Tucker Carlson, sans bowtie, has been out there "reporting" from the Israeli border, asking real NBC correspondents such leading questions as, "Do we have any idea whether this city was targeted by Hezbollah because of its Christian population?" (This isn't just about "good" Christians and "bad" Muslims, Tucker.)

I'm about to burst into tears.

Be afraid, be very afraid

Here's how Israel got the message to Lebanese in the south to evacute behind the Litani according to Anthony Shadid, who's without a doubt doing the best reporting from the region:

TYRE, Lebanon, July 20 -- The warning came in the morning Thursday, a recorded message dialed to phone numbers in southern Lebanon. In flawless Arabic, it instructed: Leave now, beyond the Litani River that bisects the rock-studded wadis of the south. Don't flee on motorcycles or in vans or trucks. Otherwise, you will be a target. The message signed off simply: the state of Israel.

Creepy. And is that really how Israel identifies Hebollah members? By the type of vehicle they drive?

Here's the rest of Shadid's lede, who in a brief couple of paragraphs, is able to paint a poignant picture of the wider conflict:

But leaving this southern Lebanese city Thursday was more complicated than a choice. Aid officials say that tens of thousands have already fled Tyre and its environs along the Mediterranean Sea but that perhaps 12,000 Lebanese remain stranded. The wartime circumstances of a besieged city keep them here: no gasoline for their cars, no money for taxi fares that have surged 75-fold, no faith in assurances from Israeli forces that have repeatedly attacked civilian vehicles and, most desperately, no hope of finding safety.

"We're just left here to die," said Maher Yassin, standing across from Tyre's harbor and wearing a shirt that read, "Mortal."

The plight of Tyre's people is the story of the latest Arab-Israeli conflict writ small: In nine days of attacks that Israel says have targeted the infrastructure of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, Lebanon's civilians have suffered inordinately, with more than 300 dead, many times that number wounded and 500,000 displaced. As this city awaits the brunt of an Israeli attack that most think is imminent, resignation, hopelessness, occasional defiance and a sense of abandonment course through the beleaguered population.

"They evacuate the foreigners, bring them to safety, and they leave us like dogs in the street," said Therese Khairallah, sitting with friends in an alley near the seashore. "A small mistake turned into this mountain of a disaster, and we're the victims."

She shook her head, on a day when attacks had waned, more breather than respite. "God knows what's ahead."

How anyone can still think that they can pound a people into submission and not expect any backlash is just beyond me?

Macbush: The Tragicomical History of Dubya the Great, King of America, and Subsequently Emperor of Oceania

In these times of crisis, the classics provide us with comfort and context:

Edited and conjecturally restored by Harold Bloom
(A play in three acts)

Preface
There can be little doubt of the historical existence of the King-Emperor Dubya the Great, who is thought to have reigned from 2001 to 2009, and to have presided over the transition from the American Plutocracy to the Oceanic Empire, which appears to have taken place in November 2004, 20 years after the date set by the prophet Orwellius.

Unfortunately, only a few fragments of the manuscript of Dubya the Great (also known as Macbush) have been recovered. They were found during the Times of Troubles, which followed the fall of the Oceanic Empire. The Great Bank Crisis preceded the Rebellion of the Serfs, and the Second Civil War resulted in extensive carnage and looting. After the sacking of the Wyoming states of the descendants of Richard Duke of Helliburton (protagonist and hero-villain of Dubya the Great), various bits of the text were discovered as wrappings on spare brandy snifters, some two dozen in numbers.

In editing these foul papers, rent by broken glass, I have been compelled to undertake the dubious labor of conjectural emendation, which rarely evokes universal scholarly assessment. However, I have been aided by my shrewd surmise that the dramatist who composed Dubya the Great was Richard Wharfinger, author of “The Courier’s Tragedy,” preserved for us in a full plot summary, with extracts, by T. Pynchon in “The Crying of Lot 49,” pp. 64-75.

Much of the fragmentary Dubya the Great seems to be plagiarized from Shakespeare, particularly from the high tragedy of Macbeth. Wharfinger, as was his wont, also pilfered from Shakespeare’s forerunner Christopher Marlowe. The character of Richard Duke of Helliburton is indebted to Barabas, hero-villain of Marlowe’s “The Jew of Malta,” while Dubya the Great is quarried mostly from Macbeth and from Tamburlaine in Marlow’s “Tamburlaine the Great.”
Thought little aesthetic merit can be ascribed to Dubya the Great, it may survive as a historical curiosity, quaint indeed in our present age of the orderly reign of King Jeb the Fifth, who presided over the full Restoration of the House of Bush.

Wharfinger was a rather bloody-minded dramatist, who preferred the gory Titus Andronicus, Troilus and Cressida, and Macbeth to Shakespeare’s more refined dramas. This Wharfinger taste was reinforced by the brutalities of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, as reflected in Dubya the Great’s war leadership, and by the Machiavellian bloodlust of Barabas, a strong strain in Richard Duke of Helliburton and in Rummy Baron Bechtoll and his henchman Wolfie.

Dramatis Personae
(Wharfinger’s listing, but only some of these manifest in the three fragments that have been preserved.)
Dubya the Great
The King Father
Richard Duke of Helliburton
Rummy Baron Bechtoll
Lord Colin of Powell
Baron Ashplant
Baron Rover
Grand Duke of Bakerhut
Prince Jeb of Veneria
Sir Will Slick the Usurper

Sodom Hussy, Emperor of Babylon

The Cabal, or the Seven Deadly Virtues:
Wolfie the Leader
Pearl-of-Great-Price
Will Crystal
Faith
Kaghan
Elyot
Gingy Newt

The Queen-Empress
The Queen Mother
Lady Slick
Lady Leezza of Stanford

(The three surviving scenes are Act.I, Scene I; Act II, Scene 3; Act III, Scene 5. All are set in Washington, D.C.)

Act I, Scene 1

(A secret hideaway of Richard Duke of Helliburton. Enter unto him Rummy Baron Bechtoll and Wolfie.

Helliburton: And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice,
Is it profane that an empire can rise without His aid?

Bechtoll: Jesus and big battalions rise together
As even Wolfie avers.

Wolfie: American Jesus is a Republican.
That is the Gospel according to Saint Leo.

Helliburton: To business then. Babylon’s oil must be ours.
The Persian Gulf is ours to get and keep.
What says your Office of Special Plans?

Bechtoll: Let Wolfie speak for the Cabal.

Wolfie: Many will talk of title to a crown:
What right had Caesar to the empery?
Might first made kings, and laws are most sure
When at full moon they are writ in blood.
And let us smile to see how full our bags are crammed.

Helliburton: And thus methinks should Helliburton frame
My means of traffic from warlike trade
And as my wealth increaseth, so inclose
Infinite riches in this little room.

Bechtoll: Here commeth our fullmooners now.

Enter pell-mell, to stand alongside Wolfie, the six other Deadly Virtues. With Wolfie giving them the beat, they chant in unison:

Cabal: We weird brothers, hand in hand,
Mooners of the Sea and Land,
Thus do plot, around, about,
Seven to thine, and thine to seven,
Seven again, for G.O.P. heaven,
Oil and power neath every Bush
Our charm’s wound up, and we rush,
Old Sodom Hussy to crush, to crush—

Helliburton: But stay, weird fullmooner-neos,
Loyal Straussians of Saint Leo’s.
Old Europe balks at our crusade,
Their outcries flow in full cascade.
What can we urge as truth,
What tales present as perfect sooth?

Bechtoll: Old Europe’s done, and must pall.
Our empire shall engross them all.

Wolfie: W.M.D.’s in Babylon abound,
Vats of Plague shall e’er be found,
Catapults of Greek Fire;
Assassins of the Base aspire
To bring our Towers of Hermes down,
And burn New York into Troy Town.

Helliburton: These suffice, and so I urge
Us forward in no shallow surge.
Summon King Dubya to hear our case
To crusade forth against the Base!

(“The Base” is Wharfinger’s translation of the Arabic al-Qaeda. The remainder of Act I is lost, beyond even conjectural restoration.)

Act II, Scene 3

Dubya: Now crouch, ye triple kingdoms of the world
For shock and awe shall rain upon your battlements
As my pathetical persuasion strikes at your pleasure.
Know ye not that I, Dubya, have come out of Crawford
To bring you hot blessings of New World order?
All of earth shall melt into my Oceania,
Making it safe for democracy and commerce.
And all shall know that I am Dubya,
Emperor of the globe, who shall fix my banners
Upon the high towers of Babylon, and cage the impostor assassin,
Who plotted murder of my dear Poppy,
For which I shall pen Sodom Hussy in a spider hole
Where he may bat his brains out against the earth
And grace my triumph.

Helliburton: We’ll dance our masque as if it were the truth,
Since we are sworn to perpetual vendetta
Against the Base and the Democrats, and on all else who doubt
Our zeal, we’ll bring down fell and soulless doom
Unutterable…

Bectholl: Their base lies we rewrite into truth,
Our Truth. Who is not with us,
Here or in Old Europe,
Is against us. Only Helliburton and Bechtoll
Shall rebuild Babylon.

Leezza: Who dare doubt us? Only those
That wish the smoking gun to be a Plague cloud.

Rover: The sage Mencken counseled:
Fool all the people all the time.

Wolfie: Boobus americanus, as the sage so dubbed him,
And we must save him from himself.

Helliburton: Our creed’s National Security, our state
Knows every grain of Pluto’s gold.

Ashplant: A watchful state keeps place with forethought,
And, like God, unveils all thoughts in their dumb cradles.
There is a mystery in the soul of state,
Which has an operation more divine
Than the foolish press can know and publish.
What’s theirs is first ours
And ever must remain so.

Rover: Well spoke, Baron! Oceania thrives
On Doublethink and Doublespeak.
We soak the poor, enrich the rich,
And say that all who murmur profess class warfare.

Wolfie: Our gallant regions fester here
At home in neighborhoods so bleak
But thrive abroad in Babylon.
Yes, they’re the ones of which we speak.

Bechtoll: Our brave Franks (well he deserves that name),
Disdaining Fortune, with his brandish’d steel,
Which smok’d with bloody execution,
(Like Valor’s minion) carved out his passage
Till we faced the slaves
And unseamed them from the nave to the chops,
And fixed their heads upon their battlements.

Helliburton: Rummy, you engorge your soul,
Even as the oil-rich Gulf enlarges our cofers.

Dubya: Let the Cabal chant!

The Seven Deadly Virtues, to Wolfie’s beat, conclude the scene with a dance, as they recite:

Cabal: All hail Dubya! All hail Macbush,
Thane of Crawford, Thief of Baghdad,
King-Emperor of Oceania!
Saw we weird brothers, hand in hand,
Boasters of the Sea and Land—
A billion Muslims, on their sands,
Shall rue the drives of Dubya’s bands.

(The rest has been lost.)

Act III, Scene 5

Dubya in conclave with Helliburton, Bechtoll, and Leezza. Wolfie enters.

Wolfie: O royal imp of fame,
Sodom Hussy is taken!

Dubya: Mission accomplished!

Helliburton: We must not heed all those who scoff
At the W.M.D.’s we have not found,
Or at his missing links to the Base.

Bechtoll: Look round the wicked streets of Babylon,
And when we find the murderers, we’ll stab ‘em,
For all who have served Sodom Hussy are murderers.

Wolfie: For a time they will stab back,
But our force is copious and can endure loss.
Pre-emption is imperial policy
And will mark Oceania as Dubya’s forever.

Leezza: We have stovepiped Dubya to his glory!

Dubya: Summon the Cabal to proclaim my empire!

The cabal enters, and chants in unison to Wolfie’s beat, as they dance:

Cabal: Eye of Newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork, and blindworm’s sting,
Lizzard’s leg, and owlet’s wing,
For Dubya’s charm of power and trouble,
A hellbroth of war and bubble.

Hellibruton: O, well done! I commend your pains!
And everyone shall share our gains!

All onstage proclaim Dubya the Great as Emperor of Oceania.

Dubya: Scourge of kingdoms with my conquering sword,
Yet I shall bring universal peace upon the globe,
Unipolar, as I confront the axis of evil.

Midyear roundup

Twelve singles you need to own. Thanks to Matos.

Mary J. Blige, "Be Without You"
Madonnna, "Sorry"
Nelly Furtado feat. Timbaland, "Promiscuous"
Ghostface feat Capadonna, Trife, Shawn Digs, Theodore Unit, "Jellyfish"
Gnarls Barkley, "Crazy"
Basement Jaxx, "Hush Boy"
Sonic Youth, "Pink Stream"
The Pipettes, "Pullshapes"
Pet Shop Boys, "Minimal"
Christina Aguilera, "Ain't No Man"
The Arctic Monkeys, "Dancing Shoes"
Scritti Politti, "Robin Hood"

Basement Jaxx: sleazy, sneaky, joyless, marvelous

Basement Jaxx are shrill. Basement Jaxx are merciless when it comes to cobbling hooks, rhythm tracks you think you remember from old house or Italo-disco records, and diva vocal melodies. Basement Jaxx albums remind me of casual gay sex observed from a comfortable distance by liberal het chroniclers: you're at the bar, you hear music in flashes, you don't remember the conversation, and suddenly you're back at his place and THUMP THUMP THUMP; it's fun and not very enjoyable.

These objections still hold for Crazy Itch Radio. But it's also the record of theirs I've enjoyed the most -- the one which, two days later, doesn't pain me to recollect in tranquility. Their version of dance music still doesn't offer the promise of transcendence that their referents did without strain; their elusively allusive approach evinces a certain quaint European post-modernism that doesn't fudge the line between distance and submission as often as we'd like. Post-modernists need concepts, though. The key is in the title: truth in advertising if anything is. An imaginary station on which you can hear tracks evoking/inspired by Vanity 6, Robyn, Cee-Lo, and Dizzee Rascal duke it out, Crazy Itch Radio realizes BJaxx's pursuit of sleazy pleasure. Credit the album's near-flawless sequencing. Applaud their writing/assembling sleazy pleasures like "Hush Boy," "Take Me Back To Your House," and "U R On My Mind," the latter of which summons the ancient weirdness of a DJ Shadow track (Greil Marcus might approve).

I'm Not Lion

When I first heard that an American raid had left a few lions from the Baghdad zoo wandering the streets, I thought: "What a story!" and came up with an outline semi-updating Animal Farm to fit current events (sacrilegious as that may sound). But a few months later out came that "Madagascar" movie. I thought the concept was too similar, (the thing was recycled to begin with) and threw that half-baked sucker on the ever growing pile of never-weres. Then a few months Disney came up with ANOTHER animated flick that had, like, the SAME plot, (that one was called "The Wild.") I was upset and felt like adding to the cannibal orgy and once again drug up my litle story about the Iraqi lions that are "freed" and don't quite know what to do with their freedom, but then something shiny flew outside my window and I got distracted, which is just as well because a much better writer (Brian K. Vaughan, he of "Y: The Last Man" fame) is tackling the story- and hopefully doing it justice.
"Pride of Baghdad"is looking great. It comes out September 13.

Losing Joementum

In a Quinnipiac University poll released today, Ned Lamont surged ahead of Lieberman by four points among likely voters. Lamont has 51 to Lieberman's 47.

Anti-war Connecticut U.S. Senate candidate Ned Lamont has surged to a razor-thin 51 - 47 percent lead over incumbent Sen. Joseph Lieberman among likely Democratic primary voters, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.

This compares to a 55 - 40 percent lead for Sen. Lieberman among likely Democratic primary voters in a June 8 poll by the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University.

But the poll also confirms what we've known all along, that in a three-way race, with Lieberman as an independent, things start to look better for the schmuck. Here are the likely election matchups.

• Lieberman defeats Republican challenger Alan Schlesinger 68 - 15 percent;
• Lamont beats Schlesinger 45 - 22 percent, with 24 percent undecided;
• Running as an independent, Lieberman gets 51 percent, to 27 percent for Lamont and 9 percent for Schlesinger.

And Bill Clinton, who can apparently forgive all things, will be stumping for Lieberman next week. But who knows, he might also miss his train.