Wow

I found an article about a "Porn star in a wheelchair [who] breaks barriers" in the Guardian. Yeah.

Feminist standpoint theory vs. postmodern feminist theory

An insighful essay on feminist standpoint theory and what poststructuralist and postmodern feminist theory makes of it.

I thought Thomas might enjoy it.

They found a way to put the fun back in sin

As promised, my Sleater Kinney obit. I had no urge to listen to them last night; the jones was satisfied on Sunday when, reviewing a CD-R I burned for a friend, I listened to opener "Little Mouth."

Craziness

A brief triple post from Memphis, home to some of the world's best barbeque spots and, (not a coincidence) fat Elvis. One: I want an explanation for the sort of craziness that allowed the following change to take place in an adjoining restaurant table during lunch.
"You know what gnaws at me? Pedophiles... It's so horrible- How could someone even think to hurt an innocent child?" Nods all around. "I don't understand why God doesn't just send AIDS to kill them, like he did for the faggots."
Just the sort of deadly conversational leap that would be accompanied by a record scratch on a sitcom but in reality is only answered by... more nods all around.
I think the whole of my sociopolitical frustrations always come to this childish whine:
Why are people so MEAN?
Two: I wish I'd had a camera to capture the sign outside Memphis' First Methodist Curch, because this week's sermon has a very (unintentionally) amusing theme:
"Jesus is the Guide for the Blind."
Hmmmm...
Let's think about that one long and hard.
Three: David Gilmour's "On an Island" merits a second listen- or a first, if you're like most people. You won't even notice that Roger Waters is elsewhere, politicking.

Sleater Kinney – R.I.P.

So reported here. What a run. Disregarding Greil Marcus' hyperventilation on their behalf, they really were almost as great as he said. I may write later about how first hearing Dig Me Out in the summer of 1997 made me want to vomit – the reaction was that visceral.

Arif Mardin, R.I.P.

The man responsible for two of my favorite records (Dusty in Memphis, Scritti Politti's Cupid & Psyche' 85). What a resumé.

"Nobody wants to be themselves"

I'm not convinced that the Gnarls Barkley album is great -- yet -- but I'm willing to be. This collection of tunelets, aborted soundscapes, interrupted jokes, and real songs evokes that smell of midnight-in-the-perfect-world ether of prime DJ Shadow, only it's not so mysterious. At its worst it's rather gimmicky (the curtain parts when "Transformer" turns into a lost Andre 3000 track from The Love Below and "Go-Go Gadget Gospel" keens like Basement Jaxx).

A narrative of sorts unfolds: a character with a warped sense of humor struggles to maintain a sense of equilibrium; it's whistling in the dark, and one of the few times that an audio experience captures that sense of suspension before a thought is vocalized. Often the thoughts are contradictory for their own sake, like telling yourself that 2+2=5 to adduce your ability to escape the boredom of logic. He has to rummage through his trunk of discarded identities first. I sense no angst. Like Prince and Green Gartside, Cee-lo questions God and language because a girl dumped his ass (admitting that "Basically I'm complicated" on "Who Cares?" verges on caddishness). Only on "Necromancer" does Cee-Lo make explicit the link between The Girl-as-source-material and The Girl-who-done-me-wrong: she's a nexus between those sadomasochistic blues tropes and the "neo necro" hocus pocus in which producer Danger Mouse envelops them. It's a troubling song, not least because Cee-Lo's reaction to The Girl's overdose has more in common with Rick James than Robert Johnson. Even creepier is the woozy "Smiley Faces," in which Cee-Lo can't figure out why The Girl is so damn happy all the time, despite his shit. He envies her but can't bring himself to emulate her -- not yet.

No caveats about "Crazy," possibly the weirdest song to hit the Billboard Top 10 this millenium.

Who fancies Nancy?

Since Jillian mentioned House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi in passing a few hours ago, let me link to this Slate piece which ran a few months ago (one of my favorites this year) praising Pelosi's unrivalled genius for ill-considered political moves. I'll also add her talent for nearly always saying the wrong thing and looking shrill and strung-out, rather like Condoleeza Rice.

This essay deserves another look too. I forgive Jacob Weisberg for writing "Howard Dean is smarter than either Pelosi or [Senate Minority Leader Harry] Reid."

This Prairie might be too homey

Irony and sincerity collide, dissolve, and collide again, infuriatingly, in Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion. Young men of Cuban descent didn't grow up listening to Garrison Keillor's corny fireside cats (but I did read a lengthy excerpt from Lake Woebegon Days in a 1986 issue of Reader's Digest, if that counts), not when they had their abuelos and tios' domino-side chats to parse. Wry, affectionate, and often inert, APC doesn't know whether to gently prod these amiable second-raters for their gumption or let them have their fun; Altman doesn't seem to know either, which is part of its minor charm (the film's villain, played by Tommy Lee Jones, is disposed of – I mean this literally – in a manner that can only be described as defiantly listless). The film's about 10 minutes too long.

Lindsey Lohan is fine. Kevin Kline plays a hopeless part with a deadpan skill which gets more surprising as the movie progresses and you realize he's still getting away with it. Lily Tomlin proves once again that she should be in every movie ever made (the closeup of her legs in I ::Heart:: Huckabees is one of the most generous moments a youngish director ever offered an actress over forty). RoboStreep, engine purring but not yet revved up, gets into the spirit of the proceedings; she and Tomlin sure don't look like sisters but you'd never know it. This is minor Altman to be sure; like Cookie's Fortune, perfidy is intimated without anyone paying it any mind.

Cuban transition in the works?

Oscar Corral posted a good chunk of Brian Latell’s report, which I’m going to paste below, inferring from recent media coverage of Raul Castro in Cuba, that a transition may have already begun. It’s almost inconceivable to me, that Fidel Castro would relinquish any bit of power—even to his brother—but Latell makes a convincing argument.

"Signs of what is probably accelerating succession planning at the highest levels of the Castro regime have been multiplying since early this month. As Fidel Castro’s ability to provide coherent leadership has conspicuously deteriorated, his brother Raul seems to be assuming broader responsibilities while also reaching out to improve his image with the Cuban people. These developments could even indicate that Raul has already assumed critical responsibilities from his brother and is now acting as Cuba’s de facto top decision maker.

"Raul has been asserting personal control over the communist party apparatus, highlighting its likely enhanced role in the future. He has been focusing intense and sympathetic media attention on himself, while also emphasizing the strength and unity of the armed forces he has run since 1959. He has been out in public much more than has been customary, regularly now appearing on the front page of the official communist party daily, Granma. Cuban media coverage of the younger Castro has reached such unprecedented intensity in fact, that it seems logical to conclude that he has authorized the creation of his own public relations staff. Always deferential to Fidel’s starring role in the Cuban revolution, Raul would never in the past have presumed to upstage his brother this way.

"The media blitz began on June 3rd, Raul’s 75th birthday, when Granma, ran a remarkable, extended paean to the defense minister. Under the headline Cercania de Raul, literally translated as “nearness” to Raul, the article was intended in part to project a sympathetic image of a leader who has never been popular with the Cuban people. But the Spanish language title of the article also suggests a possibly momentous double meaning: Cercania de Raul might also be translated as the “proximity of Raul,” suggesting that his ascent to power in his own right has begun, or is imminent. I do not believe that Raul has ever been the subject of such unusual and personalized media attention."

"The Granma birthday article was unprecedented in a number of respects. The authors, longtime close personal friends of Raul, seemed intent on distinguishing him favorably from Fidel, which would have been inconceivable until now. The “modesty and simplicity” that Raul demonstrates “in personal interactions” according to the authors, certainly contrasts with Fidel’s grandiosity."

"Raul, the article emphasized, avoids making “unilateral assessments.” Instead –and notably unlike his brother—he always encourages “collective” approaches to solving problems. The implication in this, and other similar references in the article, as well as in a pointed passage in a speech Raul delivered to a military audience on June 14th, is probably that he intends to govern at the head of a collective civilian-military team. He seems to be signaling other Cuban officials that he does not plan to occupy all of the most important positions of power in the party and government, as Fidel does. That is a sound strategy for assuring leadership support for Raul’s uncontested succession..."

"...The article concludes with several passages drawn from Fidel’s speeches and interviews over the years, in which he certifies his brother as his legitimate and preferred successor. “In my opinion, the colleague that was best prepared and that I knew could very well carry out the task was comrade Raul.” And, Fidel is also quoted as once having said: “everybody knows we hate nepotism here. (But) I honestly think that (Raul) has the sufficient qualities to substitute for me in case I die in this battle".

It's 1:30 a.m. -- time to spotlight the fool of the day

I will write more on this nincompoop when I’m sober and not minutes away from bedtime, though I'm still debating whether he's worth the attention. I first ran into his nonsense on Andres Oppenheimer’s blog, but I didn’t pay much attention to him. Now, it seems he has found his way into my goddamn blog and just commented here, that the reason the Cuban government restricts the internet is because of American telecom restrictions, which is absolute nonsense. The Sentinel story, for example, points to the fact that the internet booths for Cubans do not allow them to access the Internet—only a local intranet—even if they pay with dollars.

Go Hillary!(?)

I was surprised to learn that Hillary Rodham Clinton is not 100% pro-choice (her focus is on preventing pregnancy). Because of this and other reasons, many women may not have her back in the 2008 elections.

Would you vote for Hillary in '08? Why or why not?

the king of jiggle television is dead. long live the king.

The New York Times reports that Aaron Spelling, "the most prolific producer in American television," died at the ripe ol' age of 83 at his ridiculously enormous L.A. mansion. One can only hope that this means that Tori Spelling will never appear in another television series again.

To honor Aaron Spelling's memory, a question: who had the best hair on "Dynasty"? Discuss.

First Off, They're Lesbians

Have you heard the fantastic Tegan and Sara yet? If you haven't, you may be missing out on one of today's best indie/folk bands.

But I have brought them up because of something I recently read. Please take a look at this brief review (the first one under "Editorial Reviews") on Amazon.com about their latest LP, So Jealous (2004), and tell me what jumps out at you.

Here's what jumped out at me: the reviewer states that Tegan and Sara are "destined for hugeness." Agreed. At the same time, before that, the reviewer apparently felt the need to provide the reader with a caveat of sorts: Tegan and Sara are identical twin lesbians. Now don't you forget! the author seems to be telling us.

When did musicians' sexual orientation become so significant that it must be mentioned prior to the merits of the very music these musicians are responsible for? I was never a George Michael fan, say, but was his homosexuality brought up in reviews before the writers got to the point? Please educate me on this.

Jon Stewart: an anarchist

Richard Morin writes:

This is not funny: Jon Stewart and his hit Comedy Central cable show may be poisoning democracy.

Two political scientists found that young people who watch Stewart's faux news program, "The Daily Show," develop cynical views about politics and politicians that could lead them to just say no to voting.

To which I say: great! Let's keep as many people as possible from voting. The public realizes how corrupt the ruling party is and the intellectual vacuity of its opposition. Another Constitutional Convention, I say!

Give me indefinite leave to remain

On their best album in 13 years, the Pet Shop Boys make the first deliberate Pet Shop Boys album of their career -- which is to say, the first one which recapitulates familiar PSB themes and subjects (two other recent autumnal recordings include Prince's 3121 and Sonic Youth's Rather Ripped). This is Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe reminding their fans that no one else is as arch, as perceptive, as willing to accept human frailty -- and it doesn't make them wusses. Here's my review in the Village Voice.

Do you feel safe in your neighborhood?

Because I don't--whether I'm in Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, Miami, Sarasota, NYC, ... Perhaps because I am a woman I will always feel more vulnerable and susceptible than men when it comes to being harrassed, mugged, raped, or in any way, shape, or form attacked (as long as I live in a patriarchal society, that is).

This is probably because most offenders are male, and because most women haven't been educated nor do they educate themselves on the martial arts, nor do they carry a gun or even Mace on their person (something I've been planning to acquire for a while now, and it's time for me to get it already, and keep it on me whenever I leave the apartment if I'm walking more than 5 blocks, say).

The safest I've ever felt is when I took karate lessons (I went as far as a purple belt--halfway to black--before I had to move and never took it up again). I beat guys up no problem. I was never afraid on the street: I pitied the fool who would take me on. And I was only 14. Never mind that I had a god[dess] complex because of my physical abilities--a large part of the point is that I felt safe in my own skin, whereas I currently feel frail and feeble. Lifting weights doesn't do it, yoga never will, nor killing myself on the elliptical machine or kicking everyone's ass on the tennis court.

And yet I'm sure that most men, whether or not they're scrawny and weak, feel pretty damn confident about being able to fend off attackers; nor, I bet, do they ever feel anxious about getting raped. I blame this partly on conditioning: women are taught , from childhood, that they are weaker than men, and that men are the protectors ("Honey, there's a cockroach in the kitchen!! Please, you big, strong man: come kill it for me before I faint!")--and the attackers as well. [Most] women have been stuck between a rock and a hard place since kindergarten.

I'm not sure what to do with these thoughts at this juncture, but I consider it a topic worth discussing, so bring it on.

Write your own caption

Waters Pulls a Reagan

I'm all for walling. Especially when it keeps the trannies and insects out.

JERUSALEM (AP) - Veteran British rocker Roger Waters, co-creator of the legendary Pink Floyd album The Wall, performed for Israeli fans Thursday after urging Israel to tear down the concrete barrier walling off parts of the West Bank.

Oh, I heard a great joke the other day! It goes:

Knock-knock!
Who's there?
Amos.
Amos who?
A mosquito.

How much pandering could one man do?

I suppose it's a little bit of a stretch but you could draw a parallel between the Hungarian uprising put down by the Soviets in 1956 and the occupation of Iraq. You have a ragtag group of militants trying to take power of their country--the Hungarians had far less bloodlust--from the puppet regime of a hegemony. Oh, wait a minute, Bush is saying the United States is Hungary? Talk about mixing analogies. How does that work?

BUDAPEST, June 22 — Fifty years after Hungarian partisans waged a bloody but unsuccessful uprising against Communist rule, President Bush came to this eastern European capital today to lay a bouquet at the Eternal Flame monument, but also to draw a comparison to the current war in Iraq.

"The sacrifice of the Hungarian people inspires all who love liberty," Mr. Bush said in a speech at Buda Castle on Gellert Hill, overlooking the Danube and the city below. He continued: "America honors your courage. We've learned from your example, and we resolve that when people stand up for their freedom, America will stand with them."

Bush might have no concept of history or context, but during the '56 uprising the Hungarians asked for help from the West and none came. In fact, there are some very poignant radio broadcasts of Hungarians--you can hear one by Imre Nagy here--asking the world for help as Russian troops stormed Budapest.

Cross posted from TDU.

Botox me up!

This is really something. Apparently Botox injections can eradicate depression--or so claims the dermatologist who funded the study. It's one of the most ridiculous things I've ever read. Fortunately, it's an objective article, if shocking. Still, I'm sure depressed middle-and-upper-class baby boomers everywhere would rejoice if this method of treatment were truly proved effective.

Are druids creepy or what?

From my private AP wire (wink, wink):

Thousands of dancing and drumming revelers cheered the summer solstice at Stonehenge as an orange sliver of sun rose Wednesday.

About 19,000 New Agers, present-day druids and partygoers gathered inside and around the ancient circle of towering stones to greet the longest day in the northern hemisphere as the sun struggled to peek out against a smoky gray sky.

“This is the nearest thing I’ve got to religion,” said Ray Meadows, 34, of Bristol, England. The solstice “is a way of giving thanks to the earth and the universe.”

Meadows, wearing a wreath of pink carnations over long pink hair-wrapped braids, identified herself as a fairy of the Tribe of Frog.

Wait, never mind, I think I could totally get with this religion:

Crowds of partygoers stumbled toward their cars an hour after sunrise, some clutching nearly empty bottles or beer cans.

One described the crowd as 5 percent pagan and 95 percent partygoer.

And of course, religious zealots always try to ruin the fun:

“Some people here are really spoiling it,” said Chris Sargent, 37, of Bournemouth. “Once upon a time it was really spiritual.”

Sargent, clad in a long black jacket and pants, top hat and fighter pilot goggles, drank vodka and Coke from a two-liter soda bottle and confessed he was “really stoned.”

Cross posted from The Diarist Unbound.

Leonard Cohen: Hilarious Jewish Asshole

That old buzzard Leonard Cohen is one of those performers I like more than love. The received fatalism of his early work endears him to the young, for whom the grotesqueries of Tom Waits sound like wisdom (fatalism always sounds like wisdom when it's croaked). Rescreening Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs Miller last week, I noted, stunned, that the use of Cohen's songs was the most blatant concession to exposition and foreshadowing -- two elements Altman usually eschews with admirable doggedness. "Sisters of Mercy" sounded like so much jive (sorry, Lex).

For me he only hit his stride when he replaced the acoustic guitars with the Econo-Lodge synthesizers and hootchie-cootchie backup singers around the time of 1988's I'm Your Man. This and 1993's The Future indulge the fantasies of a pseudo-libertine who's drunk enough cognac to start to believe he had an active sex life; try to take his Gitanes and he'll horrify you with a 108-minute version of "Always." But he is erudite, at his best dropping prurient invocations ("Give me crack and anal sex/Take the only tree that's left/and stuff it up the hole/in your culture") which evoke the crumbling of the American Republic with more wit and foresight than Gore Vidal. In his sixties he realized that fatalism is really the sharpening of one's affinities for black humor. A shame then that his last two albums evoke instead Gerald Ford reciting a lifetime's worth of platitudes to a female grad student.

Cohen's in the news a lot these days, the subject of a documentary produced by, yes, Mel Gibson (who must have recogized himself as one of "Democracy"'s targets and is therefore a better sport than I); and in Mike Powell's rather magesterial reappraisal of his maligned 1977 collaboration with Phil Spector, Death of a Ladies' Man. Mike positions Cohen as part of the renowned lineage of Hilarious Jewish Assholes, of which Lou Reed, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker are charter members. I'd add Burt Bacharach, Randy Newman, Paul Simon, and, of course, Bob Dylan (whose contemporaneous Street-Legal wheezes "schlocky barroom bullshit," only it's not as funny).

aging feminists

Alas, a blog has a very good post on early-stage feminists and their absence from the blogosphere. I just know two bloggers on A Grand Illusion will be interested.

It seems to me that younger women like myself have a lot to learn from our older sisters; moreover, I think we can all benefit by focusing on issues that affect women through out the life course.Often feminists in my age group talk about issues like abortion, body image, marriage, child rearing, and birth control, focusing on how they affect women in their teen, 20s, and 30s. I suppose several of these issues are faced by women of all ages, but what we often fail to do is theorize about how these issues manifest themselves across the life course.

Yes, yes, he really did have a lovely voice...

My thoughts on His Bourgeois Lovingness, Luther Vandross, for once and for all. Now leave me alone.

Yay, Heat

If you're looking for analysis of and euphoria inspired by last night's game, you came to the wrong place. I do need to praise the stamina of my sixtysomething neightbors, who transformed from genial condo board enforces into revelers shortly after midnight.

80s hits and showtunes take on a whole new light.

I'm not sure whether to consider this video, shot by David LaChapelle for the runway opening of Heatherette, as art or mere oddity. I'm also not sure whether or not my love for Amanda Lepore is healthy or antifeminst (her self-objectification and status as a veritable human Barbie doll may be a bit problematic). Regardless, it's intriguing and just a little bit creepy.

As a side note, this video isn't work-safe - that is, unless you care for your superiors to believe that you're into male-to-female transsexuals covered in pink lipstick.

New address

You can find us now at agrandillusion.com

thanks for your patience.

"Romance and adventure..."

My review of Frank Kogan's book Real Punks Don't Wear Black.

Exciting day

One of the things I have to do today, before visiting the badass that impregnated by mother (here's a picture of him either pondering the meaning of life, about to recite Wallace Stevens' The Idea of Order at Key West in its entirity, or perfecting the 26th way to kill a man) is stop by the Social Security office. Several months ago, while still working at The Miami Herald, the paper published my Social Security number on the front of the Business section, ironically in a graphic about identity theft. While that's not the main reason why I left the paper, it definitely helped my decision. So now I have to get letters certifying that the new number is in fact mine, and not some scheme to skip out on student loans.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

Cross posted from my blog.

and they call this an institution of higher learning

Larry Lebowitz, who has the distinction of writing on the most boring subject on earth--traffic--has a piece in today's Herald on Florida International University's refusal, after many years of planning, to allow a Metrorail station on its campus.

The powers that be at FIU don't want Metrorail to stop anywhere on the main campus.

Transit had been planning for several years to build its end-of-the-line station on a wedge of FIU land located just east of Florida's Turnpike and Southwest 117th Avenue near the National Hurricane Center.

Now Transit is considering a new site about seven-tenths of a mile farther south, on county-owned land at Tamiami Regional Park.

No one intimately involved with FIU's master-planning, or the campus' recent negotiations with Transit, would speak for the record, leaving spokeswoman Maydel Santana-Bravo to explain the university's rationale.

FIU supports building an off-campus Metrorail station at the park because it ''wouldn't take up precious campus real estate,'' Santana-Bravo said.

For those unfamiliar with Miami, FIU is on the Western part of Miami-Dade County, a part of the county historically disconnected--not only geographically, but also culturally--from the east side of the county, where Miami proper and Miami Beach are. The extension of the Metrorail would essentially put that hinterland within a 20-minute train ride from the hub of the county, and the airport. It should reduce traffic dramatically. During rush hour, it takes about 2 hours to make it through a 10-mile stretch of highway. It only makes sense for the geniuses at FIU to try to screw all that up.

Cross posted from TDU.

The atrocity of an essentialist quiz

This makes me irate.--a completely essentialistic (and thus irrational and sexist) quiz that rates your brain's gender. Here's what I got:

Your Brain is 47% Female, 53% Male

Your brain is a healthy mix of male and female You are both sensitive and savvy Rational and reasonable, you tend to keep level headed But you also tend to wear your heart on your sleeve

What Gender Is Your Brain?

So, essentially, according to this quiz, sensitiveness is a female attribute and rationality is a male attribute; wearing my heart on my sleeve is, I take it, another female attribute.

I realize it's a quiz, and thus something to be taken lightly, but as the great Monique Wittig has said, "Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body," and through the language and outrageous implications this quiz makes, it blatantly perpetuates [sexist] gender stereotypes detrimental to the psychological evolution of our culture.

because cuban children are not like the rest of us.

Following the apparent surge of Cuba-related news, we have this interesting tidbit from today's New York Times. Seems that the Miami-Dade School Board voted 6-3 to ban a children's book on Cuba, entitled "Vamos a Cuba"/"A Visit to Cuba" due to its allegedly containing "deceptive information and paint[ing] an idealistic picture of life in Cuba."

The cover of the book shows smiling Cuban children in the uniform of the Pioneers, the Communist youth group to which every Cuban student must belong. The 32-page book describes July 26, a Cuban national holiday that celebrates a historic day in Fidel Castro's revolution, as a carnival where people dance and sing. Critics also found misleading a page reading, "People in Cuba eat, work, and go to school like you do."

"This is a very simplistic portrayal of all of the countries in the series because it's intended for our youngest readers," said Joseph Garcia, a spokesman for Miami-Dade County Public Schools and Superintendent Rudy Crew. "Complex subjects like Communism are not addressed."

But Juan Amador, the parent who made the complaint, said the book depicted Cuba as a paradise.

"It portrays a life in Cuba that does not exist and omits a lot of facts," Mr. Amador said. "Such a book should not be accessible to our children."

Obviously, because a children's book suggests that Cuban children go about daily life in a way similar to their American counterparts, it is "misleading" and ought to be taken out of schools. God forbid that six-year-olds not be explained the horrors of socialist government gone awry.

Predictably, however, the ACLU comes to the rescue!

Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, said the ban violated the First Amendment and pointed out that the book was optional reading material and not a required textbook. The A.C.L.U. plans to file a lawsuit next week to challenge the decision.

"This is a throwback to the kind of politics we saw in Miami a few decades ago in which the war against Castro was played out as a war against the First Amendment in Miami," Mr. Simon said. "It's a self-inflicted embarrassing black eye for Miami-Dade County."

Indeed. The situation is almost as mortifying as the Harry Potter book-banning controversy in Georgia, save for the fact that the Gwinnett County School Board eventually made the less embarrassing decision. In the meantime, the book - and the 23 others that join it in its series - are being taken off of library shelves. Oh reactionary politics, up yours.

a house divided?

I don't care much either way about this. But I will say that Catalan sounds a kind of funny, a little like pig latin. I'm just worried that it will fuck up the recent sync with which the Spanish team has been kicking ass recently.

Cross posted from Diarist Unbound.

a schmall compliment

In today's Herald, my friend Emily has a good article on the Opa-locka city commissioners voting to give themselves a raise--which seems outrageous percentage-wise, but it's not when you consider they make $50 a month--and to have the city assume the lawyers' fees, which IS outrageous. (And yes, you guessed it, there are several suits pending.) Opa-locka is the poorest city in Miami-Dade county and also the most entertaining. And Emily covers it with flair.

The charter currently mandates that a city official, if found guilty of a charter infraction, pay the plaintiff's litgation fees. Should voters approve the referendum question, the city, rather than its officials, would be liable. According to Commissioner Timothy Holmes, the commission had little concern about placing the burden on the city, ''as long as we don't have to pay it ourselves," he said.

At an April 19 meeting, when the commission voted to give $10,000 apiece to the vice mayor and two commissioners towards their legal defense in a civil lawsuit, City Attorney A. Quinn Jones advised they would personally be responsible for the litigation fees if found guilty. The charter says if a court rules in favor of the plaintiff, fees will be assessed against the commissioner "whose vote made the litigation necessary."

At that meeting, Quinn Jones suggested that section 178 in the charter -- which imposes fees on officials -- could be abolished through a voter referendum. But Quinn Jones warned that commissioners should "be aware that state law supersedes the municipality's charter provision." Therefore, any charter amendment to repeal that clause would have to be crafted to duplicate state law or risk challenges of legality.

Emily is also quite a looker, and single. Here's a picture of her looking bemused yet judicious, on the far right, as I drunkenly leer at two namesless blondes.


Cross posted from my blog.

Cuba report

Here are two excellent articles about Cuba. The first one ran in the Sun-Sentinel today. It's about Fidel Castro's Internet revolution. Castro has built about 600 computer school around the country trying to spark ab information industry.

The Youth Club reflects the complexities of Cuba's technology policy. The government is not only trying to teach basic computing as part of an overall push on education, but also wants to develop a formidable software industry.

For most Cubans, however, the ambitious tech plans stop at the Internet. Cubans are allowed to use e-mail and an intranet of government Web sites on topics from the weather to literature, but access is expensive for the average worker. Typically the government approves Internet access only for foreigners and a select group of Cubans. These include certain officials, academics, journalists and employees of foreign companies -- though some people use the accounts of friends or relatives.

At a March ceremony in Havana marking the 15th anniversary of a national computer education center, Castro said Cuba needs to get used to a "new world that keeps changing around us." At the same event he promoted the idea of grooming software developers at the University of Computer Sciences, a campus about 50 miles south of Havana that aims to attract the country's brightest tech students and teachers.

It's almost amusing to watch totalitarian regimes join the modern world without making consessions on the thing that keeps them behind, their politics. Castro, try as he might, will never accomplish a software industry if he keeps access to the internet restricted. Cubans can't access the internet, only an intranet with information about the island and similar inoffensive stuff. Most ironic is that the internet could actually transcend the embargo, since even the United States can't sanction it, but Castro is too afraid of its freedoms to take advantage of the benefits.

The second was in the Herald yesterday, I think. It's a good account of the children of Cuban elites and the lives they make outside the country.

They are known as quedaditos, which means ''those who stayed'' but implies the under-the-radar lives they lead to avoid the whiff of dissidence that might stick to their decision to live outside the communist system.

''If you say something here, over there in Cuba they'll find out and you'll never see your family again,'' said a Cuban lawyer in her 30s who lives in Madrid. 'For example, if you put in the newspaper my name and quote me saying, `Cuba is a load of crap,' if that's published, they'll say: 'You said what? You're never going back to Cuba again.' ''

So the quedaditos try to live quiet lives and remain largely unknown outside the close-knit group of Cubans in their same situation.

Cross posted from my blog.

World Cup interlude

Bitch Ph.D. has an amusing post about balancing family and World Cup.

Pseudonymous Kid: Mama, will you make me a sandwich?

Me: Papa, can you make him a sandwich?

Mr. B.: What do you want, PK?

Pseudonymous Kid: A sandwich with mayonnaise and lettuce.

Mr. B.: What do you want with that? Ham, cheese, bacon? Do you want a BLT?

Pseudonymous Kid: No. Just flat cheese (i.e., the pre-slicedkind).

Also, I'm watching the France/Korea game and... does anyone find it funny that French fans chant Ode to Joy, a song by German?

Cross posted from my new personal blog.

tis a sad day

NEW YORK · Barbara Epstein, a founder and co-editor of The New York Review of Books who was involved in editing The Diary of Anne Frank early in her career, died Friday at age 76.

More here.

Also, lest AGI be thought to only provide content when people expire, I'll start blogging soon, and not on the dead beat. But I've said that before, so be a good little reader and take my word for it.

James Wolcott nails precisely what's so rancid about Woody Allen's Match Point, in particular what's so painful about Scarlet Johannsen:

Johanssen really can not act except in brief moues. Usually it doesn’t matter, because the camera feeds on her pillowy features and (male) viewers project smoldering passion into her jug-like passivity. In Lost in Translation, Bill Murray was so overstocked with ennui that her youth came across as the vitality he was missing, never mind that she also seemed anesthetized. Here, surrounded by real actors, she sounds like a toneless amateur rattling off the stock dialogue Allen writes for young actresses; she doesn’t even bring the sly attack Juliette Lewis did to her writing-student role in Husbands and Wives (her chatty, pseudo-feminist critique of Woody’s novel in the cab was a masterpiece of destructive criticism—in which she took such sly delight!). Emily Mortimer is so charming and vivid as Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s girlfriend (later, wife)—so outclasses Johannsen’s character—that the only plausible reason he’d cheat on her is because Johannsen is American and blonde, her nookie pure Hollywood gold; Woody’s shiksa fascination in action.

Extinct indigenous tribes and Neil Young

Every Neil Young fan has their own favorite Moment of Young Madness; the man's career overflows with them. My current favorite is "Like an Inca," a track no one's thought much about, seeing how it's buried at the end of side two of the only 1980's Young album that remains out of print. Trans is remembered as Young's Devo record, but this is inaccurate: it sounds like Styx's Kilroy Was Here, a chirpy arena-rock dystopia also hustled on unsuspecting fans in 1982. When it's not fighting for elbow room amidst the vocoders and EPCOT Center synths, Young's ugly guitar injects menace and danger to tracks whose search for tranquility in an environment crippled by disease and mistrust flirts with Aquarius-age complacency. In this it's got lots in common with other 1982 albums by aging boomers (Paul McCartney, Townshend, Reed, Billy Joel, Elton John) making peace with skinny ties and syndrums. Remove the Tron overtones and you've got Deja Vu.

But back to "Like an Inca." Often described as an unseemly amalgamation of "Cortez the Killer" and "Like a Hurricane," it's really a variation on "Cortez" set to a Santana beat. The melody anticipates 1986's "Pressure" (I'll defend that one some other time). The lyrics are jejune colonialism, as stupid and barbaric as Young and Nils Lofgren's competing guitars; and yet, and yet, Young's empathy and genuine desire to be one of those encroached Incas, at the point of extinction, crouching in "beautiful buildings to house the chosen few," sounds far less fatuous coming out of his mouth than, say, David Crosby's. The guitars reflect his confusion; he's honestly stupid, maybe. Or he's a stupid genius:

if you want to get high,
build a strong foundation
sink those pylons deep now
and reach for the sky
if you want to get lost
in the jungle rhythm
get down on the ground
and pretend you're swimmin'.

What do you do with verses which begin as empowerment cliches and end as survivalist doggerel? How are you going to get your hands on this song when Trans has yet to be reissued?

Signs and signals

There are two voguish current terms which make American political discourse extremely irritating. They occur routinely in every press conference, every current-affairs broadcast, every congressional debate, and almost every editorial comment. The terms are "perception" and "signal." The first is used as either a displacement or an evasion. The speaker need not say that he thinks the consequence of policy X will be harmful. That would be definite nad thus too risky. It is usual, then, for him to intone that policy X "will be perceived" as harmful. This has two political advantages: it takes longer to say and thus sounds more important; and it is ambiguous, having all the moral weight of the statement "It's not me, it's the neighbors."

-- Christopher Hitchens, "Perceptions and Signals" (Feb. 18, 1984).

Carnage!

Behold – the damage wrought by Tropical Storm Alberto. And we have nine months of this left.

Announcement: Chanteuse and rapper lock eyes

Merely for stomping over the thriving subgenre inaugurated by Method Man and Mary J. Blige (and adulterated to increasingly cowardly returns) of shoving sensitive poetry in a chanteuse's ear that the rapper is too thuggish to repeat himself, Nelly Furtado featuring Timbaland's "Promiscuous" is the single of the year. This is one of the few contemporary R&B hits in which the rapper and chanteuse are evenly matched -- in this case it's all the more impressive considering the chanteuse in question is birdbrain Nelly Furtado. It's an honest-to-goodness dialogue, fraught with tension and smut, and as ludicrous in its way as Raekwon and Ghostface trading lines*. As for Timbo, well, all those records with Aaliyah and Missy Elliott sure helped.

* Maybe the trend was dying anyway. Ghostface, always the cuddliest Wu-ster, wheezes like the Irish grandma in a John Ford movie in his duet with Ne-Yo, "Back Like That."

Peanut Butter Words vs Grand Illusions

Mike Powell and I graduate from pulled pork to Sonic Youth's Rather Ripped, on AIM:

------------------------
Powell: I see it as a kind of flipside to EVOL, though it's tainted by the fact that I fucking adore evol
Powell: but evol's this album about High Passion (shadow of a doubt, green light, even tom violence); but where evol's remainder was destructive, this one is sort of about peaceful liberation ("do you believe in rapture," parts of "turquoise boy")
Soto: It seems like RR is music recorded by adults who've experienced and thought through the merely received notions of passion (or High Passion, as you call it) which dotted those early albums
Powell: yes yes yes!
Powell: because you know what--I started thinking about this stuff b/c I was in a coffeeshop and PET SOUNDS was on, and I was thinking about that balance; the maturity/youth, passion v. teenage "bullshit" thing.
Soto: It's marvelous that "Do You Believe in Rapture?" is posed as a question. if the same trope was on EVOL it would have been a statement. They're adult enough to have realized that rapture is sort of chimerical
Powell: definitely
Powell: one thing I was noticing, speaking of phrasing: the important stuff in "Reena" is all posed as empirical observation
Soto: it does start w/out fuss, doesn't it?
Soto: we're hearing lyrics 4 seconds into the song
Powell: oh it's a great beginning
Powell: it's like, you wonder if somehow the first 30 seconds get cut off
Soto: and then once in a while ("What a Waste," "Incinerate") they do indulge in uncomplicated sex, because that's ok too.
Powell: right, the uncomplicated sex thing is fine, almost essential to the album – or at least being a little flip about it
Soto: "a little flip" – exactly right. It's bizarre. Usually a band dispenses with irony as it ages; SY have embraced it.
Powell: explain
Soto: Irony questions form – the way in which we formulate answers, even douts the way in which questions are asked. It's a REDRESS.
Powell: oh man you are trying to pull out my wires again
Soto: those early records were the sound of kids tripping on Manson and outsider myths. Their records post-Washing Machine seem informed by those myths; now they're asking if you can live your life (get coffee, get laid) with these myths which shaped your youth
Powell: I guess yeah, I agree with that, to a degree...
Soto: I think so. It's what they love about Neil Young: their work is a continuum. I still hear echoes of the old SY in this record
Powell: yeah I think I'm coming on to what you mean with the youth-shaping myth thing
Soto: "Sleepin' Around" is both a "dumber song" than "Death Valley '69" or "Green Light" yet is packed with wisdom
Powell: well, it's got more wisdom because it's probably the way a cuckold would really carry himself
Powell: when your girlfriend is fucking someone else, you are not thinking about feelings being "green lights" or any of that shit

Roll over, Russert: Stewart's got the news

I won't applaud Jon Stewart for soundly eviscerating Bill Bennett on the subject of gay marriage (which he did, btw, politely and with a lot of class), in large part because his huge audience knew he would win, no contest. But I do marvel at the tremendous effectiveness of comedians as pundits. After all, the great ones mastered their craft: timing, wit, speed. As Kung Fu Monkey remarks, "It's almost as if nothing more than a lifetime of performing comedy had honed his ability to make his point clearly, highlight and ridicule the idiocy of his opponents' argument simultaneously, and do so with a simple emotional resonance so effective his opponent is left helpless to respond."

Tim Russert's reputation for "objectivity" is based upon the diligence of his staff, who actually take the trouble to sift through a politican's record for contradictions. In response the politician stammers that he was "taken out of context." Whereupon Russert DROPS THE SUBJECT. If he actually questioned their incoherent jargon, called them on their use of cliches (look to the language, Orwell always said), forced them into retreat, then he would deserve his reputation. Russert however is quite comfortable with this bowdlerization of English, which he happily employs in the presence of his royal court of bloodless geezers (David Broder, E.J. Dionne) and geezers-in-waiting (Jon Meacham, Byron York).

Eliminate the Sunday morning punditocracy, I say. Install Stewart, Margaret Cho, and Stephen Colbert. Newt Gingrich will never glower with such confidence again.

"If I was anything, I'd be the water in your bathtub"

I'm embarrassed. Yesterday was Prince Rogers Nelson's birthday. No doubt he's happy: this time he's bolstered his recent cred with a pretty good new album (which happened to be his first number-one debut ever).

Listening to a trove of his b-sides this morning, as well as outtakes from the never-finished Dream Factory project, it hit me how much pleasure Dirty Mind, 1999, Purple Rain, Parade, Symbol, Emancipation, and – supreme among them – Sign 'O' The Times have given me over the years. Near-misses like Controversy and Around the World in a Day still perplex; crap like Graffiti Bridge and Diamonds & Pearls still provoke (no one's made much sense of Lovesexy, which is to say: it's about time someone did).

Why I Love Christgau.

Because he agrees with me, naturellement. Today's review of Sonic Youth's Rather Ripped echoes my fulsome praise last week. Dissenting with Amy Phillips' widely derided contention that, with Murray Street, Sonic Youth had passed into irrelevance as they approached middleage, Christgau nails the subtle paradigm shift which occurs in the aging and not at all to younger critics -- the ability to distinguish between taste and judgment:

It's fine not to like almost anything, except maybe Al Green. That's taste, yours to do with as you please, critical deployment included. By comparison, judgment requires serious psychological calisthenics. But the fact that objectivity only comes naturally in math doesn't mean it can't be approximated in art.

Rather Ripped has already surpassed Sonic Nurse as my favorite post-1990 SY album. So go buy it already.

"Taken Seriously"

From a post sent to Andrew Sullivan:

It may sound trite, but I think it's fair to say that my tolerance for gay rights generally and the marriage right specifically is due in no small part to the Pet Shop Boys. Their music was deliberately ambiguous and over time, I came to appreciate how appropriate that was. The typical Pet Shop Boys song is about love - new love, love on the decline, lost love, inappropriate love - sentiments felt similarly by straights and gays. Times have certainly changed over the last twenty years, but even now, as a straight man with few gay friends, the Pet Shop Boys' music is as close as I usually come to encountering gay culture.

For years, I've loved their music; somewhere along the line, though, I came away with something I hadn't bargained for - an appreciation that gays were not really "different" and that, once superficial differences were set aside, we had more common ground than I would have thought. I think that, just as racial equality gained ground once whites came to view blacks as not particularly different than themselves, the Pet Shop Boys enabled many straights like myself to appreciate gays' humanity rather than being distracted by their sexuality. What Tennant and Lowe still convey to clueless straight boys like myself is not an overt message which has to be confronted (and which we might, even now, instinctively resist), but is instead a quieter comment on universal things, regardless of your gender and that of the person you love.

I'm a Pethead and I'm a better person for it.

Their new album Fundamental sounds pretty good to these ears so far.

James Blunt is so beautiful

Roffles:

This may be oh-so-last-October to some, but James Blunt is a British singer-songwriter whose brilliant debut album "Back to Bedlam" showcases his haunting voice and vivid lyrical imagery. You've probably heard the singles "High" or "You're Beautiful" at some point if you go into any Starbucks — it always seems to be playing in there. Anyway, what's interesting is that James comes from a military family and served four years in the British Army, rising to the rank of Captain and seeing action in Kosovo, among other places.

I love The National Review.

No words necessary...

The recipient of MTV's Best Kiss and Best Performance awards.

English vs American laddishness

The Sasha Frere-Jones interview in which he discusses his New Yorker article on why Americans are leery of English pop is more insightful than the article itself.

Regarding the insoluble problem of how to make English issues acceptable to a wide American audience, Sasha defines the boundary of what's acceptable:

The problematic content in these songs is the description of social and political realities or ideas about them. (Also, the Jam and the Specials sounded really English. There’s a line that is being constantly redrawn: we can take some accent, but not a lot.) Americans can handle aesthetic darkness as long as it’s depoliticized and personal. Look at Depeche Mode—we love Goth music, which is essentially a passive pleasure: depression as comfort. The Cure and Depeche Mode ended up with big American fan bases (although the Cure’s happy songs are what really caused them to break out here). We like the moody types, such as Radiohead, but we don’t like it when somebody says, clearly, “This bad thing happened and I have a theory as to why, and also we are from England because you can hear my weird accent and I just talked about takeaway curry and you’ve haven’t the foggiest.”

But the English have as pronounced a weakness for depression-as-comfort as the rest of us; the irony employed by the likes of Morrissey and the Pet Shop Boys is a mere garnish, a subtle way of hiding the non-subtle ways in which these acts enforce their miseries to a willing (ok, passive) audience. Which means they've got more in common with the laddishness of Oasis, Blur, and the Arctic Monkeys than they (and their fans realize). Even determined swishes like Placebo hide their ambivalences behind power chords and granitic rhythms that (I'm just supposin') Linkin Park and Staind might admire; and since Staind and Linkin Park sell millions of records without a drop of lip gloss why do we need the English equivalent?**

The moral? Laddishness is universal -- and territorial.

**Green Day could be our Placebo. Billie Joe is as cute-ugly as Brian Molke. They write songs which femme boys, macho boys, undergraduate women, and Anthony DeCurtis can hum and love. But their sexual politics are if anything more stunted than Placebo's. Where Placebo at least suggest they've made it to 12th grade, Green Day have flunked 10th grade sex ed twice.