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BOOKS:
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami {A Japanese detective story/war novel/Kafka rip-off. It's great.}
• Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, by Christopher Hitchens {First drafts of history, second thoughts on received wisdom, versatile meditations on great works of literature -- all by a man who can write about anything.}
• The Code of the Woosters, by P.G. Wodehouse {The Rise and Fall of the "Black Shorts," and the best of Bertie and Jeeves. You'll need Wodehouse in your life eventually. Start here; you've 89 or so more to go.}
• The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921, by Isaac Deutscher {Magnificient biography finally back in print, along with Volumes II and III. But better start before the revolution -- and Deutscher's conscience -- was betrayed.}
• Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S., by Jeremy Leven {A sorely forgotten modern classic. Leven has since swapped the galley for the camera, directing such keepers as Don Juan Demarco and The Legend of Bagger Vance. Satan has relapsed.}
• Colossus, by Niall Ferguson {Why the U.S. can't hack neo-imperialism, much to Niall's chagrin.}
• Reflections on a Ravaged Century, by Robert Conquest {Don't even try to have an opinion about the twentieth century without reading him.}
• Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh {One of the funniest books, ever. Shrinks the remainder of the "innocent abroad" genre to the vanishing point.}
• Put Out More Flags, by Evelyn Waugh {Lapidary prose on the frisson between the wars. Basil Seal riding low before he rides again; Auden and Isherwood lampooned as "Parnsip and Pimpernell."}
• The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh, by E.W. {Nasty, brutish and short, in short form.}
• The Origins of Postmodernity, by Perry Anderson {Terrific writer from the London Review of Books and New Left Review, who ought to be more famous than he is, tackles lucidly the abstruse bloodhound gang -- from Habermas to Jameson -- of Theory.}
• Saul Bellow: Novels 1944-1953: Dangling Man, The Victim, and The Adventures of Augie March, [Library of Congress Hardcover Edition] {Look: it's his world, we all just live in it.}
• The Counterlife, by Philip Roth {How Portnoy learned to stop complaining and write a brilliant postmodern novel.}
• Rise of the Vulcans, by James Mann {Probably the only low-blood pressure source on Bush's brain trust. Valuable for charting the progression of neo-neo-conservatism, and how Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz contravened, and then dismantled, the Kissinger realpolitik foreign policy machine.}
• Money, by Martin Amis {Forget Bonfire and Psycho. It took the English author of The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America to effectively chew up the Reagan era -- largely by reminding us that it was also the Thatcher era. A fine lesson in history repeating, too: Di and Charles were TV's original Ben and J. Lo; the Self-on-Massi sex tape is where Paris (if she can read) might have learned her stuff; and the cavalier cash flow in this soft-boiled checkbook who-dun-it tale rivals that of any West Coast dotcom monkey a decade later.}
• The War Against Cliche and Experience, by Martin Amis {If Amis kept on doing what he did in his award-winning collection of critical essays, James Wood would lose more hair. It's saying quite a lot that his non-fiction exceeds his fiction. Experience is by far the best memoir to appear in the last decade: a more muscular Speak, Memory, it's a midlife nostalgia trip pureed out of chronology, though somehow more cohesive than a stream-of-consciousness hodgepodge. Guaranteed to pluck at the coronary sinews for anyone dealing with the loss of a father.}
• Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis {A comic genius on academia, Amis is the pitch-perfect representative of postwar male rage. None of that Angry Young Man, stuff, though. His apoplexy is hilarious at any age. The faces: "crazy peasant," "sex life in ancient Rome," "shot-in-the-back." Moo, by Jane Smiley, The Straight Man, by Richard Russo and everything by David Lodge seem impossible without this Platonic key ring to rule them all, and on the campus, bind them.}
• The Letters of Kingsley Amis, edited by Zachary Leader {Pay close attention to the letters to Philip Larkin -- together with Larkin's Collected Letters (try eBay, sorry), these constitute the documentation of one of the most rewarding and hilarious literary friendships to date. Amuse yourself by guessing the exact page number where Kingsley abandons Communism.}
• The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, by V. Nabokov {I'm way underqualified, with my mean years on the planet, to state critical opinion. Still in larval adulation, which I understand is a longterm afflication. Read Anthony Lane's review in Nobody's Perfect. And M. Amis on Nabokov in toto in the prenominate War Against Cliche. And get a dictionary.}
• The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, edited by Leon Wieseltier {The style is dated and stilted, but the insights are not. Especially worthwhile: the Orwell essay, the Mansfield Park burn, and "The Situation of the American Intellectual at the Present Time" (i.e. "What Do They Know of America, Who Only the Upper West Side Know?"}
• The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel, by James Wood {The bling to Dale Peck's blah.}
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace {Self-indulgence and the consequences of a missing-in-action editor never had it so good. The state fair, cruise ship and TV pieces are the best. But also read the Lynch essay: it'll make you want to re-watch Blue Velvet, which you can conveniently buy below.}
• Collected Poems, by Philip Larkin (edited by Anthony Thwaite) {Poetus mirabilis and, after Auden, the occupant of a near empty Hall of Metrical Wonders in the Postwar Anglophone wing of the museum. Master ironist and curmudgeon you least want to bludgeon.}
• Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, by Margaret Macmillan {A dryly told account of global dust-settling after what was then myopically known as "the Great War." Explores the follies of Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau, which helped bring about WWII.}
• Doomed, Bourgeois, In Love: Essays on the Films of Whit Stillman, edited by Mark Henrie {Discreet charms of the bourgeoisie given the scholarly treatment by the kinds of New Criterion-y people who liked Grosse Pointe Blank because John Cusack's assassin refused to unionize. Don't let the pedantry taint your judgment of Stillmania, though.}
• Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi {A beautiful paean to Western literature from an Eastern scholar living under Islamic statism; the Gatsby trial and Jane Austen dance chapters are particularly enjoyable.}
• The Persian Mirror: The Elusive Face of Iran, by Elaine Sciolino {For those with short odds on the next war of choice.}
• Nobody's Perfect: Writings from The New Yorker, by Anthony Lane {He needs to stop it with the creepy drooling over Natalie Portman, but Lane is still the best around for losing it at the movies.}
• The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl {Adult stories, less like his children�s stuff than what O. Henry would have been like if his ironic plot twists had involved wife-swapping, cannibalism, or turning infants into superhuman bee-monsters. Might be fun for the kid who never reads, actually.}
• The Chicago Manual of Style, by the University of Chicago Press Staff {and the ghost of Allan Bloom.}
• The Brothers Karamazov, by F. Dostoevsky, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky {Incest! Murder! Theodicy!}
• Collected Non-Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges {A prose impresario short-winded enough to keep beside the toilet -- especially if your john is in a labrynith that transcends spacetime.}
• Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories, by John Shepard {Stories narrated by John Ashcroft, John Entwistle, Nazi rocket riders, the creature from the black lagoon, and others.}
• My Life and Hard Times, by James Thurber {Think of David Sedaris, in turn of the century Columbus, Ohio. And without the gay schtick, or even a pretense at respect for his family.}
ALBUMS:
• You Are the Quarry, by Morrissey {He's back! And almost paid off the deficit incurred by Maladjusted. A few gripes: "America Is Not the World" never fulfills the promise of its title. It's an unwieldy blunderbuss, not a rapier -- and the use of "hamburger" as synecdoche for our national obesity problem is a new hackneyed low for the Oscar Wilde of the microphone. "I Have Forgiven Jesus" ultimately works, but I can't help but feel that that one was just too easy.}
• Weightlifting, by The Trashcan Sinatras {Remember them from your college radio daze? A brisk homecoming track, appositely named "Welcome Back" ("Everyone survived / Everyone's alive!" -- well, thank goodness) kicks off this highly accomplished return to musicmaking for an alt-pop band that shouldn't have stayed away so long.}
• Strange Bird, by Augie March {With a name like Augie, it has to be good. It is. Analogs fail me.}
• Evergreen, by Echo and the Bunnymen {Best 80's Band Comeback Album. No contest.}
• Mermaid Avenue, by Billy Bragg and Wilco {A fucking classic. Ukanian bloke Billy Bragg manages to capture the rhythms of dustbowl Americana better than Dylan -- the obvious disciple/witch doctor to perform a Woody Guthrie resurrection -- ever could do. All lyrics by Guthrie, music by Bragg and Wilco.}
• Don't Try This at Home, by Billy Bragg {Most people who hear Mermaid Avenue invariably want more of the man who brought it to them. This is Bragg's most "accessible" solo album, though not without the politics that's defined his career. "Accident Waiting to Happen" is a punk snarl against cultural fascism.}
• Galore, by Kirsty MacColl {May this earth angel charm the knickers off the winged principalities. MacColl died a few years ago in a boating accident, but I can only imagine how well-attended her funeral must have been by the panoply of musicians guilty of "sampling" her Celtic nightingale voice. This album consists mainly of covers, but that's more than all right for someone generous enough to never ask for top billing, despite consistently stealing the show.}
• These Are the Vistas, by the Bad Plus {"Smells Like Teen Spirit," the jazz standard. No kidding. Comes off not just better than you'd expect, but brilliantly.}
• SMiLE, by Brian Wilson {Reviewed here. Check to the right.}
• The Soft Bulletin, by the Flaming Lips {And the hard singing voice to take, but worth it anyway.}
• It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, by Public Enemy {More complicated rhymes and denser loops than have been on the radio before or sense, plus the guy with the big clock.}
• Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?, by the Unicorns {Morbid, tinny, wildly innovative and beautiful.}
• Loaded: Fully Loaded Edition, by the Velvet Underground {Funny, Lou Reed doesn't usually look this happy. Must be Laurie Anderson's doing.}
• Traitor In Our Midst, by the Country Gazette {What you always thought bluegrass was supposed to sound like.}
• The Modern Lovers, by the Modern Lovers {Speaking of Lou Reed, remember the guy with the guitar who gets shot in Something About Mary? Imagine that guy redoing "White Light/White Heat," but with lyrics about aging with dignity and eschewing drugs. That sounds like a snark, but it�s actually the SAM guy, and John Cale produced.}
• The Queen Is Dead, by The Smiths {I can't believe you don't own this already. The summa of the Moz/Marr collaboration.}
• The Boatman's Call, by Nick Cave {The Prince of Darkness may have been afraid to board a plane after 9/11, but this "New Testament" sound is proof of moisture's sustainability in Hell. "Into My Arms" is sweet enough to play your girlfriend on Valentine's Day, leaving the oldie-but-dreary "Deanna" to blast at her when she dumps you.}
• No Cities Left, by The Dears {The lead singer cried when Morrissey asked the band to open on the "You Are the Quarry" tour. That kind of gone-to-pieces sentimentalism can only lead one place: straight down. Get 'em while they're new and good.}
• The Boy With the Arab Strap, by Belle and Sebastian {Might as well order that black V-neck sweater, Rimbaud's Collected Poems, while you're at it. "Theoretical" bisexuality not a requisite, despite what angry twee detractors say.}
FILMS & TV:
• Cannibal! The Musical. {Trey Parker's college thesis, a feature-length movie musical about the only American ever convicted of cannibalism. Not for all markets, but better than most of his later stuff.}
• Before Sunset, directed by Richard Linklater {The sequel that doesn't feel like one. Why thirtysomethings who chat are more interesting than twentysomethings who do likewise. Some sluggish moments, but all made up for by a luminous final scene that made me fall in love with Julie Delpy once more. Bet it made Anthony Lane "spill [his] Sprite" again, too.}
• Collateral, directed by Michael Mann {Tom Cruise has always been a hard-working, as opposed to naturally gifted, actor. This part was his pension come early. Michael Mann is the Richard Avedon of the moving Los Angeles image. And Jamie Foxx ain't too shabby, either.}
• The Unbelievable Truth, directed by Hal Hartley {Surreal-ish debut from a master indy filmmaker and satirist. Yes, that is Edie Falco as the diner waitress.}
• Henry Fool, directed by Hal Hartley {Hartley's masterpiece. Probably the only movie about writers that's ever worked. Barton Fink, anyone?}
• Metropolitan, directed by Whit Stillman {Downwardly mobile 60's college jet set. Making a film about this demographic is like trying to play matchmaker to a Republican leper in Northampton, Mass. That the dialogue (and it's all dialogue) stays liquid-tongued is a monument to Stillman's talent... dare I say, genius?}
• Barcelona, directed by Whit Stillman {Anti-Americanism when it was more funny than scary. The "subtext" speech belongs in Bartlett's. The DVD commentary is, as someone from the earlier film might say, "priceless."}
• The Last Days of Disco, directed by Whit Stillman {An assault on 70's cliche in the best possible way -- the anti-54. Also known as Yuppies: A Defense. Chloe Sevigny gives grace to the one night stand, instead of head to Vincent Gallo.}
• Mr. Jealousy, directed by Noah Baumbach {Who wouldn't hunt down the ex-boyfriends of Annabella Sciorra? Eric Stoltz had fewer difficulties with girls in Mask. Chris Eigeman from the Stillman flicks swaps Mayflower pedigree for facial hair (modeled on David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest jacket photo), to varying degrees of success. An underrated romantic comedy, but don't say I didn't warn you: this film may engender awkward relationship conversation. It may also plant supersleuth-stalker seeds in frail men's heads. Or so I've heard.}
• Blue Velvet, directed by David Lynch {So many epigones, so far from this mark.}
• Father Ted: The Holy Trinity {BBC TV series about three priests on an island. No, not that kind of series, you sick fuck.}
• The Office - The Complete Collection (First And Second Series Plus Special) {Creator, writer, director and star Rick Gervais used to manage Suede and now this. That's enough laurels for one lifetime. He can die now.}
• Arrested Development - Season One {To think that Teen Wolf Too was just a glimpse of Jason Bateman's potential.}
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Main
| June 2006 »
The New York Times is barely veiling how pissed off it is about a 40% reduction in counterterrorism funding to NYC and DC. Must be that liberal media thing.
Overall, New York State will get $183.7 million, which is a 20 percent drop from last year. That means New York State's per capita share of grant funds, which totals $2.78 per person, will drop to an even lower level compared to some rural states, like Wyoming, which will get $14.83 per person this year.
Okay, but say for the sake of argument that there are weapons labs or energy pipelines or something in Wyoming that need protection, and that the cost of that protection is higher per capita than the needs in New York or DC, which can be defended appropriately with less per resident than Cheyenne. But it gets worse.
According to the PDF of budget allocations, Guam, the Northern Marianas Islands and American Samoa will each get over $2.7 million, spending ttotaling $16, $33 and $42 per person, respectively, for these atolls.
Aside from some military bases -- which would presumably have their own defensive capability under the Pentagon's budget -- what are we defending from terrorists in these far-flung Pacific archipelagoes?
Context is overrated anyway. So, who said the following: VP Dick Cheney in an address to the Naval Academy, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in an interview with Spiegel?
Their goal in that region is to seize control of a country, so they have a base from which to launch attacks and wage war against governments that do not meet their demands. [They] believe that by controlling one country, they will be able to target and overthrow other governments in the region, ultimately to establish a totalitarian empire... Some might look at these ambitions and wave them off as extreme and mad. Well, these ambitions are extreme and mad. They are also real, and we must not wave them off. We must take them seriously. We must oppose them. And we must defeat them.
Well, he couldn't have very well bequeathed his fortune to his family, now could he?
Albert Le Roy, a hardline Marxist who died two months ago at the age of 80, amazed his native Goudelin, in Brittany, with a handwritten will discovered in a drawer at his home that said he was leaving his property, valued at €140,000 (£96,000), to the village council “to prepare for communism???.
Hmm... Poetry magazine, "my darling cat Princess," or communism. Tough call indeed.
Village red-faced at butcher's late call to revolution - World - Times Online
 Seeing the franchise degenerate into the hands of Brett Ratner has me hoping that Bryan Singer's Superman turns out more Nietzchean than that trailer suggests.
Part of the problem is that Ratner luxuriates in being the juiciest cured ham on the market; he's Michael Bay with a lower-budget and no casting Afflecktion. But watching him inherit the latest installment of a popular, high-adrenaline series is like watching a bad connoisseur of magic try to explain Houdini's stagecraft. Red Dragon completely demystified Hannibal Lecter, assuming, that is, there was any mystique left after the premise of doing a remake of a prequel had already run riotous over one's suspension of genius cannibal disbelief.
The story of The Last Stand revolves around a mutant "cure," which has half the extraordinary populace vying for dibs whilst the other half thunders in rage over the very idea that they're suffering from a disease. This belabored allegory seems perfectly obvious to anyone who's lived through the last few election cycles, and yet I disagree with Michael Agger at Slate that the overtones of gay rights have been abandoned for a conventional (straight) love story. Rather, they've been so clangurously invoked and deharmonized in this movement that there's hardly any social value left to the X-Men franchise at all. Rather than eschewed, the civil rights motif has, well, mutated beyond all recognition.
Two equally obvious inconsistencies make this case. First, one can easily imagine someone like Rogue, who either absorbs the mutant power or human anima of whomever she touches, would want to rid herself of this particularly grim DNA of alienation. Rid herself she does, and yet the homosexual corollary would have it that she is misguided and self-hating, opting for a cure in the name of social acceptance through normalcy. Perhaps that's part of her rationale, but is it the whole of it? If anything, Rogue wants to realize a part of her true nature, which has been fettered by her more destructive part: she's in every way an average, hormonally volatile vixen looking for some long-deferred nookie with her boyfriend ("Iceman" to you and, I guess, the overtaxed metaphor department at Marvel.) Living a life of complete tactile solititude can't be glorified through any appreciable form of special pleading. The same would go, by the way, for Cyclops, who can't open his eyes without atomizing whatever object they alight on. Are these forms of mutation examples of benign difference, or personal hell experienced as such long before the bigots and bullies enter the picture? In this next plane of evolution, it seems that nature, and not intolerance, is the real detractor from the pursuit of happiness -- at least for those prohibited from doing what the bulk of their genome still wants them to do.
The second major difficulty in continuing to view the X-Men as levitating and wall-crawling carriers of moral instruction is embodied in Magneto, a character rescued from total absurdity only by the strictures of dramatic conflict. What was once a dangerous but sympathetic antigen to peaceful human-mutant coexistence has now turned into a genocidal megalomaniac. Oh, and did I mention he actively recruits members to his militant "brotherhood" of outcast revolutionaries, whose final pitched battle occurs in... San Francisco? (Exactly which strain of paranoia in the gay kulturkampf is being villified here?) Inverting his own status as a Holocaust survivor and opting for the Jabotinskyean line of mutant Zionism, Magneto shows no compunction about recycling cars with drivers still inside them, sending his pyrotechnic goon to immolate the ground level of the cure-distribution facility (and, presumably, whatever low-wage flunkies work inside), single-mindedly adjusting the trajectory of the Golden Gate Bridge and killing hundreds (possibly thousands) of people in the process, and generally declaring war on the "inferior" species at large. He's had how many run-ins with his amicable nemeses who are dedicated to "betraying their own cause," and yet both parties seem as blase as strangers in light of their storied mutual antagonism. (Agger was right that Wolverine should have been made into a paperclip necklace long ago, yet he's only ever halted and toyed with by Magneto.) Also, you'd think that with the foregoing acts of naughtiness to his credit, we non-telekinetic meatsacks would have set about apprehending such a preternatural megavillain, wouldn't you? Nope. Welcome to Ratnerstan. At film's end, Magneto is reduced to the status of a mere homo sapiens, consigned to a Members Only fate of sitting in a San Franscisco park playing chess by himself and looking about half an infarction away from relocation to the Seinfeld parents' retirement village in Florida. Ratko Mladic's on a conspicuous lam, too, but you won't find him searching for Bobby Fischer in Washington Square.
Everything in The Last Stand is underexplained and shuffled along to keep the pace frenzied and the supporting cast reminiscient of the comic. By now I think only Gambit has been absent from the celluloid (a minor mercy to the people of New Orleans, we can be sure.) The newbies are oldies with all the cartoonishness but none of the pizzazz: Juggernaut is a soccer hooligan with a head shaped like a petrified bell end; Beast is now Frasier as more physically attractive to Andrew Sullivan; and Angel has absolutely no relevance or purpose whatsoever save to parody a Freudian masturbation anxiety and then, as very awkward form of expiation indeed, rescue his own father from death.
All this might be forgiven for the fact that Famke Janssen has a scene wherein she uses her mouth-watering legs like she hasn't since GoldenEye. Still, the Usual Suspects treatment was eminently more worthwhile than Rush Hour on fantastical Darwinism.
X-Men: The Last Stand reviewed. By Michael Agger
As it turns out, "I would have gotten away with it if it weren't for you pesky kids and that goshdanged dog" isn't a good defense ploy.
Other than that, the verdict was pretty dull. Upon learning that he faces something like 20 to 30 years in prison, Skilling's remark to the press was, "We fought a good fight. Some things work. Some things don't... Obviously I'm disappointed, but that's the way the system works." You couldn't have gotten a more sanguine response from an inanimate sack of O-negative.
But then, the whole trial has been an anticlimax since the defendants failed to go on a multi-state killing spree. I think of tabloid headlines screaming "Killing and Slay," and dream of what might have been.
Recent evidence of superpowers of possibly divine origin:
Most of Francis Wilkinson's American Prospect article on politics and balls in America is belabored, but put enough pressure on coal and you'll get some diamonds:
Orrin Hatch, perhaps the Senate’s most fastidious prig, with a proclivity for French cuffs and pink ties, declared Democrats “the party of homosexuals.???
Cesar Millan has a Malcolm Gladwell profile in last week's New Yorker and this Times attaboy to his credit. There's also that recherche note of having truly arrived: being parodied on South Park. All this for taming seemingly incorrigible pups? If it smells like rotten Alpo, it is. I've cracked the Millan Code:
He quickly discovered: no. Americans were letting the dogs, rather than the humans, be the pack leaders, in almost every respect. "Americans work against Mother Nature, and that's why dogs don't listen to the general population of America," he said. "Why are dogs growing up on a farm much happier than a dog living in the city? Because on a farm, it gets to be a dog. And in the city they become a child, they become a husband, they become a soul mate. They become something the human wants before they are willing to do what is best for them."
You don't have to be Machiavelli to realize the word "Americans" means "women" and the word "dogs" means "men" in Millanese. (He practically gives it all away with "husband.")
The backlash won't come from lawsuits or the first deprogrammed Rottweiler to chews through its muzzle. It'll come from the species that wishes it could lick its own scrotum. Cesar wasn't an illegal immigrant -- he was a chick.
Robert Bly, Caitlin Flanagan, you're on borrowed time. Be afraid, boys. Be very afraid.
From the 'Dog Whisperer,' a Howl of Triumph - New York Times
Well, it took months to establish that Philip Larkin had some very unsavory views on things but was still a poet of unrivalled genius. How long 'til all the fuss about a new Jewish conspiracy dies down, do you think?
So much of Michael Massing's New York Review of Books essay recounting and analyzing the late (but apparently unlamented) kerfuffle over Mearsheimer and Walt's suggestion that a Jewish Lobby [sic] for Israel is jeopardizing America rests on an exhaustive but colorful use of tautology. It culminates in a Yellow Pages cross-section of major policy think tanks and journals and private endowments, in whose uppermost chambers lurks a congeries of machers that would... Hmm. How to put this without incurring the charge of "rank guilt by association?" Shall we say, the list compiled is slightly less than Schindlerian in its optimism?
Also, by now I bet you had no idea that stuff like this was going on in this country:
All the measures pouring out of Congress convey a very clear message. As one congressman put it:
We're so predictable, so supportive, so unquestioning, of Israel's actions that in the long run we've alienated much of the Arab world. We've passed any number of resolutions making it clear that we didn't want Clinton or Bush to put pressure on Israel with regard to settlements, or negotiations. If we passed a resolution that fully embraced the road map, it would make an enormous difference in the Arab world, and it would help undermine terrorists. But you would never get a measure like that through the international relations or appropriations committees. Congress would never pass a resolution that was in any way critical of anything Israel has done.
I asked the congressman if he was willing to be identified. He said no.
Forget Mearsheimer and Walt's ostensible "bravery." The real medal of honor goes to Massing for asking if his source wanted his or her name in print after all that.
The piece is nonetheless useful because it demonstrates (until it's disputed or debunked, anyway) the inner-workings of AIPAC, technically not a de jure political action committee but an organization whose name most people in the free-thinking world are now given to communicate the way the chubby girl's mother in St . Elmo's Fire said the word "cancer": through a whisper. Partly, I understand, this has to do with the manner in which AIPAC operates. Legally, it can tell a potential admirer of Israel running for office something like, "Look, we can't help you directly, but we'll put you in touch with those who can." This is circuitous and suspect only because election law is circuitous and suspect, and yet a faint aura of conspiracy automatically attaches itself to AIPAC. Very well, let's concede this point. But Massing makes a obvious fool of himself and his reader by continuing to prove it, practically with his own ham brand of mood music:
One congressional staff member told me of the case of a Democratic candidate from a mountain state who, eager to tap into pro-Israel money, got in touch with AIPAC, which assigned him to a Manhattan software executive eager to move up in AIPAC's organization. The executive held a fund-raising reception in his apartment on the Upper West Side, and the candidate left with $15,000. In his state's small market for press and televised ads, that sum proved an important factor in a race he narrowly won. The congressman thus became one of hundreds of members who could be relied upon to vote AIPAC's way. (The staffer told me the name of the congressman but asked that I withhold it in order to spare him embarrassment.)
Conversely, candidates who challenge AIPAC can find their funds suddenly dry up. Two well-publicized cases are those of Representatives Cynthia McKinney of Georgia and Earl Hilliard of Alabama, both African-Americans. In 2002, McKinney and Hilliard were alleged to have made statements or taken positions critical of Israel, and their primary opponents received large amounts of pro-Israel money. Both candidates had limited public support and ended up losing. Cases such as these occur infrequently: a candidate's position on Israel is rarely enough by itself to cause defeat. But it can have a very large effect on fund-raising. (McKinney was reelected to Congress in 2004.)
Here's a thought experiment for you. Imagine an over-powerful group controlled by archconservative financiers and scions ready to dole out bushels of cash to candidates willing to link up with its cause. The cause is the unquestioning defense of a nuclearized hyperstate in the Mediterranean. What the group is offering that candidate could surely use -- even if he doesn't necessarily require it -- to get into office. Yet he's a complicated wannabe pol with moral compunction about Palestinian rights and anything having to do with legislation whose passage is to be attended by a disposition of zero criticism. This is how a conversation according to such dynamics of enablement might occur:
"Hi, I was wondering if AIPAC could send out an announcement to its affiliate or sister organizations endorsing my candidacy for Congress. Donations to my campaign would also be greatly appreciated."
"We'd be happy to oblige. Here's some literature on our platform, which we'd expect you to support unwaveringly."
[Reading it over] "What a crock of shit all this is... Now when can I expect that check?"
There. And I didn't even have to cite Noam Chomsky.
The New York Review of Books: The Storm over the Israel Lobby
 Ladies and gentlemen, Ms. Lila Zanganeh:
“My interest in Nabokov was really, purely a literary one. I just adore him,?? she said, adding that any parallels between Russia and Iran were not the source of her admiration. “It took me four months to read Ada, or Ardor, because I read every page five times. I can’t read it normally—I can’t help it. I remember, just to give myself a break while I was reading Ada, I began reading The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster, and it was like drinking water with a little bit of dust in it after having eaten the most exquisite kind of mille feuille, with all kinds of creams and the most refined pastry in the world.
“Just purely the language, the style … ,?? she continued, becoming all dreamy-eyed, “I really have the feeling that [Nabokov] is phantasmagorique—it’s an imaginative, phantasmagoric landscape that belongs to me. That speaks to me. That is me. And it had nothing to do with Iran.??
NYO - The Transom
Buried in a hot-and-cold Slate dispatch from the 2006 Eurovision was this striking and underreported (in the USA, anyway) anecdote that may or may not have been a tipping point in the recent, very close, referendum that saw Montenegro choose independence from Serbia.
[Serbia and Montenegro] will be voting despite being unrepresented in Athens this year, after a political row that proved impossible to resolve.
The selection process for the 2006 Serbian entry was dogged by controversy, climaxing in a near-riot on live television when the winning song was announced. The victors, a boy band called No Name, who also represented their country in 2005, hail from the minority state of Montenegro. Their song was widely interpreted as a thinly veiled call for Montenegrin independence, much to the annoyance of the majority Serbian population. (On Sunday—just one day after the Eurovision final—Montenegro is holding a referendum on independence from Serbia; a "yes" vote will result in the country formally splitting in two.) After taking to the stage in Belgrade for the customary winner's encore, a storm of abuse from the studio audience—accompanied by a barrage of bottles and chants of "Thieves! Thieves!"—brought No Name's performance to a swift halt and sent them fleeing the venue under the protection of security guards. Immediately afterward, the second-placed Serbian act commandeered the stage for their own reprise, claiming victory by default. The incident relegated even the death of former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic to second place in the following day's news. And you thought that Eurovision was just some campy little piece of light-entertainment nonsense? Wars have been waged over less.
For those who've never seen it, the Eurovision contest is a long-running annual World Cup of lurid dancing and bad songwriting that unites the United Kingdom in gleeful hoots while the Continent takes it very, very seriously. I saw the 2003 edition in a hostel with some giddy Brits. It was hilarious. Though I have to admit that there's something compellingly Nouvelle Vagueish about this year's German entrant, a country and western (!) act named Texas Lightning (!?). Check out their web snippet honky-tonk Lou Reed cover. I might buy the album.
Lending credibility to grassy knoll types everywhere who think the best cover for an assassin is another assassin in the same place killing the same person, UN investigator Serge Brammertz seems to be inclining toward the idea that the roadside bomb that appeared to kill Lebanon's Rafik Hariri was cover for a much larger, deadlier bomb buried under the road, detonated simultaneously. If true, the assassination must have been the work of someone with the authority to put stuff under the road, e.g. the Syrians or their Lebanese puppets, and not some fringe Saudi terror group.
Earlier this month, Brammertz set up a tent at the bomb site and reopened the crater that was carved by the explosion. The chief investigator and his team have been analyzing soil samples and carrying out a comprehensive survey of all underground tunnels, pipes and the sewage system at the site, Asharq al Awsat said.
It is almost certain now that there were two simultaneous bombings, the paper said. The first one, a charge hidden in underground pipes, was set off by remote control causing the second bomb placed in the Mitsubishi to explode.
The article said Brammertz also based his conclusion on eyewitnesses who testified hearing two explosions. Furthermore, he relied on the analysis of recently hired explosives experts who noted cracks in the foundations of the structures near the site and that large amounts of asphalt had landed on the top floors of the buildings in the vicinity, an effect that can only be caused by an underground blast.
(Hat Tip: Hit & Run.)
I love the Federal Reserve. But I don't love it enough to enjoy this WaPo starter.
One of Wall Street's favorite sayings is that you don't know who's swimming naked until the tide goes out. Now, thanks to Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, we're starting to see some skin.
At least Glenn Hubbard isn't desperately whoring himself anymore for Greenspan's job.
 My mother belongs to the lapsed Catholic school of regurgitated pea soup and outre tongue slips: "This is a blasphemy!" she once told me about my cohabitating with a girlfriend, making me feel instantly more Byronic and sexually assured than I'd ever imagined I could do. Like Beetlejuice, she's seen The Exorcist about a hundred and sixty-seven times, and it keeps getting funnier every single time she sees it. This is to say nothing of her Rick Ross-like following of every other cult installment of celluloid devoted to demonaical mischief and stigmata and gothic crosses with an inconvenient tendency to hemorrhage on cue...
I guess one has to have taken communion to appreciate, at the soft and dewy age of 12 -- which is when I was first subjected to Linda Blair's stained glass-gargling headspin -- that Jesus is magic but Satan is blockbuster.
I absolutely refuse to read The Da Vinci Code because much more intriguing to me are the ecumenical cover-ups along the lines of: "Father Lemley regrets to inform the parish that he will be unable to coach the St. Francis of Assisi boys' softball team again this year due to a sudden committment in Uzbekistan," or: "Eek, someone has stolen the holy knish shaped like the Blessed Mother."
Still, a cultural phenomenon is a cultural phenomenon. And Anthony Lane is the courageous embed you're going to want on the scene:
There has been much debate over Dan Brown’s novel ever since it was published, in 2003, but no question has been more contentious than this: if a person of sound mind begins reading the book at ten o’clock in the morning, at what time will he or she come to the realization that it is unmitigated junk? The answer, in my case, was 10:00.03, shortly after I read the opening sentence: “Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery.??? With that one word, “renowned,??? Brown proves that he hails from the school of elbow-joggers—nervy, worrisome authors who can’t stop shoving us along with jabs of information and opinion that we don’t yet require. (Buried far below this tic is an author’s fear that his command of basic, unadorned English will not do the job; in the case of Brown, he’s right.) You could dismiss that first stumble as a blip, but consider this, discovered on a random skim through the book: “Prominent New York editor Jonas Faukman tugged nervously at his goatee.??? What is more, he does so over “a half-eaten power lunch,??? one of the saddest phrases I have ever heard.
It gets better.
Heaven Can Wait - The New Yorker
The major advantage the Iraqi military has over the Iraqi police force is that the latter is infiltrated by turncoats and closet insurgents, while the former* is generally more committed, loyal and robust -- after having got off to rather shaky start. William Shawcross reports in the Sunday Times:
Even those who were opposed to the invasion of Iraq should recognise that this is a whole new battle — between the values of a liberal civil society and nihilism, sometimes Islamic but always nihilism.
The coalition training of the Iraqi armed forces is proceeding well. The Iraqi army already has the lead in about 60% of the country. We can soon begin to draw down our troops and turn over more power to provincial authorities.
*This originally read "latter": Sorry, end of a longish, harrying day. And all my typos are destined to look like Freudian slips.
It's no time to quit Iraq — we're winning - The Times Online
A group of Israeli diplomats wants to sue Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for incitement to genocide.
I much prefer the anti-Semitic cartoon contest method of dealing with the Persian Aspersion. Also, what will this suit do, assuming it gains any traction whatsoever, to substantive violations of the genocide convention? (I can't see this playing well in Darfur.) With the recent National Post implosion, isn't sticking to the serious (and true) stuff the smarter move on Iran?
Also, it'll mean another hop in the shower to wash off the sticky residue from Juan Cole's inevitable, pedantic exegesis of "incitement to genocide."
Israelis aim to sue Ahmadinejad - BBC
 Imagine, say, William Donohue, the sulfuric, vein-throbbing president of the Catholic League, reacting to Madonna's descent on stage from a giant mirrored cross. Now compare that to this:
"Why would someone with so much talent seem to feel the need to promote herself by offending so many people?" said the church in a statement.
Can any objection be phrased more politely than that? What I'd like to know is this: Who was so unkind as to disturb naptime at the vicarage with this unseemly spectacle, and so long before evensong and without the benefit of revitalizing biscuits and tea? Hmm?
Madonna's giant cross 'offensive' - BBC
On the heels of the New York Times' annoying round of cultural arbitration, Meghan O'Rourke makes the case for the small but ruminative novel:
The bias against the short novel has deep roots. The American novel (and American canon-making) has always been a highly self-conscious enterprise. The aim of our early writers was not merely to write a great work of art, but to make a great American work of art. Yet early on American writers were anxious about what James Fenimore Cooper worried in 1828 was a "poverty of materials." It wasn't until Melville, Hawthorne, and Whitman seized on what Philip Rahv called "the tensions and hazards" of the American experience that our literature began to look robust, imaginative, and new to its own creators and early critics. They made up for the perceived "paucity of ingredients" with an impressively self-conscious gusto; their methods were as big as their vision. Consider Whitman's sprawling poetic line, his insistent use of anaphora; James' knotted, lengthy sentences, and his protracted epics of social mores, The Golden Bowl and The Ambassadors; or Melville's Moby-Dick.
In the decades that followed, our notion of the great American novel became entwined with a perception that shorter books weren't, somehow, as serious. Seriousness required self-consciousness, and self-consciousness required expansiveness. When F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, he and Maxwell Perkins worried that it was too short; indeed, the book—a mere 50,000 words or so—did less well commercially than his earlier novels. Complaining that it never became a best seller, Fitzgerald wrote to a friend about his misjudgment: "It was too short. Remember this. Never write a book under sixty thousand words." Luckily for Fitzgerald, his closing pages draw back to meditate, self-consciously, on the nature of the tension between the private and the public in America, offering a prime example of what Philip Rahv once said was the ur-aim of American literature: to contemplate "the discrepancy between the high promise of the American dream and what history has made of it."
Then there's Bellow teaching a class with Martin Amis a few years ago. A student asked, with frightening non-anxiety, "So what's Augie March about?"
"It's about 200 pages too long."
The war to protect America from radicals won another victory, as customs apparently made British/Sri-Lankan world music phenom M.I.A. literally missing in action, apparently sending her home instead of letting her show up for work in New York. On the spectrum of British musical threats to freedom and liberty, M.I.A. is now apparently more dangerous than than the Clash, who titled an album after a Nicaraguan leftist guerillas and opened Stateside sets with a song titled "I'm So Bored With the USA"; more dangerous than people-powered tax-dodger John Lennon; and about as dangerous as the Kinks, who were banned from the USA for the interesting half of the Sixties for abandoning two-chord protopunk in favor of acoustic vignettes about overweight cats.
 This Times piece should be framed and mounted on a West Wing wall next to James Fallows' Atlantic cover story "Why Iraq Has No Army." Interesting to see Bernie Kerik playing the retroactive Cassandra. In addition to his fulsome praise on the South Lawn for an incipient Iraqi police force, I remember his talking up the merits of his just-finished consulting project on all the chat shows a year ago; that is, when he was still angling for employment higher than Judith Regan's chewtoy.
Six months is what New York cadets have to earn their blues, by the way. Whether or not Kerik's nine year estimate is hyperbole or just face-saving bullshit, who knows.
At first, members suggested that Iraqi police recruits receive six months of academy training, the amount trainers settled on in Kosovo. Mr. Kerik said he "started laughing," and calculated that it would take nine years to train the force.
The team reduced academy training to 16 weeks, and eventually 8 weeks. Later, a 2005 State Department audit found that translating classes from English to Arabic ate up 50 percent of training time. With translation, Iraqi recruits received the equivalent of four weeks of training.
To make up for the shortened classes, the Justice Department team proposed a sweeping field training program similar to Mr. Mayer's. The team calculated that more than 20,000 advisers would be needed to create the same ratio of police trainers to recruits in Iraq as existed in Kosovo.
Deeming that figure unrealistic, they recommended placing 6,600 American and foreign trainers in police stations across the country to train Iraqis and, if necessary, enforce the law.
DynCorp, the Texas company that was to provide the trainers, had already located 1,150 active and retired police officers who had expressed interest about serving in Iraq.
Two weeks after the Justice Department team arrived in Baghdad, they submitted their proposal to Mr. Bremer. The administration now had a second plan for training the Iraqi police. On June 2, Mr. Bremer approved it, he and Mr. Kerik said.
A Plan Begins to Unravel
The 6,600 police trainers never showed up.
How sectarian wariness becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: Had the CPA given the eminently able peshmerga fighters Iraqi uniforms, and thus the imprimatur of being a kind of civil guard for the immediate postwar period, would the "Arab street" in Baghdad have been more opposed to creeping Kurdish hegemony than to containing anarchy by the best means available? Evidently not, since the one thing most Baghdadis pined for in April and May of 2003 was more authority -- even at the expense of its slipping into a gentle imperial authoritarianism.
Yet another wasted opportunity.
Misjudgments Marred U.S. Plans for Iraqi Police - New York Times
 It was yesterday. And so far as I can tell, there is only one word in the following piece of light verse, contrived by a sadly forgotten American poet and humorist called Guy Wetmore Carryl, that casts doubt on Mill's having been its singular inspiration. The word is "Yankee." That he certainly wasn't, and yet the Oedipal teeth-gnashing, and the encyclopedism, and the comparison to Carlyle, and the pissing off everyone and everything -- these are just too uncanny for this to be any other "Jack."
"How Jack Made the Giants Uncommonly Sore"
Of all the ill-fated
Boys ever created
Young Jack was the wretchedest lad:
An emphatic, erratic,
Dogmatic fanatic
Was foisted upon him as dad!
From the time he could walk,
And before he could talk,
His wearisome training began,
On a highly barbarian,
Disciplinarian, Nearly Tartarean
Plan!
He taught him some Raleigh,
And some of Macaulay,
Till all of "Horatius" he knew,
And the drastic, sarcastic,
Fantastic, scholastic
Philippics of "Junius," too.
He made him learn lots
Of the poems of Watts,
And frequently said he ignored,
On principle, any son's
Title to benisons
Till he'd learned Tennyson's
"Maud."
(You can get an anthology of such tongue-in-cheek renderings of fables in the collection Grimm Tales Made Gay.)
Forced to learn Greek at 3: it's no wonder Mill hated authority - Times Online
"For these are the giants
Of thought and of science,"
He said in his positive way:
"So weigh them, obey them,
Display them, and lay them
To heart in your infancy's day!"
Jack made no reply,
But he said on the sly
An eloquent word, that had come
From a quite indefensible,
Most reprehensible,
But indispensable
Chum.
By the time he was twenty
Jack had such a plenty
Of books and paternal advice,
Though seedy and needy,
Indeed he was greedy
For vengeance, whatever the price!
In the editor's seat
Of a critical sheet
He found the revenge that he sought;
And, with sterling appliance of
Mind, wrote defiance of
All of the giants of
Thought.
He'd thunder and grumble
At high and at humble
Until he became, in a while,
Mordacious, pugnacious,
Rapacious. Good gracious!
They called him the Yankee Carlyle!
But he never took rest
On his quarrelsome quest
Of the giants, both mighty and small.
He slated, distorted them,
Hanged them and quartered them,
Till he had slaughtered them
All.
And this is The Moral that lies in the verse:
If you have a go farther, you're apt to fare
Worse.
(When you turn it around it is different rather: -
You're not apt to go worse if you have a fair
father!)
 Not sure about Nic, but in the royal Esquire sense of "we," we are indeed zapped something awful by the liebstod when it comes to Ms. Anne Hathaway.
I co-opt my co-editor preemptively because I already know this affection is contagious and is at least partly responsible for endangering relationships. A few months ago I went to dinner at my dad's house and caught him on-demanding Ella Enchanted, not, I hasten to add, for its snappy dialogue and knowing, postmodern take on the fairy tale paradigm... His wife, my stepmother, is English and thinks this sort of thing is sick and unseemly, and I tend to agree. Dewar's, nitroglycerin and Viagra lined up on any shelf belonging to my kin is not a lab assignment for which I'm inclined to do the homework. I've scheduled a summit with my y-chromosome over whether or not to break it to the old man that his own schoolboy vixen of choice Julie Andrews is in the Princess Diaries series...
But yeah, only slightly less pathetic is being on the cusp of 26 and smitten with someone whose chief demographic is 12 year-old girls. Though I suppose this is far superior to being twice that age and smitten with the chief demographic itself, eh, Derbs?
Perhaps it's the catscratch fever of industrial competition, but actress little sisters and actress ex-girlfriends alike don't appreciate drooling over this particular ingenue for some reason. Odd, too, because she seems to have wit and class and an enviable self-awareness and... well, now having written that, I wonder where the oddness comes into play at all.
Hathaway is the only thing that'll get me to see The Devil Wears Prada. I slogged through Havoc, I can put up with the Wintour of Non-Content. (And one of my job requirements at Jewcy is to be on nodding terms with chick-lit and its offshoots.)
Apple - Trailers - The Devil Wears Prada - Trailer B
 There are three ministry posts still unfilled -- Defense, Interior and National Security -- and so of course there are cries of illegitimacy going up already. However, anyone who inhales deeply today only to then use his breath to loose sarcasm and cynicism might profit from a gander at this remarkable interview with Iraq's re-elected president Jalal Talabani. I've used this space before to argue that what is almost unbelievably historic about this government is that it is now being led by a committed socialist Marxist, who has -- perhaps more than any other politician in the Middle East -- been versed in the tactics and gambits of democratic politics for close to two decades, as the former secretary-general of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. He's also had his fair share of civil war exposure since the PUK and Kurdistanti Democratic Party (KDP) drove each other out of northern Iraq in 1994 (and under the auspices of alternating but thoroughgoingly perilous alliances with Saddam Hussein and the mullahs of Iran), until a cease-fire agreement brokered by the US, UK and Turkey inaugurated a far more propitious era of power-sharing and federalism.
Never forget that despite the media's coarse lumpen-anatomy of Iraq's sectarianism, the definition "Kurd" encompasses more declensions and contradictions than "Democrat" does here. Even allowing the fact that most Kurds are also Sunni doesn't begin to suss these out or to make two citizens of Sulaimaniah agree with each other any more than two Jews in Manhattan do. The New York Times resorts to a common designation for divided identities, and men like Talabani have to work overtime restoring the divisions to their rightful places.
Anyway, I quote from the most urgent bits in this interview of him by Asharq Al-Awsat, reprinted in the Kurdistan Observer:
(Talabani) Let me tell you the reality. This is Iraq. It is made up of the Arab and Kurdish nationalities. This was stipulated in Saddam Hussein's constitution. There are the Turkoman and Chaldean-Assyrian nationalities besides these two. There are Muslims and Christians in Iraq. The Muslims are divided between the Sunni and the Shiite doctrines and there are the Hanafists and Al-Shafi'ists in the Sunnis. This is quite normal in Iraq and it is not imported or concocted. But what is lacking in Iraq today is the presence of parties spreading across the homeland as branches and organizations and extending from Zakho to Basra and where the party enters as a real list. Iraq lacks the democratic experience. When the Aflaqists took over power in Iraq, they put en end to the progressive movement in the country and also to the pan-Arabists who were unable to send a single deputy to parliament. The fact is that the political movement in Iraq is today divided into secularists and Islamists. The latter are the majority, whether they are Sunni or Shiite Arabs. They won the majority of seats in parliament as a result of the elections. It is therefore natural f | |
