• 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.}
• 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 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.}
• 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?"}
• 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.}
• 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 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.}
• 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.}
Any snarky blogentary bracketing that name would just make me look like even more of a two-bit Internet hack than I already am, beside the pure blue flame of absurdity that burns inside him like a revolutionary passion.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has praised Belarus, calling it "a model social state like the one we are beginning to create".
During a visit to Minsk, he called for a strategic alliance with Belarus to counter "hegemonic" capitalism.
"In Venezuela, too, we still think Levi's are fashionable in the West, and club those seen in denim."
Mr Chavez is on a world tour, partly to win support for Venezuela's bid to win a seat on the UN Security Council.
Well. Perhaps if the diplomacy works, Belarus can pull its one remaining string for Chavez. It's good to have friends in nonplaces.
The "Lives" feature on the inside back cover of the New York Times Magazine is normally one of the least interesting parts of the whole paper, so I'm glad I had insomnia last night or I might not have bothered to read this gem by a former American governor of an Iraqi province.
One morning [Asad] invited me for lunch at his home. He served a huge fish and described the history of his tribe. He proudly showed me a painting of an ancestor who backed the Ottomans against the British invasion of 1916, killing many British and then, having swapped sides, killing many Turks. To my surprise, his only request during the lunch was that my bodyguards eat some rice. Over coffee he spoke about the need for foreigners to leave Iraq.
A week later my compound was attacked. After the first mortar rounds landed, injuring one bodyguard, I heard that Asad was directing the attack. I phoned him.“Seyyed Rory, you must leave the compound: all of you, tonight,” he said.
...
Five weeks later, I saw Asad at the ceremony in which we handed over power to the Iraqi government. He embraced me and kissed me, saying: “We will miss you. We wish you could stay. You are my hero.” I asked Asad why he had been trying to kill me. “Ah, Mr. Rory,” he replied with a grin, “that was nothing personal.”
Along with many others, I was blown away by the twist at the end of The Sixth Sense. For two hours I’d snickered at the artiness of the compositions, at the way Bruce Willis’s character was so ludicrously alienated from the world that he had no spatial relationship with anyone but the freaky kid. And then: Kaboom! Talk about using a critic’s jadedness to pull the rug out from under him! Shyamalan was still a showman back then, before he began to fancy himself a shaman—or is that shyaman? Now he just writes dead people. -- David Edelstein
It's Fighting Jews week here on Snarksmith, I guess. Why is Israel doing what it is doing to Lebanon? Tim Cavanaugh at Reason makes the case that a lot of the justifications being made by politicians and pundits are not supported by actual Israeli actions. His preferred theory:
Israel is trying to internationalize anti-Shiism. Even more plausible, and supported by the tepid criticism of Hezbollah coming from Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The invasion of Iraq has turned the dream of a Shiite Crescent into a reality. The Sunni states are looking for any means to cut chunks out of that crescent, and with Saddam Hussein no longer available, Israel becomes a useful means to that end.
Cavanaugh doesn't go into the nitty-gritty game theory, but if this worked, it would put Syria in the position of siding with Iran and being a pariah even among other Arab countries, or making nice with Egypt, Saudi and Jordan and having to moderate a little bit. Either way, Syria, Iran or both would lose.
There are undoubtedly many other possibilities, and I should note that the assumption that there is a master strategy may be rooted in the simultaneously philo-Semitic and anti-Semitic notion that The Jews have figured out the universe and therefore always have a plan.
Well, Mossad did a pretty good job convincing the world that Sharon had a "stroke," didn't they?
First Matisyahu lickety-boom-boom-yeahs his way to the top of the reggae charts, now this:
Even among fighters, an ambitious and conflicted bunch, Salita’s ambitions and conflicts are more outsize than most. In a sport whose participants often thank Jesus or praise Allah before bowing to Mammon and doing their best to separate opponents from earthly consciousness, Salita is not just a Jew but a deeply observant Jew, involved with one of the world’s most ultra-Orthodox branches of the religion, the Brooklyn-based Chabad Lubavitch.
I swear to fucking God, next week I'm going to open my New York magazine and I'm going to find this sentence:
"By all accounts, Chaim Szamuely is a character. As the bush-domed, bass-voiced owner of a Crown Heights barbershop that's been in his family for generations (with the the revolving candy-striped pole outside to prove it), he'll gladly trim your payis for slightly more than the cost of a Supercuts snip. But most of Szamuely's regulars agree, this is value for money. Where else can a Jew get a haircut while also hearing of how Ben Gurion was the 'antisemite's antisemite,' Philip Roth was 'right about hand-jobs,' and -- most alarming of all -- 'Berkowitz did it?'"
Yes, yes, we all know Bush talks while he chews and thinks Syria is behind all this Hezbollah "shit." But more intriguing in the Times wrap-up of the G8 guerrilla miking is the following:
Whether the cause was poor staff work by the Russian hosts or something more calculated, the result was more interesting and revealing than the catalog of official statements the leaders had issued during their talks here in this St. Petersburg suburb, at the Konstantinovsky Palace.
Jeez, some people are so paranoid. You'd think it was the Cold War all over again with KGB agents skulking in the shadows or something.
Interesting side note: On the heels of Gawker's coverage of the original version of this article, the Times apparently thought "shit" was too harsh for precious readers' ears. The piece has since been bowdlerized.
Sully and Djerejian go to work on Glenn Reynolds for more than good reason. I have no problem with a major site declaring its political bias (even when it isn't quite sure of just how far that bias has migrated in the past months; not that I'm projecting or anything.) But Reynolds has always struck me as too eager to please his base than to highlight the internal contradictions and criticisms that make modern (and neo-) conservatism so interesting right now.
Bertie Wooster once described a cow creamer as bearing the likeness of "sinister, leering, Underworld sort of animal, the kind that would spit out of the side of its mouth for twopence." I always think of that gentle bovine nature masking the inner hostility when I read Instapundit. Reynold's domain is really just another Feel Good, Incorporated, serving up prefab confirmation of Bush policy and witless snipes against those who challenge it.
Here I should disclose my own personal grievance: It was rather nice of Reynolds to link to every other site about the NYC Denmark rally except the one that organized the thing. I know we have potty mouth and don't particularly like Gitmo or wiretapping round these parts, but still... Whither this Pajama-Paine revolution Glenn seems so enamored of?
It doesn't take an especially discerning eye to notice that Arts & Letters Daily is pretty libertarian as far as the more highbrow major-bandwidth clearing houses go. But Denis Dutton keeps things fun and fresh by being hilariously bitchy and by also linking to articles that call his own well-worn tendencies -- on, say, environmentalism -- into question. This is the way it should work.
The echo-chamber of "Heh" has well passed the point of diminishing returns.
Question to Snarksmith's readers: is Israel blowing the shit out of Lebanon (or Hezbollah provoking Israel to blow the shit out of Lebanon) the final nail in the coffin of the Democratic Peace Theory, which holds that wars never happen between functional democracies?
This can only be true if (a) Israel isn't a functional democracy, (b) Lebanon isn't a functional democracy, or (c) this isn't really a war.
I'm inclined to think that this decisively eliminates the theory for once and for all. Lebanon isn't the most robust democracy yet, but it's hard to say what it would have done if it could to crack down on Hezbollah, which holds seats in the parliament. The Lebanese government didn't seem to be in any hurry to disarm its militias before the incursion. Israel is clearly a functional democracy. And I would say that rockets exchanged with demolition of all major transit infrastructure can be classified as a war.
The Democratic Peace Theory, then, seems to find a correlation between democracies and peace that doesn't actually depend on democracy qua democracy but, I think, a certain level of comfort with not going to war among functional democracies, plus a willingness to put a Bowie knife in one's teeth and kick some ass if the democracy really is threatened. Lebanon has always had the former, but I don't think is invested enough in the latter.
I'm not in agreement with every one of Eric Lee's arguments in this smart and honest post about why the British Left should support Israel. For one thing, you can't maintain that international law should obtain in the conduct of warfare and then look, for an example, to the Soviet Union's grinding and bloody charge through Europe at the close of the Second World War at a time when Nazism was all but defeated. (If the corollary is that the IDF ought to behave themselves in Beirut the way the Red Army did in Berlin, count me out, comrade.)
However, Lee makes a point, and it's nice to see the long arm of Euston-inflected socialism coming down on religious fascism, which is identified here by the proper name.
Let's be clear: Israel may act with disproportionate force when it is threatened or attacked, but it is still one of the few functioning democracies in the Middle East. Its government not only pays lip service to human rights (something which Syria, Iran, Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon and Hamas-controlled Palestine seldom, if ever, do) but its constituency routinely exercises the rights of self-criticism and the formation of opposition politics. Moreover, Israel has been the locus for some of the most progressive and radical scholarship ever conducted in the realm of debunking the mythology of Judaism and all other monotheisms, giving the empirical lie to messianic Jewish statecraft. (Another irony lost on today's Left: it's now the "Zionists" who are performing the tedious spadework of anti-Zionism.) Of what neighboring country can this be said to be the case? The Left obviously cannot say that because Israel is a democracy it should be held to higher standard and subjected to a louder chorus of global condemnation whenever it deviates from democratic norms. Apart from being condescending to all Muslims (and apart from the fact that the Left chooses not to see Israel as even nominally democratic), such logic slaughters those twin ewe-lambs of parliamentary power, Hamas and Hezbollah. Are these elected groups to be held to no standard at all?
When they act aggressively without provocation, they do so out out of "memory" for past traumas. Funny, though, how that memory always seems to go on the fritz whenever the Holocaust is mentioned, or when real revolutionary movements take hold to discredit dictatorship or theocracy. This is when past wound-lickings are replaced by present acts of violence -- precisely when the Left loses its own heed of democratic norms and grows aristocratic in its selective recall of history.
The real question for socialists when a war like this breaks out is to look at what will happen if either side wins. Let us imagine that Israel wins -- meaning that the captured soldiers are returned and the rocket attacks from Gaza and Lebanon end. The result will not only be good for Israel, but good for the Palestinians and Lebanese as well. The Islamo-fascists will be weakened. Democratic and secular forces will be strengthened. Socialists should cheer this on.
Now image what happens if Hamas and Hizbollah win. They over-run the Jewish state, slaughtering and expelling its several million Jewish inhabitants. They create a reactionary theocratic dictatorship along the lines of their benefactor, Iran. No one benefits -- not the Jews, not the Arabs. This a result that only fascists could applaud.
The Socialist Workers Party of the UK, a pretty lumpen sodality to begin with, claims to derive its platform from the Fourth International politics of "Trotskyism." Yet it maintains gender-divided prayer services for its Islamist fellow travelers, it declares allegiance with headbanded thugs who give the Hitler salute and back this up by being openly dedicated the elimination of regional Jewry. (Is that all it takes to be called a "resistance" these days?)
This is how Trotsky, who surmised as early as 1938 that the ambitions of National Socialism were inseparable from the mass murder of Jews, is rewarded. This is how Marxism enters the 21st century, full of contradictions all but the Marxists themselves can detect.
Actually, she's from Mississippi and, so far as I know, still quite sane. But "88 Lines About 44 Women" is stuck in my melon after seeing ads for The Oh in Ohio, about Parker's elusive orgasm.
Owen Gleiberman in EW:
I'm convinced that what Truman Capote did for Philip Seymour Hoffman, a Katharine Hepburn biopic could do for Parker Posey. Take a good look at her: She's Hepburn's double, and so naturally stylized that you can just imagine her slipping into those head-tilting gestures, that playful aristocratic lilt. Yet it's Parker Posey's extreme stylization, her distinctive way of putting air quotes around joy or despair, that has also limited her as an actress. Mostly, she has thrived in goofy-camp indie throwaways that exploit her penchant for alluring self-mockery.
Good call, although Posey's at her best when she's playing a neurotic clubrat in Alphabet City, not a bubbly bourgeois on Park Avenue.
My favorite is still Miami from Kicking and Screaming, with the markered sign in the dorm room: "I cheated on you." Pause. Squeak, squeak: "Sorry."
On Paris Hilton's debut single "The Stars Are Blind," Jody Rosen feels like Jack Black did in High Fidelity after hearing the demo made by those back-alley skater punks. With head cradled in hands: "It's... really fucking good."
Like I've been banging on about since Snarksmith went live: give her another decade and Paris is going to be Lynne Cheney. She's just working it all out of her system, see. The shock factor is now at that delicate stage of being subsumed by... merit. Soon it's the "please don't hold my youth against me" plaint, the deep reflections on a gadarene dip in national morality (for which she was partly responsible) and then all-out cultural conservatism. But the process has begun. She's already somewhere between Calvin Klein commercial and Chris Isaak dune romp. Just look:
Compare this to the pea-gree ragdoll treatment by King Solomon from a few years back.
Peter Savodnik of the Moscow Times wishes the inchoate opposition to Vladimir Putin were more, erm, "choate":
But freedom as an idea or aspiration can't be quashed. Spinoza knew this. So did Martin Luther King Jr., Andrei Sakharov, and Vaclav Havel. So did the Soviets. Other people can tell you that you are free. They can tell you this while they kill you or arrest you or strip you of your right to travel or work, and they can tell you they are doing these things to preserve your freedom or the freedom of other people you love or have never met or have yet to be born. But you don't have to believe it. You can believe whatever you want, and in the process of believing independently, you exercise your agency: You achieve your freedom.
This is what the "Other Russia" should have told the rest of Russia, but it didn't. By staging the two-day conference this week, before Bush, Blair, et al. descend on St. Petersburg, the hope was to lift the curtain on the nonsense that will be taking place inside Konstantin Palace, where the talk will focus on energy markets, AIDS, and North Korean nuclear missiles, and no one will say what everyone knows: Russia does not belong in a club of democratic nations. The "Other Russia" should have said what no one will say, and it should have said exactly what it would have done to correct Russia's political course, but it didn't.
There was an old photo floating around cyberspace a few months ago. A random wall or billboard in New York was defaced with the question: "Is it fascism yet?" Some clever passer-by wrote underneath: "No, you're still making signs."
The trouble with an Opposition in Russia is that it fails on its own raison d'etre: to make trouble for the current regime. Putin "allows" this kind of carnival-mirror G8 summit to take place in a low-rise, low-rent hotel in St. Petersburg because he knows that its supporters -- like Savodnik -- are going to cluck their tongues over how ineffectual and pathetic it all seems... Which is not to say, of course, that Gasparov and those crumpled old Falstaffs of dissent are not to be supported or (especially) encouraged to bid dos vedanya to the neo-Nazis and Bolshevik nostaglics who comprise the rump of their contingent. But the minute they do what Savodnik advises them to do is the minute they'll be shut down.
The Economist gave its cover , in a week when Mumbai commuters became the latest quarry of Al Qaeda, to the slithery authoritarian in the Kremlin because, for the time being, he's having it both ways in a grand style: curtailing individual rights while showing "results." The latest of these is the murder of the chief Chechen rebel-terrorist. (Notice how Putin's power consolidation is not seen as a "distraction" from the hunt for radical Islamists that chivvy his constituency.)
More dispiriting than Putin's popularity (around 70%) is the public's unwillingness to even try to justify it according the standard euphemisms and rationalizations: "Of course we're still a democratic country!" "Khordokovsky was a criminal! Putin was right to catapult him into Siberia!" etc. etc. Instead, there's the cynical Slavic shrug about petty little freedoms and high-blown "Western" concepts such as human rights.
And why not? As long as the rent is paid and the thugs are wiped off the streets, who's to quibble with state-ownership of the means of production, or cenorship of the press?
And yet it has only been six years. And presidential term limits have not been breached. And pipelines are being laid across Kazakhstan.... The last laugh's always on the cynic, though: Just you wait.
P.J. O'Rourke said somewhere that one could always get a good sense of how dire the Arab-Israeli conflict was by the bagels served at UN headquarters on 2nd Avenue: a thin slime trail of butter, no cream cheese. And don't even think about asking for lox.
Now Anthony Bourdain is spending his own holiday in hell. Courtesy of Page Six:
"They're bombing right now in southern Beirut. I can hear the explosions. The thing is, the people here are really, really nice and totally embarrassed by Hezbollah and horrified by the bombings."
After spending Monday and Tuesday eating his way through Beirut and befriending locals, Bourdain and his crew partied at local nightclubs into the wee hours. "This is a party town," he explained. "Everyone in this city is [bleeping] gorgeous. It's like L.A. It's a totally international, sophisticated city. Everyone speaks English and throws dollars around."
Oh, what a vertiginous week in Jew media it's been for this associate editor. New York's finest get their first Hasidic cop, then it's proved they didn't. Then it's revealed the Post headline ("NYPD Jew") was originally slated as "Kosher Pig." Now this brilliant blog hurtles down the Jewcy slipway:
Not Chosen, Just Posin'
I just got a job with a Jewish magazine. I'm not Jewish. They think I am.
You think those walleyes got that way from Koran-induced sublimation, huh?
The human mind has the capacity to feel the oneness of things, to put aside selfish ego and the violence, psychic and physical, that it promotes. The drug just demonstrates that the capacity is there. This was known. The question is, what one does with it. A peak experience can just be an experience. Or it can be the beginning of a more fulfilled, kind and giving life. The drug by itself is no more important than a parlor trick. As with anything in life, it matters what is done with it. And, the true mystic does not need mushrooms to have peak experiences.
Ayatollah Sistani's website says: "This is good shit."
I'm a fan of the Big Dig's planning and engineering, but all that money and engineering cleverness may be wasted by cheap materials and sloppy workmanship. I consider this to be murder by neglect.
Mitt Romney: if you pin criminal charges on the contractors responsible for this, and if you raze the corrupt fiefdom that is the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, I will look past our political disagreements and your overarching dislikability and support your bid for president. I want a flaming pyre of scapegoat sacrifices. Get 'em.
PS: shortly before publishing this, it looks like Romney is doing just that. Fuck yeah. I want all the wrath of the vindictive God of your first and third testaments, Mitty Boy.
PPS: Attorney General O'Reilly, who wants to be governor and might lose to insurgent Democrat Deval Patrick, is opening a criminal investigation. This may become a race to see who can claim the most scalps first. I certainly hope so.
Vive le France. After an absolutely outstanding victory against heavily favored Brazil in the quarterfinals in which the Europeans were the ones playing the Beautiful Game, the relatively old French team looked tired yesterday against Portugal -- but not that tired.
History uncannily repeated itself Wednesday, as France defeated Portugal, 1-0, on a penalty kick by Zinédine Zidane to reach the World Cup final for the second time in less than a decade.
Six years ago, France beat Portugal in the semifinals of the European Championships, also on a penalty kick by Zidane. The memory of that call still rankles Portugal and served to fire up the squad that took the field here.
Not enough, though. Despite an energetic effort by wings Luís Figo and Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese could not penetrate France's swarming defense.
Sorry, but if there's anything remarkable about Portugal losing on a penalty kick, it's that they were hoist with their own petard. Portugal have been playing like petty thugs, knocking other players to the ground and then flopping themselves to try and draw a foul. They set records for the number of penalties and drew an unbelievable number of red and yellow cards against Netherlands. I'm glad to see the eggplant-jerseyed reprobates sent to the consolation round.
Zidane Leads the Old Men of Europe | New York Times
Saddam's Road To Hell is a PBS/Frontline documentary as yet unaired in Britain because, according to some Kurds, Channel 4 is wondering how to implicate Whitehall and Washington in the Anfal campaign. (Some non-Kurdish journalists like to say that this genocide was evidence of Saddam's distinction among monsters, for it was the first time in history that a dictator deployed chemical weapons "against his own people." He may have thought he was Saladin reborn, but the Kurds were never "his," either by definition as chattel or along mutual ethnological lines.)
Perhaps an edited-in split-screen showing Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam might have enticed the BBC to exhibit the film. Then again, what schoolchild doesn't have that vignette permanently burned into his mind's eye by now?
Nick Cohen curses deaf broadcasting with his bootless cries in The Guardian:
The film follows Mohammed Ihsan, Kurdistan's Human Rights Minister, as he sets off in an armoured convoy through the maelstrom of postwar Iraq to find the bodies of the dead, a case for the prosecution in the trial of Saddam. We see backstreet shops where, for a very high price, lawyers looking for evidence can buy documents looted from secret police archives, skeletons being dug out of mass graves in the desert and snuff videos of torturers blowing up prisoners or throwing them from rooftops. All the time, like a low hum in the background, the threat of assassination hangs over the investigators.
It is very good film, but Channel 4 failed to show it. The Middle East being the way it is, the Kurds have a conspiracy theory. Channel 4 is filled with Rory Bremner types, they say: rich, Western liberals, uncomfortable with crimes against humanity they can't blame on Tony Blair or George W Bush. QED. C4 has suppressed it to maintain its unjustifiable self-righteousness.
The real treat, though, is the Comments section (even "freer" than the Guardian blog) beneath the article itself. Some nice tropes to watch out for: "what Saddam may or may not have done;" "neocon Kool-Aid;" "Blairite and Zionist tactic;" etc. etc.
Poor darlings tire themselves out so quicky. At least they'll all sleep soundly tonight.
The Atlantic reprints an old Nabokov short called "Cloud, Castle, Lake," which borrows from the troika title sequence of King, Queen, Knave. Anyway, wanna check this out?
‘I shall complain,’ wailed Vasili Ivanovich. ‘Give me back my bag. I have the right to remain where I want. Oh, but this is nothing less than an invitation to a beheading’ —he told me he cried when they seized him by the arms.
Now, Invitation to a Beheading came out in Russian in '38, but was not translated, with that decided title - the more precise tongue change would have been Invitation to a Decapitation - until '59. "Cloud, Castle, Lake" was published in 1941.
Must have been percolating in the old bean for a while.
I don't subscribe to any doctrine of Israeli infallibility, which I'm told, with the most stone-faced expressions by my European friends, is what every American Jew with a political conscience does subscribe to. Do I think the existence of the Jewish state is a foregone conclusion, and that any attempt to deny this self-evident fact is no longer the stuff of silly fantasy (Tony Judt might be the rare exception here) but of sinister calculation? Yes. Do I think the IDF has employed heavy-handed methods of dealing with Palestinian terrorism? Yes. Do I think razing bridges and taking out power and water supplies -- which are guaranteed to affect more innocent civilians than murderous militants -- is an example of such? I do.
And yet... What I admire about the Israeli military is its view that the life of one soldier is worth so much. This is culled from the Comments section at Harry's Place, not known for its cooing reassurances of Zionism:
Well, let me explain something from a perspective of somebody that, with neither great pride nor great shame, served two-and-a-half wars (the half being the War of Attrition on the Suez Canal) in an IDF combat fatigues. Israeli government and IDF are guilty of many sins and I have never been bashful on HP in pointing this out. But IDF is a real people's army, manned (and wommaned) by citizens (conscripts and reservists) and essentially acting by consent of the people. The whole ethos is that the grunt on the ground is not an expandable chit in a high-stakes poker game. That you and your mates go into harm way, but you expect your army to do what it takes to rescue you in hour of need. As one of Israel's top tank commanders, Shmuel Gonen, once said, "I'll willingly sacrifice hundred soldiers to rescue a single wounded soldier" (and added, "but I will not harm a single fingernail of one soldier to salvage a corpse"). This might be poor tactics but it is the strategy that made IDF into a such an effective combat force. And UK and US military and political echelons never shared this ethos. Not on the Somme, not in Danang or Mogadishu and not in Iraq.
Too true. The IDF comes closest in the world to approximating the social democratic military theory of Jean Jaures, albeit it with the noticeable swap of his non-standing people's militia with a permanent and highly professional army. Carefully misremembered by today's left are the Menshevik underpinnings of Israel's founding, and just how socialistically conceived is much of its public sector. Indeed, the spirit of fraternity is probably strongest within the IDF ranks, and for reasons that don't reduce to mere Jewishness. (Other countries have ethnically homogenous forces, yet one life isn't worth the bother of a full-scale invasion.)
Yet another cause for shame and laughter in witnessing those who pretend to march under red banners of solidarity linking arms with the carriers of the black flag of jihad.
Since (late) 2004, satisfying your jones for political and cultural commentary, day-old scoops and late-breaking marginalia, and whatever else finagles its way into the cyber-planetary potluck...
• Civil Disobedience on the Web By Michael Weiss {British bloggers stand up to threats of libel lawsuits., originally published in Slate.}
• Spray-Fire Atonement By Michael Weiss {How cognitive behavioral psychology can help High Holy Day Jews who repent too much., originally published in Slate.}
• Mutiny on the Manifesto By Michael Weiss {Spineless scalawags are sabotaging the most promising leftist doctrine in decades. Don't let them., originally published in Jewcy.}
• Rise of the Faux-cialists By Michael Weiss {Three poseurs who would have Marx spinning in his grave (plus their real-deal counterparts), originally published in Jewcy.}
• Stepson of the Time By Michael Weiss {A reconsideration of Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, originally published in The New Criterion.}
• The Surge Can Work By Michael Weiss {Everyone's wrong about the president's new war plan, originally published in Jewcy.}
• A Kibitz on Pure Reason By Michael Weiss {The author of Betraying Spinoza on rationalism, passion, and great 17th-century hair, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Brainwashing's Nemesis By Michael Weiss {How Rick Ross became a cult buster extraordinaire, originally published in Jewcy.}
• The Whiz Kid of Warfare By Michael Weiss {How Noah Shachtman has revolutionized military reporting, originally published in Jewcy.}
• A Blacklist The Left Could Use By Michael Weiss {Meet the Christopher Hitchens of postpunk, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Is Marriage the New Dating? By Michael Weiss {A divorcee, a young married, and a singleton debate wedded bliss, originally published in Jewcy.}
• The Jewish Jihad for Jesus By Michael Weiss {Why converts are leading the evangelical movement, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Tribal Threads By Michael Weiss {The designer of Gytha Mander on the holy land, holsters, and honeys, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Some Kind of Republican By Michael Weiss {The real legacy of John Hughes, published in Slate.}
First Matisyahu lickety-boom-boom-yeahs his way to the top of the reggae charts, now this:
Actually, she's from Mississippi and, so far as I know, still quite sane. But "
Peter Savodnik of the Moscow Times wishes the inchoate opposition to Vladimir Putin were more, erm, "choate":
Jacob the Jeweler pleads not guilty to money laundering. I can't wait to see the diamond-encrusted "Innocent" bling he shows up in court with.
