17th and Irving

Friday, March 31, 2006

the little burro chase game

So I saw Juan Pablo today and he promised he hadn't stolen his job from a real American like O'Hannigan, Smith or Scherzbach in at least a week. The nativist lunacy that burrows like a cicadda is back again visiting another plague on the manipulated, short-sighted and deluded American people and has brought forth its populist political leeches who make a practice of making policies of hate sound like "messages of the people". They would never presume to rule by ignoring the voice of the people! They must heed it! That great and terrible voice! The one that during the commercials for American Idol and Pimp My Ride has cried out for justice against the oppressive terrorist dishwasher who everywhere seeks to block advancement for the white people of this country...I mean, excuse me, not the white people. Did I say that? No I said the Middle Class. You know, the backbone of this country. Meanwhile these same leeches have no compunction about allowing banks to raise huge fees on the consumers, avoid meaningful discussion of social security and its benefits nor address the huge inequalities that exist in public education. How exactly is New Orleans doing these days again?

Iraq?

Better to legislate by responding to the will of the people than by addressing nagging issues that the liberal press makes too much of.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher believes hell, let the prisoners pick the fruit. That's what the American people want. This is the same Dana Rohrbach of Orange County, California, you know the guy that let Jack Abramoff use his name as a personal reference when he was getting a $60 million loan for some casino boats in Florida.

Old Dana, he really worries what the people of America want. And they want rapists and people who wave the Mexican flag at rallies picking fruit in the noonday sun.

Surely it was what Americans wanted when Rep. Rohrabacher helped out a guy who promised to make a movie based on a Rohrabacher script. Rohrabacher set up some meetings with some Republicans serving on the committee liasoning with the Department of Homeland Security and the guy offered to make one pro-American movie a year and generally be a good citizen. He'd make a good American movie that any mom, pop and their tyke could watch without having to worry about the homosexuals, the deviants or the liberals funding it and influencing it. And if that filmmaker happened to rip off his investors of five or six million bucks, well, look, he said he was going to make pro-American movies. You don't see Steven Speilberg doing that.

Rohrabacher was also the guy that wrote California's legendary prop. 187 and in 2004 proposed a bill to withhold emergency room treatment to people who couldn't prove they were citizens of our fair country.

Apparently Americans are an angry, vengeful lot. At least the ones he represents. And why not, the forces of hate are strong in this world -- as a matter of fact he supported the Taliban as enemies of terrorism and hate in 1996. They would bring order he asserted in the November/December 1996 issue of Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. After 9/11 he said the attacks were because the Clinton administration was blind.

And even though Rohrabacher's political campaigns have been largely funded by a friendly billionaire, and though he's friends with "an honest man", the person he was referring to there being of course, Jack Abramoff, Rep. Rohrabacher really is concerned with representing the views of Mr. and Mrs. Joe America.

And if America is a vengeful, vindictive, xenophopic place right now, who is Rep. Rohrabacher to blow against the wind? Hell, he's turning on the fan and opening the windows so the voice of true Americans (not ones waving some spic flag) can ring out. "Blow wind blow," he breathes to himself and to everybody that will listen.

Give me that spic flag, that Mexican flag to be correct and I'll wave it in your face too (and I'm no nationalist, the country is about as valid as the sports team -- at best it's a way of quantifying who needs to be helped and amassing ways to organize the morpheus and bring assistance to those who need it, meanwhile the Cubs are a way of life), and I think of all the people I know who came here, some risking things to call this country their home that few would be willing to do who were born here, and these people who have been so good to me so many times, some of their kids I've tutored, I've taught now, and who made my life as a waiter, a teacher, a friend, so much fucking fun I didn't worry about when I was leaving, what I was doing or how I looked, who work as hard as any other person and who don't have to apologize for anything, and I see some bastard like this, spitting on these people with his flag-spitted lips, saying the Mexicans are the ones tearing this country down and meanwhile, him and all the other opportunist low-lifes like him who have brought down the level of political and social discourse in this country to the neanderthal level acting like they're protecting us and have our best interests at heart when they are leeching off of us and seeking to instill the fear necessary to manipulate and the hate necessary to manipulate. When is the point that to call an ass an ass is more than honest, it's necessary?

How does he come to represent the views of so many of our citizens? This is a sick, sick country, with a middle class so jittery and uncertain of its economic and social future that since we laid that atom bomb over the small river jutting through Hiroshima it has been easier and easier to co-opt the middle class in a brutal, arrogant and expensive foreign policy. To gather their support has only taken the breath of a potential threat to their way of life, fragile as it is because it is built on the broken eggshells of a foreign policy that has supported far more tyrants than it has fought, and has involved a blossoming of slave labor and a need for willful blindness as the complicity of the many.

And now it's the Mexicans fault. Whatever that means.

That keeps the Arabs off the front page because things aren't too cool on that front right now, but it reminds all those voters just who they need to keep in mind for protection. Because it's a mean world out there. And I don't want to say anything, but you know that Mexican clipping your hedges, he could have helped some Al Qu'aida guy get in here. Six degrees of Kevin Bacon? How about three degrees of Osama bin Laden? You, that hedger, Osama.

How about measures to help the lives of the people who help build the fabric of our society? Not just the illegal immigrant, but those people not pandered to by the commercials during Desperate Housewives?

This battle, for the meaning of government, at worst this political opportunism will cost yet more lives. The political alter of sacrifice is hungry these days. A couple more American soldiers were killed in Iraq today.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, I'm sure, is quite comfortable at the moment.

Many of those he seeks to further punish, are toiling away at jobs that only further define the oppressive gap between the comfortable and jittery constituancy of Dana Rohrabacher and the struggling and growing population of those who shoulder this economy on their backs. Many of those he claims to support, he's sent on a fool's errand, and they are at this moment, some of them, patrolling Iraqi neighborhoods already spilling over and veering toward civil war.

Meanwhile, Wood is out until May and Prior's at least a few weeks away. As dreary as that thought is, it's the one that keeps me sane. That and that Zambrano still throws. The vines aren't there yet at Wrigley, won't be until mid-May at the earliest, but next week there's baseball, the beautiful beginning, middle and end broken up into threes.

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Thursday, March 23, 2006

"no president wants war"

Oh yeah?

Why is it today I miss Los Angeles? Who misses Los Angeles besides people from Los Angeles? The 405? Cold Water Canyon? The 110 on both ends, the ocean and the hills just beyond Pasadena that lead out through the hills into the long flat bowl of central California that bakes and hides as you approach it from the north in a fog.

I used to love driving down the Five, the fault just off the highway running along and watching the horizon for signs of police aircraft. It's its own world there, a language of 1950s truckers and washed out women who've long ago lost hope of making it out unless it's as inspiration for a sleazy character in a cheap detective novel and I'm between San Francisco and Los Angeles for just a minute and always thinking I should stop and see what downtown Bakersfield looks like.

Then Los Angeles, coming in over the pass where the temperature drops and it first it seems like it's still aways away but then the 110 and soon enough the 101 and at night the 101 can feel like the most perfect place on earth.

Going home I'd always take the 101 and look forward to the ocean just around Santa Barbara and, if I was lucky, the last bit of sunlight in the hills just off San Luis Obispo. Here, Brooklyn's stuck in this perpetual pre-spring/post-winter rut where the wind (there is no breeze) is always cold and the sun still feels weak. Baseball in less than a month?

I can't talk about the idiot in the White House today, but I did learn that a soldier in Iraq is about 30 times more likely to die than if he were at home. I don't know about catastrophic injuries, but I do know some conservative pundits have been trying to say Iraq's not much more dangerous than anywhere else. Really (one place to look is littlegreenfootballs.com on 3/21). They don't want to denigrate the soldiers, they say, but really, hell, construction's just as dangerous. College is just as dangerous. Accounting. Yep. So they imply. As much as I hated French, I will never confuse it with Falujah.

So anyway, some guy at tpmcafe.com ran some statistics, which didn't take into account things like soldiers probably don't have aggravating conditions that would more directly threaten their lives than would be found in the rest of the population, which might make it even more dangerous, from a statistical point of view. I stayed home sick today.

Mostly I read, slept and listened to those old songs I've been downloading. I also made a final desperate look for my shaver, but it's gone. Gone, gone, gone. So I'll have to buy a new one tomorrow or the next day and get respectable again. Seriously, it looks more likely than not, on looking at me, that I'll ask you for change.

I spent a bunch of time at my friend Melissa's website. She runs a magazine which is beautifully put together, called Hyphen ( www.hyphenmagazine.com ), it makes me wonder why I'm wasting my life: supreme efforts like that.

I also listened to "Rosa Parks" by Outkast a bunch of times and thought about this article I read a few days ago where some guy who robbed Rosa Parks's apartment and beat her in the 1990s was really sorry because he'd never get to apologize to her. He said he was upset that he would go down in history as the guy who robbed Rosa Parks and he wants redemption. He supposes he will have to draw strength from God. He got 53 dollars. Apparently he had a history of targeting older women for robbery and when he got jumped the next day and turned over to the police he had 11 cents. ( http://detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060319/METRO/603190401/-1/ARCHIVE ) So he gets to jail and everybody takes delight in beating the hell out of him and throwing shit on him and basically passing judgment because finally here's somebody who sucks more than them and there's so much of this everywhere, this, "I would never do THAT" and yesterday O'Reilly's talking to Newt Gingrich about how great Bush was for realizing he "had to take his cause directly to the American people" because of course the media is confusing them, and then O'Reilly turned to the camera, and I was already sick and getting sicker in a haze of pseudafed and he tells me I won't want to miss his next segment, an interview with a kid who had been sexually abused by a guy who only got probation. There it is: groundbreaking journalism. A lot of reporting and deciding there and what else are you supposed to decide about some sexual predator and yet, I thought about it after I turned the channel, because I didn't really want to have to deal with the syruppy sympathy and sloppy sentamental outrage against such an easy target, so I watched this movie for a few minutes with Rosalind Russel on Turner Classics that looked wonderful but I needed to sleep but I kept thinking about it as I said above, while I was dropping off into this really odd dream: why is it that if you try to understand something awful like those above things in a larger context in which we all take on some responsibility (you know, "am I not my brother's keeper" and stuff like that), you're immediately jumped on and instead of being able to explore these issues and their connectivities in discussion you constantly are reduced to saying things like "I understand how horrible and heinous this was", well duh, but can we at least explore the idea that we have a violently repressed society sexually in which we inject tons of artificial sexual stimulants that create images that don't challenge the viewer's fantasies but instead coddle them and further them (and further more, this is a necessary complication of free speech) and while pedophilia is nothing new, how do we spend so much time thinking about that in the media with such obvious outrage and titillation while ignoring our societal confusion as to sex that exists; or that we have a huge underclass that is largely ignored except for when we condemn it and its people of sin and that in such a society it's just a matter of time before someone of Rosa Parks stature is robbed by somebody of Joseph Skipper's stature and it's just their respective bad luck that it's those two, with those names, who become linked so that the one simply becomes a sentence in the other's book of life.

I hate all this God stuff, how we ascribe to God these human attributes like strength and will so that we can give shape to things like fate and life. Let God be God, thank God for existance and then don't profance God with all our sillinesses, stupidities and good lucks. We create borders in which we can define God: constellations against the vacuum of space. I won't hold God to any word, the words were for us to use, for us to guess with, who knows why? But the vastness of this Creation forces us to create all these words which in the end form our only relationship to Creation that is entirely socially based. And so often calling on the "word" of God is used as a way to silence dissent (hardly a groundbreaking thought, I know), but why is the authority of knowing SO EASILY assumed by so many people? How do you presume to KNOW the will of God. The will of God? The will of God is the story of the birth of something out of nothing, can you presume to know that? If your knowledge of God is only selective then how do you discern where your belief becomes a certainty.

To call on faith at this point is to simply revert to the argument "I know because I know". That's ok if you're talking about who's the best baseball player ever, or which cheese is better than which, but not ok if you're talking about how people should be required to live.

I should sleep, tomorrow is long.

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Sunday, March 19, 2006

how come nobody has a band called "the braces"?

The anarchists were handing out pamphlets at 13th and Broadway, wearing masks and scaring little kids and FOX-News patrons, and they seemed to be having more fun than anybody was during the movies. V for Vendetta, playing just upstairs from the anarchists was slick and uneven. At times there might be something cutting politically by Hollywood standards, and I'm all for that, but for the most part, the theater was too hot and the action was too cool. I like some kick-ass in my action movies and while I'm all for a civics lesson on civil disobedience and a debate on the role of violence, it would be nice if I was awake for it.

The problem is this too, if one hates the government, and these days there are more reasons to hate our government than to support it, then how does one go about building any kind of coalition? That problem is not exactly addressed in the movie, it seems to assume that if your country lies to you, bullies you into fear and restricts your freedoms and your ability towards expression (for instance, like making it much more difficult to find sustainable employment that offers hope for advancement so that one doesn't feel two paychecks from rooting around in the garbage while meanwhile billionaires get tax breaks even after they're dead) that you might get angry about it and support actions made in protest or even in direct conflict with your government. But the known pain in the ass is always safer than the unknown and in the back of many minds, no doubt, is a pastiche of Stalin trials and hippies when people bring up revolution and civil disobedience, as well, perhaps, as Gandhi spinning thread and getting shot.

Anyway, I've spent most of the day at this site run by UC Santa Barbara downloading all these old songs taken from late 19th and early 20th Century 78s. There are some truly wonderful songs and utterances to be found. For Mac users, when clicking on the download you should hit option with the mouseclick, I don't know the other way, but maybe it's just right click....

Otherwise, the most enjoyable movie I saw this weekend was She's the Man. The two boys in front of me were very impressed by Ms. Byne's performance and Vinnie Jones was in it too. V for Vendetta could have used him. One last thing about V for Vendetta, Stephen Rea, as always, was amazing.

But what's the deal with apparently the head police inspector doing all that leg work? Shouldn't he be directing movement a little more? I felt like I was watching the police in Monty Python's Holy Grail.

The other day I was at the Dunkin' Donuts and spilling things, tripping and just basically playing the role of clumsy oaf and this woman at the table next to me was so kind, she helped with the spill, she smiled sympathetically when I was clumsy, she pointed out that I'd dropped a bag and later a phone and was in general so kind that I really felt grateful.

Maud called today and I could Ron and Pat on the radio behind her -- hearing them always makes me miss Chicago. I forget who the Cubs were playing, but Rich Hill is getting bombed. Man, they could use some more offense. That team does not know how to get on base, and now it looks like they're going to be getting hit pretty hard on a regular basis.

Off to do some grading, maybe a movie, maybe some more 78s.

Some articles:

How Pop Sounded Before It Popped
By JODY ROSEN
Published: March 19, 2006

FOR a couple of months now my iPod has been stuck on Stella Mayhew's "I'm Looking for Something to Eat." It's a lurching little waltz-time pop tune, drawled over brass-band accompaniment. The lyric is hilarious, the lament of a gal on a diet who can't stop eating, and it climaxes with a glutton's soul cry: "I want some radishes and olives, speckled trout and cantaloupe and cauliflower/ Some mutton broth and deviled crabs and clams and Irish stew." I can't get it out of my head — so far, it's my favorite record of 2006.

As it happens, it's also my favorite record of 1909. It is an Edison Phonograph Company wax cylinder, recorded 97 years ago by Mayhew, a vaudeville star who liked to poke fun at her considerable girth. In certain ways, the song is up to date: the satire on dieting is plenty relevant in the early 21st century, and Mayhew's slurred talk-singing is a bracingly modern sound. But the noisy, weather-beaten recording is unmistakably a product of the acoustic era — the period from about 1890 to the mid-1920's, before the advent of electric recording — when musicians cut records while crammed cheek-by-jowl-by-trombone around phonograph horns in rackety little studios.

Mayhew's record is just one of several thousand cylinders, the first commercially available recordings ever produced, that have recently become available free of charge to anyone with an Internet connection and some spare bandwidth. Last November, the Donald C. Davidson Library at the University of California, Santa Barbara, introduced the Cylinder Digitization and Preservation Project Web site (cylinders.library.ucsb.edu), a collection of more than 6,000 cylinders converted to downloadable MP3's, WAV files and streaming audio. It's an astonishing trove of sounds: opera arias, comic monologues, marching bands, gospel quartets. Above all, there are the pop tunes churned out by Tin Pan Alley at the turn of the century: ragtime ditties, novelty songs, sentimental ballads and a dizzying range of dialect numbers performed by vaudeville's blackface comedians and other "ethnic impersonators."

For decades, these records languished unheard by all but a few intrepid researchers and enthusiasts. Now, thanks to the Santa Barbara Web site and the efforts of a small group of scholars, collectors and independent record labels, acoustic-era popular music is drifting back into earshot, one crackly cylinder and 78 r.p.m. disc at a time. These old records hold pleasant surprises, but they also carry a larger lesson about gaping holes in the story of American pop.

While historians have exhaustively investigated blues, jazz, rock and their offshoots, the mainstream pop music of the early 20th century has received only glancing treatment, the victim of a variety of prejudices entrenched in popular music culture. Listeners accustomed to the crispness of modern studio recording have been put off by the primitive sound of the old records, with their limited frequency response and harsh bursts of noise. Pop-song purists have scorned the music as the height of Tin Pan Alley's factory-produced pap — the gruesome stuff that came before Jerome Kern, Cole Porter et al. swooped in to transform popular music into a legitimate art form. Nearly everybody has been repelled by the content of songs that date from a time when coarse racial caricature was one of America's favorite sources of amusement.

Then there is the anti-pop sentiment that has dominated rock-era historiography, the tendency to trace rock's roots exclusively to folk sources — Delta bluesmen, Appalachian balladeers and other romantically hard-bitten bumpkins — while dismissing as inauthentic anything with a whiff of Broadway about it. But turn-of-the-century pop was roots music in its own right, and the period that gave us the very first star singers and hit records deserves a central place in the historical narrative.

"Acoustic-era music is the historical underdog," said Richard Martin, the co-owner with his wife, Meagan Hennessey, of Archeophone Records, a label that specializes in acoustic-era pop. "These are scratchy records, with 19th-century aesthetics, with racist material all over the place, with artists you've never heard of. This stuff is completely unknown, and it's a treasure trove."

Today, a flurry of activity is reviving those antique musical treasures, and strengthening the challenge they present to critical orthodoxy. Archeophone (archeophone.com), a tiny mom-and-pop label based in St. Joseph, Ill., has released dozens of superb compilations chronicling the careers of the period's top recording artists, including Henry Burr, a prolific warbler of sentimental ballads, and the acoustic era's biggest star, Billy Murray, who wrapped his reedy pipes around virtually every hit of the day, including George M. Cohan's "Yankee Doodle Boy" (1905) and Irving Berlin's "Alexander's Ragtime Band" (1911). The label's current top seller is a two-disc feat of audio archaeology, "Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1891-1922," released in conjunction with a groundbreaking book by the historian Tim Brooks.

Meanwhile, the Internet is crammed with specialists sharing knowledge and posting audio files of their own collections. By far the biggest online resource is the Santa Barbara site. It took $350,000 and several painstaking years for archivists to digitize the university's vast cylinder collection — the third-largest after the Library of Congress's and Syracuse University's — using a newly invented electric cylinder player that extracts information from the ancient grooves with startling clarity. The response has been overwhelming, with more than 750,000 songs downloaded and streamed in the four months since the site went up.

"I thought the site would be used primarily for scholarly research," said David Seubert, the project's director. "I had no idea that so many people would want to hear the records."

Spend a little time browsing the site and a lost musical world opens to you. The range of music is staggering: whistling soloists, xylophonists playing polkas, John Philip Sousa leading his band through famous marches. Hacks abound — tone-deaf songbirds mauling treacly ballads — but there are also some real virtuosi. There are dozens of catchy records by Harry Lauder, the Scottish music hall star with a lustrous vocal tone and a flair for comedy. There's the banjoist Vess Ossman, whose fleet-fingered renditions of cakewalks and rags reveal that rhythmically dynamic improvisation entered American music years before the rise of jazz. Pop vocalists like Murray don't exactly swing, but there is a briskness and cheer in their singing that is infectious — the sound of American pop shrugging off its Victor Herbert-light opera complex and becoming something definitively Yankee Doodle.

It is a commonplace that sitcoms and stand-up comedy are contemporary extensions of vaudeville, but we have lost sight of pop music's vaudeville roots. The popular theater was the main performance outlet for Tin Pan Alley's tunes, and you can hear that vaudeville lineage on acoustic-era records, in the singers' booming, shout-down-the-rafters vocal styles and in lyrics packed with punch lines. It was a time when pop music and comedy were virtually one and the same, and one of the delights of the period's big hits is the glee and unpretentiousness with which they aim for the funny bone. That emphasis on jokes and novelty has done the music no favors with historians who equate art with gravity.

But the best of these novelties were artful, with indelible melodies and flashes of wit, and many have endured: "Give My Regards to Broadway," "Yes, We Have No Bananas," "Shine On, Harvest Moon," "The Darktown Strutters' Ball," "Carolina in the Morning." Period recordings of these standards can be revelatory. Consider "Take Me Out to the Ball Game": it's one of the most frequently sung songs in the United States, but few people know the verses on Edward Meeker's 1908 record. It turns out "Take Me Out" was a comedy number about shifting gender roles, starring a baseball-crazed young woman.

Katie Casey was base ball mad.

Had the fever and had it bad

Just to root for the home town crew

Ev'ry sou Katie blew.

These lines, belted out by Meeker with an audible twinkle in his eye, carry us back the social tumult of the Progressive era, to an America moving swiftly and anxiously into a post-Victorian phase. Songwriters were obsessed with topicality, charting every fad and invention and bubble in the melting pot, and the recordings from the period are unusually rich artifacts — far more historically evocative, for instance, than the 32-bar variations on the theme "I Love You" that dominated popular song for years afterwards.

Yet most public archives and record companies have been cavalier about conserving these valuable artifacts. (The preservation of silent film reels has been a far bigger priority, although the very earliest records, delicate brown wax cylinders from the 1890's, are far more imperiled.) The most notorious episode occurred in the early 1960's, when RCA dynamited the Camden, N.J., warehouse that held the masters for Victor Records' thousands of acoustic-era 78's. The rubble was bulldozed into the Delaware River and a pier was built atop it: a huge part of our musical heritage, entombed in a watery grave.

And while scholars and critics have lavished attention on early roots music recordings — no rock snob's record collection would be complete without Harry Smith's "Anthology of American Folk Music" and an Alan Lomax field recording or two — they have almost completely ignored this other recorded legacy. Pop critics are currently in the throes of post-"rockist" revisionism, thinking through their longstanding biases against commercial pop music. Maybe it's time to look at how those same prejudices, projected back into history, have distorted our vision of pop's distant past.

The truth is, beneath their quaint rhythms and lyrics about "spooning" under stretching boughs, acoustic-era songs are thematically quite similar to rock and even hip-hop, awash in sex and dancing and a cheery anti-authoritarianism. (Little wonder that moralists of the day thundered against Tin Pan Alley's "suggestive" songs and the pernicious moral effects of ragtime.) You hear that spirit in the Columbia Quartet's 1911 recording of Irving Berlin's "Everybody's Doing It Now," in the salacious relish with which the singers deliver the lines "Everybody's doing it/ Doing it?/ Doing what?" Berlin's song is nothing less than an anthem of youth rebellion, an ode to kids going nuts doing racy dance moves — precisely the kind of song that, according to conventional wisdom, did not crack the pop mainstream until sometime around 1954.

Of course, the biggest obsession of songwriters during this period was ethnic pastiche, and you won't get too far into the Web site without bumping up against "How Can They Tell That I'm Irish?," "I'm a Yiddish Cowboy" or "Ching-a-Ling's Jazz Bazaar." And then there are the ubiquitous "coon songs" — hundreds upon hundreds of them, filled with racial epithets, chomped watermelon and other grotesqueries. No period in American music has been as bound up with the question of racial representation, and it is embarrassment about minstrelsy more than anything else that that has kept this stuff tucked in the darkest corners of sound archives.

"Some of it was probably better forgotten for a while," Mr. Seubert said. "I think coon songs would have been a pretty hard thing for a folklorist to try to resurrect during the civil rights era."

Now, though, minstrelsy is a hot scholarly topic, and much of the current interest in the acoustic era revolves around blackface and black performers. By far the most talked-about figure is the brilliant vaudeville singer Bert Williams, the first African-American pop star, who specialized in blackface material. (Archeophone has released three volumes of Williams's recordings.) But if we really want to know acoustic-era pop music, we need to look at the white minstrels, ask some hard questions and rein in our instincts to dismiss their acts as racist trash, full stop.

Some of the most compelling voices of the period belong to female "coon shouters" — Mayhew, May Irwin, Sophie Tucker — who eventually washed the burnt cork off their faces and graduated to a thrillingly insouciant singing style. That style owed everything to minstrelsy but was no longer explicitly "black."

Then there are even trickier cases, like that of Al Bernard, a blackface comedian and female impersonator who specialized in fiercely swinging ragtime and minstrel numbers. Are we ready to admit that unequivocally racist songs, delivered by white singers in the thickest possible dialect, might not only be historically significant music, but great music?

Students of pop history will be mulling over such questions for some time to come. In the meantime, there are thousands of new records to be listened to — some of them more than a century old. "Some of this stuff is dreadful, you'd really rather not listen to it," Mr. Martin allowed. "But there's some really enjoyable stuff along the way."

One enjoyable record, which distills the period's pleasing mix of pop hooks, belly laughs and sheer strangeness, is the vaudevillian Eddie Morton's "Don't Take Me Home," a jaunty ragtime novelty about a husband who runs off to war to hide out from his henpecking wife. Morton sings the verses pretty straight, but in the fiendishly catchy chorus — "Don't take me home!/ Pleeeease, don't take me home!" — his voice ripples across the frantic oompah beat, a long sobbing phrase that's halfway between an Irish tenor's flourish and the yelp of a dog whose tail has been stepped on. It's unclear what impact the record made when it was released in 1908. In 2006, it sounds like a hit.

The Stringers
By Paul McLeary

Just days before I met Salih in Iraq this past January, he became a wanted man. A stringer for The Washington Post in Tikrit, he had helped report a story that ran on January 13, fingering local Tikriti officials who the story said had looted a complex of palaces built by Saddam Hussein.

The story, like so much else that has gone wrong in Iraq, has its roots in what was supposed to be a sign of progress. Last November, the American military in Tikrit made a big show of handing the palaces over to the Iraqis. Some time later, after hearing that the palaces had been looted, Salih was one of several Post stringers assigned to cover the story. After seeing the destruction firsthand he sent word back to the Post, which ran a piece that named local Iraqi forces and the head of the local security force, Jassam Jabara, as the culprits. Jabara, who had a history with Salih from an earlier story, was not pleased. As a result, according to Salih’s sources, Jabara placed a $50,000 bounty on his head. Salih fled Tikrit and has yet to return.

Salih’s troubles, while extreme, are echoed in the lives of many Iraqi stringers working for Western news outlets across this unlucky country. As Iraq slips further into what seems an endless spasm of bloodletting, many Western reporters have been forced to hunker down, only leaving their guarded compounds for short periods and only then with a translator, a driver, and at least one bodyguard in tow. As a result, they have come to rely more and more on Iraqi stringers to gather information. This isn’t to say Western reporters don’t get out — they do, as much as possible — but given the violent reality of Iraq, there are times where it’s just not feasible for them to travel.

For the Iraqi stringers who risk their lives and often are forced to hide what they do from friends and family, typically without even the glory of a byline in return, the answer to the question of why they do it is complicated. In a country impoverished by decades of war, criminal dictatorship, and international sanctions, money was often the principal draw, at least initially. Drawn from the ranks of college-educated professionals — accountants, professors, doctors, computer experts — the stringers can sometimes more than double what the average Iraqi earns in postwar Iraq.

But for many, after months, and now even years of working in their new profession, this blunt economic incentive seems to have given way to a deeper — even passionate — appreciation for journalism’s ability to tell important stories and, sometimes, make a difference. As Yousif, a twenty-four-year-old stringer who asked me not to include his last name or his employer, put it, “Americans have to know how the Iraqis are suffering. There are millions of stories out there, but the problem is the safety. It’s dangerous to go out there and get the story.”

Yes, it is. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, of the sixty-one journalists killed in Iraq from the beginning of the war in March 2003 through February 2006, forty-two were native Iraqis. In addition, twenty-three media workers — drivers, translators, and so forth — have been killed in Iraq. One of the most recent casualties was Allan Enwiyah, who worked as a translator for Jill Carroll, the Christian Science Monitor freelancer, and who was shot to death during her kidnapping on January 7. Yousif and Enwiyah were friends.

The Post’s Salih is the only Iraqi stringer I met who had worked as a reporter before the war. A thickset man of thirty, with a shaved head and large, expressive eyes, he came to the Post a little over a year ago. At the time he was working at one of the numerous papers that sprang up in the wake of the invasion, and heard the Post was looking for local help.

Speaking through a translator in a fortified house with armed guards out front, he told the story of his ongoing struggle with Jassam Jabara. It started in August 2005, when Salih helped report a story about a man who died in custody, only five hours after being arrested by Jabara’s security forces. According to Salih, a day before the story ran, Jabara’s cousin visited him and urged him to pull it, suggesting that otherwise, “Jassam has the ability to make you disappear.” The story ran the next day, and Jabara complained to the governor of Tikrit, urging him to have Salih arrested. The governor refused. Three days later, Salih said, “a black BMW stopped in front of me and two men jumped out, one holding a pistol and one holding a metal bar, and tried to force me inside the car. I kept pushing back and they beat me with the gun and the metal bar.” He showed me thick scars behind his ear and on his back, which he said came from the beating.

Luckily, some locals who knew him came to his aid, and the men fled. Just a few days later, he says, while he was walking near the governor’s office, a man jumped out of a car and opened fire on him with an automatic pistol. Salih ducked, and the shooter’s aim was high.

Because of stories like this, the Iraqis who report for Western news outlets are forced to lead painful and dangerous double lives. One woman, whom I’ll call Salama, told me that although she has been working for American newspapers for over three years, her friends and neighbors don’t know about it. “My colleagues here don’t tell their neighbors they work for an American news agency either,” she said. As we sat in one of the hotel rooms that her news organization occupies in Baghdad — there are armed guards in the lobby and security in the room next door — she told me that she explains her long days at the office to neighbors and friends by telling them she works for a financial company with branches around the world, so she has to work late because of the time differences.

The strain of this dual life has taken a toll on Salama and her family, and while she was rather soft-spoken and polite, her frustration was obvious. “To get a story you have to risk your life,” she said matter-of-factly. “Sometimes I wonder if the people in the U.S. really understand how much we go through in order to write the story.” To underscore that, she told of being pushed from behind by an Iraqi man while covering a story with a Western reporter, of being caught in a firefight in Sadr City, Baghdad’s sprawling and violent slum, and of being threatened by a group of insurgents while out reporting. Yet in a country with few opportunities, journalism is a way to make a living, and to stay involved. “We never know when something could happen to us,” she said. “But then at the same time, I cannot stop living.”

Like Salama, Yousif is discreet about his work. “Ninety-five percent of my friends — close friends — don’t know I work with journalists,” said Yousif, who is fluent in English and began working for his American employer as the bureau’s IT manager. “It’s very dangerous to tell people you’re doing this. I tell them I’m working for a computer company.”

It’s widely accepted that the insurgents know the handful of hotels and compounds where many journalists stay, and Yousif said he takes precautions on the way to and from work. Typically, he walks a good distance from the compound before hailing a taxi, and when coming to work he asks to be dropped off in different places and then walks the final blocks to the compound. But he is always wary, and pays close attention to the drivers. Once, a taxi picked him up near the compound, he said, and the driver seemed very interested in the neighborhood and who was staying at nearby hotels. A few days later, the same taxi driver picked Yousif up near his home, far from the compound, and started asking the same questions, so Yousif told him to take him somewhere else entirely, and got a new taxi.

Beyond matters of life and death, the Iraqi stringers face more mundane frustrations. Yousif, for instance, is hungry to do more writing, but says that “They’ve only mentioned my name in about five articles, because most of the journalists want to do their own stories.” Western journalists do give him plenty of advice, however, “about how to look at the stories from a different angle, what is important, and what the people outside Iraq are concerned about.” That last part is sometimes the hardest. One of the biggest challenges, Yousif said, has been “trying to think like an American guy, and think what Americans might be interested in.” Especially at first, he said, he would pitch stories to the reporters that he gleaned from conversations he overheard on the street or things he read on insurgent Web sites, only to be told that his ideas were probably only interesting to Iraqis, and not necessarily to an American audience.

Another common thread in my conversations with the stringers was the immense distrust, bred of fear, that Iraqis have for one another these days. One evening, while we sat in the living room of Yousif’s employer’s guarded compound, he told of the time he bumped into a friend at Baghdad University while he was there with an American reporter. Since his friend thinks he works for a computer company, Yousif quickly made up a story about being there to broker a deal with the university to supply computers. “He didn’t buy it,” Yousif said with a laugh, “but he didn’t see the journalist, so I escaped.” The friend, he explained, thinks journalists are spies for the Americans. “Iraqis always think that there is a conspiracy against them.”

Critics of the press’s coverage of the war in Iraq often grumble that American journalists are obsessed with reporting “bad news,” while ignoring the “good.” To many of the Iraqis working for the U.S. media, this seems irrelevant, even absurd. Ahmed, an owlish thirty-one-year-old who taught poetry at a local university before the war and who now works for an American newspaper chain, shrugged and said, “It’s true that journalists here are mostly writing about the bad. But when you have a hotel being built in Najaf and a kidnapping of a female journalist in Baghdad, what are you going to do? The bad news eclipses the good news.”

Assad, who works for an American magazine, has an even darker view. “There is no peace, there is no reconstruction, there is no rebuilding to write about,” he said, over lunch at his employer’s compound. “I have only seen the reconstruction of the Green Zone, and that is for the Americans.” An amiable matter-of-fact guy, Assad was an accountant and an English teacher before the war, and has worked for a handful of European and American publications, beginning with a Danish newspaper just before the war began. He said he would like to go back to being an accountant — preferably in the United States — but for the moment, his work as a journalist pays better.

Of the Iraqi stringers I met, Assad might be the exception in that he doesn’t necessarily see his future in journalism. Despite the danger, the secrecy, the frustration at both the muddled U.S. occupation and the desire for more autonomy in their work, most of the stringers seemed intent on sticking with their new careers, even if that means leaving Iraq. Yousif and Ahmed both told me they had come to see journalism as the only way to properly tell the story of their country, and both are applying for journalism scholarships overseas.

For now, neither would consider working for Iraqi publications, which they dismiss as little more than mouthpieces for specific political or religious groups. Yousif said he would like to start his own magazine in Iraq one day, using the tools he has learned from Western journalists, while Ahmed takes a more expansive view. “I think journalism that is independent and objective can promote democracy and can promote a solid political standing in Iraq,” he said. “If we can obtain these conditions, I would work for an Iraqi publication. That’s the main target for me, to work for such a place.”

Even Salih, who goes to work every day knowing that people want to kill him, said journalism is the only way he can help the world understand what is happening to his country. But he is frustrated by the danger, and by what he says is the lack of interest on the part of American and Iraqi officials in investigating the crime and corruption that pervades so much of postwar Iraq. In a startling statement, he said that even under Saddam, if a journalist wrote something accusatory about a government official, the allegations would be investigated. “You used to be able to write about, say, smuggling, but now if you do, you may be killed,” he told me. “Is that the right way to tell the truth in this country? The American forces are supporting such people as Jassam Jabara, and when stories like mine run, they never investigate, and these guys are becoming worse — they’re becoming untouchables.”

Paul McLeary is a reporter for CJR Daily. His recent series of dispatches from Iraq can be read at www.cjrdaily.org/dispatches_from_iraq/

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

one nation for why?

So I was wondering today why we should try to hold Iraq together when it's such an artificial invention in the first place? It's something I think about a lot, but then I think, well, if it's such an obvious question how come nobody's asking it? However, really, why one nation? Iraq was one nation formed out of a few outlying colonies/states/provinces? of the Ottoman Empire if I remember my history with any trustworthiness and it's always been held together with the glue of potential terror and terror unleashed. Such an artificial design seems only to have inspired imperialist-born misery on a huge population for awhile now. And if the Turks are so afraid, why are they afraid? We're afraid because in a partition Southern Iraq definately becomes an extension of Iran and the oil there becomes Iran's, pretty much. I guess we have to ask to what degree this is already true? And also, how much is it worth to prevent this? And a few other questions as well...but it's late.

I was also wondering why leftist intellectuals have not insisted on changing the words they use in debates about what the judiciary should look like and what kind of philosophies they support on the bench. "Strict Constructionists" and "activists" are not good words to have when arguing against conservitive ideology on the bench. Strict constructionist just sounds stern but fair, in reality so-called "strict constructionists" seem to believe that dozens of men came together after a hellish decade of fighting and living in economic turmoil and agreed exactly on what the government being established should look like and where it would head. In reality, the Constitution is not a single voice of agreement, and maybe not even a harmonization. Instead it is a series of compromises, agreements and insistances over objections that were palatable for many of them precisely because it was not a fixed document and because it was something that could be interpreted and fought over in terms of meaning. To insist on not going outside of the written of the Constitution is an opinion about the Constitution and, I believe, one that would be out of step with many of the framers of the original Constitution. So instead of calling them Strict Constructionists, I would label them with a term they should know, "Pharisees".

Meanwhile, "activist" conjures up a bunch of long-haired hippies and self-righteous intellectuals and while I'm in favor of more of both, most of America isn't and they hear "activist" and they're thinking "this guy wants to bomb some college administration building and talk to me about some linguist from the 18th Century." "Activist" sounds to too many like "recklessness". I don't believe this is true, sometimes the status quo is the recklessness (was there anything more reckless than the Democrats continued support of the Iraq War during the last election? Supporting the status quo was not only unpatriotic, it doomed them to irrelevance from which they've yet to disassociate themselves while Bush and his administation have not had one success to show for all their failure). While the esteemed Justice Antonin Scalia suggested that those not supporting the Pharisees were "idiots", I would argue that these are simply people capable of viewing the Constitution as something that points toward its own meanings without always giving them if it is going to take into consideration things like women's rights, intellectual property issues and all other kinds of et ceteras seen, forseen and unimagined. These "activists" are aware that there is a guiding spirit behind the Constitution, a commonality of belief if you will about government, or a common denominator maybe. This commonality of belief springs forth from the idea that government protects the rights and liberties of the people and is given permission to rule from the people. In this age in which leaders seem to insist in ruling over us, deciding popular elections with nine votes and the like, it might be helpful if Scalia and his juggernaut of ideologues would have some sort of concept of these principles. I don't believe they do. Their arrogance to rule is as disgusting as the deadly sin of gluttony. Anyway though, I haven't figured out a better name than "activist" yet.

Otherwise the day was pretty quiet. I need to find a new book to read, I finally finished #9 Dream, which was pretty brilliant; I need to find my shaver, I look like hell and a friend comes to visit tomorrow.

The studenten have tests tomorrow. We'll see. We've been going awfully fast as of late.

Saw The Libertine last night...dark. Duck Season on Sunday I liked much better, not that The Libertine was bad or vapid, just that Duck Season was less an intellectual exercise and more a curious exploration of characters and environments. Like most movies that are love letters to the towns they are set in, there were few shots of Mexico City and no postcard shots; instead the love letter was addressed through the characters who grew there.

Matt Murton's having a nice spring for the Cubs...so can Dusty ruin him? It'll be an interesting experiment.

the new glasses
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Nouri Ar Rawi
01

Scalia
Insidescalia

desk in my classroom
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Sunday, March 12, 2006

Sunday afternoon falling down

She looked kind of funny to me but Drae said she looked pretty normal. When it comes to realtors I'm pretty suspicious, after all, they have absolutely no interest in your happiness. It's the pretending that bothers me about that.

The apartment in Crown Heights was beautiful, but it felt like it was on the moon. "Is this what New Jersey feels like," I wondered. The only laundromat was closed but the daycare was going full-bore.

The weekend was pretty quiet. Pee-Wee's Big Adventure was the midnight movie at the Landmark Sunshine and I couldn't believe how much of it I remembered; I hadn't seen it since high school. Otherwise this weekend was all about sleep, March being the cruel month for teaching. No hope for the end yet and spring is a paper thin illusion, a screen door against the slowly departing winter.

I've been spending some time at this nifty website factcheck.org, it's kind of fun and depressing.

To close, a story from Sunday's New York Times about Darfur and the genocide's spread into Chad (with a slight aside to the posturing windbaginess of Bill O'Reilly, this generation's foray into Father Coughlin like moralizing and obtuseness):

A Village Waiting for Rape and Murder
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: March 12, 2006
KOLOY, Chad

Darfur: The Genocide Spreads

Men in Koloy describe how the janjaweed militia attacked their villages.
Politely but insistently, the people in this town explained that they were about to be massacred.

"The janjaweed militias have already destroyed all the villages east of Koloy," Adam Omar, a local sheik, explained somberly. "Any moment, they will attack us here.

This remote market town of thatch-roof mud huts near the Chad-Sudan border is on the front line of the genocidal fury that Sudan has unleashed on several black African tribes. After killing several hundred thousand people in its own Darfur region, Sudan's government is now sending its brutal janjaweed militias to kill the same tribes here in Chad.

President Bush is showing signs that he may be ready to stand up to the thugs in Sudan, but China is protecting Sudan, Europe is inert, and the African Union can't even muster the courage to call for immediate U.N. peacekeepers. So the people here are probably right to resign themselves to be slaughtered — if not sooner, then later.

Koloy has no electricity and no phones, so the people could not call for help. But even if they could, no one could help them. Chad's small army had sent a few trucks of troops the previous day, but after learning that they faced more than 500 janjaweed armed with heavy machine guns, the Chadian soldiers had dashed away again. As I drove into town, the town's police force was fleeing on horseback.

I visited the "hospital" — an open-sided tent that lacked any medical personnel but was filled with gunshot victims. Local leaders told me that the janjaweed were only three miles away and had sent word that they would attack Koloy that day.

"When they see you, they shoot you," said Adam Zakaria, the sheik of a nearby village, Gindeiza, that had been attacked the day before. Mr. Adam had one bullet wound in his foot and another in his thigh.

"I know the man who shot me," Mr. Adam said. "He used to be my friend." That man, Hussein al-Beheri, is an Arab neighbor. But last year, according to Mr. Adam's account, Mr. Hussein joined the janjaweed and now regularly attacks non-Arabs.

"I told him, 'Don't shoot me!' " Mr. Adam recalled. "Three or four times, I pleaded, 'Don't shoot me.' And then he shot me."

Ten people are known dead in his village, Mr. Adam said, but many others are missing — and no one has been able to look for dead bodies because the janjaweed still occupy the village. Among those missing, he said, are his two wives and four children.

"I have not seen them since yesterday, when they were in the village," he said. "In my heart, I think they are dead."

This entire area gets no visits from diplomats and no help from the U.N. or aid groups, because it is too risky. Only one organization, Doctors Without Borders, sticks it out, sending in a convoy of intrepid doctors three days a week to pull bullets out of victims.

It was nerve-racking to be in Koloy, and my local interpreter kept insisting that we rush away. But I've never felt more helpless than the moment I pulled away in my Toyota Land Cruiser, waving goodbye to people convinced that they would soon be murdered.

In the end, there was no janjaweed attack that day. Perhaps that's because the janjaweed have found that it is inconvenient to drive away absolutely all Africans; now the janjaweed sometimes leave market towns alone so that their own families can still have places to shop.

The people of Koloy are still waiting to be massacred. Think for a moment what it would be like to huddle with your family every day, paralyzed by fear, waiting for the end.

And then remember that all this can be stopped. You can go to www.millionvoicesfordarfur.org and send a postcard to President Bush, encouraging him to do more. At www.genocideintervention.net, you can find a list of "10 things you can do right now."

Maybe it seems that you have no real power to change anything in Koloy, but, frankly, right now you're the only hope that the people in Koloy have.


Bill O'Reilly refused to join me on this trip, passing up the $727,000 that my readers had pledged to sponsor his trip to Darfur. But Ann Curry of the "Today" show and a top-notch NBC crew did travel with me on this trip. Unlike Bill, Ann didn't flinch at traveling in janjaweed-infested areas or at staying in a primitive $4-a-night "hotel" with no plumbing. (O.K., she did shudder just a little at the wildlife in the hotel's outhouse.) If you want to break your heart, watch her reports beginning tomorrow — and ABC and CBS, where are you?

In the meantime, watch my Op-Ed special report from this trip, "The Genocide Spreads."

A victim of the genocide
02

Friday, March 10, 2006

the C Train cometh

"A moment to save the children, sir?"

Some guy is talking to me by George Washington in Union Square and I just want to be alone. "These fucking leeches, I think, what I say is, "Please leave me alone." It just comes out.

"Fuck you," he says after a couple steps. I don't care, I'm alone, staring out at the twilight, purple almost black lit up by signs. It feels good, leaving the all day surrounded by students and house-cleaning administrators. The security guards had gotten everything good for breakfast once again but now I was having a few seconds of tranquility looking over the signs at the tops of buildings into the night and I was feeling pretty lucky. A little fuck you wasn't going to spoil this mood. I hate those bastards that find it so easy to intrude on your privacy.

I'd just looked at my second apartment in Bed-Stuy. A dispiriting affair considering the price, the kitchen, as Drae put it, was simply built into a hallway of sorts, and I came out feeling kind of low, truth be known and the C to the A to the L was not meant to improve my mood. At 14th Street these Mexican kids, four and six maybe, were hyper-actively handing out orange "Jesus Saves" pamphlets and behind them grandma offered me one but I kept walking, looking at all the orange paper underneath the little statues on the stairs down to the L, little invitations to eternity, it seems so easy.

Anyway, the port deal died and the evil UAE millionaires have said they'll let some other evil millionaires run the ports. Meanwhile, there's really been no call to make the ports actually safer, as they've done at some of the world's other busiest ports. It is odd though, isn't it? How this "war on terrorism" is fought, vocally, as if we are locked in some doomsday race to define heaven and earth, strategically, as if the fight is for profit rather than salvation.

You know, I just found out today that a bunch of the Christian right got all freaked out about the Easter Egg Hunt on the White House Front Lawn back in January. I went to one blog and was looking at it and in the corner they had pictures of the 9/11 planes crashing into the World Trade Center on a loop. Strange how much they enjoy the feelings of pity and prayerfulness that accompany witnessing the pain of others. Perhaps Vonnegut was right to advocate Mel Gibson making a movie simply observing a man being boiled to death.

I should sleep. Tomorrow we begin discussions about immigration and I have to write a recommendation first period and see if I can find one of the students a copy of Crime and Punishment.

There's a lot about all the steroids Barry Bonds has been taking and some guy in the Post was writing about "755" (Aaron's home run record) as if it was some nun's virginity, about to be defiled, but I have to admit, I'm more concerned, when I think about it, about the validity of the Giants' wins and losses, especially the year they won the National League and came within a few outs of the World Series. How can you define their seasons if their best player (playing perhaps the best baseball ever played...) was so juiced he started to look like an East German swimmer? In a way it would have been 1919 all over again. Oddly enough, with Bonds, nobody mentioned the idea that he was doing it for a payday, everybody seems to point at pride and desire, usually celebrated things. Here they are, oddly perverted, and now with the ghoulish impersonation of Paula Abdul to boot.

Bonds once said in an interview I read, that he loved watching Ryne Sandberg play ball, with all this bullshit and juicing, when I think of Sandberg, suddenly it makes me think of a more pure game...I don't like the Costas bullshit, you know, thinking if it was 1958 everything would be ok, but the steroid thing is so frustrating because it does throw the balances off and it does make you long for the days when they just took some greenies and went out there...suddenly I have to stop, a keening for Wrigley Field, how the field opens up, lush in the early summer, emerging after the crowded sidewalks and vendors, tourist buses from Iowa and Wisconsin, the scoreboard and Lake Michigan off in the distance; Lake Michigan between the buildings: a few rectangles of deeper blue beyond the powder white foul lines marking the field. You can't not look for the new flags, Santo's ten and Sandberg's twenty-three tied to the foul poles beneath Banks's fourteen and Williams's twenty-six and then looking for the guy I always buy my program from, ancient, looking like the kind of guy who suffers from Lumbago and knows what it is. The same guy emerging later and selling Cubbie claws and pennants with a long face: two pencils and keep the change. Shea Stadium, by contrast, is cavernous and unbeautiful, Yankee Stadium arrogant and plain. There is nothing in baseball that beats Cubs/Cardinals in June and as long as Barry Bonds doesn't fuck that up I'll be fine.

Some have been saying Prior's really in bad shape, ah the Cubs!

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

new glasses

Late, hate-music blaring, once again fucked by the train. If it's not one it's the other. One of these trains is going to get me.

There's some guy at the G-stop at Nassau who's always writing: "Kill this fucken tyrant Bush" and "Traitor Bush is the son of a bitch", and a couple days like clockwork, somebody adds a few strategic lines here and there trying to obscure it, like some G. Gordon Liddied Holden Caufield and meanwhile there's this war of wills, for months now, fought on the unlikely territory of Fresh Direct advertisements and coming attractions for Harrison Ford. Welcome to Greenpoint, political debate on tap.

At 8th Street on the R/W it's all about marches that have already passed and days of solidarity, mixed among the murals. Somebody's politically energized and it makes me think about how quickly time passes on and seasons mix like muddied palettes: this no-man's land of March.

After school another meeting, purposeful, direct and invigorating. We stuffed envelopes but we couldn't find most of the addresses. I stuffed one envelope.

Then I tried on glasses and found a couple pairs. It was a relief to find I didn't have any obvious signs of eye disease or defect besides being massively near-sighted. That I already knew.

A couple things: first, about this abortion law in South Dakota, sad enough to see pro-lifers linking abortion to gay marriage ("Legislators feel that now is the time to wrestle back their authority from the courts," said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, based in Washington. "The courts have overstepped their bounds on issues like gay marriage, and the legislators are speaking up."--NYTimes//3.7.06) but for pro-choice forces, sputtering about constitutionality and affronts to the rule of law, this hardly seems an appropriate response to the emotional outburst of the pro-life side that claim the rule of law is about murder rather than something abstract as "women's health". If pro-choice forces want to rally the base and get a few more on board, shouldn't they start asking about the innocent babies killed by American bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, civilians? It seems if pro-"lifers" want to claim the moral highground of not being murderers it would be more difficult. If they claim it's ok to kill a few innocents in the name of "fighting terrorism" in a country that did not support the terrorism against us, then certainly we can argue that along that slippery slope it seems odd that a woman wouldn't be able to defend herself from the assaults of those who would tell her what choices she has to make about her body -- if terrorism is the oppression of freedom of movement, thought and belief, then what do we call this. And who may call themselves innocent? A woman making this decision should only have to answer to herself.

Second, it's always comforting to see Bush flipping the finger to Pakistan for the hell of it. Giving India the green light to ignore calls for restraints on developing nuclear missiles is mystifying enough. Then telling Pakistan we wouldn't agree to the same deal with them was typical of the compound stupidity of this administration. I never understood this trip, it seemed kind of on-the-fly and the policy created for the trip seemed unconnected and splotchy. Today I saw a t-shirt advertised, it was pro-Bush, it said "Cutting taxes and killing terrorists: 4 more years!" What do you say to that? It's what a stormtrooper might wear off-duty at Mos Eisley.

"Hot Cop" by the Village People just came up on the random. 22,000 songs get distilled to this one. Oh "Hot Cop", what happened? Were you a visage the same day Adam saw the guy from ZZ Top?

I heard that Kirby Puckett died. Stroke. When he first came up you never saw somebody looking to take the extra base, find the extra way to win the way he did. He was electric and had great line-drive power as his career established itself. He was one of my favorites. Today I was talking to Corms about it, I asked if he thought it was true about Kirby's off-field problems, specifically about whether or not he assaulted women. I didn't want it to be true, I was hoping Corms would reassure me it was all bullshit because I still remember him beating Toronto in the play-offs. When was that? I don't even remember, ridiculous green Astro-turf named after what the future was going to be as far as 1966 believed turning my tv memory almost blue. But Corms remembered hearing something about his difficulties with temper, and supposed there was a good chance it was true. What do you do then? I loved watching him play. The thing I remember about watching Kirby play was he was one of those guys you never wanted to see fail.

Off to sleep.

Falluja_baby_dead

Peterson17l

Monday, March 06, 2006

block party

Crash winning was about as surprising as rain from a dark cloud, and really who cares? Forest Gump beat Pulp Fiction. I think to people locked in uni-race lives or, more importantly, uni-class lives, Crash probably seemed more daring and provocative than it was.

Went to see Dave Chapelle's Block Party tonight instead of staring at dressed up people thanking other people for three hours and loved it. It was so full of life and just got at something. It maybe sagged a little here and there, but it seemed a result of not pushing the material or putting things in that weren't there, so you could respect the sags, and they were slight.

Talib was amazing.

(where to start with his solo stuff: http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&token=ADFEAEE47E19DD46A87420C5963A47C2B161A158FE5AFB86112F0456D3B82D4B8C0063F20FA495CEAEFC6AB679AFF962A5500ED2C0EF50ECAD1B&sql=10:zlm8b5p4zsqs )

Donald Rumsfeld is tacitly admitting failure in Iraq if anybody wants to bother to listen. He's setting up another "stab in the back theory" which is common among fascists. Just like the right wing in Germany that believed the Germans would have won the First World War if only the commie-Jews hadn't gotten in the way even though their soldiers were starving and in active rebellion while facing an onslaught of never-ending fresh troops from the U.S., now we're starting to hear the "pesky kids" whines of those that have been caught dressing up in disguises (here, competent and professional governmental leaders or air force pilots), claiming if we weren't believing the "terrorists" in the prisons we'd be sniffing the scattered rose petals of victory in Iraq. From Rumsfeld:

"They're taught to lie, they're taught to allege that they have been tortured, and that's part of the [terrorist] training that they received. We know that torture is not occurring there. We know that for a fact. … The reality is that the terrorists have media committees. They are getting very clever at manipulating the media in the United States and in the capitals of the world. They know for a fact they can't win a single battle on the battlefields in the Middle East. They know the only place they can win a battle is in the capitol in Washington, D.C., by having the United States lose its will, so they consciously manipulate the media here to achieve their ends, and they're very good at it."

Kind of like the Lincoln Group, but apparently better.

It's all about will, nothing to do with a mismanaged, immoral war fought in the name of one thing while being about another.

Meanwhile, they sneak in the injured under cover of night, as if those soldiers are people to be ashamed of, instead of about; sometimes they hold a few of them up as examples of how much they care and the boys, five or six years from their first shave and a decade away from 30 say a few things and learn to live with missing limbs and cognitive difficulties.

And if this war is still just because we removed a dictator, then will somebody please tell me why we're giving Saudi Arabia all this money? Why is the Sudan the Sudan? I've never been much for being isolationist, but it would be nice if we didn't enter into world affairs like misbegotten Tom Buchanons.

Read that Felix Pie has tripled twice in the opening days of spring training, perhaps the Cubs will get lucky and won't fuck him up the way they did Corey Patterson. I'm feeling good about #31...

Saw they were building a Dave and Buster's in Times Square tonight. Can old Forty-Deuce die any more completely? Horrible.

Tomorrow is Populism with the studenten. Another age full of corruption, imperialism and the far-reaching abuse of the common people by the wealthy people.

I'll end with a few quotes from some articles I read on detainee abuse in this cluster-fuck we've been urged to support so that we don't "screw it up":

DICK CHENEY: "They're living in the tropics. … They're well fed. They've got everything they could possibly want. There isn't any other nation in the world that would treat people who were determined to kill Americans the way we're treating these people."

From an FBI Agent at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba: "On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18 to 24 hours or more. [On one occasion] the detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night."

DONALD RUMSFELD (again): “What took place at Guantánamo is a matter of public record today, and the investigations turned up nothing that suggested that there was any policy in the department other than humane treatment.”

Alberto J. Mora, former general counsel of the United States Navy, serving under Ronald Reagan, George Bush the elder and until recently, George Bush the lesser and now legal counsel for Wal-Mart's international wing: “If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America—even those designated as ‘unlawful enemy combatants.’ If you make this exception, the whole Constitution crumbles. It’s a transformative issue.”

A Really Good Quote from the New Yorker Article About Mora on February 20th: Mora drew Haynes’s attention to a comment that Rumsfeld had added to the bottom of his December 2nd memo, in which he asked why detainees could be forced to stand for only four hours a day, when he himself often stood “for 8-10 hours a day.” Mora said that he understood that the comment was meant to be jocular....

Congress is retroactively changing laws to protect the president and our country is torturing people, and in a country in which it takes an excruciatingly long time for the people to realize there's a nose on their face, a movie like Crash is singled out. Really, it all kind of makes sense.

From www.mcsweeneys.net an article that gets at Crash's lameness:

CONVERSATIONS I'VE HAD
DURING A NORMAL DAY
IN LOS ANGELES,
MODIFIED TO
INCLUDE THE SHOCKING
DEPICTION OF RACISM
FOUND IN PAUL HAGGIS'S
2004 FILM CRASH.

BY BRENDON LLOYD

- - - -

ME: Are we working tonight?

CO-WORKER: Yeah.

ME: This sucks.

CO-WORKER: I can't freakin' stand those Indians.

ME: I'm part Cherokee.

CO-WORKER: Then why don't you go smoke a peace pipe and get the hell out of my country?

- - - -

FRIEND: How was work?

ME: Not bad. The usual stuff. Yourself?

FRIEND: I sure hate those Mexicans.

- - - -

WAITER: Can I take your order?

ME: I'll have the club sandwich, easy on the mayo.

WAITER: To drink?

ME: Why are you people always asking me what I want to drink?

WAITER: What?

ME: You heard me.

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Sunday, March 05, 2006

velvet head

The dog was staring at the wall. I was staring at the wall. Another Saturday afternoon. After about an hour, I stood up, so did the dog, somebody else was coming home and for the first time in awhile there was noise; the dog barked, keys jangled; I got dressed. The day finally awoke from the stupor it had found.

Read a lot today, mostly #9 Dream by David Mitchell, but also the usual suspects and once again none of the news was good. First a little on #9 Dream. It's written with a nod to Murakami, maybe more an embrace of Murakami, but there's a lot of Dickens too and the nice thing about Mitchell, as it seems many writers currently, he does little to hide his influences. It has made me think about what it would be like to write a novel, or even a long story, that did its utmost to refrain from referencing anything media, all the sudden that seems so Little House on the Prarie if you know what I mean.

It's also made me think of DeLillo and his tendency to take basic quest stories and twist them up amidst all the neurosis and detritus of a culture and to show how cultures speak through their individuals so that we become almost the colors of a palette, but a palette which is recognizable and veering toward always different revelations of itself so that we seem to be as predictable in form culturally as are wings of museums. I think I like this method of writing, and find it satisfying, but perhaps there is more to be said for depictions that hint at broader strokes and see more importance in human fate rather than in human revelation. I think this book breaks out of the DeLillo mold on that account and gets more toward that question of individual fate, if I'm making any sense.

Probably not, it hasn't all settled in there yet.

"So many stars. What are they for?"

It was upsetting to read how the Pentagon was politically censoring sites that soldiers could look at: bad enough to be moralists, but to be outright indocrinating, well, that's just typcial these days. And typical these days represents a lot of bad.

Even worse was this news article which concerns the mind-numbing blatency of the comfortably and dimly ensconced:

Army to Pay Halliburton Unit Most Costs Disputed by Audit By JAMES GLANZ
Published: February 27, 2006

The Army has decided to reimburse a Halliburton subsidiary for nearly all of its disputed costs on a $2.41 billion no-bid contract to deliver fuel and repair oil equipment in Iraq, even though the Pentagon's own auditors had identified more than $250 million in charges as potentially excessive or unjustified.

Questioned Charges, Still Reimbursed

Auditors Find Widespread Waste and Unfinished Work in Iraqi Rebuilding Contracts (January 31, 2006)

The Army said in response to questions on Friday that questionable business practices by the subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, had in some cases driven up the company's costs. But in the haste and peril of war, it had largely done as well as could be expected, the Army said, and aside from a few penalties, the government was compelled to reimburse the company for its costs.

Under the type of contract awarded to the company, "the contractor is not required to perform perfectly to be entitled to reimbursement," said Rhonda James, a spokeswoman for the southwestern division of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, based in Dallas, where the contract is administered.

The contract has been the subject of intense scrutiny after disclosures in 2003 that it had been awarded without competitive bidding. That produced criticism from Congressional Democrats and others that the company had benefited from its connection with Dick Cheney, who was Halliburton's chief executive before becoming vice president.

Later that year auditors began focusing on the fuel deliveries under the contract, finding that the fuel transportation costs that the company was charging the Army were in some cases nearly triple what others were charging to do the same job. But Kellogg Brown & Root, which has consistently maintained that its costs were justified, characterized the Army's decision as an official repudiation of those criticisms.

"Once all the facts were fully examined, it is clear, and now confirmed, that KBR performed this work appropriately per the client's direction and within the contract terms," said Cathy Mann, a company spokeswoman, in a written statement on the decision. The company's charges, she said, "were deemed properly incurred."

The Pentagon's Defense Contract Audit Agency had questioned $263 million in costs for fuel deliveries, pipeline repairs and other tasks that auditors said were potentially inflated or unsupported by documentation. But the Army decided to pay all but $10.1 million of those contested costs, which were mostly for trucking fuel from Kuwait and Turkey.

That means the Army is withholding payment on just 3.8 percent of the charges questioned by the Pentagon audit agency, which is far below the rate at which the agency's recommendation is usually followed or sustained by the military — the so-called "sustention rate."

Figures provided by the Pentagon audit agency on thousands of military contracts over the past three years show how far the Halliburton decision lies outside the norm.

In 2003, the agency's figures show, the military withheld an average of 66.4 percent of what the auditors had recommended, while in 2004 the figure was 75.2 percent and in 2005 it was 56.4 percent.

Rick Barton, co-director of the postconflict reconstruction project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said despite the difficulties of doing business in a war zone, the low rate of recovery on such huge and widely disputed charges was hard to understand. "To think that it's near zero is ridiculous when you're talking these kinds of numbers," he said.

The Halliburton contract is referred to as a "cost-plus" agreement, meaning that after the company recovers its costs, it also receives various markups and award fees. Although the markups and fees are difficult to calculate exactly using the Army figures, they appear to be about $100 million.

One of Halliburton's most persistent critics, Representative Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat who is the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Government Reform, said in a written statement about the Army's decision, "Halliburton gouged the taxpayer, government auditors caught the company red-handed, yet the Pentagon ignored the auditors and paid Halliburton hundreds of millions of dollars and a huge bonus."

About $208 million of the disputed charges was mostly related to the cost of importing fuel, which was at the heart of the controversy surrounding the contract. Kellogg Brown & Root hired a little-known Kuwaiti company, Altanmia, to transport fuel in enormous truck convoys. The Pentagon auditors found that in part because of the transportation fees that Kellogg Brown & Root agreed to pay Altanmia, the cost for a gallon of gasoline was roughly 40 percent higher than what the American military paid when it did the job itself — under a separate contract it had negotiated with Altanmia.

The Army said in a written statement that it had largely accepted Kellogg Brown & Root's assertions that costs had been driven up by factors beyond its control — the exigencies of war and the hard-line negotiating stance of the state-owned Kuwait Petroleum Corporation. The Army said the Kuwaiti fuel company blocked attempts by Kellogg Brown & Root to renegotiate its transportation contract with Altanmia. In the end, the Army decided to pay the Halliburton subsidiary all but $3.81 million of the $208 million in fuel-related costs questioned by auditors.

The Kellogg Brown & Root contract, called Restore Iraqi Oil, or RIO, will be paid with about $900 million of American taxpayer money and $1.5 billion of Iraqi oil proceeds and money seized from Saddam Hussein's government. Official criticism of the work became so intense that in November, an auditing board sponsored by the United Nations recommended that the United States repay some or all of the $208 million related to the alleged fuel overcharges — an allegation Halliburton says has never been justified.

In fact, Ms. Mann said, the Army's decision clearly showed that "any claims that the figures contained in these audit reports are 'overcharges' are uninformed and flat wrong." She said that the fuel charges themselves had been 100 percent reimbursed and that the reductions all came from adjustments on administrative costs associated with that mission.

Still, the Army conceded that some of the criticisms of the company's business practices were legitimate. As a result, the Army said, it would exclude about half of the auditors' questioned charges from the amount used to derive the markups and fees, which are calculated as a sliding percentage of the costs. That decision could cost the company a maximum of about $7 million.

Ms. James, the Corps of Engineers spokeswoman, said that in addition to the other modest penalties that Kellogg Brown & Root had been assessed by the Army's contracting officers, the sliding percentages on some of the fees had been lowered by unspecified amounts to reflect shortcomings in the company's dealings in Iraq. "All fees were awarded in accordance with the award fee plan set out in the contract, which placed more emphasis on timely mission accomplishment than on cost control and paperwork," Ms. James said.

Mr. Barton, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that with the relatively small penalties paid by the company for falling short in its performance in Iraq, it was hard to see what the Army's scrutiny of the company's practices had amounted to in the end.

"When they say, 'We questioned their business model or their business decisions' — well, yeah, so what?" Mr. Barton said. "You questioned it but there was no result."

In answer to written questions, a spokesman for the Defense Contract Audit Agency, Lt. Col. Brian Maka, said the settlement of the disputed charges was based on "broader business case considerations" beyond just Pentagon audits.

But when asked whether the Army's decision reflected on the quality of the audits, Colonel Maka said only that the agency "has no indication of problems with the audit process," and he referred questions on the settlement itself to the Army.

A former senior Defense Department manager knowledgeable about the audits and the related contracting issues said, "That's as close as D.C.A.A. can get to saying, 'We're not happy with it either.' "

Because of the size of the contract and the contention surrounding Halliburton's dealings with the government, the RIO audits were carried out by the agency's top personnel and were subjected to extraordinarily thorough reviews, the former manager said.

This is unlikely to be the last time the Army and Halliburton meet over negotiated costs. On a separate contract in Iraq, for logistics support to the United States military, more than $11 billion had been disbursed to Kellogg Brown & Root by mid-January, according to the Army Field Support Command, based in Rock Island, Ill. Pentagon auditors have begun scrutinizing that contract as well.

That's about it, it's getting late and tomorrow I have to do a lot about the French Revolution.

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

the edge of Bed-Stuy

Classon, off the G, was as desolate as I remembered it, broken sidewalks and some empty lots mixed in among the projects to the left and the rehabs running down Lafayette. Pretty soon it'll all be "artists" complaining about rents in Williamsburg. I ended up kind of liking the apartment, but the shape wasn't right really, and I have to admit to some trepidation after the long trip from Union Square. Perhaps usually it's better.

But with the MTA would I really want to believe that.

A politician recently brought up the fact that the MTA sucked and the MTA president spouted off the usual generalities about the MTA safely transporting 8 million people blah blah blah. What a fucking moron. I wanted to throw the paper on the ground and watch it combust. The MTA does suck, how many times do I have to buy a weekly or monthly that's only good about 18 hours a day, five days a week. The L works like it's a Tyco Racetrack. You know, you see the commercials and it's these cool, middle-class kids who will one day ease into home of their own laughing and steering these cool looking cars around this loop-da-loop track with S-curves and when you actually get the thing it's cheap plastic with cars that break after drearily circling the impossible to construct track like they were five day old balloons falling off the ceiling. How many times will I sit around and wait a dozen minutes or so during rush hour when every fucking minute is a like a nail in the coffin of my blood pressure? How many times will I give up and take a cab because one of the trains isn't running or is skipping a stop and I have to go half-way to Coney to make it back home?

For me it's just an inconvenience, something to allow me to reflect on how unaccountable are government is to us, but for other people this thing is a life-line and it's seriously frayed.

Anyway, the port business is getting weirder, but who could expect it not to? Now the company involved in buying the port turns out to be boycotting Israel and the Coast Guard is talking about security gaps and half the stories on the internet are talking about Al Queida like it already has free movement in Newark. Meanwhile, if Bush supports it, how many of his friends are about to see a big old payday? The over/under is probably around 8 or 9....

Today I talked about Carravaggio in Government class, I could see this one painting of the sacrifice of Isaac so clearly in my brain, I wondered why I was thinking about it, but I haven't been able to answer that one all day.

I spent a lot of time thinking about how little it is that government seems to change society; the driving force is technology, and it seems like we try to simply keep government from oppressing the poor to the point of revolution. What an awful equation.

Not much about the Cubs, just that Wood and Prior are both throwing without pain. Is it expecting too much that this will still be true in June?

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