The American viceroy in Iraq has changed his tune about the death squads. Zalmay Khalilzad “is now saying that militias are Iraq’s No. 1 security threat,” Jeffrey Gettleman reported in his striking front-page story on Sunday in the print edition of The New York Times, And again in another front-pager this morning, reported here: When […]
GROCK!
Ever hear of Grock, the Swiss circus clown? I never did, until composer friend Bill Osborne filled me in. As another friend of mine says, “Swiss clown? Normally a contradiction in terms, like Swiss Navy. But this guy’s brilliant.” video clips of Grock, beautifully reproduced and posted by Osborne on his and musician-actor-artist Abbie Conant’s […]
EHRENSTEIN SINGS OUT
I shoulda known not to recommend
THE GOOD OLD BAD OLD DAYS
Long ago in San Francisco — the year was 1969 — John Bryan and I put together an issue of Notes From Underground³. As you can see, it had a self-mocking cartoon cover (by Gary Grimshaw, our “art director”), which showed a newsie shouting, “REVO LOO-SHUN!!” while hawking the Daily Grind. I don’t know if […]
THE COPYCAT AND THE ORIGINAL CAT
Is there a difference between appropriation and exploitation? Interpretation and imitation? Real live originality and gold-plated copycatting? Even in a postmodern world where the difference is sometimes hard to figure, I’d say there is. Do you see any similarities in the images below? Three are by Norman O. Mustill, from “the onus of plagiarism.” That […]
DEAR DIARY
Three days away from the blog means so little in the scheme of things that I’m betting you didn’t notice. Anyway, Paul Krugman’s column caught my attention this morning. Headlined Bullshitter-in-Chief‘s] administration isn’t trustworthy.” But, it adds, we should guard against a conventional wisdom that seems to be taking hold in some quarters, which says […]
FOR THE LOVE OF ALGREN
Nelson Algren’s Lou Reed’s lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly. When “Walk” first appeared, in 1956, the literary critics pretty much told Algren to take a hike, and for the many years since, they’ve pretty much ignored him and it. writing in The Telegraph, notes that the novel “made a mockery of the American dream. […]
JEWISH CARTOON (LAFF) RIOT
The Muslim cartoon furor just won’t go away. “About 50,000 people, many chanting ‘Hang those who insulted the prophet,’ rallied Sunday in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi,” AP reports. Another 20,000 in the eastern Turkish city of Erzurum chanted anti-Danish slogans and shouted “Allah is Great.” We’ve all heard about the Al Qaeda video […]
THE LITTLE THINGS THAT NIGGLE
The fine art of the meaningless gesture and the empty symbol was honed to perfection with a combined “symbolic gesture” when the A front-page story in The New York Times on Saturday reported that he “flew directly to Islamabad aboard Air Force One,” as “a symbolic gesture that he considered the country safe enough for […]
STARRY REARVIEW MIRROR
Refighting the Vietnam War is not an option. Rethinking it is. That’s what they’ll be doing in a star-studded, two-day conference to rival Sunday’s Oscars. (Well, almost.) It’s called Who are “they”? Oh, just a few policymakers of the Vietnam era (like Kissinger and Haig), along with journalists (like Halberstam and Frances Fitzgerald), and historians […]
THE LIES WITHIN
TED SORENSEN’S ITALICS
Grim and getting grimmer — that’s my “take away” from this afternoon’s roundtable discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations about the situation in Iraq three years after the invasion (per yesterday’s Stephen Biddle (senior fellow for defense policy at the council) replied: “It’s an acceleration of what we’ve seen before rather than a fundamental […]
THE VIET-‘RAQ CONNECTION
Not too long ago the idea of comparing the American misadventure in Iraq with the Vietnam War was strictly limited to anti-war activists. To mention Iraq and Vietnam in the same breath made neocons roll their eyes, and even pro-war establishment liberals wouldn’t hear of it. How things have changed. Stephen Biddle in the March/April […]
OH YEAH
A friend writes, The ones who don’t enjoy themselves, even when they laugh. Oh yeah. The ones who worship the corporate image, not knowing that they work for someone else. Oh yeah. The ones who should have been shot in the cradle… Pow! Oh yeah. The ones who say “Follow me to success, but kill […]
BOLD, RED-FACED CONTRADICTIONS
Iraqi death squads doing America’s dirty work? Sunni genocide, hasn’t it? In public, “Police Tied to Death Squads” shows, possibly without meaning to, how contradictory and difficult the distancing is: Leading Sunni figures have blamed the reprisals on Jabr. … In a recent interview, Army Maj. Gen. Joseph Peterson, who is leading the multibillion-dollar effort […]
TORTURE: THE REAL McCOY
The subject of torture is latest Abu Ghraib photos obtained by Salon, but in “The Memo,” Jane Mayer’s latest exposé, which pins the blame on a gang of war criminals running the U.S. government. So before it disappears into the past, here’s a must-see: “A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to […]
DEAD RECKONING
It was Some anxious-looking patriot paddles up, identifying himself as the Washington correspondent of The New Yorker bringing tidings of comfort and joy: namely, that if the Little Calumet were the Volga I’d be up to my ears. And paddles away as contentedly as if he’d really done something for me. He hasn’t done a […]