"Shades Are Drawn/Don't Ask Me Why"

The Raveonettes hold the distinction of being the last band whose CD I bought on the merit of a music video. That video, "Attack of the Ghost Riders" (above) was a slick (probably) copyright-infringing visual summation of their Wild One-meets-Psychocandy aesthetic. The accompanying EP, Whip It On, was pretty much stuck in the same gear, though, with nothing matching the peak of "Ghost Riders." I sat out the ensuing LP, Chain Gang of Love, and the 2005 follow-up, Pretty in Black, which I understand traded the Jesus and Mary Chain's love of feedback for their love of Phil Spector. The Raveonettes then presumably got cashiered by major label Columbia, another victim of post-Strokes hype, and had been largely unheard from since. Frankly, I'd assumed they'd broken up.

As it turns out, I was wrong: the Danish couple, Sune Rose Wagner (guitar/vocals) and Sharin Foo (bass/vocals), resurfaced on indie lifestyle brand/record label Vice with their third album, the unfortunately titled Lust Lust Lust, which dropped in the UK in late 2007, and has just seen release in the States. Laurie Anderson once said that "Now is the time, and now is the record of the time" - well, with A Place to Bury Strangers and The Magnetic Fields binging on distortion, it appears, as with Television, Joy Division, Brian Wilson, and Bruce Springsteen before them, JAMC's moment as the chic indie inspiration has arrived. The Raveonettes' faith thus rewarded, they delivered a great record, bringing the girl group-aping aspects of their sound into perfect balance with their enduring love of aural abrasion.

The biggest difference from Raveonettes mark 2002 and now is the obvious exuberance, which if memory serves, was formerly submerged beneath thick layers of ennui and icy detachment. Certainly the mean temperature of Lust Lust Lust is medium cool, but songs like "Blush" and "You Want the Candy" pop with a vibrancy that not only renders the highs higher, but brings the lows into sharper relief as well. The record has an emotional topography that may not matter much in this à la carte age of the iPod, but makes for a consistently engaging listen - no mean feat for a one-trick pony like the Raveonettes, no matter how neat the trick.

The Raveonettes - "Dead Sound":

Surrender, Dorothy

How you doin'?

Now, I'm sure there are limitless Hillaryland dead-enders willing to sell you a line about how the Wehrmacht can break the Red Army encirclement of Berlin she can still win the nomination even if she doesn't carry either Texas or Ohio, but with Obama now rolling up his ninth and tenth consecutive victories last night in Wisconsin and Hawaii, I wouldn't buy that for a dollar. It's clear at this point that not only is the Clinton campaign bleeding, it's hemorrhaging, writhing around in the street, waiting for the sanitation department to shovel it into a Hefty bag and toss it in a landfill.

Now I may be crazy, but I don't think that this is actually a terrible place for Hillary to be at this point, relatively speaking. Obviously, she would prefer to be out in the lead, or at least trading paint with Barack, but delegate-wise she's still well in contention, it's just in the realm of public perception that she's foundering. If she manages to galvanize her firewall of Latinos, blue-collar workers*, and older Dems (not to mention, uh, women**), she could easily fend Barack off in Texas, thereby shooting the tires out from under his momentum express and taking the lion's share of the 200+ delegates up for grabs in the Lone Star State. Furthermore, by getting up off the mat just as the long knives are beginning to come out, her "comeback" would appear all the more "miraculous", like Popeye downing a can of spinach and punching out forty dudes armed with machetes or something. At the very least, she'd make it a race again, and push the contest to April 22 in Pennsylvania.

For the first time in the campaign, Senator Obama is definitely in the driver's seat: ergo, he has more to lose*** March 4. Win both Texas and Ohio, and Hillary is effectively finished; the superdelegates that have thusfar been deserting her in drips and drabs will begin to abandon ship, and party leaders will start to coalesce around the presumptive nominee. No one, not even the Clintons, are going to be allowed to push this thing through the summer to the convention, not with the White House there for the taking. But if Hillary should pull out either of those two contests, well, she looked dead in the water after placing third in Iowa, and look what happened when she carried New Hampshire.

* According to exit polling I'm reading this morning, they're abandoning her.
** She barely won among women in WI.
***Well, I take that back, seeing as Hillary could actually flat out lose the nomination that day. Duh.

A Confederacy of Dunces is Poised to Secede

Nader 2008

I said it a couple of days ago (in a roundabout fashion), but George Packer just beat me to the punch. I could understand defectors if I could discern any meaningful policy differences between Hillary and Obama, but the fact of the matter remains that they're moderate peas in a pod. Barack Obama may be a person of greater personal integrity and stylistic appeal (which is why I support him), but it's not as if he's Moses come down from the mount with a radically different brand of politics for us. In fact, methinks I've seen his "hope" shtick somewhere before. So what these people thinking of jumping ship really mean, in large part, is that they're willing to sacrifice the country to another four years of Republican mismanagement in order to satiate a self-absorbed need for Pyrrhic "change." Indeed, Packer cites his friend's litany of third party candidacies, that, though unsuccessful in their immediate aims, helped reshape the political landscape:

...the Teddy Roosevelt’s “Bull Moose” Party got Wilson elected in 1912 and laid the ground for Republican Progressives to switch allegiances and bring F.D.R. to power in 1932. Go back even further: in 1848, the Free Soiler Martin Van Buren planted the seeds for the arrival of Lincoln and the Republican Party in 1860. Third parties remake American politics when the established parties stagnate and fail to solve chronic, structural problems (slavery, economic inequality); they bring not just a new program but new forms of politics.

Of course, the more recent tradition of Democratic defections is not nearly so illustrious, as Packer himself points out: abandoning Humphrey in '68 wrought Nixon, John Anderson's progressive candidacy helped torpedo Carter and usher in Reagan, and, well, there's no need to rehash the 2000 election. Perhaps in some distant future these events will ultimately be seen as net positives by liberals, but it's less the ideas these candidacies espoused than the subsequent havoc wreaked by their more immediate benefactors, i.e. arch-conservative Republicans, that provoked any real change in the Democratic Party. It can certainly be argued that the progressive agenda has more momentum now than at any time post-1980, though I would be more inclined to credit that fact to the successive disasters of the war in Iraq and the destruction of New Orleans, than, say, Ralph Nader.

Scuttling a prospective Hillary ticket is not going to usher in a new era of progressive politics, destroy a moribund Democratic establishment (nominally headed, it's worth noting, by Howard Dean), or even unify the party behind Obama in 2012. What it will do is keep us in Iraq longer, forestall meaningful health-care reforms, and ensure that our tax policies continue to favor the wealthiest Americans at the expense of the rest of us. Every subsequent setback and disaster will be on the heads of those "Democrats" holding out for a spotless white knight embodying each and every one of their pure-as-the-new-driven-snow "latté liberal" wet dreams to emerge on horse back and spirit the country off to some inconceivable post-partisan utopia. The rest of us, meanwhile, have already figured out that he's holed up somewhere with the Easter bunny and Santa Claus, who also don't fucking exist. This year, to borrow a familiar phrase, you are either with us or against us.

I'll Be the One to Hold the Gun

Small admission: I'm not the biggest Feist fan there's ever been. "1234", her biggest "hit" thusfar, doesn't do much for me, even though I enjoy the goofy community theater dance-o-rama video (and I obviously wasn't the only one). Yet two other tracks on the new (well, now recent) record, The Reminder, have lit up the neural switchbord: the piano-pounding of "My Moon, My Man" - also available in a taffy-pulled electro junk remix by Boys Noize - and my present #1 jam, the late-blooming current single, "I Feel It All".

"I Feel It All" is a clatterer; unlike other Feist tracks that roll, skip, or slip, this song falls down the stairs after a running start. One might even say it rocks, after a fashion. It's about a breakup, as approximately 60% of great pop songs are (scientifically proven, that), and the time-honored tradition of reserving the right to break your own damn heart:

I feel it all, I feel it all

I feel it all, I feel it all
The wings are wide, the wings are wide
Wild card inside, wild card inside

Oh I'll be the one to break my heart
I'll be the one who'll break my heart
I'll be the one who'll break my heart
I'll end it though you started it

The truth lies
The truth lied
And lies divide
Lies divide

The Cold War Keeps Ending On Us

The end of history (?)

Yesterday, Fidel Castro, the charismatic strongman who has ruled Cuba since seizing power in 1959, announced his resignation as president and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He outlasted nine American presidents, as well as his patron, the Soviet Union, which predeceased his rule by sixteen years. Withstanding invasion, embargo, and the very tides of history, Castro endured, a living monument to the East-West ideological strife that engulfed the 20th century, and a potent beacon of global anti-Americanism. As communism has been replaced by Islamist jihadism as the great threat of our age, and we find more outspoken antagonists headquartered in Caracas, Tehran, and Pyongyang, it is only fitting that Castro, the firstest with the mostest, should finally pass into history.

Reading Castro's political obituary, there is little to mourn. He replaced the brutish Batista regime with another jackboot, concealing his iron fist in the velvet glove of socialism - the very definition of "fascism with a human face." Doubtlessly he did much to improve the economic plight of a great many Cubans who suffered under the yoke of an unmitigated feudal capitalism; his rise should remain a cautionary tale to those who continue to shred the social safety net and explode the distance between the wealthiest and poorest. However, the price for these modest gains was systematic repression, political imprisonment, and death - meet the new boss, same as the old boss. He should not be missed.

In the wake of Castro's resignation announcement, President Bush announced that "the United States will help the Cuban people realize the blessings of liberty," calling for free and fair elections ahead of next week's critical National Assembly meeting - a gathering that will ostensibly produce, or at least validate, Castro's successor. A good first step in this direction might be to end the failed sanctions that have been in place for four decades, depriving the Cuban people of economic opportunity and a direct connection to the United States. Opening this potent avenue of exchange would undoubtedly be the most effective method of exposing Cubans to those "blessings of liberty" the president spoke of. The Cold War has been over for almost two decades now, and as another one of its relics is packed away in mothballs, perhaps it's time for America to realize that, yes, we actually did win, and move on.

"You Don't Have to Love Me"

The Sixth Sense reignited the "creepy kid" horror movie trope/subgenre, and though it has surprisingly endured for almost a solid decade, the trend has spawned remarkably few worthwhile films. One might be tempted to add Joshua to this scrapheap; the movie, released (dumped, actually) by Fox Searchlight approximately nowhere for a hot minute sometime in 2007, very nearly disappeared without a trace. However, critics latched onto the film as a startling psychological thriller in the vein of Rosemary's Baby without the need for supernatural hokum. Indeed, no movie I know of similarly exploits the heightened emotional tension surrounding a birth, but whereas Roman Polanski's 1969 classic is prenatal, director George Ratliff's terror is strictly post.

The film concerns a well-to-do yuppie couple (Sam Rockwell and Vera Farmiga), who have just added a second child to the family, eight years after their first, the eponymous Joshua (Jacob Kogan). Immediately we detect, as we are meant to, something amiss with the boy: he is preternaturally serious, self-contained, playing Bartok on the family's grand piano and obsessing over ancient Egyptian burial rites. His parents, especially his father, seem both mystified and wary of him. Later, we see Joshua watching video footage of himself and his parents when he was an infant: he is screaming constantly as his mother visibly cracks up under the strain of postpartum psychosis, his father a helpless bystander amidst the unfolding emotional chaos. He suspects, as we do, that his parents don't genuinely love him, and begins to enact subtle retribution.

Joshua's first hour or so verges on brilliant, recognizing the unspoken potential terror of parenthood, namely the fact that you are essentially trapped with something you brought into the world, for good or ill. The film is initially ambiguous as to Joshua's true nature, cautiously laying out just enough string to support several theses. Then, following a harrowing game of hide-and-seek, the movie's grueling pace, essential to developing its merciless tension, unfortunately begins to unravel. The filmmakers ultimately choose to go the Damien route, turning a once-novel take on a tired premise into just another example of superior craft. Yet, to their credit, they never completely tip their hand: we never develop a clear understanding of Joshua's motives, nor a sense of his true feelings towards his baby sister, whose arrival clearly serves as the catalyst for his malfeasance (occasionally, title cards pop up to inform us of how many days old she is). Diminished, but far from crippled by its flaws, Joshua is an overlooked gem that could have been a diamond, an unsettling film that could have been truly disturbing.

Rivers of Blood

I don't like much of what I've heard from Black Lips or Times New Viking: the whole "got ripped on Old Crow, played our guitars with broken beer bottles, and recorded it straight to cassette" aesthetic does not, on its own merits, do a whole lot for me. Memphis' Jay Reatard comes from the same DIY school, but has thoughtfully included the tunes. Punk-as-fuck in the Ramones' two-minutes-and-we're-out sense, but scuffed around the edges, Reatard's 2006 solo debut, Blood Visions, is a lost gem of nouveau garage rock. Now he's jumped up to the majors (well, at least Triple A), signing with Matador Records, with whom he plans to release a series of six 7-inch singles, with each edition in a successively smaller batch. For Reatard fans with a vinyl fetish or a collector's appetite, I'm sorry to say that you are getting a grade-A screwing. For myself, I'd say that there's nothing quite so wasteful in this age of digitization as committing all that raw material to two songs. For everyone else, I'd say fear not, as there are plans in the works to release the contents of these limited edition singles in CD format, you know, the music being the important thing and all.

For some idea how this holy terror actually sounds, you can click here.

"Peace With Honor"

You must remember this

For all you Obamaniacs considering sitting out the general if your (and my) man loses out to Hillary because you don't like superdelegates or you just don't "like" her, check this quote on Iraq from the man you would be helping to elect President of the United States: "...the whole thing is keyed to Americans being able to withdraw and come home with honor, not in defeat."

Funnily enough, I thought the whole thing was "keyed" to preventing Saddam Hussein from obtaining WMDs, er, avenging 9/11, um, hastening the spread of democracy, I mean, fighting the terrorists over there rather than in New York or Washington, yikes, how about stabilizing the Iraqi government and preventing the descent into civil war and genocide? No, wait, I know: "being able to withdraw and come home with honor, not in defeat." Yeah, that's the ticket.

For all of you who think that this talk about a false choice between honor and defeat sounds familiar, allow me to reach back through the mists of time to then-candidate Richard Nixon, who promised on the campaign trail to end the Vietnam War by seeking "peace with honor." Incidentally, after taking office in 1969, Nixon expanded the war by secretly bombing Cambodia (which he later invaded) and Laos, while laying waste to North Vietnamese cities and escalating the civilian death toll exponentially. American involvement in Vietnam finally ended in 1973, and the South finally fell in 1975. "Peace with honor", which had prolonged the conflict needlessly for four more years and cost thousands of American and millions of Vietnamese lives, ended up looking a whole lot like plain old peace. Or "defeat".

Kiss It Goodbye

See ya J-Kidd.

On the bright side:

If You've Already Given Obama $2,300

Jersey City-based free-form radio station WFMU (available at 91.1 FM on your dial in the NYC area, or 90.1 in the Hudson Valley; streaming here) marks its 50th anniversary this year. To celebrate, the station is using its annual pledge drive to try and secure at least $100,000 for the purchase of a booster antenna to "give WFMU the coverage that our broadcast license has long promised but which local geography and buildings have always denied us." Like the bumblebee, free-form radio should be physically unable to fly, but thanks to the generosity of aesthetes like yourselves, it continues to defy the hard-hearted dictates of the marketplace. Certainly there are institutions more deserving of your charity, but how many of them will give you an awesome bumper sticker in return? Click here to make a contribution.

When You Were Young You Were The King of Carrot Flowers

The best-selling title in Continuum's book-per-album (or was that the other way 'round?) 33 1/3 series is Kim Cooper's take on Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. This might not strike you as odd at first, until you get around to the other titles in the series: The Beatles' Let It Be, The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main St., Radiohead's OK Computer, Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA, Nirvana's In Utero, The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, etc. So we are not just talking about a bunch of obscurities here, these are some of the best-selling classic albums by the biggest acts in rock 'n' roll history - records that have sold millions and millions of copies, the mere mention of which causes label execs (those that remain) to squirt a few tears for the good ol' days. According to the book (which I have not read - this factoid was cited in a review here), as of 2005 In the Aeroplane Over the Sea shifted a relatively meager 150,000 units since it was released in 1998; compare that to Merge stablemates the Arcade Fire, who moved 92,000 copies of their newest, Neon Bible, in its first week of release. Yet, in the pantheon of pantheons that is the 33 1/3 library, it is an obtuse contortion of lo-fi buzz and lyrical cryptology that never even pawed at the screen door, let alone scratched the surface of the mainstream, that is number one.

I can't begin to tell you why this record has the death-grip it does on some people's ears and imaginations. ItAOtS is hardly inviting at first listen: its ramshackle orchestrations, mastermind Jeff Mangum's piercingly nasal vocals, and the too-clever/strange-by-half wordplay...well, it can be like trying to swallow an entire watermelon at once. It's an album a not inconsiderable proportion of the public might consider as having been inflicted upon them rather than listened to. I myself had an intense allergic reaction to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, derisively referring to it as "Aeroplanes in My Cereal" and other such intentionally mis-remembered sobriquets.

It's now been ten years since In the Aeroplane Over the Sea came out; the only reason I recalled this was that Pitchfork - a publication that infamously expunged its original, insufficiently laudatory review of the record - is running a two-part series celebrating the anniversary. The album is a Rosetta stone of indie tastes - a last gasp at willful obscurantism in the pre-internet age, when you had to make an effort to seek out a record like this without the benefit of eight million blogs posting the same shitty-fi mp3s months in advance. Nowadays indie music's success is a combination of increased reach via the web combined with the mainstream bar plummeting due to the record industry's swan song. The marketplace is so bifurcated as to give the insulated music dork the appearance of having achieved a kind of hegemony, when in fact no one knows who M.I.A. is, or who James Murphy is, and Feist is that chick from the iPod commercials. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea reads like a missive from another dimension when Pitchfork is pumping out fey-pop icons like Sufjan Stevens - a Tommy Stone to Jeff Mangum's Brian Slade.

Mangum disappeared after this record arrived on store shelves. Well not literally, but apart from a collection of field recordings of Bulgarian folk musicians, he hasn't laid a note to wax or plastic since, a fact that has undoubtedly burnished both his and the record's legacy as a kind of misshapen masterpiece that hung a left off Art just before the intersection with Commerce. When he does turn up, as he did a couple years back at a concert by fellow Elephant 6ers (and disappearing act) Olivia Tremor Control, "Elvis is alive, well, and working at a gas station off of I-10 in Louisiana"-type stories pop up across the blogosphere. Will the disciple who once wailed "I love you Jesus Christ" at the 0:22 mark of "King of Carrot Flowers Part 2 & 3" break his unacknowledged vow of silence or recede into the ether once more?

In retrospect In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a sinking ship, overloaded with ambition, emotion, ideas, and sheer virtuosity. It is a bold, brilliant, beautiful album that I'll never get my arms all the way around, never understand the way that those people who really love it do. Sometimes that's the way it's meant to be, I guess. "But now we must pick up every piece/Of the life we used to love/Just to keep ourselves/At least enough to carry on."

"Just a Box"

Rorshach test

RIYL mysteries, interesting story from Seymour Hersh in the most recent (as of today) New Yorker. "A Strike in the Dark" follows up on a newsblip back from September 2007, when the Israeli air force conducted a raid in Syria, blowing something up and then flying away; they wouldn't say what was destroyed, the U.S. won't say what was destroyed, and the Syrians - who one would think would be very upset - won't say what was destroyed, and haven't pressed the matter further. The fascinating aspect is that the target itself is something of a MacGuffin - clearly the Israelis thought it was worth the risks inherent in trying to obliterate it, and the Syrians aren't eager to reveal what it was. The important questions are the how and the why, especially as they relate to the decision-making process that got us into Iraq, and still threatens to get us into Iran.

Trusty Ol' Mitt

Consistency, they say, is the hobgoblin of small minds; it was also the hobgoblin of Mitt Romney's aborted presidential bid. Mitt tried to be all Mitts to all people - a genial moderate when running for statewide office in liberal Massachusetts, and a hair of the dog conservative when seeking the G.O.P. presidential nomination. Some bona fide conservatives with genuine conservative bona fides did sign up for Romney's campaign, but the evidence suggests that this was a marriage of convenience, designed to thwart the insufficiently doctrinaire McCain and Huckabee candidacies. No one, you see loved Mitt for Mitt, and a vote for him was almost always a vote against someone (or something) else.

In a smaller field, Romney's strategy of shoehorning himself into the pro-business, socially conservative gap might have propelled him to victory. On the back end of this construction, however, Huckabee proved to be his superior, a genuine bible-thumping clergyman who could talk the talk with the conservative Christians, who, after being lionized in the wake of President Bush's 2004 re-election, have thusfar been an afterthought in 2008. Furthermore, the entire field of Republican candidates, especially McCain and Rudolph Giuliani, seemed to take particular delight in singling Romney out for abuse whenever possible. The Massachusetts governor's "flip-flopping" and win-at-all costs mentality (his campaign was the most aggressively negative) seemed to especially irk his fellow Republicans, and undoubtedly their constant withering fire stripped a lot of the luster off his candidacy, if not his comically immaculate coif.

Underreported, of course, is the extent to which Mitt's religious background derailed his presidential bid. The media is free all day to speculate on whether Obama's blackness or Hillary's gender helps or hurts, both because identity politics play a huge role in Democratic politics, and having an African-American or female president would be a seismic break with tradition. Crossing religious boundaries, or at least, since JFK, coming from a non-mainline Christian denomination, doesn't have a whole lot of national juice (though it's worth noting that Utah went for Romney by an absurd 90%-10% margin). Yet, in large part it was Mitt's religious preference that doomed him; in many swaths of the Evangelical community, Mormons are considered heretics - it's not far-fetched to consider that such bias, or at least discomfort, cost him vital support, especially in Iowa. I, for one, would be fascinated to know how many Republican primary voters were ultimately turned off to Mitt not by his transparent fakeness, but his church.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not sorry for Mitt Romney. His laughably eager-to-please, cynically manipulative style doomed him from the start. Had he managed to attain the presidency - and I think either Obama or Hillary would have eaten him for lunch in the general election - what would he have done? How would he have governed? Given that self-contradiction seemed to be his only constant, we honestly have no way of even speculating what a Romney administration would have looked like. The only thing surprising about Mitt's announcement that he was dropping his bid is that he didn't return to the podium fifteen minutes later and deny ever saying anything of the sort.

This announcement, delivered to a fawning crowd of imbeciles at the Conservative Political Action Conference who actually shouted, "No!" when Mitt declared he was dropping out, was the final nail in the coffin for any shred of political dignity Romney hadn't already shed during the campaign. During his speech, Romney warned "that unless America changes course, we could become the France of the 21st century" (changes course from what? the Bush administration?), made a cheap crack about Harvard professors being liberal (as an alumnus of that effete, elitist institution, he would presumably be in a position to know), and said, alluding to the fact that if he remained in the running, it might improve Obama and Hillary's odds of winning, "I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror." It was a condensed lesson in why he is exceedingly unfit to be President of the United States. I, for one, am extremely pleased that his life-long dream died a slow, painful death; I only wish he could have burned through another $35 million before it was over.

Recent Greatness

Consider the following discs/files for your home listening pleasure:

Autechre - Quaristice (Warp)
Magnetic Fields - Distortion (Nonesuch)
Clipse - We Got It For Cheap Vol. 3 (Re-Up Gang)
Cribs - Man's Needs, Woman's Needs, Whatever (Warner Bros.)
Elvis Presley - Elvis at Sun (BMG)
Hot Chip - Made in the Dark (DFA/Astralwerks)
Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend (XL)
Miles Davis - Miles in the Sky (Columbia)
Blood on the Walls - Liferz (Social Registry)
Boris - Smile (Southern Lord)
Lime Spiders - Beethoven's Fist (Caroline)
The Vibrators - Pure Mania (Columbia)
Television - Marquee Moon (Elektra)

Competing Visions of the Future

28 Weeks Later, the 2007 sequel to Danny Boyle's zombie flick resurrection 28 Days Later, is equally as allegorical as it's predecessor: now the pointed target is the American occupation of Iraq. A U.S.-led NATO force has entered post-infection Britain, establishing a command center for reconstruction in London known colloquially, get this, as the "Green Zone." The so-called "rage virus" from the first film has apparently abated as the infected (i.e. the zombies) starved to death, having gobbled all of us normals up, and the military is repatriating U.K. citizens to aid with the rebuilding effort. Predictably (though inventively) an outbreak of infection occurs within the compound, and also predictably, the Americans botch the containment effort. What follows is a lesson in junk politics - primarily amounting to a broad criticism of our inability to tell friend from foe, and more than a suggestion that we might be as bad for the Iraqis' health as the insurgents.

The initial 28 Days Later was a culture shock, primarily owing to the simple fact that the zombies possessed velociraptor-type speed. 28 Weeks Later, lacking this element of surprise, feels in many respects like a quicky retread. Still, director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo is an obviously talent, rationing out tension and release in a professional, if predictable manner. Like its predecessor, 28 Weeks Later is the cream of its genre; I just don't know how many more passes we're handing out for English accents and cack-handed pretensions.

* * * * *

If you were creating a cinematic time capsule of 1995, you would undoubtedly include Clueless, Strange Days, and, of course, Hackers. The last film is a prime example, along with The Net, of the cautious technophobia enveloping our culture as Windows 95 and the Sony Playstation became immutable facts of life. As computers were just becoming integrated into every aspect of our waking lives, they still held a almost-mystical ambiance, credited with near-omnipotent reach. Hackers is a prototypical entry in the tappa-tap-tapping genre, wherein the control of even the most innocuous electrical system is available with a few furious keystrokes, and meaningless jumbles of graphic hoo-hah constitutes revelatory information. The cast alone is a gold mine of dweebazoid cred: Jonny Lee Miller, Matthew Lillard, and Angelina Jolie (with a pre-fame bit role for Wendell Piece i.e. Bunk from The Wire). It's a glorified B picture at best, a fascinating example of sci-fi predictions that don't come to pass.