Pennsylvania Avenue Freeze Out

Elitist

Surely I am not alone in wondering whether or not a Springsteen endorsement might have been more helpful before the New Jersey primary.

Shot With His Own Gun

O shit

George Packer on Obama's "cling" gaffe:

The real problem with what Obama said is that it’s basically untrue. In southwestern Pennsylvania, religion, hunting, and insularity predate the post-industrial era. They’ve have become politically manipulable points in part because of economic decline, but to confuse wedge issues with traditional values is the mark of the high-minded reformer or the political junkie, or both. It’s the kind of mistake one could make only from a great distance, once those voters had become almost entirely abstract—and, again, no one wants to be an abstraction.

This is far from the only thing Obama believes about religion and small-town America, as his 2004 interview with Charlie Rose and much else in his career show. Conservative propagandists like Kristol are predictably and unfairly wrapping Obama’s disastrous sentence around his neck and garroting him with it. So is Hillary Clinton, and the spectacle of her swallowing a boilermaker in a Pennsylvania bar is crass opportunism that will antagonize more voters than it charms. These days the winner is always McCain.

Amerykahn Idol

Bigger than religion

Sasha Frere-Jones is Mr. Ubiquitous lately: here he is on NPR discussing Erykah Badu's newest album, New Amerykah: Part One (4th World War), which, for my money is the best record of 2008 so far, though it's ridiculously early to be thinking about such things. It is the epitome of difficult art, sonically dense and lyrically complex, part of a rich tradition of avant-garde black political pop traceable to Sly Stone, Miles Davis, George Clinton, and Public Enemy. Badu is widely regarded as one of the progenitors of neo-soul - that is, soul updated with hip-hop signifiers - and New Amerykah persists in that vein, probing at its outer boundaries in search of something ineffably new; tracks that begin as straightforward songs end as sound collages, riven by expropriated dialogue ("Twinkle" concludes with a near-straight lift of Peter Finch's famous monologue from Network) and meditations on the religious philosophy of Clarence 13X Smith, the leader of a Nation of Islam splinter group assassinated in 1969. It's an imposing-sounding work, but thanks to Badu's ear for pop, which here doesn't necessarily translate into hooks, it remains an engaging, satisfying listen throughout. Slyly appended as a hidden track is the sweet, conventional radio single, "Honey," a standard deviation removed from the rest of the album, like a dessert awaiting a child who cleans his plate at dinnertime.

"Because nobody loves me/It's true/Not like you do"

Sasha Frere-Jones has a wonderful write-up of Portishead's brilliant third album, Third, in this week's New Yorker. By all means obtain it; it puts lie to the notion that trip-hop is merely dinner party music for over-literate yuppies (and yet you can still eat to it). Above, find a live rendition of the band's biggest hit, "Sour Times," circa 1998's Roseland NYC Live.

"You have to ask: Where were these security men last week? Beating up people in the villages of China, no doubt.”

Maybe, maybe not

Over the past week, the Olympic torch wound its way through the streets of the free world en route to Beijing, host of the 2008 summer games and seat of perhaps the world's most prominent autocracy. Citizens of France, Britain, and the United States, accustomed to voicing their opinions in the public square without governmental restraint, took the opportunity to criticize the Chinese government for its deplorable record of political repression and human rights abuses, highlighted by a recent crackdown against protesters in Tibet. They jeered as the torch passed, surrounded by a phalanx of Chinese security goons, and a good number of them broached the divide between protest and outright civil disobedience, clambering over police barriers and attempting to extinguish the flame altogether. Indeed, crowds were so disruptive that in Paris the torch was loaded into an armored police carrier, and in San Francisco, it was sent on a different route than previously announced in an effort to forestall an incident altogether.

The Chinese government, unaccustomed to public displays of displeasure at home, has reacted with much pique at those abroad. According to the New York Times, Qu Yingpu, a Chinese spokesman condemned the London demonstrations, saying “This is not the right time, the right platform, for any people to voice their political views.” This phrasing is interesting, because it reminds one that in China, the government decides which platforms and times are "right" for people to "voice their political views" - in fact, they even decide what types of "political views" may be voiced. Indeed, Mr. Qu's remarks are more than a little risible, considering that the Communist Party has welcomed political statements and actions in the context of the games that bolster its prestige both domestically and internationally; this seems to be the entire point behind China's bid to host the Olympics. Not that this is shocking or unusual: host countries always use the Olympics to boost their own agendas. Autocracies are more apt to indulge in this nationalistic chest-thumping than most; not having legitimacy conferred upon them by popular mandate as in a liberal democracy, they manufacture their own. Hence the nauseating spectacle of Adolph Hitler turning the 1936 games into a grotesque validation of his perverse eugenic fantasies; hence China, which has thus far had the good taste to confine its Gestapo tactics to its own population, using the Beijing games as a cudgel against internal opposition.

All of this is not to say that I necessarily endorse boycotting the Olympics; such symbolic gestures are only likely to buttress the regime and alienate the Chinese population, most of whom look forward to hosting the games as an affirmation of their national success. Isolating a country with 1.8 billion people and the world's 2nd largest economy is a fool's errand, and America's long record of failure when it comes to diplomatic disengagement (Iran, Cuba) augurs against trying it. At this point, damaging our relations with China will not hasten the liberation of Tibet or the rise of democratic institutions - indeed, it will only cement the tenuous bonds in place between China and other autocratic nations, like Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Myanmar.

Yet, as the Chinese have made the officially apolitical Olympics an implicitly political affair, I would argue that it is incumbent upon those citizens of the free world who disapprove of China's policies to make it an explicitly political one. Demonstrators should feel free to disregard Beijing's opinion on the propriety of using the Olympics as an occasion for protest; indeed, they should seize their chance to draw intense international scrutiny to China's shameful record on human rights. Let China's system of cruelty and repression compete with the imperfections of liberal democracy in the marketplace of ideas. Or, as Chairman Mao said, "Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend."

On Returning (to Form)

What, did they just go into the studio one day and say, "How about on this record, we shake things up and turn down the suck?"

R.E.M. may be the okay-est great band in rock history; apparently you had to be there, and by there, I mean managing a college radio station between 1983 and 1987. Fear not though, as Accelerate, their latest, has universally been hailed as a return to form. According to Bill Wyman in the Huffington Post, however, the revanchist hosannas sound a little stale.

For what it's worth, I've heard the record, and it sounds like a big white can that says "NO FRILLS ROCK" on it. But that's okay, because Around the Sun sounded like a big white can that said "NO FRILLS SHIT" on it.

Hell and a Handbag

Just finished watching Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev, an epic meditation on Russia's most legendary icon painter. Intriguingly, the film, really a series of lengthy vignettes linked by an overarching metaphorical conceit, never shows Rublev actually painting - indeed, he is absent entirely from the screen for great chunks of the movie's 3 1/2 hour running time. Yet after virtually ignoring his subject's body of work, Tarkovsky chose to end the black-and-white Rublev with a shock of color, panning over what survives of Rublev's miraculous icons and frescoes during a languid, enrapturing five minute sequence. This celebration of an Orthodox Christian art form in a film produced in the atheistic Soviet Union is striking. It is clear from Tarkovsky's reverent framing that he is not viewing Rublev's work as merely a Russian cultural artifact, regardless of his official minders interpretations or intentions; indeed, it's obvious that Tarkovsky's Rublev is modeled on the monk's own portrayal of Christ. Predictably, Soviet authorities suppressed the film (which they deemed too violent and too politically complex) upon its completion in 1966, but following an ecstatic international reception at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival and subsequent unauthorized screenings in Paris, they relented and allowed Rublev to be screened domestically. Tarkovsky was forced to make cuts, and for years it was only available in various bowdlerized incarnations; Criterion restored and released a widely-available definitive 205-minute cut a few years back.


If Rublev has a stylistic inheritor today, perhaps it is the commercialist-provocateur Takashi Murakami, a Japanese artist renowned for his anime-inspired "superflat" style, wherein brightly-colored figures and symbols are rendered with a complete lack of depth - an aesthetic with obvious metaphorical implications. His work is presently on display at the Brooklyn Musuem in a much-bruited about show predictably titled "©Murakami." Murakami makes no secret of his debt to progenitor Andy Warhol, who popularized the concepts of both mass-produced art and art-as-product; the most-discussed feature of his present exhibition is not any specific catalogue item, but the Louis Vuitton boutique that accompanies it per the artist's wishes, selling Murakami-designed leather goods at exorbitant prices. New Yorker reviewer Peter Schjeldahl, admittedly mystified by Murakami's aggressively garish work, opined that the Vuitton display was his favorite part of the show:

The shop is lovely. Shelving units in chrome and white enamel, with recessed fluorescent lighting that sets brass fittings on the merchandise aglint, caress the eye. They provide a haven from the strident grotesquerie of what might be termed Murakami’s fine-art product lines: paintings, sculpture, and wallpapered environments that play off the charms of Japanese traditional and popular arts with close to no charm of their own.

The Beast and Dragon, Adored

Prettier than Mick Jagger, according to his fans

Last night at the Electric Factory Spoon operated primarily in burst mode, firing off one choked missive after another: "Don't Make Me a Target", "The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine", "My Little Japanese Cigarette Case", "Small Stakes", etc. The set tended towards Gimme Fiction and Ga^5, the two albums most responsible for what notoriety the band has accrued to this point. Luckily for the audience, Spoon are eerily consistent; while it is certainly possible to prefer one of their records over the others, this distinction says more about the listener's tastes than any significant difference in quality. Apart from obvious highlights - "Everything Hits at Once", "I Turn My Camera On", "You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb", "I Summon You" - the apex of the evening was an encoring-opening cover of The Rolling Stones' "Rocks Off" from 1972's Exile on Main St.; for anyone wondering whether or not Spoon's seemingly-limited aesthetic is a product of design or circumstance, listening to the band tear through the masters' masterpiece with equal parts swagger and ease was a resounding affirmation of the former.

Great Things at the Moment

Save the receipt

Spring has sprung:

- The New York Times has two (and probably more) worthwhile pieces today: a profile of the Princeton Record Exchange and an examination of Juergen Teller's engaging, perplexing ads for Marc Jacobs.

- Hendrik Hertzberg discusses Vermont Governor Jim Douglas's veto of a bill that would institute instant runoff voting for that state's congressional elections. I want to have a problem with I.R.V. - seems like giving the other candidates a second bite of the apple - but I have to admit that my objections are rooted in professional prejudices that are forced to bow before superior logic; in a Democracy, it's bad when the candidate most people want to lose ends up winning.

- Elvis Costello's new record, the abstrusely-named Momofuku (dude likes noodles?), will not be vinyl-only, as was originally reported; though the record will initially be released as a vinyl record with a download certificate on April 22, Lost Highway will drop a CD version on May 6. In the interim, listen to 1986's brilliant Blood and Chocolate, fill up with bile, and anticipate. Additionally, Costello will be hosting a variety/talk show on CTV in Canada and Sundance in the U.S. to be produced by none other than Elton John; the project was evidently inspired by E.C.'s stint as a fill-in for David Letterman a few years back.

- Robert Kagan posits the retrenchment of autocracy as an ideological mode over at The New Republic, in an essay whose title, "The End of the End of History" mocks penitent neocon Francis Fukuyama, who famously predicted that after the fall of the communism, we would see "the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

“We haven’t turned any corners. We haven’t seen any lights at the end of the tunnel.”

With all due respect to Gen. David Petraeus, who I believe is making a good-faith effort to evaluate Iraq from a military perspective wherein "stalemate" does not necessarily compute, the war is no longer a military problem. It is a political problem with profound long term strategic implications for the United States, which is why it should be no surprise that President Bush, once perfectly willing to overrule his commanders in order to get us into this war on his terms, now insists on deferring to them slavishly. Petraeus's pronouncements before Congress Tuesday, rooted in the paradoxically obvious notion that we have made enough progress to justify our continuing presence in Iraq, but not enough to leave, confer legitimacy upon the Bush administration's non-strategy of buying enough time for the President to duck out the back door and leave his successor holding the bag. Thus does Petraeus come of as a bit of shill, regardless of his own intentions, because in a way, he is: the President and his coterie are taking advantage of the General's stature because they know that the American public is by-and-large too trusting or too stupid to scrutinize the statements of a man whose very uniform connotes honor and integrity. He needn't even be a party to this scam; after all, the beauty of a president deferring to his military commanders is that, ultimately, he's the one giving the orders.

10 Year Anniversary Special Edition

Why Read Blogs About Books When You Can Just Read Books?

Arsed about something, no doubt

New site in the blogroll: The Quietus (which is not necessarily a reference to Children of Men; it's an actual word as well), a UK-based music blog that has already proven its meddle with a track-by-track review of the as-yet-unreleased new Fall album, complete with speculation as to how many pints the famously lubricated Mark E. Smith must've had when recording it.

We'll Make a Lover of You (Yet)

Tim Harrington, as has been oft-noted, is an incendiary showboat: throughout Les Savy Fav's live show he pinwheels, flops, spits, flits, and strips, yowling all the while into a microphone attached to what must be sixty feet of cable. In other words, he is a consummate showman, and his presence alone was enough to differentiate his band from the preceding Dodos and Big Sleep, both of whom were competent (ill-served by the TLA's policy of mixing the vocals way too low) but seemingly disengaged; it probably didn't help that at least two-thirds of the crowd didn't show up until the headliners were about to go on. Still, both opening acts placed the emphasis on the indie, whereas LSF focused on the rock portion of the equation.

There was beer and water but no peanut butter, blood, vomit, or any other fluid of dubious provenance, so I guess you could call Harrington restrained; at one point he did come out dressed like "Stevie Nicks", according to him. The set-list included "The Sweat Descends" and "We'll Make a Lover of You", but beyond that it was impossible for me to discern, not that this was a barrier to enjoyment. Form, in this instance, is function.

"We rob banks."

Rife with complex sexuality and searing ultraviolence, 1967's Bonnie and Clyde drew a bright, bleeding line between the studio-centric assembly line ethos of Old Hollywood and the auteur-driven personal filmmaking of New Hollywood. The vision of its star and producer Warren Beatty (otherwise known as George Clooney Mark I), the picture was among the first major American movies to reflect the influence of the French New Wave, wherein enterprising filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Melville had taken the pulpy atmospherics of 1940's cheapie Hollywood noir and reflected them back through a kaleidoscope of wit, glamour, and impeccable stylishness. Nowhere was this transatlantic conversation more evident than in Faye Dunaway's megawatt portrayal of Bonnie Parker: she opens the film standing nude at her window, hollering at Beatty's Clyde Barrow, then a recently-paroled two-bit ex-con, to keep away from her mother's car; after a few moments of sexually-charged back-and-forth, she goads him into the spontaneous robbery that sets the pair on their fateful trajectory across the Depression-era landscape. By herself, Dunaway would elevate the film into the realm of the iconic, but it is director Arthur Penn's masterful depiction of the pair's gruesome finale that cemented Bonnie and Clyde in the upper stratosphere of our cinema, rejecting genteel precedent in favor of founding a new vocabulary grounded firmly in the tumult of its age.

Q: "Oh the butcher and the baker and the people on the streets, where did they go?"

A: