Lovely Old Scottish Buses (thanks I like)
Friday, May 28, 2004
The Return of the 'Stab In the Back'
"Nevertheless, the political purpose of the theory isn't hard to grasp. The groundwork is being laid for a new version of the 'stab in the back' myth that helped destroy Weimar Germany. No matter how far south things go in Iraq, the blame will be laid not at the feet of the president who initiated and conducted the war, but rather on those who had the temerity to note that it wasn't working. Rather than the critics having been proven right, or so the story goes, the critics are to blame for the failure of the very policy they were criticizing. It's an ugly tactic, and as you go down the journalistic food chain, it grows uglier still.
Former Gingrich aide, Tony Blankley, writing in the well-known bastion of journalistic propriety that is The Washington Times, likewise took the press to task, calling it 'heatbreaking, though no longer perplexing, that the president's political and media opposition want the president's defeat more than America's victory.' Standard stuff, so far, but he went on to lament that nothing could be done about it . . . yet. 'Sedition laws almost surely would be found unconstitutional, currently -- although things may change after the next terrorist attack in America.' Some might find it heartbreaking, though no longer perplexing, that the president's political and media allies are more committed to his re-election than to the basic principles of American democracy."
"Nevertheless, the political purpose of the theory isn't hard to grasp. The groundwork is being laid for a new version of the 'stab in the back' myth that helped destroy Weimar Germany. No matter how far south things go in Iraq, the blame will be laid not at the feet of the president who initiated and conducted the war, but rather on those who had the temerity to note that it wasn't working. Rather than the critics having been proven right, or so the story goes, the critics are to blame for the failure of the very policy they were criticizing. It's an ugly tactic, and as you go down the journalistic food chain, it grows uglier still.
Former Gingrich aide, Tony Blankley, writing in the well-known bastion of journalistic propriety that is The Washington Times, likewise took the press to task, calling it 'heatbreaking, though no longer perplexing, that the president's political and media opposition want the president's defeat more than America's victory.' Standard stuff, so far, but he went on to lament that nothing could be done about it . . . yet. 'Sedition laws almost surely would be found unconstitutional, currently -- although things may change after the next terrorist attack in America.' Some might find it heartbreaking, though no longer perplexing, that the president's political and media allies are more committed to his re-election than to the basic principles of American democracy."
Thursday, May 27, 2004
Lee Perry- Good Always Conquers Evil: "Occasionally, Lee Perry brings up in interviews many references to comic books. In one particular interview, he mentions that he defeated Lex Luthor (Superman's nemesis) with the help of his 'teddy bear, my hair, and my invisible chair, and my 144,000 mosquito angels what sting with lightning, psssssst' "
No Such Thing as Paranoia
"Our mass media, its ownership consolidated among a handful of billionaires whose interests are identical with those of corporate cronies (globalized 'free trade' for the wealthy nations, peonage for the third world, Chomsky's 'manufacture of consent' via a constant torrent of propaganda for the status quo), reflexively dismiss the most obvious or credible explanations for ugly phenomena as the perfervid fantasy of 'conspiracy cranks'�for instance, the idea that successive 'preemptive' wars might be launched against demonized enemies in order to award reconstruction contracts to corporations formerly helmed by, say, the vice president of the United States and other exalted government employees, or that the strategic purpose of one such war might be the economic colonization of former Soviet republics rich in oil and mineral resources, and to guarantee a secure pipeline for the exploitation of said resources. Instead, the altruism and democracy-spreading goodness of the American power elite are portrayed as self-evident, taking all other motives off the media table. "
"Our mass media, its ownership consolidated among a handful of billionaires whose interests are identical with those of corporate cronies (globalized 'free trade' for the wealthy nations, peonage for the third world, Chomsky's 'manufacture of consent' via a constant torrent of propaganda for the status quo), reflexively dismiss the most obvious or credible explanations for ugly phenomena as the perfervid fantasy of 'conspiracy cranks'�for instance, the idea that successive 'preemptive' wars might be launched against demonized enemies in order to award reconstruction contracts to corporations formerly helmed by, say, the vice president of the United States and other exalted government employees, or that the strategic purpose of one such war might be the economic colonization of former Soviet republics rich in oil and mineral resources, and to guarantee a secure pipeline for the exploitation of said resources. Instead, the altruism and democracy-spreading goodness of the American power elite are portrayed as self-evident, taking all other motives off the media table. "
Saatchi Warehouse Fire Destroys work by Emin, Hirst, etc.
"'[The tent]'s a seminal thing. It was that moment and that time in my life. It's me sitting in my flat in Waterloo sewing all the names on. It took me six months to make. It just fitted inside my living room, which was 10ft by 12ft, and the TV just fitted inside the tent. I couldn't remake that time in my life again any more than I could remake the piece. And anyway, I haven't slept with anybody for a year.' "
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
Jean Crowder is running for the NDP in my riding and has a real chance. Just ordered an extra big lawn sign.
Tuesday, May 25, 2004
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"Kelly Wood
Modern Decor for the Poor.
May 29 - July 3, 2004
Opening Friday May 28, 8PM
Western Front
303 East 8th Avenue
Vancouver, BC
Following her recently completed five-year Garbage series, Kelly Wood's
satirically titled installation based exhibition makes use of the
colourful byproducts of modern capitalism: advertising flyers. Wood's
redecoration of the gallery will include modular universal furniture to
rest upon while surveying the installation or while holding impromptu
conversations.
Kelly Wood lives and works in Vancouver. She received her MFA from the
University of British Columbia and is represented by Catriona Jeffries
Gallery. Wood was a recipient of the VIVA Award in 2003 and has
recently exhibited at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario, the Morris
and Helen Belkin Gallery, Vancouver, Galerie Wilma Lock, St. Gallen,
Switzerland and Fotomuseum, Wintertur, Switzerland.
The Western Front is open Tuesday--Saturday from 12--5pm. For further
information please contact Jonathan Middleton or Mark Soo at (604)
876-9343 or exhibitions@front.bc.ca
C'era Una Volta Il West: "This theme is made explicit when Fonda recognizes that Ferzetti's methods--cash and surrogates--will never work for him, and decides to confront Bronson directly. 'So you found out you're not a businessman after all,' Bronson tells him. Fonda replies, 'Just a man.' 'An ancient race...' Bronson muses. 'Other Mortons will be along and they'll kill it off.' "
A snail just like this just off the porch just now, the rain here started about an hour ago, it was setting a good pace. Found a big dead country rat between the rainbarrel and the lattice--(turned up on his) gray belly and sides but a big brown set of deep stripes (a little chipmunky?) when I flipped him over with the little spade, dropping him into the thick brush.(thanks stopDrag)
Luc Sante on A.J. Liebling
"As his friend Joseph Mitchell noted at the funeral, the secondhand booksellers who were then clustered together in a district on Fourth Avenue held his books in special esteem, because they were in perpetual demand. 'Literary critics don't know which books will last,' Mitchell quoted a bookseller as saying, 'and literary historians don't know. We are the ones who know. We know which books can be read only once, if that, and we know the ones that can be read and reread and reread.' "
Monday, May 24, 2004
wonderful Shockwave version of Wallace Stevens' The Idea of Order at Key West by Jim Andrews--
" Many will be familiar with this poem. I found a recording of it on the net
and played it in Sound Forge, looping parts of it, and occassionally an
interesting music emerged. Of course, loop anything and it eventually
becomes musical. I know that poem well enough that I was looking for
different ways to hear it, different approaches to it. Click around on it or
leave it alone. You can have it loop in bits or play the recording normally.
it takes a while to start up once it's finished downloading: it needs to
decompress the audio."
" Many will be familiar with this poem. I found a recording of it on the net
and played it in Sound Forge, looping parts of it, and occassionally an
interesting music emerged. Of course, loop anything and it eventually
becomes musical. I know that poem well enough that I was looking for
different ways to hear it, different approaches to it. Click around on it or
leave it alone. You can have it loop in bits or play the recording normally.
it takes a while to start up once it's finished downloading: it needs to
decompress the audio."
Hollywood Help Wanted: Classicists With Style
"They need to know, for example, that 'Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles ' is the opening of 'The Iliad,' even if they choose to reject it for being too poetic and oblique. In 'Troy,' the line the screenwriter David Benioff came up with instead - Odysseus, speaking in voice-over: 'Men are haunted by the vastness of eternity' - is an exquisite specimen of contemporary popspeak, so overpowering in its empty profundity that virtually everyone can pretend to understand it."
"They need to know, for example, that 'Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles ' is the opening of 'The Iliad,' even if they choose to reject it for being too poetic and oblique. In 'Troy,' the line the screenwriter David Benioff came up with instead - Odysseus, speaking in voice-over: 'Men are haunted by the vastness of eternity' - is an exquisite specimen of contemporary popspeak, so overpowering in its empty profundity that virtually everyone can pretend to understand it."
Sunday, May 23, 2004
Susan Sontag--Regarding the Torture of Others
" If there is something comparable to what these pictures show it would be some of the photographs of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880's and 1930's, which show Americans grinning beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree. The lynching photographs were souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done. So are the pictures from Abu Ghraib. "
(registration req.)
" If there is something comparable to what these pictures show it would be some of the photographs of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880's and 1930's, which show Americans grinning beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree. The lynching photographs were souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done. So are the pictures from Abu Ghraib. "
(registration req.)
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