Don't forget to vote, American readers! 

I'll be back after Guy Fawkes day!! 

Norman Mailer on The Gilmore Girls tonight--

"I've got to call Rory. She read "The Naked and the Dead" while she was still in footie pajamas."  

"In counting there is strength"

Thomas Nast 

"An Election Entertainment"

William Hogarth & 18th century print culture 

endlessly searchable Brooklyn Daily Eagle Online (1841-1902) 

an interesting-looking play about electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire was just on in the UK and its website has free Mp3's "responding" to her work--I wonder if they'll do a movie?

the mighty Sasha Frere-Jones on London Calling--

"On "London Calling," Strummer remakes his major points: the police are on the wrong side, wage labor will crush your soul, and sometimes people need to destroy property to be heard. His sense of righteousness is enhanced by the album's sequencing, which feels Biblically logical and begins with one of the best opening songs of any record ever, the title track. The song starts cold. Two guitar chords ring on the downbeats, locked in step with the drums, marching forward with no dynamic variation. A second guitar introduces difference, coming toward us like an ambulance Dopplering into range. The bass guitar, sounding like someone’s voice, heralds everybody over the hill and into the song. If you can listen to it without getting a chilly burst of immortality, there is a layer between you and the world. Joe Strummer simultaneously watches the riots and sloughs off his role as de-facto punk president: "London calling, now don't look to us / All that phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust / London calling, see we ain't got no swing / 'Cept for the ring of that truncheon thing." The chorus forms a keystone for the whole album: "A nuclear error, but I have no fear / London is drowning and I, I live by the river." The Clash are laughing at Margaret Thatcher and will be dancing long after the police have come and gone." 

extraordinary rendition

"The Torture Convention naturally bars parties from sending anyone to a country where “there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.” But the House bill would lift this prohibition, enabling the United States to deport (or “render”) foreign nationals to countries long condemned by the U.S. State Department for widespread practices of torture and other gross abuse. A potential deportee could avoid this fate only by proving through “clear and convincing evidence that he or she would be tortured” upon return. Merely showing that torture is more likely than not would no longer be enough. "