Charles Ives's Ears

Moreover, while Magee conjures up rich interpretations from Ives's major works by dating many of them to World War I, she fails to address the fact that they all sprang from the so-called experimental pieces that Ives began to write in 1906, beginning with The Unanswered Question and Central Park in the Dark. These still-astounding works really do precede anything comparable in European music--not that there was anything comparable until perhaps after World War II. These miniatures present the textures and rhythms that Ives would later expand into extended musical panoramas: superimposed musical layers moving at different tempos and with different harmonies that evoked a sense of cosmic mystery. They are the core of Ives's achievement, yet Magee is at a loss to explain them. Indeed, she mentions The Unanswered Question only as evidence of Ives's current fame because the title of the piece served as a running gag on an episode of Frasier...

YouTube - Lukas Foss conducting The Unanswered Question

Central Park in the Dark

Faits Divers de la Poésie Américaine et Britannique brilliantly addresses the deafening silence of most of the "post-avant" blogging community concerning the invasion of Gaza--

Well, Guernica’s come and go… As Gaza burned, Mlle Dark, the self-appointed U.S. poetry medium of Badiou, devoted her blog to a personal “Top-40 Countdown” of pop music hits in 2008...

Yes, and as Gaza burned, the avant with 2,000,000 hits, former editor of the Socialist Review, devoted his blog today to an anecdotal homage for the 70s sitcom hit, Starsky and Hutch...

M. Hassad addressed the speaker, M. Hicks: “Could you tell us, Sir, why the Flarf School is strictly Caucasian, heterosexual, and highly
educated?” “Because,” said M. Hicks, “It would otherwise be hard to mock Asians, gays, and other subaltern groups.” Then M. Hassad stood and hurled his shoes at the speaker...

12/26 through 12/29: Three-hundred and some dozens dead in Gaza; three dead in Israel. So far, post-avant bloggers have said not a word. Then
again, three hundred and some dozens of them are in San Francisco, at the MLA, wearing masks…

And there lie the bodies

As Israel has been preoccupied with Gaza throughout the entire week, nobody has asked whose blood is being spilled and why. Everything is permitted, legitimate and just. The moral voice of restraint, if it ever existed, has been left behind. Even if Israel wiped Gaza off the face of the earth, killing tens of thousands in the process, as a Chechnyan laborer working in Sderot proposed to me, one can assume that there would be no protest.

They liquidated Nizar Ghayan? Nobody counts the 20 women and children who lost their lives in the same attack. There was a massacre of dozens of officers during their graduation ceremony from the police academy? Acceptable. Five little sisters? Allowed. Palestinians are dying in hospitals that lack medical equipment? Peanuts. Whatever happened to the not-so-good old days of Salah Shahadeh? When we liquidated him in July 2002, we also killed 15 women and children. At least back then, moral qualms were raised for a moment.
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Here lie their bodies, row upon row, some of them tiny. Our hearts have turned hard and our eyes have become dull. All of Israel has worn military fatigues, uniforms that are opaque and stained with blood and which enable us to carry out any crime. Even our leading intellectuals fail to speak out on what havoc we have wreaked. Amos Oz urges: "Cease-fire now." David Grossman writes: "Hold your fire. Stop." Meir Shalev wants "a punitive operation." And not one word about our moral image, which has been horribly distorted.

The suffering in the south renders everything kosher, as if the horrible suffering in Gaza pales in comparison. Everyone is hungry for revenge, and that hunger is excused by the need for "deterrence," after it was already proved that the killing and the destruction in Lebanon did not achieve it.

Yes, I know, war is war. After all, they brought this on themselves. They are a terrorist organization and we are not. They want to destroy us and we seek peace. Still, is there nothing here that will stop this blood pipeline? Even those whose hearts are hardened by "moral righteousness" will have to momentarily halt the bombing machine and ask: Which Israel do we have before us? What will become of its standing in the world, which is now watching the events in Gaza? What are we inflicting on the moderate Arab regimes? And what of the simmering popular hatred we are sowing throughout the world? What good will emerge from this killing and destruction?

It is doubtful whether Hamas will be cut down to size as a result of this wretched war. Yet, the face of the state has been cut down to size, as have civilian elites who are apathetic and scared. The "peace camp," if it ever existed, has been cut down to size. Attorney General Menachem Mazuz authorized the Ghayan killing, regardless of the cost. Haim Oron, the leader of the "new left-wing movement," supported the launch of this foolish war.

Nobody is coming to the rescue - of Gaza or even of the remnants of humanity and Israeli democracy. The statesmen, the jurists, the poets, the authors, academe, and the news media - pitch black over the abyss...

Orwell, blinding tribalism, selective Terrorism, and Israel/Gaza - Glenn Greenwald

Former McCain-Palin campaign spokesman and current Weekly Standard editor Michael Goldfarb notes that Israel, a couple of days ago, dropped a 2,000-pound bomb on a Gazan home which killed a top Hamas leader . . . in addition to 18 others, including his four wives and nine of his children. About the killing of those innocent civilians, Goldfarb writes (h/t John Cole via email):

The fight against Islamic radicals always seems to come around to whether or not they can, in fact, be deterred, because it's not clear that they are rational, at least not like us. But to wipe out a man's entire family, it's hard to imagine that doesn't give his colleagues at least a moment's pause. Perhaps it will make the leadership of Hamas rethink the wisdom of sparking an open confrontation with Israel under the current conditions.

That, of course, is just a slightly less profane version of Marty Peretz's chest-beating proclamation that the great value of the attack on Gaza is to teach those Arabs a lesson: "do not fuck with the Jews."

There are few concepts more elastic and subject to exploitation than "Terrorism," the all-purpose justifying and fear-mongering term. But if it means anything, it means exactly the mindset which Goldfarb is expressing: slaughtering innocent civilians in order to "send a message," to "deter" political actors by making them fear that continuing on the same course will result in the deaths of civilians and -- best of all, from the Terrorist's perspective -- even their own children and other family members.

To the Terrorist, by definition, that innocent civilians and even children are killed isn't a regrettable cost of taking military action. It's not a cost at all. It's a benefit. It has strategic value. Goldfarb explicitly says this: "to wipe out a man's entire family, it's hard to imagine that doesn't give his colleagues at least a moment's pause."

That, of course, is the very same logic that leads Hamas to send suicide bombers to slaughter Israeli teenagers in pizza parlors and on buses and to shoot rockets into their homes. It's the logic that leads Al Qaeda to fly civilian-filled airplanes into civilian-filled office buildings. And it's the logic that leads infinitely weak and deranged people like Goldfarb and Peretz to find value in the killing of innocent Palestinians, including -- one might say, at least in Goldfarb's case: especially -- children...

Micro-Wars and Macro-Wars

The big long-term problem Israel has is that its assiduous colonization of the West Bank has made a two-state solution almost impossible, turning it into an Apartheid state. And if you go on practicing Apartheid long enough, that begins to attact boycotts and sanctions. And forestalling a Palestinian state means that likely the Palestinians will all end up Israeli citizens.

I was on the radio recently with John Bolton, former US ambassador to the UN, and he expressed the hope that Egypt would take back Gaza and Jordan what is left of the West Bank. You may as well dream of pink unicorns on Venus. It isn't going to happen. The Palestinians are Israel's problem. War on them, circumscribe them, colonize them all you like. They aren't going anywhere, and you can't keep them stateless and virtually enslaved forever, occasionally exterminating some of them as though they were vermin when they make too much trouble. That, sooner or later, will lead to boycotts by rising economic powers and by Europe that could be extremely damaging to Israel's long-term prospects as a state.

It may still be 10 or 20 years in the future. But because of Israel's economic and demographic vulnerabilities, for it to lose the war of global public opinion may ultimately be more consequential than either macro-war or micro-war...

Robert Fisk: The self delusion that plagues both sides in this bloody conflict

One common feature of Middle East wars is the ability of all the antagonists to suffer from massive self-delusion. Israel's promise to "root out terror" – be it of the PLO, Hizbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Iranian or any other kind – has always turned out to be false. "War to the bitter end," the Israeli defence minister, Ehud Barak, has promised in Gaza. Nonsense. Just like the PLO's boast – and Hamas' boast and Hizbollah's boast – to "liberate" Jerusalem. Eyewash. But the Israelis have usually shown a dangerous propensity to believe their own propaganda. Calling up more than 6,000 reservists and sitting them round the Gaza fence is one thing; sending them into the hovels of Gaza will be quite another. In 2006, Israel claimed it was sending 30,000 troops into Lebanon. In reality, it sent about 3,000 – and the moment they crossed the border, they were faced down by the Hizbollah. In some cases, Israeli soldiers actually ran back to their own frontier.

These are realities. The chances of war, however, may be less easier to calculate. If Israel indefinitely continues its billion dollar blitz on Gaza – and we all know who is paying for that – there will, at some stage, be an individual massacre; a school will be hit, a hospital or a pre-natal clinic or just an apartment packed with civilians. In other words, another Qana. At which point, a familiar story will be told; that Hamas destroyed the school/hospital/pre-natal clinic, that the journalists who report on the slaughter are anti-Semitic, that Israel is under threat, etc. We may even get the same disingenuous parallel with a disastrous RAF raid in the Second World War which both Menachem Begin and Benjamin Netanayahu have used over the past quarter century to justify the killing of civilians.

And Hamas – which never had the courage to admit it killed two Palestinian girls with one of its own rockets last week – will cynically make profit from the grief with announcements of war crimes and "genocide".

At which point, the deeply despised and lame old UN donkey will be clip-clopped onto the scene to rescue the Israeli army and Hamas from this disgusting little war. Of course, saner minds may call all this off before the inevitable disaster. But I doubt it...

Charlie here wishing y'all a happy & safe 2009, & if you have any money left please buy at least one of my grampy's new books--if you like either dogs, photography or pointless anecdotes about Nanaimo in the eighties try To the Dogs; if you would like those same anecdotes told less intelligibly, with added references to Judee Sill & Captain Beefheart, try

The Age of Briggs and Stratton---

some trees from a 2000 trip to Finland & Estonia

Nervous About Nixon?

In this curious blend of confessional and closing argument, Nixon is his own defense attorney, and he is as gifted as Clarence Darrow, which is all the more impressive because it is quite clear as the interview grinds on that he has absolutely no case. Watching this in 2008, after eight years of George W. Bush, a president who can barely put a sentence together, there is nostalgic pleasure to be had in following Nixon's agile use of language and the elaborate architecture of his thought process. Still, his guilt is clear; as he presses the unconvincing argument that he didn't obstruct justice, he is essentially throwing himself on the mercy of the public court. And the price he must pay to win this mercy is perfectly clear. He must consummate the deal with a cathartic moment and let his guard down long enough for the camera lens to slowly zoom in and scoop up a glistening teardrop...

WAR WITHOUT END?

It appears that Israeli political leaders and military planners labor under the illusion that there is a military “solution” to Hamas. The extended military operation in Gaza is expected to serve as a pedagogical tool for moderating or eliminating Hamas. But this will not work, and the idea that a ground invasion of Gaza could actually eliminate Hamas as a force in Palestinian politics is delusional. The Israeli approach is every bit as driven by militarism as Hamas’ strategy is. Beyond a certain point, it can serve no realistic political goals. In fact, I would offer a concise definition for militarism as not knowing when to stop. Israel is in danger of recapitulating in Gaza the last few weeks of the war against Hezbollah, which increasingly turned into a war against Lebanon...

Hello, it's

Nazz

Todd Rundgren

Isley Brothers

Lani Hall

Paul Giamatti

Groove Theory

John Legend

YouTube - Tim Hardin (above w/ Karen Dalton in Colorado) at Woodstock --"If I Were a Carpenter"

some trees from 1930s-40s in Color - a set on Flickr

farewell too Freddie Hubbard--

w/ Art Blakey - Moanin'

"Red Clay"

farewell to Winnipeg's Ann Savage, co-star of Detour--

My first scene was in the car, when she tells Haskell he’s not who he pretends to be. I read the lines and he corrected the tempo, and that was the last bit of coaching he gave me. He had given me the key, which was the tempo. It was difficult to speak that quickly, but it helped give the character her craziness–it was just right. I didn’t see the rushes, so I had no idea I was coming over as hard as I was...

Torture ambivalence masquerading as moral and intellectual superiority - Glenn Greenwald

...As the above-excerpted clip demonstrates, those who view American Torture as a fascinating moral dilemma over which Serious People publicly agonize -- as Drezner put it: "if you're a national security person, you don't care about the legal niceties . . . it is a complicated question; it's not cut and dried" -- have actually convinced themselves that their refusal to make clear, definitive judgments is a hallmark not only of their moral superiority, but of their intellectual superiority as well. Only shrill ideologues and simpletons on either side believe that the torture question is "cut and dried." They actually believe that their indecisive open-mindedness on such clear moral questions is a sign of their rich and deep complexity, even though it's nothing more than an adolescent inability to assess the world through any prism other than their own immediate reflexive desires and self-interest...

this just in: on TCM at 11 PST--Blood Freak!

If
you've ever wanted to know what would
happen if you combined a little Manos: The Hands of Fate with Tammy Faye Baker's former religious
flare (and eye make-up), sprinkled in a little
Herschel Gordon Lewis inspired gore, the
plot-logic and Shakespearean sincerity of Robot
Monster and every anti-drug scare film you've ever seen, you'd probably agree that such a combination
would have some noxious -- if not totally lethal results. Then imagine that whole concept was scripted by Ed Wood and directed by Coleman Francis, and you might get an inkling as to
exactly what kind of brain-bending movie
watching experience Blood Freak truly is...

farewell Harold Pinter--

The Birthday Party - "The Interrogation"

The Homecoming - "Glass of Water"

Harold Pinter's The Caretaker - "The Job Offer"

Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party - "Blind Man's Buff"

YouTube - Aristotle (from "Accident")

Leaders of Men (From "The Comfort of Strangers")

Accident (1967) .. UK Theatrical Trailer

Samuel Becket's Catastrophe (2000) directed by & starring Pinter

Wale - The Mixtape About Nothing

The Ten Best Hip-hop Mix Tapes of 2008

with download links