Month: May 2007

Music Stuff

by tristero

I’ve been reluctant to mention my music in my blogging, except in passing or when I’ve thought it relevant, because it’s just not my style. I’ve always thought it unfair to plug what I do to you when you come here and do me the incredible courtesy of paying attention to my thoughts on politics and culture – and often take the time to correct me or argue with me or even agree with me (all of it deeply appreciated). However, while it still seems to me an imposition on your time to advertise my musical activities to you, I’ve had so many inquiries into what I’m up to, and since some of the projects would be of intererst to you even if you aren’t interested in contemporary music, I’ll – very occasionally, I promise! – keep you posted on some of it. And so…

Tonight on PBS (ie Monday May 14, times may vary) will see the premiere of Middlemarch Films’ Alexander Hamilton, produced for American Experience by Catherine Allan, directed by Muffie Meyer, written by Ron Blumer, edited by Sharon Sachs and Eric Davies, and with music by me. Hamilton was a complex, brilliant, and very troubled figure whose life soared to the heights of achievement and sank into genuinely dismaying seaminess. I think you will enjoy the show, it’s among my favorites that I’ve done with Middlemarch.

This Wednesday at noon, at the Westminster Presbyterian Church, 262 State Street, Albany, NY the Musicians of Ma’alwyck will preview selections from my new Voices of Light Suite, finished a few days ago. The group was founded by Ann-Marie Barker Schwarz, a wonderful violinist and good friend. Ann-Marie was instrumental in pushing for the Albany premiere of the complete Voices of Light a while back. She suggested that I make a suite of the music that she could play with Ma’alwyck and I immediately agreed – why hadn’t I thought of that before????

The complete Voices of Light Suite will premiere Sunday, May 20th, 3pm, at St. George’s Episcopal Church, Route 146, Clifton Park, New York, which Ann-Marie tells me is about 30 minutes north of Albany. Tickets are $20 for adults, $10 for students and you can call 518/377-3623 to reserve them. I’ll be there on Sunday, so if you make it, please say hello.

Last week, there were two performances of Voices of Light, in Tampa Bay, Florida, and Lebanon, Ohio, both of which went extremely well (I was at the Lebanon, Ohio performance). We’re in the final stages of planning a very large production abroad this summer; more information when I can officially announce it!

Finally, there’s something coming up which I can’t wait to tell you about, a major new piece. I should be able to tell you more in a few weeks…

Good Thoughts

by digby

If you are a praying person, or maybe just inclined to believe that if you think good thoughts something positive may come of it, say one now or put out some good vibes for Steve Gilliard, who apparently has had a setback.

And be sure to read his site regularly — a lot of great writers are keeping the fires burning over there for his return. This one on the Reagan Cult from one of my favorite bloggers, Driftglass, is just one example.

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You Get What You Pay For

by digby

My pal Ezra has a big fat cover piece this morning in the LA Times Opinion section about the effects of GOP privatization and malfeasance, called “Government by Bake Sale” that is excellent. (The headline is different online, for unknown reasons.)I knew it had gotten bad when I read stories about families being forced to buy equipment for troops in the field, but I had no idea that we had now created “private” prisons where you can “upgrade” your stay by paying for better accomodations:

What’s so wrong, in other words, with hollowing out the public sector and replacing it with a pay-as-you-go society? It is the natural endpoint, after all, of the privatization craze, of the gospel of tax cuts and of the smaller-government-is-better-government mentality that has been on the ascendancy in the U.S. for nearly 25 years.

The New York Times recently offered a particularly striking example: Apparently there are about a dozen jails throughout California that offer pay-to-stay “upgrades.” Inmates (or “clients,” as they’re known) who pay an extra $75 to $127 a day get a cell with a regular door, located at some distance from violent offenders, as well as the right, in some cases, to bring in an iPod, a cellphone or a laptop. The rich no longer need patronize the same jails as the rest of us. It makes you wonder whether Paris Hilton’s unexpected jail time is a sentence or a scouting mission for new hotel expansion opportunities.

Funny. I honestly didn’t know that we were now basing our prison system on the old English Newgate model where the swells could buy themselves better accomodations, but I guess we really are going back to the good old days. A broken government that’s reduced to being nothing more than an armed enforcement agency and a pass through organization for tax dollars to go straight into the pockets of rich political contributors is certainly the natural result of endless tax-cutting and GOP corruption. But you have to admire the pluck of those who actually find ways to make an extra buck off of the more wealthy criminals who have the misfortune to get caught. That’s what I call All American know-how.

A lot of people will say this is part of a “starve the beast” strategy, but I’m not sure I believe that anymore. The Republicans just run on cutting taxes while promising all kinds of government largesse to get elected and get their hands on the treasury. It’s a very nice little racket that has far less to do with any kind of political philosophy and more to do with their inherent greed and corruption. They go as far as they can until the nation gets fed up and then they leave the field to the Democrats to clean up the carnage.

But the effects are just as bad as if they were starving the beast. As Ezra notes in his piece: “Libertarian humorist P.J. O’Rourke likes to say that ‘Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work, and then they get elected and prove it.'” The problem with that is that it breeds a reflexive mistrust of government — and (a very difficult to argue) case against raising taxes.

It’s not that taxes were ever popular, any more than paying your electric bill is “popular” or buying a new furnace is “popular.” But until the GOP hit on their free lunch propaganda they were just considered a fact of life (“death and taxes”) as long as the rich weren’t perceived to be getting off easy and the government was delivering services to the people. Republican campaign tactics and governance have pretty much destroyed that resigned acceptance by making people believe that taxes are inherently evil and if the government needs to do something it will magically find the money some other way. The truth is that the Republicans have been running a game that’s the equivalent of you or I taking off work without pay for weeks so we can go to Vegas and play roulette with our credit cards. One only hopes “the grown-ups” haven’t gone so far that we will have to spend the next decade suffering from the hangover.

No matter what, people still need to go to college and troops still need to have body armor and New Orleans still needs to have levees. And according to Ezra there are signs that the citizens are beginning to see through the con:

A new Pew Research Center poll finds that public support for a societal safety net and for government protections is at its highest levels in more than a decade — which suggests that Americans don’t think bake sales are the way to fund their schools or that Philip Morris is really who they want subsidizing law enforcement. And in recent elections, the once popular “Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights” amendments that seemed so unstoppable a decade ago are being rejected and, in Colorado, repealed, as voters finally tire of paying the costs in broken infrastructure and insufficient public services.

That’s the opening for the Democrats to make a new argument and I hope they find a way to do that.

Nobody likes paying bills, but at some point in our adulthood most of us accept it. Taxes are just the bill we pay for the services we get from the government, which includes everything from homeland security to pet food regulation to aviation safety. It’s not actually a bad deal considering the kind of interest rates people are paying for their credit cards or the outrageous fees they pay for health insurance. (How about concert tickets!) Perhaps Americans are sobering up after the reckless Republican borrow and steal bender and recognizing that a little straightforward honesty and competent government stewardship is worth the price they pay in taxes. They might even vote for it.

Ezra expands on his piece, here. (Another point for blogs — you can add back in what the editor took out!)

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Mother’s Day For Peace

by digby

It’s unfashionable and vaguely unpatriotic these days to talk about “peace” but back in 1870, it was a pretty compelling concept. As the country was still reeling from the effects of the civil war and still dealt daily with its consequent illness, poverty, injury and death, feminist Julia Ward Howe wrote the following proclamation creating a Mother’s Day convention and a demand for “the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.” How quaint.

For those who missed it when I posted about it last week, you can click the link above for a nice Mother’s Day gift that will keep giving tomorrow and many days beyond.

Mother’s Day Proclamation – 1870
by Julia Ward Howe

Arise then…women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
“We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace…
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God –
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

update: Susan G wrote a very nice Mother’s Day piece today on DKos.

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The Iraq Delusion

by tristero

What is it about the Bush/Iraq War that makes so many people stupid? In reading this interview, I don’t get the sense of a bad person the way, say Cheney is bad. It’s more like Rory Stewart stops firing on all cylinders when he considers Iraq and simply ends up cuckoo, deluded. But he clearly has plenty of experience:

Rory Stewart is chief executive of the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, a non-profit organization in Kabul devoted to social and urban redevelopment in Afghanistan. A former member of the British Foreign Office, he served, from 2003 to 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq as Deputy Governor of the southern provinces of Maysan and Dhi Qar, an experience he described in the book The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq

So he obviously is an experienced observer/participant in Iraq. But consider how he describes his decision to leave Iraq for Kabul:

The experience that I had in Iraq was a disillusioning one. Originally I supported the invasion because I had served in Indonesia, the Balkans, and Afghanistan and I thought Iraq could be more stable and humane than it had been under Saddam. I realized in Iraq that I had been wrong. I was working for the British government as coalition deputy governor of the southern provinces of Maysan and Dhi Qar and I had by April 2004 $10 million a month delivered to me in vacuum-sealed packets which we were supposed to be dispensing in order to get programs going. And almost none of the programs caught the imagination of the local population; and then I was facing hundreds of people demonstrating outside my office day after day, saying, “What has the coalition ever done for us?” And we restored 240 out of 400 schools; we restored all the clinics and hospitals; but nobody seemed interested or remotely engaged with the process.

There were only two projects we did that I thought had some kind of impact: one of them was the restoration of the bazaar in al-Amara, the capital of Maysan province, and the other was the creation of a carpentry school for street children in Nasiriyah [Funding was stopped for the carpentry school. It no longer exists.]…

So coming to Afghanistan again in 2005, I saw that a quarter of the historic city of Kabul was due to be demolished again…Afghans wanted jobs, incomes, and a renewed sense of national identity. I sensed that restoring the traditional commercial center of the city and creating a crafts center that would make furniture, ceramics, and textiles would not only be good for the economy but would also catch imaginations. I could not undertake this kind of project in Baghdad. Those are some of the things that came together to make me do it…

Is it possible that he has no idea he sounds like Nigel Bruce in a pith helmet? Yes, I think it’s quite possible. I honestly think he wasn’t listening to himself. But what’s worse than this rather crudely obvious expression of white man’s burden is the following muddle, where he clearly perceives the situation quite well, and then draws totally unwarranted conclusions:

What would I do in Iraq now? I am not an expert, but I believe that the time has come to withdraw, that our presence is infantilizing the Iraqi political system…

…without intending to, we have discredited democracy in the eyes of many Iraqis. We have created a situation in which many Iraqis now feel that the only way to keep security is to bring back a strongman. They are extremely skeptical of our programs and suggestions for development.

Whew! Where to begin. I think he makes two mistakes here. First, he exaggerates the influence and power of the recognized “central government” in Iraq, which neither has much central government and indeed barely any status as a government throughout wide swaths of the country. Secondly, in an all too typical narcissism, he grossly overestimates the impact of the West on Iraqi politicians about whose motives and motivations Stewart – and I’m being kind here – has no clue.

And then there’s the infantilzing he perceives. What? Infantilize? Where? When ten million bucks a month are being delivered to an Iraqi province in nicely sealed packages, Iraqi politicians are acting the way mature politicians always act everywhere – they grab as much of that swag as they can before it stops and before anyone else can get it. I recognize that by “infantilize” Stewart really means “becoming increasingly dependent upon” the largesse of the Big Daddys from the West, but he wrongly, and lazily, pop-psychologizes a situation which is simply one of politics as usual. When the money from America dries up, they’ll just find someplace else to bleed. It’s nothing special to Iraq – can you spell Katrina Cleanup? – and it certainly isn’t infantile behavior.

The infantilization framework not only stinks of ethnocentrism but is clearly incoherent even to Stewart himself, as the passage directly following the above makes clear. But having such a frame – sorry, it’s a good word, “frame,” and the most appropriate metaphor for this context – leads Stewart into a spectacular error of judgment:

I think that Iraqi politicians are considerably more competent, canny, and capable of compromise than we acknowledge [ie, not infantilized!]. Iraqi nationalism, in my view, can trump the Shiite–Sunni divisions. [!] Our continuing presence is encouraging Iraqi politicians to play hard-ball with each other. Were we to leave, they would be weaker and under more pressure to compromise.[!!!!] In our relations with the Iraqis we often blocked negotiations with Moqtada al-Sadr or Sunni insurgency leaders, or the offer of troop withdrawals and amnesties for former Baathists and insurgents, among others. Yet these will probably be elements in any kind of settlement.

And therefore, my belief—and I emphasize this is my belief, not a certainty—is that were we to withdraw, things would improve…

If the West is infantilizing Iraq, as Stewart asserts, then Stewart, as the West’s provincial governor, must think he is acting in loco parentis and indeed, his words reek of loco parenting. His children are, in fact, competent even if it doesn’t look that way. And Sunni and Shia can rise above their differences to understand they’re all Iraqis in the same playground.

I don’t think so. From what I can tell, Iraqi nationalism, at least as Americans understand nationalism, is weak to non-existent, always has been, while political/cultural adherence to a religious group easily trumps that. Add to this the simple fact that the Sunni are vastly outnumbered and are easy pickins for ghettoizing and massacre and the conclusion is well nigh inescapable that political compromise is completely out of the question. Yes, they would be weaker if occupying troops withdraw, but when people feel weak – especially in a situation as unhinged as Iraq with its class and religious hatreds not to mention its egregious population imbalance – they don’t compromise, they quickly arm themselves to the fucking teeth. I can only conclude, based on the reality of the situation as it has been reported and on common sense, that Stewart’s belief in Iraqi nationalism is delusional. He has an irrational hope that his “children,” left to their own devices, will grow up the way he hopes they will.

They won’t, not because they’d be acting like children, but because they’d be acting the way humans always act in similar situations. It is remotely conceivable that, given a sober and sensible head of the US government acting in concert with an international coalition, that somehow something could happen to make the withdrawal from Iraq a slightly less horrific withdrawal. But Bush? Even if he ever was disposed to withdraw, he’d screw it up horribly.

In other words, step one of any approach to the debacle in Iraq with even an outside chance of a relatively decent outcome requires the removal of the Bush adminsitration from power. Step two is an implementation of a plan that calls for a rapid withdrawal of all occupying forces. That Stewart fails to acknowledge the fundamental problem that is the current American policy and policy makers, but rather comes close to calling the Iraqis ungrateful children, is simply incredible.

But here, I completely agree with Stewart:

Whatever government emerges after our departure is likely to be Islamist and authoritarian. People talk sometimes too easily about choosing between lesser evils. In this case the choices may be genuinely evil. But I am certain that our presence is not improving things. Despite some claims to the contrary, there is not a single indicator of significant, overall improvement I know of over the last four years, neither in electricity, nor in education, nor in police training, nor in the military…

Does this argue for an immediate withdrawal? Indeed it does, in two steps. First, withdraw the Bush administration from power. Then, draw up and implement a plan to withdraw the troops. The troops will not leave under Bush, period. And if, by some bizarre chain of events, they did, I can only say this: Anyone who thinks they’re hedging their bets and says they “believe” things will improve given action X while Bush is in office still hasn’t grasped the full depth of the Bush administration’s stupidity and malevolence. (It goes without saying – or should – that there are competent military personnel who are honorable to a fault. The stupidity and malevolence lies at the top, not necessarily with troops on the ground and their immediate commanders.)

Then, Stewart gets a currently trendy question, which has a fairly straightforward answer, a version of which I’ll provide later. But Stewart, in the grip of the Iraq Delusion, can’t wrap his mind around it:

Moderator: What about the danger that the civil war, or whatever you want to call it, escalates to the point that the general public in the United States and Great Britain says it’s unacceptable, we have to go back? Or it escalates into a larger regional war with the Sunni powers, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, seeing their brethren being massacred and decide that they need to invade, and Iran invades in turn?

This is a very difficult question and there are three different elements to it. One of them is the question about public perception; one is a humanitarian question; and one is a question about national security.

Concerning the national security question, which could involve the invasion by Iran and neighboring countries,I’m pretty convinced that our experience in Iraq is sufficient to dissuade any neighboring country from wishing to attempt a military occupation in the country[!!!]…an intervention in Iraq for humanitarian reasons and in order to stop the civil war would differ significantly from the situation we’re in at the moment. We’re not perceived on the ground as a neutral peacekeeping force there to stop a civil war. We’re perceived by many people as a foreign military occupation…

Can you believe it? “[O]ur experience in Iraq is sufficient to dissuade any neighboring country from wishing to attempt a military occupation in the country.” Holy Jeebus!!!! I can’t believe I read that, and in the New York Review of Books, no less! This is on the hallucinated level of, “I believe we’ll be greeted as liberators.” Why, you ask?

Ok. Very slowly now, here are three main reasons a neighboring country might invade Iraq:

1. Oil
2. Oil
3. Oil

But wait, there’s more! Aside from the religious/cultural axis, there’s another reason. US failure in Iraq does not have much importance to the leaders of Iran (except of course as a splendid opportunity to advance their own interests). The US had to fail for many reasons as they see it, starting with the fact that not only is the US not Islamic, but no one in the US military ever bothered to learn Arabic.* And their president’s a total moron who’d rather be catching bass in his Seement Pond than figgerin out the difference between a Shia and a Sunni. And there are many more. As Iran must certainly see it, the reasons for American failure don’t have much to do with Iran’s situation and therefore in no way impact the chances of Iran succeeding with a military invasion. Whether or not Iran will do so is anyone’s guess right now. But to think they’d be deterred because of the bad example “we” set? That’s madness.

As for a reinvasion by the US being perceived as a humanitarian mission – in your dreams. Of course, it can only be perceived in the following way: The US only withdrew temporarily, with every intention of coming back, a classic divide and conquer strategy. Y’see, America assumed that the factions in Iraq – whose violent hatred of each other was deliberately inflamed by the Americans – would quickly turn to slaughter each other once they were gone. The Americans got us to do their dirty work for them! And their own troops were completely out of harms way. Call it “self-pacification.” Now, they claim they’re reinvadinng for humanitarian reasons, after they permitted unspeakable atrocities to take place! There’s no end to their self-centered and ignorant arrogance!

And now, let’s answer that question – What about reinvasion in the future if the situation deteriorates into a severe humanitarian crisis? – in the only way it should be answered. It is impossible realistically to plan that far ahead. Right now, there’s not even a remote prospect of a withdrawal given the reluctance of the American Congress, and the people of the country to toss Bush out on his ass. And you want to discuss the pros and and cons a reinvasionl? Ridiculous. Especially so here, since Stewart’s present-day focus is so incomplete and distorted the importance of the Bush administration’s incompetence isn’t so much as mentioned.

Finally, Stewart ends with what must be one of the most bizarre comments I’ve read about this war, a war that breaks all records for eliciting bizarre comments. He starts off reasonably enough and then something, somewhere misfires in his head:

The problems in Iraq are now so deep, complex, and intractable that they cannot be solved by surges or new tactics. They can only be solved by Iraqi political leadership and Iraqi political processes. We can provide diplomatic and economic support. We can continue to protect ourselves against terrorist attacks on our home soil through intelligence and special forces operations in Iraq. But we cannot win through an indefinite blanket occupation because we lack the will, the resources, the legitimacy, and also the consent necessary to play such a role. My instinct is that Iraqis can overcome their problems and create a functioning nation. But even if I’m wrong, I believe that what good we can do we have done. We should leave now.

That’s painful to read. “But even if I’m wrong, I believe that what good we can do we have done.” That epitomizes the kind of deranged narcissitic psychopathy that led to this debacle. And you know what’s the worst thing about it?

Tragically, Stewart’s reasoning is the reasoning of the only Good Guys acceptable to mainstream discussion. He’s not a Bush or a Cheney and he’s even unequivocally pro-withdrawal. He’s, more or less, reciting the mainstream understanding and emphases of the present situation. For instance, I’ve seen that idiotic question about reinvasion come up several times recently and all the responses I’ve seen are essentially variants of what Stewart said – if “we” re-invade and re-conquer Iraq , “we’ll” be perceived as humanitarians.

Many of you will have noticed that Stewart is a liberal hawk – wrong about the war from before the start. But what Stewart makes abundantly clear, and the reason I’ve gone on at such length to rant at him, is that the liberal hawks are still wrong, profoundly wrong in understanding the situation, profoundly wrong in understanding the most fundamental steps that will need to happen to have a chance of relieving the misery of the Iraqi people. And despite the fact they are completely wrong, only they and far-right ideologues have important microphones. Those of us who were absolutely right from the start are excluded. We understood, long before the bodies started to pile up to heaven, that Bush/Iraq was insane, not “worth a chance.” And we were absolutely right.

Today, many of us understand that the relationship between the Iraqis and their occupiers cannot be reduced to a cheap psycological cliche of a stern parent that is infantilizing the gorvernment and the people. We see the relationship for exactly what it is, a very adult confrontation among equally self-interested groups of actors over the acquisition of billions of dollars and oceans of oil. We see the withdrawal as most certainly necessary AND as requiring intelligence and careful planning from competent American leadership. A call for withdrawal of troops is dishonest if it fails to take into account who is expected to plan the withdrawing – and since it won’t be Bush, withdrawal simply will have to wait until he is removed from power.

Yes, Iraq’s fiendishly complicated, but it doesn’t take anything close to rocket science, just very smart, reasonable people prepared to think. The problem is that Stewart’s errors, and by extension all the liberal hawks, are so terribly easy to catch. They are not only wrong, but obviously wrong, the way folks who reported a UFO behind Hale Bopp were wrong. They are not perceiving reality but rather only the projection of their own overheated delusions. They deserve little to no public standing in a serious discussion. Infantilizing? Doing as much good as can be done? My God, what a waste of time it is to take such crap seriously! But taken seriously it most certainly is – you don’t merit an entire page in the New York Review of Books because the editors think you’re an intellectual or cultural lightweight.

There’s something about Iraq that creates cognitive distortions. Until there are voices in the regular American public discourse on a regular basis who are not prone to such distortions, the road out of Iraq will surely be blood-red. It makes me physically sick to think about it. God knows if an even worse bloodbath can be prevented even by the finest minds alive. But when those minds are systematically excluded from serious consideration or power – the group I’m thinking of includes Tuchman Mathews, Cirincione, Gore, Brady Kiesling, you can add and subtract your own – the conclusion is all but foregone.

*Okay, technically speaking, I’m pretty sure 3 or 4 soldiers speak fluent Arabic. You’ve heard of a fifth? Fine, there’s actually five Arabic speakers in the US military. You wanna add Abizaid to that list? That’s fine, too. Six Arabic speakers. I hope you feel more confident now. (Yes, of course I’m exaggerating, the tragedy is that it’s not by much. I’d guess there’s much less than 10,000 fluent in Arabic. That sounds like a minimal number given the goal articulated by Bush, essentially the conquest of the entire Middle East. And how many Persian speakers are there in the US military, by the way? Just asking.)

Saturday Night At The Movies

Divine Trash, Hidden Jewels-Part 2: Klaus Kinski

By Dennis Hartley

This week I am continuing a new series that I am posting on occasion, which will put the spotlight on some films you may have missed, and that your humble reviewer thinks are worth the search and a peek on a slow night. Hope you enjoy!

Klaus Kinski is best-remembered for his mercurial collaborations with director Werner Herzog (the infamous love-hate dynamic between the two artists has been duly noted, in Herzog’s own documentary “My Best Fiend” and Les Blank’s legendary “Burden of Dreams”) but this week I am featuring a pair of lesser-known films in the actor’s resume.

First up, a movie that definitely falls into the “divine trash” category-director Jess Franco’s 1969 gothic horror-psychedelic-sexploitation fest “Venus in Furs” (aka “Paroxismus”). This visually rich mash-up of “Carnival of Souls” and “Blow Up” is a little light on plot but heavy on atmosphere.

Maria Rohm portrays a mysterious siren who pops into a nightclub one foggy night, and stirs the loins of a brooding jazz trumpeter (played with a perpetually puzzled expression by James “Moondoggie” Darren). Temporarily forgetting that he has a girlfriend (Barbara McNair), Darren follows Rohm to the back room of a mansion, just in time to witness her ritualistic, sadomasochistic demise at the hands of a decadent playboy (played to the hilt by our man Klaus) and several of his kinky socialite friends. Some time later (timelines are a bit nebulous; one assumes by design) Darren is playing his trumpet on the beach, where Rohm’s body is seen washing ashore (you following this so far?). Next thing we know, she has miraculously “revived” and sets out to wreak revenge on her tormentors (“Kill Bill”, anyone?), in between torrid love scenes with Darren. Or does she (and her “killers”) actually exist, outside of Darren’s mind? I’ve always wondered if this element of the film was an inspiration (well, partial, at least) for Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut”.

“Venus in Furs” was allegedly inspired by a conversation the director once had with the tragically doomed trumpeter Chet Baker (which would make this film a fascinating double bill with the haunting 1988 Baker documentary “Let’s Get Lost”, if only it were in print, dammit). Manfred Mann and his band supply a surprisingly accomplished jazz score (involving slightly more complex arrangements than, say, “Do Wah Diddy”). James Darren actually played his own solos in the film; he apparently started in show biz as a trumpet player (!) The Blue Underground DVD adds some interesting present-day interviews with Franco and actress Maria Rohm.

Klaus Kinski has more of a featured role in my next selection, a little-seen but worthwhile low-budget sci-fi offering from the Roger Corman stable called “Android”.

Kinski portrays a Dr. Frankenstein of sorts, living alone on a space station with his “homemade” manservant, an android named Max. Max is played in a quirky, endearing fashion by Don Opper (who also scripted). When Max innocently overhears that the good doctor is planning to dismantle him so that he can focus on perfecting his next generation model (a female), he begins “acting out”, much to Kinski’s chagrin. Complicating matters are three escaped felons who handily con the naïve Max into giving them safe haven on the station. Some fairly suspenseful intrigue ensues, with a few good twists.

“Metropolis ” is the most obvious touchstone here, but observant sci-fi buffs may detect echoes of “Silent Running” and “Blade Runner”. Beware the packaging blurbs on Anchor Bay’s DVD edition that bill this as a wacky comedy. There are comic moments, (some unintentional, mostly stemming from Kinski’s generally hammy performance), but there is enough menacing violence to qualify the film as more of a “dramedy”.

Barely screened as a theatrical release in 1982, and only recently available on DVD, “Android ” is one of those films that has slowly picked up a cult following, mostly via the odd 3am cable showing over the years. As the director and writer point out in the DVD commentary, if this film had been released in today’s more “indie-friendly” environment, it undoubtedly would have enjoyed more mileage. Check it out!

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Don’t They Know He’s Shameless?

by digby

So, the two Brits who were found guilty of breaking the Official Secrets Act were convicted for exposing a secret that everyone already knew. (Orwell was British, wasn’t he?)

We cannot report allegations about what the document contains even though they have been reported time and time again – “recycled” was the word the judges preferred – by the media, including British newspapers.

That’s not strictly true. The judge said we can repeat those allegations but only if they appear on a different page of a newspaper than any reference to the trial or the document which was at the centre of it. We can also report, since it was said in open court, that the Guardian’s counsel, Anthony Hudson, argued that it would be inappropriate to restrain publication of the allegation already in the public domain claiming that President Bush suggested that the Arabic TV station al-Jazeera should be bombed.

The document in question was the minutes of the meeting that had been widely reported to feature our fine presidential codpiece casually talking about ordering the bombing of the Al Jazeera news agency. Now why would they want to keep this particular document secret?

The judge imposed his contempt of court – gagging – orders after the prosecution stressed the importance the attorney general (AG), Lord Goldsmith, was personally attaching to the case. Official Secrets Act prosecutions always require the consent of the AG.

He, and the government as a whole, seemed particularly concerned about the need to protect Bush from embarrassment, (the prosecution conceded that no “actual damage” had been caused by the leak) and to show the White House that Whitehall is determined to try and keep secrets even though Washington cannot.

The person who leaked it said he did it because Bush sounds like a madman. I don’t doubt it. If people could see the president’s puerile id in full glory contemplating the bombing of a television station, I’m sure it would validate all of our worst fears about his embarrassing lack of gravitas and maturity. But at this point, there is really no reason on earth that the British should protect him. I can only assume the minutes show that Tony Blair was also doing his usual Tony Randall-as-the-best-friend impression which actually would be embarrassing during the pomp and pageantry of his send-off.

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Comstock’s Little Goodling

by digby

This article about Monica Goodling would be shocking if we didn’t already know that the Mayberry Machiavellis had been running things from the beginning. Still, it’s always a little bit startling to see the full extent of the Republican party’s attempts to use every lever of the US government for partisan purposes. Goodling’s job seems to have been to replace the entire Justice Department, including career civil servants, with Republican hacks:

Ms. Goodling would soon be quizzing applicants for civil service jobs at Justice Department headquarters with questions that several United States attorneys said were inappropriate, like who was their favorite president and Supreme Court justice. One department official said an applicant was even asked, “Have you ever cheated on your wife?”

Ms. Goodling also moved to block the hiring of prosecutors with résumés that suggested they might be Democrats, even though they were seeking posts that were supposed to be nonpartisan, two department officials said.

And she helped maintain lists of all the United States attorneys that graded their loyalty to the Bush administration, including work on past political campaigns, and noted if they were members of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group.

By the time Ms. Goodling resigned in April — after her role in the firing of the prosecutors became public and she had been promoted to the role of White House liaison — she and other senior department officials had revamped personnel practices affecting employees from the top of the agency to the bottom.

[…]

In one case, Ms. Goodling told a federal prosecutor in the District of Columbia that she was not signing off on an applicant who had graduated from Howard University Law School, and then worked at the Environmental Protection Agency.

“He appeared, based on his résumé, to be a liberal Democrat,” Ms. Goodling told Jeffrey A. Taylor, the acting United States attorney in Washington, according to two of the department employees who asked not to be named. “That wasn’t what she was looking for.”

Now what does this remind me of? Oh, that’s right:

While lower-level White House staff members typically handle most contacts with the media, Rove and Libby began personally communicating with reporters about Wilson, prosecutors were told.

A source directly familiar with information provided to prosecutors said Rove’s interest was so strong that it prompted questions in the White House. When asked at one point why he was pursuing the diplomat so aggressively, Rove responded: “He’s a Democrat.” Rove then cited Wilson’s campaign donations, which leaned toward Democrats, the person familiar with the case said.

Rove apparently wanted to turn the US Justice department into the enforcement arm of the Republican Party. Again, not surprising. He believes there are no ethical limits:

Rove insisted, he had only circulated information about Plame after it had appeared in Novak’s column. He also told the FBI, the same sources said, that circulating the information was a legitimate means to counter what he claimed was politically motivated criticism of the Bush administration by Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Rove and other White House officials described to the FBI what sources characterized as an aggressive campaign to discredit Wilson through the leaking and disseminating of derogatory information regarding him and his wife to the press, utilizing proxies such as conservative interest groups and the Republican National Committee to achieve those ends, and distributing talking points to allies of the administration on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Rove is said to have named at least six other administration officials who were involved in the effort to discredit Wilson.

They don’t even try to pretend they have any ethics. And who knows how far over the legal line they’ve gone? This is the thinking that has pervaded the Bush white house for more than six years, so Goodling was undoubtedly one of many who believed her job at the US Department of Justice was to further the political fortunes of the GOP. She learned, after all, at the feet of one of the most vicious streetfighters the GOP ever produced:

Since joining the GOP, Comstock has become a kind of one-woman wrecking crew targeting Democratic leaders. As a onetime senior aide to Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) who directed numerous investigations of Clinton-era scandals, and now as head of research for the Republican National Committee, Comstock has perhaps done more than any other GOP operative to skewer Bill Clinton, Al Gore and their congressional allies.

Comstock is a practitioner of the mysterious Washington art of “opposition research” — mining public documents for embarrassing facts about political adversaries and releasing them for maximum punch. “Rush Limbaugh should pay her as a news source for all her stuff he uses,” an RNC colleague said.

[…]

Gary Maloney, himself a GOP opposition researcher, said Clinton’s presidential campaigns swamped Republican opponents in 1992 and 1996 with sharper research and swifter dissemination. But the GOP’s research operation roared back under Comstock in the last two years, he said.

Goodling was Comstock’s protege at the RNC oppo unit in the 2000 election, her first job out of law school. She was groomed and trained by the most partisan, black operators in the Republican party and then planted in the most politically senstive department in the entire US Government when Comstock herself became the DOJ spokeswoman. Goodling’s job seems to have been to populate the department, (most suspiciously the civil service) with Republican loyalists. I continue to wonder why nobody in Washington noticed this — or if they did, why they didn’t say anything? The fear (or sympathy for the cause) in that town must have been extreme. This has been going on for years.

And, perhaps more pertinently, how many more Goodlings are out there?

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Arthur Berger

by tristero

Regular commenter olvlzl has done me a nice honor by dedicating his post on composer Arthur Berger to me. Berger is one of those excellent American composers that those of us in the know love and appreciate but who gets only a fraction of the performances he deserves. I hope at least some of you take the trouble to hear some of his music. I was struck by this passage from olvlzl’s post:

I could tell you that roughly measures 25 through 31 of the first movement of Berger’s Duo move me to an all encompassing state of ecstacy every single time I hear it or play through the piano part. Just remembering how that passage sounds can take me out of myself. I could try to think of further metaphors or write a formal technical description, to give a partial explanation of what happens at that time in the music and then guess why it produces that effect. All of that might be entirely true, in part, and entirely useless in total. Any elucidation that someone reading that description might think they%u2019ve received would be deceptive. It would tell you nothing useful, it might endanger your own experience of the music. I would have to motivate you to experience the music, to listen to it, complete and in its entirety, to have any hope that you could know what I was talking about. No one who had not heard the music would know the first thing about it.

This is something that musicians who have some kind of verbal ability grapple with all the time (sidebar: I doubt Monk thought too much about it, frankly). How to understand what music means, what it is. Olvzl’s words reminded me of a book I’m reading now, Music and the Ineffable by Vladimir Jankelevitch, which argues rather beautifully that due to its very nature, music is not really a language, by which Jankelevitch means that the actual experience of music cannot be translated into words, and therefore it has no “meaning” as we understand the word. It’s a complex argument and may seem counter-intuitive to many of you, but I basically think Jankelevitch, and olvlzl are quite right.

When I was in grad school, the requirements for getting a doctorate in Composition were that you had to write a substantial piece of music along with an essay analyzing the piece. I thought this was the height of idiocy (this was long before the present White House infestation, I was young and innocent). Why? Because everyone I knew who had gone through the program had done exactly the same thing: They’d written the essay first and then wrote a piece that was consistent with it. That’s because no matter how hard you try, you can’t write music that reduces down to a verbal or formal description unless you start with such a description first. And who wants to defend their music to a group of bored academicians by saying, “Frankly, I have no idea what I was thinking when I wrote that g#, I just liked the way it sounded” when you know that will cause them to reject your thesis?

So I kept on suggesting to the graduate music faculty that maybe they should call up their colleagues over in the English department and suggest that anyone interested in a doctorate in English should have to sing their dissertation. For reasons that utterly escape me, they thought I was joking.

Anyway, read olvlzl’s post. And listen to Berger. He’s worth it.

Brady Kiesling

by tristero

Heroes are always a rare thing. But one of the greatest of our time surely is John Brady Kiesling, the career diplomat in Greece who dramatically resigned in 2003 rather than continue to support the Bush/Iraq war. Here, Kiesling writes with undisguised bitterness at the financial and career rewards Tenet received for behaving like a scoundrel while, in contrast, Kiesling’s job prospects were, in effect, destroyed because he was absolutely, and very publicly, right. Two excerpts from this essay by one of the most remarkable Americans of our time:

Accurate prophecy regarding Iraq does not require brilliance or deep expertise. An open-minded person who watched the interplay of nationalism and religion in the Middle East, anyone who listened sympathetically to ordinary Muslims, could have predicted the response to our amateurish attempts at preemptive democracy. And now that foreign policy pragmatism is socially acceptable again, the spies, diplomats, politicians, journalists and academics are pulling out their private correspondence to remind us that indeed they knew better. They would have given an honest opinion on Iraq back when it mattered, but their Commander in Chief failed to ask them for it.

Note that Kiesling writes “foreign policy pragmatism.” Nevertheless, his excellent book, Diplomacy Lessons is subtitled “Realism for an Unloved Superpower.” But it is clear that Kiesling is hardly advocating black box diplomacy of the traditional “Realist” sort, but rather diplomacy that knowledgeably grapples with issues in international relations as they come up, not within the dangerous framework of an ideological agenda.

I’ll come back to the implications of that in a moment. But I wanted to share this other excerpt from Kiesling’s essay with you first:

I live simply these days in central Athens. By bicycle (the silver SUV had palled, even if I could still afford it) it takes half an hour to Korydallos prison. There I study “Revolutionary Organization 17 November,” a Greek terrorist group that humiliated the CIA for 27 years. This next book would be more salable if I soft-pedaled U.S. blunders, but then key lessons for America’s “war on terrorism” would be lost.

I find this very moving. Rather than deliberately cashing in on the big bucks (and from what I can tell, I may be one of three people in the world who actually bought and read “Diplomacy Lessons”), Kiesling is doing scholarship – primary source scholarship – that will provide a candid, no-holds barred, look at a long, frustrating, struggle with terrorism. Talk about serving your country…

Given both his pragmatic approach to diplomacy and the overall tenor of his writing, Kiesling is the kind of person who, at one point, would probably have been labelled a conservative. Quiet, principled, uninterested in revolutionary change, loyal to his country, aware of America’s foibles, but never seriously questioning its core ideas. I used to meet people like him, registered Republicans, people who I strongly disagreed with on many, many issues but whose basic decency and integrity was simply beyond question. That was a very long time ago.

I should make it clear, perhaps, that I don’t find much in Kiesling to disagree with. I think his analysis of the Bush/Iraq war was, and is, spot on. I think his understanding of foreign policy commands respect due to his obvious expertise. But he is no DFH by any stretch of the imagination, as blog slang has it. Kiesling is no starry-eyed do-gooder who can’t see a problem in the world that America’s good intentions can’t solve. He’s far too cynical for that.

As for being a liberal in the sense I’m a liberal?* I suspect – I could be wrong – if ever I had the honor to spend some time speaking with Kiesling that we would quickly find fundamental disagreements in our worldview. So what? His long years of experience and his integrity mean that I would be a fool not to weigh seriously whatever he has to say. And even if he didn’t persuade me to change my mind, I would benefit enormously from hearing his opinions and trying to follow his reasoning. On Kiesling’s level, it would be immensely valuable to hear his thoughts regardless of whether or not I agree with him.

And that is the tragedy of the modern political discourse. There is nothing to gain from listening to any of the so-called conservative voices, be they Kristol, or Perle, or Wolfowitz, or Rumsfeld, or Cheney or O’Reilly…well, you can list them as well as I. There is no there there, intellectually or morally. There is only the will to power and the willingness to say anything, do anything, to seize power and wield it beyond oversight or question. There are no real ideas, despite their pretensions otherwise, and there are no fine minds; Wolfowitz’s academic credentials merely recalls to mind one of Frank Zappa’s funniest lines from Roxy & Elsewhere: “You get nothing with your college degree.”

The mainstream media desperately needs more truly liberal voices both in foreign policy and for domestic issues. But this country also needs more John Brady Kieslings, for they, too, are intellectually honest and deserve a hearing.

*Of course, “liberal” is a difficult term to define. In the sense of the Enlightenment meaning, Kiesling is as liberal as any of us – as opposed to Cheney, for example, who is a monarchist to the core of his ugly little being. Here, what I mean is liberal in the sense of socially and economically liberal in the late 20th/early 21st century American understanding of the word. I suspect that I am far more “to the left” than Kiesling is, especially about economic issues, (but I”m not sure, of course, having never spoken with him).