http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Tue, 1 Nov 2005 11:37:25 EST http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. 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Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/straightup/2005/11/01/113725.php Jan Herman Dan Neil's column in this past Sunday's Los Angeles Times Magazine talks about the many "moments of ironic fallout" included on "Atomic Platters: Cold War Music from the Golden Age of Homeland Security," which he describes as "a darkly amusing collection of songs, civil defense messages and short films [which] takes us to a zany yet oddly familiar land of galloping paranoia, where shadows are etched in concrete and happiness is a warm bomb shelter." Neil writes that his favorite moment is this one: A man returning from the ice cream parlor sees a blinding light, the mighty spark of an atom bomb. He comes to in a burning, irradiated ruin. Dazed and bleeding, he looks around desperately until, with a sigh of relief, he finds his smoldering fedora. It's the end of the world, but by all means, don't forget your hat. That moment is a long, long way from the real thing, which is not for casual viewing. There was no irony when, on Aug. 6, 1945, "lessons [began] at the National Technical University on the outskirts of downtown Hiroshima, as always, at 8 a.m. ... and Keijiro Matsushima [was] gazing out the window, bored."Suddenly, a gleaming light fills the classroom. A "reddish-orange flash" bright "as the sun" prompts him to dive beneath his desk. He places his hands over his eyes and his thumbs into his ears -- doing exactly what he has been told to do to protect himself in an air raid.But nothing can protect him against what happens next.Many artists have addressed what happened next. Most recently, the new John Adams-Peter Sellars opera "Doctor Atomic," which has been getting wide attention, treated it as the legend of a modern Faustus. But has any artist faced the subject more directly than Abbie Conant? What happened next -- literally, not symbolically or mythologically -- is the subject of "Rachel's Lament," a music-video piece documenting Conant's response -- her "inner emotional experience," as she terms it -- to "the dropping of the first atomic bombs." (You'll need a broadband connection and RealPlayer to see and hear it.) Conant performed it this past summer in Santa Fe, N.M., "in the ancient spirit of the lament -- a woman weeping for the dead," on the 60th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.For more about what happened, have a look at this three-part "Remembering Hiroshima" series:1) The Bomb That Was Meant for Hitler; 2) "My God, What Have We Done?" 3) The Cold War Heats Up.-- Tireless Staff of Thousands 38883@blogcritics.org Tue, 1 Nov 2005 11:37:25 EST http://blogcritics.org/straightup/2005/11/01/084944.php Jan HermanFrom a conscript in the Army of the Tireless: There's a cropped picture of Egon Schiele's 1912 "Portrait of Wally" on the cover of the new cultural-property anthology "Who Owns the Past?" edited by Kate Fitz Gibbon in collaboration with former Metropolitan Museum counsel and power lawyer Ashton Hawkins. The book, subtitled "Cultural Policy, Cultural Property, and the Law," is to be launched tonight at the Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea and tomorrow at the Century Club.Since 1997, when the painting was spotted at the Museum of Modern Art by heirs of Lea Bondi (the Jewish art dealer in Vienna from whom the Nazis seized it in 1939), MoMA has fought the Bondi family's efforts to get "Wally" back, arguing that the picture should be returned to its lender in Vienna, where claims by Jews for the return of Nazi-looted property are, to put it mildly, not welcomed. MoMA also commissioned a memorandum to discredit potential claims that the family might eventually make under Austrian law. The case is now in U.S. District Court. The anthology (from Rutgers University Press) includes a MoMA-friendly article on the dispute, but insiders say the case is now spreading uneasy scrutiny to the Holocaust-era history of Schiele paintings in the collection of MoMA benefactor Ronald Lauder that are now on view at Lauder's Neue Galerie uptown. (Since MoMA first rebuffed the Bondi family in 1997, the value of "Wally" has risen from $1 million to about $10 million.)You may recall that MoMA has beaten back reporters who've tried to cover the "Wally" story. If not, ask Morley Safer, whose crew was blocked from entering MoMA's 1998 Jackson Pollock retrospective in retaliation for Safer's efforts to crack the Schiele scandal. Ask the New York Observer, whose reporter Andrew Goldman drew the ire of MoMA director Glenn Lowry for daring to note that Lowry had "reptilian eyes." (Ah, vanity.) Or ask David D'Arcy, the arts reporter ousted by NPR after MoMA attacked his coverage of the Schiele case on "All Things Considered" last Dec. 27.Some background: D'Arcy was dumped for failing to do "fair and balanced reporting" when NPR management reversed its own editors, who had praised the story (listen to the broadcast), after a MoMA exec directly contacted NPR CEO Kevin Klose. NPR then issued a "correction" at MoMA's behest, stating that the museum, which had been in court over "Portrait of Wally" for more than seven years, never took "a position on the painting's ownership." Amid claims that NPR had failed to stand up to MoMA, Holocaust specialists, lawyers and journalists condemned the "correction" as false and misleading, and -- what has not been reported -- NPR (through hardball lawyers at Williams & Connolly) subsequently offered to take D'Arcy back, but he refused to sign a letter that NPR's enforcers at the law firm demanded, stating that NPR "had not caved" to pressure from the museum. We've already written a lot about the D'Arcy affair: See (in chronological order) DAVID D'ARCY, NPR, AND MoMA, RUNNING COVER FOR NPR IN D'ARCY CASE, DAVID D'ARCY REDUX, WHOSE KLOSE CALL GOT NPR REPORTER FIRED?, BATTLE OF THE NPR CORRECTIONS and 'I'M NOT EVEN ROAD KILL.' Maybe one day we'll get over it.-- Tireless Staff of Thousands 38877@blogcritics.org Tue, 1 Nov 2005 08:49:44 EST http://blogcritics.org/straightup/2005/10/31/154553.php Jan HermanSomebody feeling provoked, polarized or just plain pole-axed might get the wrong idea and mis-read the headline on this MSNBC.com cover illustration:-- Tireless Staff of Thousands 38840@blogcritics.org Mon, 31 Oct 2005 15:45:53 EST http://blogcritics.org/straightup/2005/10/31/093528.php Jan HermanPolitely put, "it sometimes seems" they are Midases in reverse. But make no mistake: "Everything they touch -- from Iraq reconstruction to hurricane relief, from prescription drug coverage to the pursuit of Osama -- turns to crud." That's Paul Krugman this morning being frank about the Bullshitter-in-Chief and his Chief of Bullshit. Let's not begrudge Krugman the courteous "sometimes seems" and the euphemistic "crud." He's not writing a blog. And he can't use photos like this.-- Tireless Staff of Thousands 38810@blogcritics.org Mon, 31 Oct 2005 09:35:28 EST http://blogcritics.org/straightup/2005/10/30/122539.php Jan Herman From a conscript in the Army of the Tireless, this photo "found while browsing" and caption for same:Upon hearing of the ravages caused by hurricane Katrina, President George W. Bush went into immediate action.He sends this reference, too: "Sans Commentaire, 'cept mebee......wa?" To which we say, "Oy" (Mayan for whoopeee!)And from way Down Under: Emma Rodgers, of Articulate, writes: This is modern art? Matthew Collings has issues with what he sees as the public's great charade of pretending to like modern art ... as if we're pretending we get it. I think he described it as a "faux love" or "pseudo interest."Collings is the noted Brit broadcaster, author ("Blimey" and "It Hurts," etc.), presenter of Channel Four's Turner Prize news coverage, and -- we should have known -- an artist himself.-- Tireless Staff of Thousands 38773@blogcritics.org Sun, 30 Oct 2005 12:25:39 EST http://blogcritics.org/straightup/2005/10/28/100121.php Jan Herman What a gal: "The thing that impresses me most about our editors is that they understand that it's not all about the book," said the publisher who heads Simon & Shuster's new S.S.E. imprint. "It's about the money you can make from that book." We know. There are more important things to think about -- like this and this -- but it's Friday. And anyway, do you know why this guy is smiling?Postscript: To ease you into the weekend: If Fox News Had Been Around Throughout History 38686@blogcritics.org Fri, 28 Oct 2005 10:01:21 EDT http://blogcritics.org/straightup/2005/10/27/213858.php Jan HermanAren't you asking what doomed Harriet Miers's nomination? Isn't everybody? So here are the answers: It was the Bullshitter's own rightwingnuts. It was their "tar-and-feather tactics." It was her failed questionnaire. It was, get this, the White Houses's own nefarious conspiracy. You know what? We think it was the eyeliner.-- Tireless Staff of Thousands 38654@blogcritics.org Thu, 27 Oct 2005 21:38:58 EDT http://blogcritics.org/straightup/2005/10/27/170327.php Jan HermanDoug Ireland, radical journalist and truth-teller, messages a request: "As the 30th anniversary of Pier Paolo Pasolini's murder is coming up in a few days, would you consider giving this a plug?" We're glad he asked. "This" refers to his exclusive publication of Pasolini's major poem "Victory" for "the first time ever in English translation." The "day of victory" of the poem's last line, Ireland explains, "is April 25, 1945, when German troops surrendered in Italy, effectively ending the fascist era." The poem was translated by Ireland's friend, Norman MacAfee, who also selected and translated Pasolini's collected poems, now in paperback from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Pasolini, above, whose mutilated body was found in a vacant lot 20 miles outside of Rome on Nov. 2, 1975, was "a giant polymath of postwar Italian culture" who "frequently celebrated homosexuality in his writings and films," Ireland writes. Ireland's must-read piece about Pasolini's murder and his career as a filmmaker, poet, novelist, playwright, literary critic, political columnist and painter, tells why Pasolini's friends believe the killing was a political assassination and not, as originally claimed, an "S&M adventure gone bad."-- Tireless Staff of Thousands 38625@blogcritics.org Thu, 27 Oct 2005 17:03:27 EDT http://blogcritics.org/straightup/2005/10/26/133405.php Jan HermanManaged to reboot without India's help. ... As we were saying when our laptop seized up, we liked Dowd's dicking around today. But we really wanted to offer for your contemplation a remark by neocon thinker-warrior Paul Wolfowitz, as quoted by Jeffrey Goldberg in an article on Brent Scowcroft, the anti-neocon former national security adviser to Bush Daddy. The article, in this week's New Yorker, is not online (although an interview about it is), and the remark has gone unnoticed in this summary or any of the online summaries we've seen.One day, I mentioned to Scowcroft an interview I had had with Paul Wolfowitz, when he was Donald Rumsfeld's deputy. ... I asked him what he would think if previously autocratic Arab countries held free elections and then proceeded to vote Islamists into power. Wolfowitz answered, "Look, fifty per cent of the Arab world are women. Most of those women do not want to live in a theocratic state. The other fifty per cent are men. I know a lot of them. I don't think they want to live in a theocratic state." [Italics added.]That remark serves as a stunning commentary on the bizarre thinking of top policy-makers and the strangely personalized way policy was, and doubtless still is, made at the top of the U.S. war regime. Was Wolfwowitz really saying the rationale for the invasion of Iraq -- democratizing the Middle East, even if you believe that -- was based not only on the brilliant revelation that half the Arab population is female, (gee, more or less like the rest of the human race) and that "most" of these women (did he take a poll perhaps?) don't like the mullahs, but that he, Wolfowitz, is personally acquainted with so many Arab men, who make up the other half of the population naturally, that you can believe him when he says he also knows what they think? Well, we think -- just as Scowcroft thinks -- Wolfowitz really was saying that. ("He's got a utopia out there," Scowcroft said. "We're going to transform the Middle East, and then there won't be war anymore. He can make them democratic.") And now that Wolfowitz heads the World Bank, Jeffrey Sachs, of all people, is willing to go easy on him (in public at least). When asked last July at the Council on Foreign Relations what he thought of Wolfowitz, Sachs chose to avoid criticizing him and joked that "he's being asked to fix the world on a $7-billion budget," instead of the $500-billion budget he had at the U.S. Defense Department, so "he knows that he's operating at the level of a failed weapons system now." Yes, yes, we know. Wolfowitz is popping up all over in his new job and being praised for it -- he even came in for praise from David Brooks for his "democratizing" principles, fancy that -- and he's making all kinds of nice noises about saving Africa first on his to-do list. Sachs has to work with him, so why alienate him? But what Sachs also didn't say -- and this is our belief -- is that, for all his touted credentials, Wolfowitz happens to be operating at the level of a failed brain system. The photo, above, shows he doesn't yet know how to pick his nose. He's actually trying to do it with his thumb.-- Tireless Staff of Thousands 38563@blogcritics.org Wed, 26 Oct 2005 13:34:05 EDT http://blogcritics.org/straightup/2005/10/26/101523.php Jan HermanWe recommend Maureen Dowd's neatly executed tribute to Vice, the Bullshitter-in-Chief's pet moniker for the Leaker-in-Chief. She's on the button again this morning, and she also gets away with an excellent headline, "Dick at the Heart of Darkness." If the double entendre isn't clear enough, her column begins:After W. was elected, he sometimes gave visitors a tour of the love alcove off the Oval Office where Bill trysted with Monica -- the notorious spot where his predecessor had dishonored the White House.Gets too cute:At least it was only a little pantry -- and a little panting.But then shows she's not just dicking around:If W. wants to show people now where the White House has been dishonored in far more astounding and deadly ways, he'll have to haul them around every nook and cranny of his vice president's office, then go across the river for a walk of shame through the Rummy empire at the Pentagon.Yawp. .... Sputt. ... We're suddenly having computer trouble. ... Part of our ongoing Dell saga of laptop motherboard issues. ... Arrgghhh. ... We'll just have to post this item as is. ... Back when possible. ... Going on the dial to India. ... Glub glub glub. ... Sauve qui peut. ...--Tireless Staff of Thousands 38553@blogcritics.org Wed, 26 Oct 2005 10:15:23 EDT