Snippet from The Washington Independent:
On Aug. 20, thousands of people — 1,700 have already committed — are being encouraged to donate to the younger Paul’s campaign in a “moneybomb” modeled after the single-day events that raised $5 million and $6 million for his father during the 2008 campaign.
The new waxpoetics is The Brazil Issue, and you are love it. There is a wonderful interview with everyone’s favorite Minister of Culture, Gilberto Gil, whose latest album, btw, is called Banda Larga Cordel (“Cordel Broadband”) and who has posted all of his albums on his website for the benefit of humanity. The interview holds some nice gems, including this smile-maker:
…and then I went to Africa, in ‘77, when we were invited for a big Blackarts festival in Nigeria, FESTAC. I stayed one whole month in Lagos, and I used to go every two or three days to Fela’s Shrine. And I met Stevie Wonder at the Shrine.
Q: Did you jam?
Yes!
Ha, if I had a specific object for every time I was kicking the international bon vivant lifestyle in post-independence Lagos and jammed with Stevie Wonder at Felat Kuti’s compound I would not have any specific objects originating from the if-then statement I just mentioned.
p.s. Ravachol Brown: Did we know that Gil was arrested in ‘68 by the military government of Brazil for performing “Questau de Ordem” (“Question of Order”), his song about the Paris student uprisings? Caetano Velosa was also arrested for his tune “E Probido Proibir” (“It’s Forbidden to Forbid”). The pair were eventually exiled to London where they were forced to hang out with Charlie Watts, Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix. LOL, at least I have my windowless desk job!
In the current issue of London Review of Books there is a poem (“Istanbul”) by Friederick Seidel with various ludicrous-amusing rhyme schemes, such as the ABAB of “From Claridge’s and London I have come / To the holy city of Byzantium / To see Ayasofya. / I see the Blue Mosque and I see a / …”. Then, tucked into the issue’s rear pages, is a rather fawning review of Seidel’s oeuvre by some young whippersnapper who likes rather too much to quote all the nasty bits (e.g. “The smell of sperm on the edge of the axe”). Well, whatever, a large swath of Siedel’s egg is nasty bits (e.g. “The smell of sperm on the edge of the axe”), but then the reviewer gives us this ludicrous-unamusing pronouncement:
Seidel, despite all his rage, is just one more rat in a cage.
Melancholy and my infinite sadness indeed!
Now you may say, Hey, cut the author some benefit, maybe his style is on the next level. Then I’d respond to you with a run-on sentence, saying, No, we know badman has poor taste because he also remarks that the new volume of collected works is ugly (“garish”) when in fact it is decidedly solid looking, and when I say decidedly I mean decided on Baby Tristan’s birthday when he awoke to find a siamese dream twin pairing of copies given to hims by his stylish girlfriend and taste-having sister, and he in turn and in kindness gave the redundant copy to his friend I, so are you, badman, looking into my gift’s mouth? Well I beg your pardon.
From:
Nancy-Ann DeParle, charged with leading the White House health effort, has a standing biweekly meeting with Mr. Baucus, while Peter R. Orszag, the White House budget director, has spent so much time in the senator’s office that he helps himself to the Coke Zeros tucked away in Mr. Baucus’s personal refrigerator.
For the author of Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and Archaeologies of the Future, it is rather amusing to see a used copy of his unpublished book on sale for $999.99 (plus $3.99 S&H).
From da LA Tymez:
Last month, 18-year-old Kenya Mejia closed her valedictory address at Los Angeles’s Alexander Hamilton High School on a startling note: publicly professing a secret passion for a classmate.
“I cannot let this opportunity just pass by,” said Ms. Mejia, who is to enroll at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the fall. “I love you, Jake Minor!”
The crowd roared. Mr. Minor stood and pumped his fists in the air. A few days later, Ms. Mejia cashed a check for $1,800.
The commotion Ms. Mejia created was actually part of a ploy cooked up by marketing executives and consultants for Twentieth Century Fox, the Hollywood studio whose headquarters is less than two miles from Hamilton High.
The goal of the plot, which included a marketing company called the Intelligence Group and at least one other contractor, was to create a “viral” buzz online for the romantic comedy “I Love You, Beth Cooper.” The movie opens with an unassuming valedictorian using his graduation speech to proclaim his feelings for the most popular girl in school. Fox and its consultants hatched the ruse to recreate the scene at a real high school before the film’s July 10 opening, say people familiar with the matter, in hopes of creating online chatter about the way the movie supposedly inspired copycats.
When it gets to be this time of the week during this time of the year my heartspot can’t help but be lured by dock talk, moon rock, and apple-scented smoke. It’s all green flag to me. These sweet friends know what I’m talking about, day & night.
DAY: Tiny Dancers AKA Dock Frolickers. When you’re really feeling it, there’s only one way to get to the dock.
NIGHT: Moonmusic. Give it a moment; the vibes will carry you to lunar spheres.
NIGHT: Moonrock. Nocturnal hand drumming and lit incense in the headstock is not just for pot luck dub parties anymore. Or is it…? (p.s. who were the strangoids who traded us homemade entrepreneurial incense packets for electrical outlets? Think I missed that episode…)
A month or so ago an homeboy who used to work at the Crisis Group mentioned that the directors there had embargoed a completed report on right wing religious groups in Israel. It was deemed too controversial and so it sat on the shelf for 6+ months. Well, I guess the new administration’s very public push against the settler movement has shifted the scope of the debate and so yesterday the Crisis Group finally saw fit to release the jawn. Quite interesting and well worth the read.
Within the settler fringe (that’s rather fringe, I’d say) there’s an whack subculture call Hilltop Youth; young disaffected dudes who lay claim to mounds, build claptrap synagogues, live in shipping containers, and do the pastoral thing + guns. The spiritual leader of the Hilltop Youth is a (what else) U.S.-born asshole with a degree from Chicago University named Yitzhak Ginsburgh. You don’t like his ideas; to wit, fn. 81:
81 After the Gaza disengagement, Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh
became an inspirational beacon for disaffected national religious
youth, particularly in the outposts. “Before disengagement
people rejected our ideas, but a few months after
people began to turn to us; their children stopped participating
in the army and studied with us instead”. Crisis Group
interview, Yisrael Ariel, Rabbi Ginsburgh’s adviser, Jerusalem,
September 2008. Imprisoned after he publicly lauded
the 1994 killing of 29 Muslims in Hebron’s Ibrahimi
mosque, Ginsburgh “emphasises the spontaneity, unthinking
naturalness of violence which transcends conventional,
petit bourgeois definitions of good and evil”.
(Jeesh! I sure don’t like his bourgeois dorm room radicalist boilerplate! And while we await Thom Westbaby’s drawing of Calvin Pissing on Nu Zionism, we can calm ourselves with this.)
Late Update (as the blogs say): From the abovementioned report one senses the strange, looming possibility of civil unrest in Israel, perhaps even civil conflict. On the grinding tension between secularists and the ultra-orthodox, this article in the usually corny Foreign Policy is quite interesting.
Is that a Cloverfield shirt?
Two weekends ago Taner & I ran across this advice column query in the Post (which was answered soberly).
DEAR AMY: We buried my father 10 years ago in a part of the cemetery that used to be quiet and secluded. Now, to one side of our plot, the surviving pot-smoking members of some woman’s cancer support group gather there regularly.
On the other side, every relative of a Chinese lady has to burn incense, paper money and mini firecrackers.
In front of our plot, a metal band plays a CD that could be called “Wake the Dead” in memory of its former drummer.
Behind our plot lies an old Scottish man, whose clan blasts bagpipes in his honor.
My mother’s asthma is triggered by smoke and flowers; my migraines are triggered by noise.
What can we do to prevent this? — Pain at the Cemetery
The “special fact” in the 4th paragraph is not up high enough in the story for my tastes…
Staffer at SEC Had Warned Of Madoff
Lawyer Raised Alarm, Then Was Pointed Elsewhere
By Zachary A. Goldfarb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 2, 2009
An investigator at the Securities and Exchange Commission warned superiors as far back as 2004 about irregularities at Bernard L. Madoff’s financial management firm, but she was told to focus on an unrelated matter, according to agency documents and sources familiar with the investigation.
Genevievette Walker-Lightfoot, a lawyer in the SEC’s Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations, sent e-mails to a supervisor, saying information provided by Madoff during her review didn’t add up and suggesting a set of questions to ask his firm, documents show. Several of these questions directly challenged Madoff activities that much later turned out to be elements of his massive fraud.
But with the agency under pressure to look for wrongdoing in the mutual fund industry, she wasn’t able to continue pursuing Madoff, according to documents and two people familiar with the investigation, and her team soon concluded its work on the probe.
Walker-Lightfoot’s supervisors on the case were Mark Donohue, then a branch chief in her department, and his boss, Eric Swanson, an assistant director of the department, said two people familiar with the investigation. Swanson later married Madoff’s niece, and their relationship is now under review by the agency’s inspector general, who is examining the SEC’s handling of the Madoff case.
As far as illicit relationships go, is this not more ”newsworthy” than that Marc Sandford’s affair?
Lest we forget:
June 22 (Reuters) - Following are security developments in Iraq at 1100 GMT on Monday.
MOSUL - Gunmen killed two Iraqi soldiers at a checkpoint in east Mosul, 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.
MOSUL - Gunmen opened fire on policemen in central Mosul, killing two, police said.
MOSUL - Police found a body with bullet wounds to the head and chest in central Mosul, police said.
BAGHDAD - A parked car bomb in central Baghdad’s Karrada district killed five people, police said.
FALLUJA - A suicide bomber detonated himself outside the Falluja municipal council building, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad, killing one person and wounding five, police said.
KHANAQIN - A roadside bomb killed three soldiers near the town of Khanaqin, 140 km (100 miles) northeast of Baghdad, the army said.
BAGHDAD - A roadside bomb went off near a police patrol, killing three civilians and wounding 12 others near al-Hamza Square in Baghdad’s northeastern district of Sadr City, police said. The victims were all students in a passing mini-bus.
BAGHDAD - A roadside bomb wounded three people in Baghdad’s eastern Habibiya district, police said.
Because we don’t have blog turbo that let’s you upload video ($60/yr?!) we will not be able to follow through on my morning dream to post heart-softening clips from a certain body of water near Dickenson’s County Store… and instead must continue posting about wretched things such as imperial sociological experiments in Afghanistan.
In today’s WPost there’s a solid piece on USAID projex in Afghanistan (by the author of the celebrated book that’s being remade into a movie that’s given a title stolen from Eat My Mind’s space page and no longer just about dorm rooms anymore, starring, of course, Will Hunting). The newspiece focuses on the agriculture sector in Afghanistan and several funky blunders (aka “war bloopers”) by the previous administration. Given the avowed goal of rebuilding the Afghan state, it is strange how much the Bush Dudes completely bypassed the government. Instead of working with the Afghan Ministry of Agriculture to ”build capacity” (as the development heads say) they set up expensive worthless development projects through private contractors, who, leaning heavily on some flat-earth free enterprise textbook, determined Afghanistan had a comparative advantage in pomegranates & almonds & such and tried to convince farmers to take on these crops because markets in Dubai were totally trying to buy snacks. For example, etc. Bush Dudes, as Lewis Lapham once said, were utopian anarchists. In this case, Utopian–in that they carried some hyper-abstracted political theory about the harmonizing function markets in society–and Anarchic–in that, through their actions/priorities, they sought to render government agencies irrelevant. (Despite spending almost $8billion on agriculture initiatives, when the current minister of agriculture assumed the post he was shocked to find his office without phone, internet, or staff.) What is wildstyle is that this tack was somewhat novel and a departure from the prevailing imperialist state-building orthodoxy. I mean, if you want to be a 21st century neo-colonialist there are playbooks you can pull off the shelf. And that way, when you fail, no one in Washington will give you a hard time. But these guys… [Snap, need to get the weekend started--will continue da rant on Monday]
Of course the flipside to “Be a Fascist to a Fascist” is “Show Compassion to Robocop (He’s a human too (sometimes))”
A backer of Mir Hossein Mousavi helps evacuate an injured riot-police officer during riots in Tehran on June 13, 2009. (Olivier Laban-Mattei / AFP / Getty Images) More pictures
“A new study finds that the mere sight of money warps judgment. In several experiments, researchers asked people to identify as many words as possible from a set of random letters – as in the games Scrabble or Boggle – and voluntarily score themselves. They were offered several dollars each time they reached a certain score. However, for some of the people, the researchers had put thousands of dollars in cash on tables in the middle of the room. For those people, the rate of cheating was much higher.”
Gino, F. & Pierce, L., “The Abundance Effect: Unethical Behavior in the Presence of Wealth,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (forthcoming).
Did you hear about the white supremacists on a rampage in D.C.?
Yeah, they’re blocking the nomination of Robert Groves to head the Census Bureau because they’re worried he won’t under-represent minorities in urban areas!
Shortly after assuming the English throne in 1603 King James summoned the nation’s religious leaders to discuss all things theological.
In the discussion on baptism, the Bishop of Peterborough then made a fool of himself. Apropos of nothing much, he said that he knew of one case in which an ancient father had baptized with sand instead of water. ‘Whereto his Majesty answered pleasantly, “A turd for the Argument. He might as well have pissed on them, for that had been more liker to water than sand.”’ The bishop’s reputation never recovered.
A turd for the Argument. Ah yes, from time to time we all have endured conversational contributions such as this. Always on the receiving end, assuredly. Now comes an appropriate expression to put rogue bishops & freethinkers back in their place.
Of the lyric poet Sappho, who hailed from Lesbos in the time of Solon, Harry E. Barnes writes:
Though only a few of her poems are extant we get from them an impression of the purest lyric ecstasy. It is as though her words were “tipped with fire.” We have here the clearest and simplest communication of personal passion in language of exquisite simplicity and grace, with a poignancy and an insight never excelled. One or two examples must convey a suggestion of this simple beauty. A girl who failed to get married is compared to an apple that ripens out of reach—“Like an apple that ripens on the tip of the bough, yes on the very tip—for the gatherers had forgotten it; no they had not forgotten it but they were unable to reach it.”
Da Durnan, rapt & transported by the scent of an rose;
poolside, American Embassy in Cairo, c. 1846
In addition to namechecking Lululemon the NYT’s article on some ex-junkie no-nonsense yoga guru to the stars has this choice 1990s post-modern fiction nonsense:
“Come on people, let’s get started,” he said in a New York accent, as if leading a conference call.
Then he cranked up “Misty Mountain Hop” by Led Zeppelin and led the students through a warm-up of sun salutations. Soon he had them stretching into a difficult split pose.
“Didn’t you see the torture memos this week?” called out Jane Harman, a 63-year-old devoted student in the front row, who also happens to be the United States Representative for the South Bay region of Los Angeles County.
The teacher responded, “That’s why I’m doing this.”
