Navigating Evil

I am not a pessimist: to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism.

- Roberto Rosselini

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

We ought always to deal justly, not only with those who are just to us, but likewise to those who endeavor to injure us; and this, for fear lest by rendering them evil for evil, we should fall into the same vice.

- Hierocles

A Boot Stamping on a Human Face

Always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.

- 1984 by George Orwell

Rather than returning our liberties, the Bush administration has just curtailed them some more:

First, the law requires telecommunications companies to make their facilities available for government wiretaps, and it grants them immunity from lawsuits for complying. Under the old program, such companies participated only voluntarily – and some were sued for allegedly violating their customers' privacy.

Second, Bush has said his original surveillance program was restricted to calls and e-mails involving a suspected terrorist, but the new law has no such limit. Instead, it allows executive-branch agencies to conduct oversight-free surveillance of all international calls and e-mails, including those with Americans on the line, with the sole requirement that the intelligence-gathering is "directed at a person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States." There is no requirement that either caller be a suspected terrorist, spy, or criminal.

There's a scene early on in The Bourne Ultimatum where a reporter says the word "blackbriar" during a cell phone conversation in Europe and it triggers surveillance at the CIA within the United States.

It's chilling because it's not science fiction. It's current fact.

And how ironic that a (hugely entertaining) blockbuster about an individual combating big-government surveillance (and rendition) should come out the very weekend our real-life government has quantifiably extended its reach. It's a surreal world we live in when our diminishing freedoms are accompanied by Hollywood commentary and its attendant profits.

Darwin's Nightmare

In an interview on the Darwin's Nightmare DVD ,director Hubert Sauper explains the power of the documentary:

We are so full of information ... but we don't have the right type of information in a way ...

What does it mean 5 million dead in the Congo? It's just a number ... You say, OK that's a lot of people. It's far away. It's so many people that you can't imagine. In the east of the Congo is a war since 7 or 8 years that every day as many people die as on the 11th of September in New York. Every day. So September the 11th is happening every day in the east of the Congo. It's so beyond anything you can describe or imagine. ... Most people don't even know the number, but it's not enough to know the number. We need this other type of information which is very processed, which is communicated through art a lot.

Ironically, the art of cinema communicates things that we knew already, but we didn't quite understand, didn't have consciousness. There's this huge gap, this huge missing link between knowledge and understanding ... and real awareness. So cinema can make you aware of something that you knew for 25 years. And suddenly it totally strikes you. And suddenly you go, Jesus, this is something I should have known or this is something I never thought of, but I knew it already.

It's very necessary to have this other type of more subtle and more processed and more poetic information. I think you need the power of poetry to understand the tragedy of our time or the complexity of our time.

Darwin's Nightmare is an excellent, though highly disturbing documentary about how planes fly empty to Lake Victoria in Tanzania only to fly tonnes of fish, perch specifically, out every day for Europeans and Americans who can afford to buy them--this while the villagers in the same area starve. Only sometimes, Sauper reports, those same planes deliver weapons to supply the wars in the same area.

Sauper's earlier documentary Kisangani Diary also appears on the DVD and it includes some of the most devastating imagery of starvation I've ever seen. human beings who appear dead, buried in rubbish, who are only recognized as alive when they open their eyes or move their limbs ever so slightly, too weak to extricate themselves. Horrifically shrunken babies abandoned by their parents, Rwandese refugees who fled the avenging Tutsis.

One can only hope more people will see these documentaries and others like them, dark as their subject matter may be, in the hope that we humans will move collectively, as Sauper suggests, beyond casual knowledge into active understanding, into consciousness.

Hillary Takes DC

Look what my brother hath wrought. Nice details: The Presidential Seal as saintly halo is brilliant. There are t-shirts, too!

I Am Not an Animal!

The BBC reports that scientists have found the gene that causes left-handedness, so now people will have to stop considering us lefties to be freaks. The downside: lefties may be at a (marginally)increased risk for schizophrenia. On the plus side: we think more quickly (but you knew that), think differently, and we're better fighters. Next up, the study that proves that lefties are better lovers.

And to think my uncle used to get his hand smacked in school for writing left-handed. The horror!

Related: It's Left Hander's Day soon - Monday, August 13th.

50's 2 Cents

George Bush has a talent: He has less compassion than the average human being. By all means, I don't aspire to be like George Bush.

- Rapper 50 Cent in an New York interview about his influences.

Not Up to Snuff

This recent Sunday Telegraph article details the rise of what New York magazine's David Edelstein dubbed torture porn. You know the recent proliferation of flicks like Saw (1,2,3), Hostel (1,2), Cabin Fever, The Hills Have Eyes remake (1,2), Wolf Creek, The Devil's Rejects, and Captivity. (Edelstein rightly suggests The Passion of Christ also.)

The Telegraph's Jenny McCartney grew up in Ulster and is disgusted with the genre. She suggests:

We might begin by questioning if we ever have the moral right to watch terrorist victims such as Daniel Pearl or Nick Berg being beheaded. I do not think we have, because the argument that has always prohibited the watching of child pornography - that the helpless victim was unable to give or withhold consent to the act or the filming - applies equally to al-Qa'eda's home-made snuff films.

That probably nails why I couldn't bring myself to watch, say, the beheading of Daniel Pearl, the hanging of Saddam, or this hanging in Iran Andrew Sullivan recently felt compelled to post.

But those movies are just fiction, right, so what's the problem? I agree with McCartney's conclusions:

The cinematic child of voyeurism and terror, 'torture porn' is a genre that gorges on the world's horrors and regurgitates them, but learns nothing from them.

The more of it audiences consume, the less they understand. In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four the panicked hero, Winston Smith, describes a nightmarish night at the flicks, as the audience relishes the sight of a boatload of enemy refugees being bombed, and roars with laughter at a mother's hapless struggles to protect her small boy from death.

We are not so very far away from that now. There must come a point at which audiences ask a different question from what will the torturer do next to his victims on screen? We must ask what watching him is doing to us.

I think we'd be a little creeped out by someone who enjoyed watching films, which simply featured scene after scene of rape for two hours. So why are we OK with watching flicks which consist solely of scene after scene of amputation, mutilation, maiming, dismemberment, disfiguring, butchering, impalement, and torture?

It Takes a Nation of 6-Year-Olds

How refreshing to hear a Republican, Ron Paul, speak candidly about why Osama bin Laden attacked the U.S. on 9/11. Of course, Giuliani immediately has to reach for the old canard that pointing out the reasons is the same as saying we deserved what we got. This clip finishes with a great quote from David Cross, which also speaks the truth with even greater candor:

If the terrorists hated freedom then the Netherlands would be fucking dust. As would Denmark and Sweden, and Switzerland and New Zealand and Canada and every other country that's truly freer than we are.

I don't think Osama bin Laden sent those planes to attack us because he hated our freedom. I think he did it because of our support for Israel, and our ties with the Saudi family and all our military bases in Saudi Arabia. You know why I think that? Because that's what he fucking said! Are we a nation of 6-year-olds? Answer: yes.

"Why did the bad man put the plane in the building?"

"Cos he hated freedom."

"Oh, cos I went to the Lexis Nexis database, and there's over fourteen hundred articles that actually explain wha..."

"Shhhh. He hated freedom. Have a cookie. Get him in the back yard! Show him the outdoor pool!"

Giuliani, you listening? Of course, even if he were, I doubt he'd change his tune. Not when mendacious criticism plays so well with the base. As usual, the jester speaks more honestly than the courtier. Maybe Ron Paul will prove an influential exception. We need folks who get it on both sides of the political divide.

Sliding Down the Surface of Things

I'm watching a few minutes of this Paula Abdul show on Bravo (I know, I know, bear with me) and it's showing her in New York preparing to do Letterman. She's worried about her impending performance on the show, so she flies in a stylist and a consultant to advise her what to say - this in addition to her usual entourage. She talks about how she wants to the interview to be fun, but is in tears as she rides in her limousine to the Ed Sullivan Theater, her consultant still coaching her on the way. So part of me feels sorry for her - that every appearance is such an ordeal, such a project - but part of me is also dismayed at how celebrities are seldom themselves in these appearances, how they're a carefully-packaged, illusory, market-driven advertisement for themselves.

"It's so simple," she says at one point. "Let me do what I do." If only. There's nothing remotely simple, nothing natural or organic about the manufactured celebrity lifecycle.

Not My Bag

So, I'm sliding onto the 2nd Ave subway this morning when I see this huge line snaking outside of the new Whole Foods on Bowery all the way around the corner, and I think to myself, "Wow, they're all waiting for Whole Foods to open" and promptly descend into the sweaty hell that is the F train and I don't give it another moment's thought. Turns out these folks were in line to buy a $15 limited edition shopping bag. And, now, I think, "What suckers." These bags apparently caused riots in Taiwan, where 30 people were hospitalized (I kid you not) and similar melees in Hong Kong and elsewhere. And you thought standing around for hours for an iPhone was lame! And, by the way, these bags are selling for over $300 on eBay, which probably reveals the real reason a lot of folks were in line. You can buy similar canvas bags (without the holier-than-thou slogan) at other NY supermarkets for like, a buck. Oh, and I understand people left carrying their canvas bags ... in a Whole Foods plastic bag.

Now, as the NYT article above describes, the gazillion plastic bags we've unleashed on the environment are a serious problem. I witnessed a remarkable display of this traveling by train through Morocco and would see huge fields stretching for acres upon acres - probably square miles - littered, blacked with hundred, probably thousands of these black plastic bags they place fruit and veggies in within the medina. It was as clear an example of the Tragedy of the Commons as I've seen.

Related:

• Apparently, the bags are made in China using cheap labor.
• And look, Trader Joe's are way cooler anyway.
• There's a satirical version of said bag, of course.
• Globototes look like a handsome and much cheaper alternative, too.
• Gothamist story from which I ripped off some of these links. This guy in the comments proves even more cynical about this whole event than me:

  I waited in this line, bought three bags, and now have an extra $300+ in my pocket that I will use to pay down some credit card debt. This whole operation was a joke - the "I'm NOT a plastic bag" bags were given to me inside a Whole Foods plastic bag. I don't feel bad in the slightest for taking advantage of the "it's hip to be eco-friendly" girls that I sold these bags to. We're all powerless to stop this rampant consumerism that plagues this country anyway.

Grinderman

GRINDERMAN
Grinderman (CD) – Anti

As Nick Cave nears 50, he engages his new band Grinderman to bequeath us with some of his most bracing and profane work yet. Cave grouses, growls and grumbles his way through this lacerating little effort. About what? Well, ostensibly women, but you’ll eventually conclude it’s the velocity of life he has a beef with. Throughout, on tracks like the fuzzy "Electric Alice," the grinding "Depth Charge Ethel," and the bluesy "Go Tell the Women," the fairer sex dominates the proceedings, and a visceral sexuality seeps into everything from the light-hearted buzz of "Honey Bee (Let’s Fly to Mars)" to the more acidic, but comical "No Pussy Blues." Cave isn’t really berating women; he’s mocking himself, his own predilections, archly tracking his own mid-life crises. Compare Grinderman’s cover with its content: Is it a coincidence that the grinder monkey on the cover appears to be cowering, its tiny fists protecting its genitals? The tongue-in-cheek emasculation on "No Pussy Blues" epitomizes the theme here, as Cave complains about the contortions he engages in to secure some booty – even petting his lover’s "revolting little Chihuahua" – all to no avail. "My face is finished, my body’s gone," he laments. Life is flitting by and any desired words of wisdom can be reduced to the mantra repeated on the disk’s opening track: "Get It On." - Robert Stribley

www.grinderman.com

This review was originally published in Skyscraper Magazine, Issue 25 (Summer 2007)

Feist - The Reminder

FEIST
The Reminder (CD) – Cherrytree/Interscope

The danger in anyone’s covering the traditional "See-Line Woman" is that one can’t help but compare the results with Nina Simone's incantatory cover of the song, but on her rewarding new album The Reminder, Leslie Feist clears that hurdle with a great version. Spelled "Sealion” here, the song is based on a field recording from the 30s and its spelling has varied ever since. Feist’s version folds her skipping vocals into a convincing mélange of handclaps, minimalist glitch keys, country guitar and eventually throbbing rock. She further cements her considerable abilities throughout this, her third release, with compelling performances of her own material, such as “I Feel It All” and her gorgeous duet with Eirik Glambek Bøe (Kings of Convenience) on “How my Heart Behaves.” Feist’s voice is both strong and sensual, and she employs both of those traits to great effect on the pounding, propulsive “My Moon, My Man” and amidst her sighing vocals on the seductive "Honey Honey." The Reminder also features some superlative collaborative work, notably “Limit to your Love,” which Feist wrote with Jason Charles Beck and “1 2 3 4,” which she wrote with Australia’s Sally Seltmann. With fellow-Canadian Ron Sexsmith, she produces “Brandy Alexander,” which begins as a simple pretty tune, but eventually dissolves into gorgeous twinkling vocal fragments. - Robert Stribley

http://www.listentofeist.com

This review was originally published in Skyscraper Magazine, Issue 25 (Summer 2007)

Impeach Is Not a Dirty Word

The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism.

In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

- Umberto Eco

There was a time when I thought the idea of impeaching Bush was a little radical. After all, we get the government we deserve. But now that it's clear that his administration is likely the most inept and deceptive one we've had in my lifetime, I'll happily acquiesce to the idea. Forgetting about the war in Iraq, just within the last couple of weeks:

• Former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona describes how he was asked to ignore science in order to propagate a political agenda:

  "The administration, Dr. Carmona said, would not allow him to speak or issue reports about stem cells, emergency contraception, sex education, or prison, mental and global health issues. Top officials delayed for years and tried to 'water down' a landmark report on secondhand smoke, he said. Released last year, the report concluded that even brief exposure to cigarette smoke could cause immediate harm.

  Dr. Carmona said he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches. He also said he was asked to make speeches to support Republican political candidates and to attend political briefings.

  And administration officials even discouraged him from attending the Special Olympics because, he said, of that charitable organization’s longtime ties to a 'prominent family' that he refused to name.

  'I was specifically told by a senior person, "Why would you want to help those people?"' Dr. Carmona said.

  The Special Olympics is one of the nation’s premier charitable organizations to benefit disabled people, and the Kennedys have long been deeply involved in it."

  All indignant emphasis mine.

• Bush commutes the sentence of a crony, Scooter Libby, who may have implicated people further up the food chain in his administration.


• Bush exerts executive privilege, telling Sara Taylor she need not testify openly before Congress on matters, which might also implicate his administration. (What do you have to hide, W?)
  


• Bush tells Harriet Miers not to show up for questioning before Congress, an action which may lead to contempt charges against Miers. (Keeping in mind that neither Taylor nor Miers even work for Bush any more.)
  
  

Conservatives don't like you to throw the "f" word (not to mention the "d" word) around, and, sure it does sound a little intemperate, but these four recent actions being just part of a long litany of similar action under this administration, doesn't the term "Ur-fascism" begin to apply?

If I sound a little obstreperous at this point, please consider giving Umberto Eco's "14 Ways of Looking at a Brown Shirt" a read. His short piece ends thusly:

Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier for us if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, "I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to parade again in the Italian squares." Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances — every day, in every part of the world. Franklin Roosevelt's words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling: "If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land." Freedom and liberation are an unending task.

Manhattanhenge

Alas, I will miss Manhattanhenge tonight, as I will be in Brooklyn (seeing David Cross though!), and I'm not aware of any Brooklynhenge. Too bad, since the view from right outside our office would likely be fantastic. Tonight at 8:27.

Elbow - Grace Under Pressure

When I first heard Elbow's debut disk Asleep in the Back, I quickly discovered another favorite band to add to list that already included several British bands. This video shows Elbow on the road and in the studio as they perform "Grace Under Pressure," a song which sounds a lot like a hymn, but ends with a punch if you listen carefully. Lead singer Guy Garvey often sounds like Peter Gabriel and he has song-writing chops to match.