A Grand Illusion

Wayne Studer, Ph.D, hosts an invaluable site on all things Pet Shop Boys. Besides a host of fascinating lists detailing all kinds of Neil Tennant-Chris Lowe arcana, there’s a serious analysis on 10 things the PSB did to kill their American popularity (they scored a number-one hit and four Top 10 followups before disappearing completely from the Top 40 after 1988). I particularly love Reason #3: Neil Tennant yawning on the cover of 1987’s Actually:

3. To summarize, Americans don’t like it when their stars yawn. At least not unless they’re not yawning at something that they themselves would think is boring or “uncool.” They especially don’t like them yawning, it would appear, directly in their faces, perhaps even at them. Chris’s odd expression—halfway between a vacant blank and a scowl—didn’t help matters, either. They’re even wearing tuxedos. Rock stars do not wear tuxedos, unless they’re getting an award from the President, and not always then. “Just what are these guys about, anyway?”

My review of the wonderful new Amy Rigby album (curious to know what Matos, a Rigby fan, thinks); and here’s my take on the marvelous new Alicia Keys song, which no one on the Singles Going Steady staff liked much because they’re ugly and stupid:

Unbreakable” is the track in which Alicia Keys finally earns those premature raves. The production’s a killer – vamping electric piano, icy muted trumpets, subterranean bass, and live (!) drums – but Ms Keys is the star. Reining in the melismatic affectations which had suggested she believed all those reviews comparing her to Dionne Warwick or something, Keys shows a relaxed command of the vernacular (dig how she sassily enunciates “technical difficulties” without technical difficulties) worthy of early ‘70s Aretha: the Aretha of “Rock Steady” and “Daydreaming.” Embodying a black middle-class dream that has room for Ike and Tina and Oprah and Steadman, she’s human enough to yield to temptation and wise enough to work it out.

More reports of detainee abuse. This one comes from Captain Ian Fishback, who describes abuses by soldiers in the 82nd Airborne Division. These include: beatings of Iraqi prisoners, exposing them to extremes of hot and cold, more delightful stacking of prisoners in human pyramids, and depriving them of sleep at Camp Mercury near Falluja. It gets better:

Captain Fishback, speaking publicly on the matter for first time, said the investigators who have questioned him in the past 10 days seemed to be less interested in individuals he identified in his chain of command who allegedly committed the abuses.

“I’m convinced this is going in a direction that’s not consistent with why we came forward,” Captain Fishback said in a telephone interview from Fort Bragg, N.C., where he is going through Army Special Forces training. “We came forward because of the larger issue that prisoner abuse is systemic in the Army. I’m concerned this will take a new twist, and they’ll try to scapegoat some of the younger soldiers. This is a leadership problem.”

Fishback has sent a letter to Senators John Warner and John McCain, the two senior Republicans on the Armed Services Committee. Now will the Honorable Bill O’Reilly pipe down about how the ACLU aids and abetts terrorists?

DeLay is finally indicted:

A Travis County grand jury today indicted U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay on one count of criminal conspiracy, prompting the Sugar Land Republican to give up his leadership post in Congress.

“I have notified (House Speaker Dennis Hastert) that I will temporarily step aside from my position as majority leader pursuant to rules of the House Republican Conference and the actions of the Travis County District Attorney today,” DeLay said in a statement.

The charge, a state jail felony punishable by up to two years incarceration, stems from his role with his political committee, Texans for a Republican Majority, a now-defunct organization that already had been indicted on charges of illegally using corporate money during the 2002 legislative elections.

This is why I love my friend Thomas. The bastard bought and reviewed the Barbra Streisand-Barry Gibb album Guilty Pleasures. And now that he’s done both, it means I’m absolved from doing either.

And so do faith-loving hostages:

Ashley Smith, the woman who says she persuaded suspected courthouse gunman Brian Nichols to release her by talking about her faith, discloses in a new book that
she gave him methamphetamine during the hostage ordeal.

Smith did not share that detail with authorities at the time. But investigators said she came clean about the drugs when they interviewed her months later. They said they have no plans to charge her with drug possession.

In her book, “Unlikely Angel,” released Tuesday, Smith says Nichols had her bound on her bed with masking tape and an extension cord. She says he asked for marijuana, but she did not have any, and she dug into her illegal stash of crystal meth instead.

Smith, a 27-year-old widowed mother who gained widespread praise for her level-headedness, says the seven-hour hostage ordeal in March led to the realization that she was a drug addict, and she says she has not used drugs since the night before she was taken captive.

In spite of my genuine encouragement of dissent, I’m churlish enough to feel vindicated when people agree with me. In this case it’s Robert Christgau in his latest Consumer Guide, who loves the new Amy Rigby and especially Stones albums as much as I do.

I know where my vote is going:

Originally posted at The Great Curve.

I hate the Kennedys. It’s got a lot to do with hagiography like this, which court pages like Theodore Sorenson and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. served to a suppliant press and a public willing to believe in golden gods. This review of JFK nephew Christopher Lawford does perform an essential task: revealing that the Kennedy clan/junta is the house of Atreus and Thebes, with Hamlet, King Lear, and Hotspur all rolled int one:

Their legacy still means something, even now, after all the humiliations and conservative counterassaults. They were not really even a dynasty, like the Bushes – their enemies made short work of that ambition. But at least for those of us in blue-precinct America, the Kennedy name is a distant trumpet that still sounds out the best of what our country stands for. When white-maned Teddy again takes the lead in confronting a Manchurian Supreme Court nominee, when Caroline Kennedy invokes her father’s legacy in her books, when Bobby Jr. rallies a crowd to stand up against the poisonous pillaging of corporate polluters, we’re reminded once more of why principled progressive leadership matters.

If you need quick Pepto-Bismol, consult Gore Vidal’s “The Holy Family” (found in his superb collection United States: Essays: 1952-1992) and Seymour Hersh’s The Dark Side of Camelot.

David Greenberg explains why hippies must die. Also: why Bob Dylan is smarter — and dumber — than hippies.

From a review of Martin Scorsese’s new documentary, Bob Dylan – No Direction Home:

The only analogy that makes the slightest sense to me, is William Shakespeare. In the recent book, Will in the World , by Stephen Greenblatt, Greenblatt tries to explain how a rural boy from Lancashire, son of a drunken glove-maker, without a literary education or the sophistication of the court, could go to London and become the world’s greatest playwright within a couple of years. Scorsese is doing the same thing for Dylan. Again, there’s just no rational explanation. Shakespeare too, borrowed from the tradition plots, bits of text, lines that he heard in the street, other playwright’s characters. He consumed the tradition and then took it to a higher place of integration, and that’s what Bob Dylan did too.

Neil Gaiman in a recent Time Magazine interview:

I always loved, most of all with doing comics, the fact that I knew I was in the gutter. I kind of miss that, even these days, whenever people come up and inform me, oh, you do graphic novels. No. I wrote comic books, for heaven’s sake. They’re creepy and I was down in the gutter and you despised me.

I miss the old days when people who were into comic books were gutterfolk and creeps. With the advent of much Hollywood sound and fury, comics have attained a modicum, albeit minor, of respectability. It’s just not the same, anymore…

It’s been a good year. Inspired by a drunken request this weekend, here they are, thus far, in no order, the best albums and singles of 2005. I could easily double the singles count, btw:

ALBUMS:

LCD Soundsystem – s/t
M.I.A. – Arular
The Hold Steady – Separation Sunday
The Go-Betweens – Oceans Apart
50 Cent – The Massacre
The Mountain Goats – The Sunset Tree
The Rolling Stones – A Bigger Bang
Bloc Party – Silent Alarm
The New Pornographers – Twin Cinema
Kanye West – Late Registration

SINGLES:

Snoop feat Justin Timberlake, “Signs”
The Killers, “Mr Brightside” (Jacques Lu Cont remix)
LCD Soundsystem, “Daft Punk is Playing in My House”
Kelly Osbourne, “One Word”
Gwen Stefani, “Hollaback Girl”
New Order, “Waiting for the Sirens’ Call”
Annie, “Heartbeat”
Interpol, “Evil”
The Killers, “All The Things I’ve Done For You”
50 Cent, “Just a Lil Bit”
Kelly Clarkson, “Since U Been Gone”
Mariah Carey, “We Belong Together”

Everyone should check out the blog of my lovely girlfriend–or fiancée as she continues to demand I refer to her–Phoebe Flowers.

During a jubilant militant get-together, explosives being demonstrated actually went off, killing three Hamas members. Hamas, of course, blames it on Israel.

“This is a massacre, a real carnage and we will avenge it,” Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokesman for the militant faction, said while rejecting claims by the Palestinian Authority officials who called it a “working accident.” “I saw the missiles with my two own eyes and thousands of people saw these missiles coming,” he said, adding “how come some PA officials deny and acquit Zionist enemy of the crime”.

Sadly, the reality is that if Israel was behind this, far more than three Hamas members would be dead. And if Isreal, was quick to point out that if this is used to attack them, then Hamas would see a real Israeli attack. Oy vey.