A Grand Illusion

Maybe soon!

So these movies I’ve seen:
Woody Allen’s “Scoop.” Pleasant trifle.
He’s not dead and he likes Scarlet Johannson’s boobies, but there’s nothing to it. Unlike “MatchPoint”, there’s no new energy to it. “A Scanner Darkly”. The book is even darker. But in whichever psyched-out state he is, Philip K. Dick has to be enjoying the resurgence of his vision. “Clerks II” was a fitting sequel. Pillow Pants made me laugh. You read the lengthier “Miami Vice” review. And is Castro dying? This is one of the crazy weekends.

Listening to Escort’s “Starlight” for the first time after spending the weekend acquainting myself with Journey Into Paradise: The Larry Levan Story forced me to confront an adamantine truth: there can never be enough tracks with rhythm guitar scratchin’ and squiggle-synths, with unforgettably anonymous vocalists atop for poignancy. Andy K’s right: “The track ends up somewhere between “First Time Around” and “Here’s to You” (Basement Jaxx’s upcoming Crazy Itch Radio, the only album of theirs to which I’ve warmed sufficiently, is perhaps the culmination of this “organic-synthetic thing,” accelerated and reconstituted into a spectacle of polyurethane frenzy).

The Levan comp — as of now my album of the year — features inexhaustible variations on the recipe cited above. I’m beginning to love this era of dance music: the demise of disco as an American commerical force caused its creators to return to the clubs, unchastened and hungry for new influences. In this context a classic like Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” (especially when it shares disc space with Five Special’s “Why Leave Us Alone,” whose synth-bass hook Eno, Byrne, Jerry Harrison, et al appropriated wholesale) is kin to disco raveups of quasi-gospel intensity like crucial tracks by Chaka Khan and Womack & Womack. Obscurities (well, to me) like David Joseph’s “You Can’t Hide (Your Love From Me)” meld Imagination and Tom Tom Club into a permutation that’s subdued but no less tinged with hysteria; and when Yaz’s “Situation” makes an appearance it represents a evolution, not a termination.

Andrew Sullivan, who’s been giggling all day over the Mel Gibson imbroglio, records this gem by David Frum. Podheretz, Lopez, Steyn, and the rest of NROWorld should write jokes for Stephen Colbert.

So, does the United States support an immediate cease-fire? Nah.

(Thanks, Matos)

Name 5-10 wistful/bittersweet songs that come to mind:

Pet Shop Boys, “The End of the World”
The Pretenders, “Hymn to Her”
Stevie Wonder, “All in Love is Fair”
Frank Sinatra, “What’s New?”
Mary J. Blige, “Not Gon’ Cry”

The 4 Best Songs Ever Written:

“Here Comes The Sun”
“When U Were Mine”
“Go Your Own Way”
“I Believe”

3 Current Favorites Songs:

Justin Timberlake, “SexyBack”
Sonic Youth, “Pink Stream”
Scritti Politti, “Robin Hood”

Classic Early Evening Drinking Music:
Any track off DJ Shadow’s The Private Press

3 All Time Faves That Never Get Old To You:

R.E.M., “Losing My Religion”
Swing Out Sister, “Breakout”
Eurythmics, “Here Comes the Rain Again”

Song You Want To Play At Your Wedding:
Roxy Music, “To Turn You On”

Song You Want to Play At Your Funeral:
The Velvet Underground, “I’m Set Free”

4 Records You Really Dug from 2005:

The Hold Steady, Separation Sunday
The Go-Betweens, Oceans Apart
M.I.A., Arular
Spoon, Gimme Fiction

4 Favorite Records From This Year So Far:

Ghostface Killah, Fishscale
Basement Jaxx, Crazy Itch Radio
Sonic Youth, Rather Ripped
Journey Into Paradise: The Larry Levan Story

5 Good Angry Songs:

Bob Dylan, “Dirge”
Public Image Ltd, “Rise”
Marvin Gaye, “I’ll Be Doggone”
The Go-Betweens, “Someone Else’s Wife”
Outkast, “Rooster”

One of Your Favorite Lyrics:
“She’s a vegetarian except when it comes to sex” — ABC, “Unzipped”

5 Cover Songs Arguably Better Than the Original:

Tina Turner, “Let’s Stay Together”
Paul McCartney, “No Other Baby”
Dolly Parton, “Save the Last Dance For Me”
Bryan Ferry, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”
The Raincoats, “Lola”

Ironic Song to Brutally Murder Someone to in a movie:
John Lennon, “Clean-up Time”

Great Dance Song You Maybe Never Realized Was a Great Dance song Back in the Day:

Michael Jackson, “Billie Jean”

Good Albums To Workout To:
Donna Summer’s Gold

Good Album to Clean The House To:
Eric B & Rakim, Follow The Leader

Good Dining Music:
Brian Eno-John Cale, Wrong Way Up

A Good Album To Have Sex To:
PJ Harvey, Is This Desire?

A Good Album To Put You In the Mood (that is Not Sade, Marvin Gaye or Barry White):
Wowee Zowee

Good Album To Sleep To:
Brian Eno, Discreet Music

5 Good Rock Songs That You Can Dance To:

The Beatles, “A Hard Day’s Night”
The Velvet Underground, “Sister Ray”
Garbage, “Stupid Girl”
Gang of Four, “Damaged Goods”
The Breeders, “Cannonball”

4 Good Dance Songs (any kind):

Taana Gardner, “Heartbeat”
New Order, “Perfect Kiss (12″ extended mix)
Madonna, “Into the Groove”
Underworld, “Born Slippy”"

Songs That Are Too Damn Sad:

Joy Division, “Decades”
Neil Young, “Ambulance Blues”
Bob Dylan, “Buckets of Rain”
Prince, “Sometimes It Snows in April”
Fleetwood Mac, “Sara”
George Jones, “The Door”

4 Happy, Life Affirming Songs:

Pet Shop Boys, “I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing”
Bjork, “Violently Happy”
De La Soul, “Ego Trippin’”
The New Pornographers, “Use It”

5 Great Love Songs:

The Beatles, “All I Gotta Do”
Daryl Hall & John Oates, “One On One”
Psychedelic Furs, “The Ghost in You”
The Notorious BIG, “One More Chance”
Kate Bush, “Hounds of Love”

An Album Full of Tenderness:
Al Green, Call Me

Song To Cheer Up A Friend:
Lou Reed, “Turn To Me”

Song To An Ex That Isn’t Meanspirited:
Pavement, “Type Slowly”

Song To An Ex That Is Kinda Meanspirited:
Bob Dylan, “Emotionally Yours”

Song to Listen to While in The Country Looking at Stars:
Air, “Cherry Blossom Girl”

Song to lose your Mind to:
Utah Saints, “Something Good”

Song To Cry In Your Pillow to:
Fleetwood Mac, “Brown Eyes”

Songs That Make You Feel Amped and Inspired:
The Jesus & Mary Chain, “Happy When It Rains”

Great Semi-Obscure B-side:
The Go-Betweens, “Casanova’s Last Words”

Song That Makes You Miss Your Mom:
Carole King, “I Feel The Earth Move”

Tough Break-Up Songs:
The Mountain Goats, “First Few Desperate Hours”

So Happy It Makes You Wanna Skip:
Saint Etienne, “Who Do You Think You Are?”

Feel No Shame: Great Current Pop Songs:
Nelly Furtado feat. Timberland, “Promiscuous”
Madonna, “Jump”
Gnarls Barkley, “Crazy”

Album No One Would Expect You To Love:
most of Jay-Z’s catalogue

Album No One Would Expect You To Dislike:
Pet Shop Boys’ Release

Emo Album You Actually Like:
Does Jenny Lewis count?

Good, But Overrated Cause Of Indie Revisionism:
I support any revisionism in spirit.

5 Desert Island Discs off the top of your head (30 sec clock):
Alexander O’Neal, Hearsay
New Order, Technique
R.E.M., Murmur
Prince, Sign ‘O’ The Times,
Rosanne Cash, King’s Record Shop

3 Contemporary Artists That Were Your Faves 10 Years Ago:
Sonic Youth, Sleater Kinney, Pulp

Fave Electronic Record You Own:
Endtroducing…

Fave Hip-Hop Record You Own:
A Tribe Called Quest, The Low End Theory

Hip-Hop Song You Know All the Lyrics Too:
oh, c’mon

Random Album You Loved In High School But Are Afraid To Admit It:
Shame is a useless emotion.

Album You May Have Listened To More In Highschool than Any Other Album:
Electronic, Electronic

If You Could Enter A Wrestling Ring to a Song It Would Be:
Pat Benatar, “Invincible”

Album To Clear A Room With:
Velvet Underground, White Light, White Heat

The very talented Emily Schmall, third blonde from left, had a story on the Herald’s front page today. The subject, corsets. Sadly, the story did not include a photo of Emily in one.

Before Miami Beach embraced topless sunbathing and thongs, it was a quaint Southern town where no woman dared leave home without her girdle.

It was in this setting in 1959 that Fay Potter opened a corset shop on Lincoln Road.

Whether for a torsolette, garters or stockings, Miami natives and snowbirds alike flocked to Fay Potter Underfashions to be ”fit like a queen,” according to an advertisement in The Miami Herald at the time.

The art of a corsetiere was in customizing a corset to the inward slope of a hip, the swell of the breast, and Fay Potter was nationally renowned for her art.

Now I can’t get the phrase “the swell of the breast” off my mind.

Featuring the best use of digital photography I’ve yet seen in a blockbuster, Miami Vice does for undercover vice cops what United 93 did for 9-11: its purported realism dessicates the material. Feature films aren’t documentaries. Art is transformative; it’s certainly not mimetic.

Writer/director Michael Mann’s film is a model of intelligent pulp; and pulp it remains. Its virtues are considerable: a couple of killer sequences (one in a trailer park will become a model of its kind) guarantee that this will remain the most action film of the year. Because it plunges us right into the narrative the film forces the audience to work; a lot of the dialogue is cop jargon and shorthand. The unsentimental conclusion is just right. You’d have to go back to John Ford and Antonioni to find another director so adept at finding topographic correlatives for his characters’ isolation (geography, however, stumps him: I couldn’t distinguish between Cuba, Jamaica, Columbia, and the Port of Miami). Mann doesn’t just eroticize locations: he teases ambiguities out of them that his actors often can’t project.

What about those actors? The only thing Miami Vice has in common with the ’80s show is its pair of star cops, one black, one white, with the splendid names of Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs. Mann dispenses with the show’s animated pastel-hued sleaze. He replaces Don Johnson’s wiseacre sneer — a TV recreation of how you’d imagine Glenn Frey would flirt with a waitress on the Sunset Strip — with the glowering unshorn visage of Colin Farrell, who whether called upon to act feral or suggest various shades of lust is as expressive as a can of asparagus spears. As for the mullet, facial hair, and satin jackets, who the fuck is he kidding? He ain’t gettin’ laid in Miami dressed like a $70 pimp. The increasingly interesting Jamie Foxx, allowed to mouth the film’s scant crumbly wisecracks, can barely look at his co-star (David Denby: “He keeps staring at Farrell as if he wanted more out of him and were having trouble getting it”). A brief scene in the film’s first third (in which he says “You don’t need to go home” with perfectly modulated rue) and several scattered bits allow Foxx the cast’s only opportunity to suggest that police work is dangerous when it isn’t ridiculous (did it ever occur to Mann, in thrall to his revisionist frenzy, to cast Jamie Foxx as Crockett? The mind recoils at the squandered opportunity). Gong Li, with whom Farrell has zero chemistry, is insolent and challenging; when she sizes Farrell up you’ve rarely seen such withering contempt. A shame Mann doesn’t know what to do with her after the second act; but you know Mann is clueless when he puts Gong’s Isabel and Crockett on a speedboat to Havana for mojitos and shower-fucking (if it was that easy to get to Cuba, then I invite the entire AGI team to meet me at Dinner Key tomorrow morning). The wonderful Justin Theroux (the besieged director in Mulholland Drive and the sadomasochist in one season of “Six Feet Under”) is in there somewhere, but you need bifocals to see him.

This is the film’s most damning feature: Mann is a director so enraptured by his own fetishes that he disregards what to him are ancillary concerns. Like: repartee! Women who aren’t Lauren Bacall-Joanne Dru knockoffs! Decent soundtracks! He still hasn’t topped The Last of the Mohicans and The Insider in my book, but for all his pomposity I urge him to keep trying. Mann’s a perplexing cat, alright. He’s got the pulse on a classic American theme: populating his oeuvre with characters consumed by their jobs (is there another director to whom ringing cellphones were more important?). He’s great when he’s operatic (The Insider) or rewriting source material (Mohicans).

As for Mr. Farrell, the prognosis is grim.

So yesterday some murderous psycho walked into a Seattle Jewish center and killed one person and shot another five, including a pregnant women. CNN reported he was an American of Palestinian descent. This was the Seattle PI’s headline, “I am a Muslim American, angry at Israel.” The shooting is rightfully being treated as a hate crime. Here’s some of the PI story:

On the eve of the Jewish Sabbath, a 31-year-old man claiming he was upset about “what was going on in Israel” opened fire at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle building, killing one person and wounding five women, one of them pregnant.

Three of the women were in critical condition Friday night with gunshot wounds to the stomach.

The gunman, brandishing a large-caliber semi-automatic pistol, forced his way through the security door at the federation, on Third Avenue downtown, after an employee had punched in her security code.

“He said, ‘I am a Muslim American, angry at Israel,’ before opening fire on everyone,” said Marla Meislin-Dietrich, a database coordinator for the center. “He was randomly shooting at everyone.”

While there’s little doubt that this guy’s actions were prompted by abstract outrage rather than an actual policy, it still illustrates the danger in equating Jewish people everywhere with the state of Israel—the single biggest, but not the only, purveyor of this irresponsibility. Here’s Howard Dean at it, and notice who’s reporting it. (Apropos, Peter Beinart had a pretty good editorial about the Democrats’ pandering in trying to get to the right of Bush in the Washington Post yesterday.)

US Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean called Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki an “anti-Semite” on Wednesday for failing to denounce Hizbullah for its attacks against Israel.

“The Iraqi prime minister is an anti-Semite,” the Democratic leader told a gathering of business leaders in Florida. “We don’t need to spend 200 and 300 and $500 billion bringing democracy to Iraq to turn it over to people who believe that Israel doesn’t have a right to defend itself and who refuse to condemn Hizbullah.”

You know if our biggest problem in Iraq was that its prime minister turned out to be an anti-Semite, that whole adventure wouldn’t have been so much of a mess. When people start labeling criticism of Israel, or worse lack of criticism for its enemies, as anti-Semitism not only does it annul any chance for a real debate about the region, but it also puts Jews in danger of attacks from fanatics, like the maniac in Seattle. Tony Judt touches on this point, and many others, in this brilliant essay in Hareetz, which comes via Bitch Ph.D.

In short: Israel, in the world’s eyes, is a normal state, but one behaving in abnormal ways. It is in control of its fate, but the victims are someone else. It is strong, very strong, but its behavior is making everyone else vulnerable. And so, shorn of all other justifications for its behavior, Israel and its supporters today fall back with increasing shrillness upon the oldest claim of all: Israel is a Jewish state and that is why people criticize it. This – the charge that criticism of Israel is implicitly anti-Semitic – is regarded in Israel and the United States as Israel’s trump card. If it has been played more insistently and aggressively in recent years, that is because it is now the only card left.

The habit of tarring any foreign criticism with the brush of anti-Semitism is deeply engrained in Israeli political instincts: Ariel Sharon used it with characteristic excess but he was only the latest in a long line of Israeli leaders to exploit the claim. David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir did no different. But Jews outside of Israel pay a high price for this tactic. Not only does it inhibit their own criticisms of Israel for fear of appearing to associate with bad company, but it encourages others to look upon Jews everywhere as de facto collaborators in Israel’s misbehavior. When Israel breaks international law in the occupied territories, when Israel publicly humiliates the subject populations whose land it has seized – but then responds to its critics with loud cries of “anti-Semitism” – it is in effect saying that these acts are not Israeli acts, they are Jewish acts: The occupation is not an Israeli occupation, it is a Jewish occupation, and if you don’t like these things it is because you don’t like Jews.

In many parts of the world this is in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling assertion: Israel’s reckless behavior and insistent identification of all criticism with anti-Semitism is now the leading source of anti-Jewish sentiment in Western Europe and much of Asia. But the traditional corollary – if anti-Jewish feeling is linked to dislike of Israel then right-thinking people should rush to Israel’s defense – no longer applies. Instead, the ironies of the Zionist dream have come full circle: For tens of millions of people in the world today, Israel is indeed the state of all the Jews. And thus, reasonably enough, many observers believe that one way to take the sting out of rising anti-Semitism in the suburbs of Paris or the streets of Jakarta would be for Israel to give the Palestinians back their land.

The reality is that Israel’s political culture, just like America’s after 9/11, is one that thrives on the fear of its citizens and a cult of victimhood. After all, the more Jews that are attacked abroad, the better Israel’s raison d’être starts to look.

Extremely light blogging today, as you may have already noticed. But I promise this will be a heavily blogged weekend.

I did want to quickly point out AGI’s latest achievements. One of Alfred’s posts was featured on the Village Voice’s music blog page. And yesterday Maud Newton had this very nice post about the site.

With their customary intelligence and verve, the Pet Shop Boys prove that middle-age needn’t be a deceleration, but a period when half a lifetime’s knowledge deepens one’s responses to calamity. The metaphors become more elaborate, the irony rueful; it’s too easy for the aged to lapse into a kind of emotional fascism. When all else fails there’s always the dance floor.

If anyone’s interested in going to their show in October, let me know.

Prime Minister Fouad Siniora’s Merchant of Venice moment:

“Is the value of human life less in Lebanon than that of citizens elsewhere?” he asked. “Are we children of a lesser god? Is an Israeli teardrop worth more than a drop of Lebanese blood?”

You really have to wonder if he was aware of the irony, and if he was, then I admire him even more.

Or as Wonkette would have it “Coulter comes out against gay Clinton marriage. ” Yes, she thinks Bill Clinton is gay.

Ms. COULTER: No. I think anyone with that level of promiscuity where, you know, you — I mean, he didn’t know Monica’s name until their sixth sexual encounter. There is something that is — that is of the bathhouse about that.

Barney Frank inches closer to his ultimate sexual fantasy.

So I’m away for two days and the conflict escalates, big surprise there. The meeting in Rome proved to be a fool’s errand, with the entire world as the fool thinking the rising civilian casualties could be enough for the United States to support an immediate cease-fire.

This is how the Finnish foreign minister put it:

“We agreed upon what we could agree upon, but that does not change the fact that the European Union has called for an immediate cessation of hostilities” while the United States has not.

And this is what Condoleezza Rice said, essentially the same thing she’s been saying since this thing started:

“I have made very clear that I seek urgently to get an end to these hostilities, an end to this violence. We all want this urgently,” Rice said in the news conference. But, she added: “We have to be effective. It means that we have to have a plan that will actually create conditions in which we can have a cease-fire that will be sustainable.”

Look at the American position this way, they want more people to die now, so that other people don’t die later. Does that make sense to you?

From Reuters we have this about the four U.N. peacekeepers killed by Israel.

DUBLIN, July 26 (Reuters) – An Irish army officer in south Lebanon warned the Israeli military six times that their attacks in the area were putting the lives of U.N. observers at risk, Ireland’s Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday.

The strike on the peacekeers proves one of two things, either they were targeted by Israel, which is unlikely, or that Israel’s strikes are that haphazard and irresponsible, and if they can’t avoid killing unarmed U.N. personnel, then they certainly can’t avoid killing civilians.

That’s that then:

Even as the fighting continues and the civilian casualties mount in Lebanon, sentiment in Congress is overwhelmingly on Israel’s side. Last week, the House passed a resolution, 410 to 8, that went even beyond the Bush administration in supporting for Israel in its battle with Hezbollah militants.

A bid by the four House lawmakers of Lebanese descent to add language urging restraint against civilian targets was rejected in negotiations. The resolution’s only nod to those caught in the crossfire came in a recognition of “Israel’s longstanding commitment to minimizing civilian loss” and an expression of condolences – in the last sentence of a three-page document – “to all innocent victims of recent violence in Israel, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.”