Best of 2007

It's that time of the year again. So, without further ado, I present to you my favorite music from the past 12 months...

MY TOP 10 ALBUMS OF 2007:
1. Radiohead - In Rainbows
2. The Bird & the Bee - The Bird & the Bee
3. Blonde Redhead - 23
4. Tegan & Sara - The Con
5. Mark Ronson - Version
6. Brandi Carlile - The Story
7. Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
8. Underworld - Oblivion with Bells
9. Robert Plant & Alison Krauss - Raising Sand
10. James Morrison - Undiscovered

EXCELLENT, BUT INELIGBLE FOR MY TOP 10:

The Shins - Wincing the Night Away (leaked last year)

Lily Allen - Alright, Still (released via the UK last year)

Metric - Grow Up and Blow Away (originally recorded in 1999)

HONORABLE MENTIONS:
Stars - In Our Bedroom After the War
The Good, the Bad & the Queen - The Good, the Bad & the Queen

The Chemical Brothers - We Are the Night
Rilo Kiley - Under the Blacklight
The New Pornographers - Challengers
Battles - Mirrored
Field Music - Tones of Town

BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENTS:
Air - Pocket Symphony
Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
Smashing Pumpkins - Zeitgeist
Kaiser Chiefs - Yours Truly, Angry Mob
Modest Mouse - We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank
Bjork - Volta
The Go! Team - Proof of Youth

BEST LIVE SHOWS:
Smashing Pumpkins - The Fillmore (SF)
Arcade Fire - Greek Theatre (Hollywood)
John Mayer / Ben Folds - Hollywood Bowl
DMB / Steven Marley - Hollywood Bowl
Bird & the Bee - The Derby
Daft Punk - Greek Theatre (Berkeley)
Stars - The Orpheum

The Beatles Doing Stairway to Heaven...Almost

This blows me away. It’s apparently from an Australian parody show in the early 90s called "The Money or the Gun", and the Beatnix are an Aussie Beatles tribute band.

Happy & Healthy to You and Yours

Run, Don't Walk

If attacked by a gang of sword wielding samurai, would the world's fastest speed walker walk or run away? The Japanese, having solved all the world's other problems, are there to find out.


Would He Run? - Watch more free videos

One Bourbon Too Many

One of my favorite authors of all-time died this week. I had the immense fortune to see him speak in person a couple of times over the years, most recently just several months ago. Although clearly diminished, his mind was still one of the most colorful and engaging you could hope to encounter.

Here's The Economist with a fitting farewell:

Norman Mailer

Nov 15th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Norman Mailer, pugilist of American letters, died on November 10th, aged 84

IT WAS on the Dick Cavett show in 1971 that Mailer (always “Mailer” in his writings; “Mister” was needless polish and priming), three-tumblers drunk, angry, little eyes blue as a touchpaper, was needled by Gore Vidal into saying this:

In Hemingway's time there were great writers...Our time has been much more complicated and there hasn't been that many really extraordinary writers around, and I have presumed with all my extraordinary arrogance and loutishness and crudeness to step forth and say, “I'm going to be the champ until one of you knocks me off.” Well, fine, but, you know, they don't knock you off because they're too damned simply yellow, and they kick me in the nuts, and I don't like it.

He had only half got going, but then the commercial came in. Much more could have been said. How Mailer had written what George Orwell called the best-ever book about the second world war, “The Naked and the Dead”. How he had won a Pulitzer for “The Armies of the Night”, the story of the 1968 anti-war march on the Pentagon, and every other book prize going except the Nobel. How, despite the critical bile spewed over much of his fiction, he still had germinating in him the Great American Novel that would out-Tolstoy Tolstoy and out-Dickens Dickens. How he had invented, with a nod to Truman Capote, the non-fiction novel and the novelised news report, through both of which strolled his best character, Mailer, with his crinkly electrified hair and his maudlin writer's hang-ups, continually “in an intimate dialogue, a veritable dialectic with the swoops, spooks, starts, the masks and snarls, the calm lucid abilities of sin...his tonic, his jailer, his horse, his sword”.

Mailer was brave. That was his virtue of virtues. In the 1950s he disdained “the stench of fear that has come out of every pore of American life...a collective failure of nerve”. He smelled fear in the dark, rotting jungle mud where he had fought as a soldier in the Philippines, in the blood, shit and slobber of the Chicago stockyards, but also at Washington parties, among his own stupid bouts of tongue-tiedness and circumlocution, as “the hard gemlike flame of bourbon” burned through him. At such points he would be rescued by the wild man Mailer, a creature “who would have been admirable, except that he was an absolute egomaniac, a Beast”.

Gristle and gravel

He talked and wrote of fighting more than he did it. Short and stocky, he was liable to be upended pretty fast. But he boxed a bit, and proudly jogged once with Muhammad Ali until his breath gave out. Instinctively, he put up his fists. In 1957, in an essay called “The White Negro”, he recommended that white Americans should live like inner-city blacks, hip and cool as cats on the edge of violence, rather than fall into the deadness of post-war conformity.

The shock tactics sometimes misfired badly. He stuck a kitchen knife (or a pair of scissors, or a “three-inch dirty penknife”) into the neck of his second wife, the second of six, all of whom loved and forgave him as long as their alimony was paid. He acted as literary sponsor to a talented murderer, Jack Abbott, who murdered again when Mailer had helped to get him out of jail. He revelled in gross, boastful or mechanical descriptions of sex (“a hard punishing session with pulley weights, stationary bicycle and ten breath-seared laps round the track”), not least because this outraged the women's libbers with whom, in the 1970s, he was permanently at war. Once Mailer, with a sparkle in his eye that was maybe aggression, maybe fun, acting his usual part of the hollering Jewish leprechaun, proclaimed that all women should be locked in cages.

On form (as in “Miami and the Siege of Chicago”, about the 1968 political conventions, or “Of a Fire on the Moon”, about the first moon landing) he was a gloriously evocative, generous, sprawling writer, worthy of the scale of his country and his subjects. But Mailer dismissed these books as journalism, that ceaseless scavenging for “tidbits, gristle, gravel, garbage cans, charlotte russe, old rubber tyres, T-bone steaks” that went to feed “that old American goat, our newspapers”. Despite his founder-role on the radical Village Voice, he took little pride in that craft. The Great Novel was his quest: a quest that became weirder and more abstruse over time, taking him to Pharaoic Egypt and the corridors of the CIA and inserting Mailer (sometimes the very Son of God, sometimes the Devil) into the made-up lives of Jesus and Hitler.

By general consent, though not by Mailer's, his best book was “The Executioner's Song” of 1979. It won him his second Pulitzer. In it he told the story of Gary Gilmore, the first man to be executed after the ending of the moratorium on the death penalty, in sentences as spare and unadorned as the Utah desert in which it was set. The style was almost reminiscent of his great hero, Hemingway. Those short, declarative sentences, he wrote once, had a suicide's dread in their silences: dread that “at any instant, by any failure in magic, by a mean defeat, or by a moment of cowardice, Hemingway could be thrust back again into the agonising demands of his courage.” Mailer's short sentences carried a more pugnacious message: he was the champ, and would be until someone braver and better knocked him off.

Time's Up for Jack and Other Poor H'wood Blokes

Amid the ever-more-debilitating WGA strike (thousands should find themselves unemployed within the next few weeks), and news that audience favs such as '24' are being put on immediate hiatus, writer-producer Marshall Herskovitz chimes in with his take on the creative nose-dive that is television in the post-government regulation era of broadcasting:

Are the corporate suits ruining TV?

Network control and media consolidation are wringing the creativity out of entertainment.

By Marshall Herskovitz
November 7, 2007
LA Times

Marshall Herskovitz is a TV and movie producer whose credits include "Blood Diamond," "thirtysomething" and the upcoming "quarterlife." He is president of the Producers Guild of America (which is not affiliated with the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers, currently being struck by the Writers Guild of America).

After 20 years and five series, including "thirtysomething" and "My So-Called Life," my partner, Ed Zwick, and I have -- for the time being at least -- stopped producing television programs.

It's not personal. I count as friends many of the executives who work at the networks. We had a deal at one network, ABC, for all of those 20 years, and, in spite of many regime changes, we were always treated with great respect. This is not about how we were treated but rather something much larger: How a confluence of government policy and corporate strategy is literally poisoning the TV business.

It started in 1995 when the Federal Communications Commission abolished its long-standing "finsyn" rules (that's financial interest and syndication, for those unfamiliar with the term), allowing networks for the first time to own the programs they broadcast. Before that, under classic antitrust definitions, the networks had been confined to the role of broadcaster, paying a license fee to production companies for the right to broadcast programs just two times. The production companies owned all subsequent rights. In the mid-1990s there were 40 independent production companies making television shows. If a particular network didn't like a show -- as famously happened with "The Cosby Show" many years ago -- the production company could take it to another network.

But not after 1995. The abolition of the old rules set in motion an ineluctable process, one that has negatively affected every creative person I know in television. Today there are zero independent production companies making scripted television. They were all forced out of business by the networks' insistence -- following the FCC's fin-syn ruling -- on owning part or all of every program they broadcast.

The most profound change resulting from that ruling is the way networks go about the business of creating programming. Networks today exert a level of creative control unprecedented in the history of the medium. The stories my friends tell me would make me laugh if the situation weren't so self-defeating. Network executives routinely tell producers to change the color of the walls on sets; routinely decide on the proper wardrobe for actors; routinely have "tone" meetings with directors on upcoming pilots; routinely give notes on every page of a script. (When we did "thirtysomething" in the late '80s, we never received network notes.) And by the way, they have every right to do these things. As owners, they have a responsibility to satisfy themselves that their product is competitive and successful.

The problem, of course, is that these executives often have little background or qualification for making creative decisions. They are guided by market research and -- they want to believe -- a learned intuition about what the public wants. This season's new shows have been a good indicator of how successful that strategy is: Even before the current writer's strike, virtually every new show was struggling.

But the changes have gone further. Over the last few years -- during a time when network profits have been increasing -- salaries and profit participation for the writer-producers who create the shows have been slashed. Fees were cut by one-third to one-half, and profit participation in many cases was effectively eliminated. It's a curious (and peculiarly American) fact that many of the great artistic talents in the history of film and TV also have been entrepreneurs: Chaplin, Capra, Serling, Pakula, Lucas, Spielberg -- the list goes on. For reasons that are probably more psychological than anything else, creative and financial independence seem to go hand in hand.

Yet what we have now is a complete absence of either in the world of television. Your TV may receive 200 channels, but virtually every one of them is owned by one of six big companies -- NBC Universal, Disney, Time Warner, Viacom/Paramount, Sony and News Corp. And each channel has a brand identity dictated by those companies to which each program must adhere. Producers are now employees, not creators. If you were foolish enough to independently produce a TV pilot today, when you took it to the network, you would give up at least half of your ownership and all of your control, even though the network wouldn't pay any more than it used to pay as that old license fee.

Is there significance to this, outside the narrow concerns of Hollywood and the lost earning power of producers? I think so. Besides any esoteric discussion of the value of storytelling in a culture -- which I believe is immense -- this trend is part of a larger problem caused by the FCC in all areas of media. The relaxation of the Fairness Doctrine (which required the networks to present the news in a balanced way), the lapse of any oversight of networks' civic responsibility, the commoditization of network news -- these are all parts of a troubling move toward the aggregation of control of information in an ever-shrinking number of entities.

Our founding fathers could not have foreseen that freedom of the press might eventually be threatened just as much by media consolidation as by government. And if you doubt that's happening, just watch Bill Moyers' recent expose on the networks' passive collusion with government in selling the Iraq war.

Because the business of television has become an exclusive club, closed to new members, some producers are turning to the Internet to have a voice. And, of course, the Big Six are doing everything they can to own and control that as well. Already, it's impossible to make an "overall deal" -- the time-honored arrangement in which producers are kept on retainer to develop shows for a particular network -- without agreeing to be exclusive to the network on the Internet as well as television. The logic of this defies all laws of economics; producers pledge fealty to networks because they (the producers) don't have the millions it takes to shoot, distribute and broadcast their own programs on television. Producing for the Internet, on the other hand, costs as little as $30,000 an hour, and "broadcasting" costs much less. Virtually anyone can do it.

So what value do the networks provide that makes it worthwhile for producers to agree to that exclusivity? You tell me, because I can't figure it out. Less polite folks might call it extortion.

Zwick and I have joined that migration to the Internet. We've created a project called "quarterlife" -- a series and a social network -- that we own and control, and we had to give up our TV deal in order to do it. The series will premiere Sunday on MySpace and then on our site, quarterlife.com, the next night. We've worked very hard, and spent a great deal of our own money, to make it as good as anything we've ever done on television. And we've gotten calls from every guild and virtually every producer we know, all of whom are curious to see if this little experiment can succeed. Because if it does, it will prove that there's a way to independently produce, finance and distribute ambitious content on the Internet. And if we can do it, others can do it. To be sure, there's every possibility this series will end up on television after it's established on the Internet, but only if we still own it and control it creatively, which would make it unique in today's landscape.

The problems of network ownership and creative control are not directly at issue in the current strike by the Writers Guild of America. What's at stake is how writers will be compensated, given the control everyone assumes the big companies will exert over new methods of delivery.

But make no mistake -- deep resentment in the entire creative community over the absolute power now wielded by these companies is the fuel that feeds the strike. The public is also fed up, turning out in droves and sending millions of e-mails whenever the FCC holds hearings on the subject. And yet the large corporations move forward, seemingly unaware that they are strangling the creative engine that might save them.

Within five years there won't be a significant distinction between TV and broadband. As of now, the Internet is just too big for any company to get its hands around, and that's good for all of us. If the large companies -- and the FCC -- cannot come to comprehend the paradox that too much control is destructive to their own ends, they may bring about their own downfall, losing their audience and their workers at the same time. Like carriage makers at the dawn of the auto age.

Wakey Wakey, Younglings

Generation Q

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Op-Ed Columnist

October 10, 2007

NY Times

I just spent the past week visiting several colleges — Auburn, the University of Mississippi, Lake Forest and Williams — and I can report that the more I am around this generation of college students, the more I am both baffled and impressed.

I am impressed because they are so much more optimistic and idealistic than they should be. I am baffled because they are so much less radical and politically engaged than they need to be.

One of the things I feared most after 9/11 — that my daughters would not be able to travel the world with the same carefree attitude my wife and I did at their age — has not come to pass.

Whether it was at Ole Miss or Williams or my alma mater, Brandeis, college students today are not only going abroad to study in record numbers, but they are also going abroad to build homes for the poor in El Salvador in record numbers or volunteering at AIDS clinics in record numbers. Not only has terrorism not deterred them from traveling, they are rolling up their sleeves and diving in deeper than ever.

The Iraq war may be a mess, but I noticed at Auburn and Ole Miss more than a few young men and women proudly wearing their R.O.T.C. uniforms. Many of those not going abroad have channeled their national service impulses into increasingly popular programs at home like “Teach for America,” which has become to this generation what the Peace Corps was to mine.

It’s for all these reasons that I’ve been calling them “Generation Q” — the Quiet Americans, in the best sense of that term, quietly pursuing their idealism, at home and abroad.

But Generation Q may be too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country’s own good. When I think of the huge budget deficit, Social Security deficit and ecological deficit that our generation is leaving this generation, if they are not spitting mad, well, then they’re just not paying attention. And we’ll just keep piling it on them.

There is a good chance that members of Generation Q will spend their entire adult lives digging out from the deficits that we — the “Greediest Generation,” epitomized by George W. Bush — are leaving them.

When I was visiting my daughter at her college, she asked me about a terrifying story that ran in this newspaper on Oct. 2, reporting that the Arctic ice cap was melting “to an extent unparalleled in a century or more” — and that the entire Arctic system appears to be “heading toward a new, more watery state” likely triggered by “human-caused global warming.”

“What happened to that Arctic story, Dad?” my daughter asked me. How could the news media just report one day that the Arctic ice was melting far faster than any models predicted “and then the story just disappeared?” Why weren’t any of the candidates talking about it? Didn’t they understand: this has become the big issue on campuses?

No, they don’t seem to understand. They seem to be too busy raising money or buying votes with subsidies for ethanol farmers in Iowa. The candidates could actually use a good kick in the pants on this point. But where is it going to come from?

Generation Q would be doing itself a favor, and America a favor, if it demanded from every candidate who comes on campus answers to three questions: What is your plan for mitigating climate change? What is your plan for reforming Social Security? What is your plan for dealing with the deficit — so we all won’t be working for China in 20 years?

America needs a jolt of the idealism, activism and outrage (it must be in there) of Generation Q. That’s what twentysomethings are for — to light a fire under the country. But they can’t e-mail it in, and an online petition or a mouse click for carbon neutrality won’t cut it. They have to get organized in a way that will force politicians to pay attention rather than just patronize them.

Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy didn’t change the world by asking people to join their Facebook crusades or to download their platforms. Activism can only be uploaded, the old-fashioned way — by young voters speaking truth to power, face to face, in big numbers, on campuses or the Washington Mall. Virtual politics is just that — virtual.

Maybe that’s why what impressed me most on my brief college swing was actually a statue — the life-size statue of James Meredith at the University of Mississippi. Meredith was the first African-American to be admitted to Ole Miss in 1962. The Meredith bronze is posed as if he is striding toward a tall limestone archway, re-enacting his fateful step onto the then-segregated campus — defying a violent, angry mob and protected by the National Guard.

Above the archway, carved into the stone, is the word “Courage.” That is what real activism looks like. There is no substitute.

In Rainbows, Heaven

In Rainbows is out and it’s gorgeous – the cumulative achievement of a career focused on innovation. It’s as if Radiohead sat around and said: “So should we revisit the first half of our career, all the crazy layers of guitars and angstful rock, or should we opt for the quirky and emotive electronic experimentation of our second turn? Hey, I know – let’s combine the two, while throwing in some lush orchestration and a dab of mellowed out balladry. Perfect!” How does a band who’s done so many new things so many times continue to do so again and again? How many times can you amp it up to yet another level? It’s pretty amazing.

Oh, btw, I suggest you buy the discbox. I did. It feels great. Like RH guitarist Jonny Greenwood put it: "It's fun to make people stop for a few seconds and think about what music is worth, and that's just an interesting question to ask people." Well, I thought about it and, hell yeah, $82 is a totally reasonable price to pay for music that will be with me for the next 20 years, enriching my days. Thank you, RH.

Leprechaun Tricks

The Radiohead faithful among you have probably already heard, but the new album – in the works for almost two years now, and previewed largely at the shows last summer – will be released in just 10 days(!!!).

I’ve been concerned for some time that the English lads (whose contract with EMI/Capitol had expired after the last album) would somehow find a way to fuck up this self-release – now called “In/Rainbows” – but instead, they’ve mapped a new path and, in doing so, may very well kick off a revolution within the DIY world of music distribution.

You have two options as to how to grab the album:

1) Purchase digital tracks via Radiohead’s website. How much? It’s up to you. Really. You can set the price at $0.00 or $100 or anything else you want.

2) Pre-order the “discbox”, which will ship on Dec. 3. What’s in the discbox? A CD of the album, two vinyl LPs of the same album, a bonus CD containing another 8 songs (including my fav from last summer, "Down is the New Up"), artwork, lyrics, a snazzy book/case for the entire product, etc. – basically, a windfall of Radiohead goodies and collectables. The cost? $82 (a flat fee that includes shipping and taxes). Oh, and while you’re waiting for the physical product to ship in a couple months, you also get the digital tracks as of next week.

So, you can snag the album for free (legally), or you can thank Radiohead for their vision and slap down $80-plus for the grand prize.

It’s a brilliant ploy. What’s the music worth to you? What is the experience worth? Will you be one of the cool kids? The band’s fans are notoriously devoted and I foresee them making a boatload on this.

Personally, I think I’ll applaud the boys for the idea and pick up the discbox. Sure, Thom whines a lot, but sometimes he gets it right, too. Now is one of those times.

Iran: So Far Away...

Inner Space

Spacemen are from Mars

Sep 27th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Half a century of space exploration has actually served to illuminate the Earth

FIFTY YEARS ago the Soviet Union launched the world's first artificial satellite. Sputnik burst into orbit on October 4th 1957, in the midst of the cold war. It was a surprise to the world, a shock to many Americans, and the starting gun for the space race between the superpowers. Thereafter, America vied with the Soviet Union for supremacy in aerospace's equivalent of “mine's bigger than yours”, as successively taller rockets lobbed larger payloads further afield.

The legacy of all this posturing is a view of space travel as a macho, gung-ho affair, all about the conquest of the solar system by men with shiny suits and very big rockets. In the 1950s many people imagined that in the decades to come the new frontier would be beaten back by pioneers bent on interplanetary colonisation. By the end of the millennium there would be a moon base at the very least. Probably, there would be hotels in orbit, frequent missions to other planets and mines on asteroids extracting metals considered rare and precious on Earth. To extend John Gray's metaphor about men and women: space was from Mars.

As it has turned out, space is actually from Venus. People have hardly travelled anywhere at all—although a scandalous amount of money has been wasted on the conceit that voyaging across the cosmos is humanity's destiny. Instead, what has happened is inward-looking and Venusian in an almost touchy-feely way rather than outwardly directed. Most of the satellites in orbit round Earth look down, rather than up, and the biggest mental change wrought by spaceflight has been not an appreciation of the vastness of the universe, but rather of the smallness, fragility and unity of Earth.

Third rock from the sun

This mental change began in a very Martian way. Before Soviet engineers built the rockets that put Sputnik in orbit, warfare was seen as being, in some sense, a limited thing. Even in the atomic decade that had preceded the space age, bombers flown by real people would have to deliver nuclear death to their targets. Negotiations could take place while they were in the air. They could be shot down. And those that got through would probably not destroy everything. After Sputnik, megadeath would arrive in minutes by rocket, non-negotiably, and in such quantities that global annihilation looked on the cards.

But bellicose intercontinental ballistic missiles were not the only spawn of Sputnik's launch. There was also the satellite itself. Today almost 900 of the things are in orbit around Earth, operated by more than 40 countries. Some are old-fashioned martial spy satellites, but many more are Venusian—watching the weather, the oceans, the changing climate and the use of land. Others broadcast television programmes, relay telephone calls, or send out the signals that tell people exactly where they are on the Earth's surface. Such satellites have enabled scientists and engineers to treat the planet as a single thing in a way that they previously did not.

More subtle—and just as far-reaching—was the message epitomised during the next leg of the space race when the crew of Apollo 8 photographed Earth-rise over a lunar horizon on Christmas Day, 1968. Earth is a fragile pocket of life in a very large and lonely universe. Looking back at a small, blue-green planet from outer space and seeing its unity and its vulnerability also changed perspectives. It was a force behind the environmental movement, which began at about that time. Rather as a foreign country helps a traveller understand his home, so it has taken space flight to understand Earth.

Some insist that humanity must hurry on with the Martian vision, to explore and ultimately to colonise other planets to secure the species's future. That may be necessary one day and many countries, and some companies, still pursue this vision of space. America's government wants a moon base, the Chinese are interested in going there, too. There might be a rekindling of the kind of nationalistic fervour of yesteryear.

The lesson of the past 50 years, however, is that the more humanity discovers about space, the rarer and more precious life on Earth seems. For the moment Venusian voyages to understand mankind's home planet are better than Martian ones to understand how to abandon the mother ship.

Sticking it to Ahmadinejad

There are a thousand arguments to be made both for and against someone like Ahmadinejad being invited to speak at an American university, but what's sure is that you will rarely come across as poignant and public a stand against such a figure as that offered today by Columbia's president and dean, Lee Bollinger.

Here's to free speech, and the courage to confront evil when you see it:


My questions for President Ahmadinejad

Editor's note: Bollinger delivered these introductory remarks on Monday, Sept. 24, prior to a speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs World Leaders Forum.

By Lee Bollinger

I would like to begin by thanking dean John Coatsworth and professor Richard Bulliet for their work in organizing this event and for their commitment to the role of the School of International and Public Affairs and its role in training future leaders in world affairs. If today proves anything it will be that there is an enormous amount of work ahead for all of us. This is just one of many events on Iran that will run throughout this academic year, all to help us better understand this critical and complex nation in today's geopolitics.

Before speaking directly to the current president of Iran, I have a few critically important points to emphasize.

First, since 2003, the World Leaders Forum has advanced Columbia's long-standing tradition of serving as a major forum for robust debate, especially on global issues. It should never be thought that merely to listen to ideas we deplore in any way implies our endorsement of those ideas, or the weakness of our resolve to resist those ideas or our naiveté about the very real dangers inherent in such ideas. It is a critical premise of freedom of speech that we do not honor the dishonorable when we open the public forum to their voices. To hold otherwise would make vigorous debate impossible.

Second, to those who believe that this event never should have happened, that it is inappropriate for the university to conduct such an event, I want to say that I understand your perspective and respect it as reasonable. The scope of free speech and academic freedom should itself always be open to further debate. As one of the more famous quotations about free speech goes, it is "an experiment, as all life is an experiment." I want to say, however, as forcefully as I can, that this is the right thing to do and, indeed, it is required by existing norms of free speech, the American university and Columbia itself.

Third, to those among us who experience hurt and pain as a result of this day, I say on behalf of all of us we are sorry and wish to do what we can to alleviate it.

Fourth, to be clear on another matter -- this event has nothing whatsoever to do with any "rights" of the speaker but only with our rights to listen and speak. We do it for ourselves.

We do it in the great tradition of openness that has defined this nation for many decades now. We need to understand the world we live in, neither neglecting its glories nor shrinking from its threats and dangers. It is consistent with the idea that one should know thine enemies, to have the intellectual and emotional courage to confront the mind of evil and to prepare ourselves to act with the right temperament. In the moment, the arguments for free speech will never seem to match the power of the arguments against, but what we must remember is that this is precisely because free speech asks us to exercise extraordinary self-restraint against the very natural but often counterproductive impulses that lead us to retreat from engagement with ideas we dislike and fear. In this lies the genius of the American idea of free speech.

Lastly, in universities, we have a deep and almost single-minded commitment to pursue the truth. We do not have access to the levers of power. We cannot make war or peace. We can only make minds. And to do this we must have the most full freedom of inquiry.

Let me now turn to Mr. Ahmadinejad.

THE BRUTAL CRACKDOWN ON SCHOLARS, JOURNALISTS AND HUMAN RIGHTS ADVOCATES

Over the last two weeks, your government has released Dr. Haleh Esfandiari and Parnaz Axima; and just two days ago Kian Tajbakhsh, a graduate of Columbia with a Ph.D. in urban planning. While our community is relieved to learn of his release on bail, Dr. Tajbakhsh remains in Teheran, under house arrest, and he still does not know whether he will be charged with a crime or allowed to leave the country. Let me say this for the record, I call on the president today to ensure that Kian Tajbaksh will be free to travel out of Iran as he wishes. Let me also report today that we are extending an offer to Dr. Tajbaksh to join our faculty as a visiting professor in urban planning here at his alma mater, in our Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. And we hope he will be able to join us next semester.

The arrest and imprisonment of these Iranian Americans for no good reason is not only unjustified, it runs completely counter to the very values that allow today's speaker to even appear on this campus.

But at least they are alive.

According to Amnesty International, 210 people have been executed in Iran so far this year -- 21 of them on the morning of Sept. 5 alone. This annual total includes at least two children -- further proof, as Human Rights Watch puts it, that Iran leads the world in executing minors.

There is more.

Iran hanged up to 30 people this past July and August during a widely reported suppression of efforts to establish a more open, democratic society in Iran. Many of these executions were carried out in public view, a violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Iran is a party.

These executions and others have coincided with a wider crackdown on student activists and academics accused of trying to foment a so-called "soft revolution." This has included jailing and forced retirements of scholars. As Dr. Esfandiari said in a broadcast interview since her release, she was held in solitary confinement for 105 days because the government "believes that the United States ... is planning a Velvet Revolution" in Iran.

In this very room last year we learned something about Velvet Revolutions from Vaclav Havel. And we will likely hear the same from our World Leaders Forum speaker this evening -- President Michelle Bachelet Jeria of Chile. Both of their extraordinary stories remind us that there are not enough prisons to prevent an entire society that wants its freedom from achieving it.

We at this university have not been shy to protest and challenge the failures of our own government to live by these values; and we won't be shy in criticizing yours.

Let's, then, be clear at the beginning, Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator.

And so I ask you:

Why have women, members of the Baha'i faith, homosexuals and so many of our academic colleagues become targets of persecution in your country?

Why in a letter last week to the secretary general of the U.N. did Akbar Gangi, Iran's leading political dissident, and over 300 public intellectuals, writers and Nobel Laureates express such grave concern that your inflamed dispute with the West is distracting the world's attention from the intolerable conditions your regime has created within Iran? In particular, the use of the Press Law to ban writers for criticizing the ruling system.

Why are you so afraid of Iranian citizens expressing their opinions for change?

In our country, you are interviewed by our press and asked to speak here today. And while my colleague at the Law School Michael Dorf spoke to Radio Free Europe [sic, Voice of America] viewers in Iran a short while ago on the tenets of freedom of speech in this country, I propose going further than that. Let me lead a delegation of students and faculty from Columbia to address your university about free speech, with the same freedom we afford you today? Will you do that?

THE DENIAL OF THE HOLOCAUST

In a December 2005 state television broadcast, you described the Holocaust as a "fabricated" "legend." One year later, you held a two-day conference of Holocaust deniers.

For the illiterate and ignorant, this is dangerous propaganda. When you come to a place like this, this makes you, quite simply, ridiculous. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.

You should know that Columbia is a world center of Jewish studies and now, in partnership with the YIVO Institute, of Holocaust studies. Since the 1930s, we've provided an intellectual home for countless Holocaust refugees and survivors and their children and grandchildren. The truth is that the Holocaust is the most documented event in human history. Because of this, and for many other reasons, your absurd comments about the "debate" over the Holocaust both defy historical truth and make all of us who continue to fear humanity's capacity for evil shudder at this closure of memory, which is always virtue's first line of defense.

Will you cease this outrage?

THE DESTRUCTION OF ISRAEL

Twelve days ago, you said that the state of Israel "cannot continue its life." This echoed a number of inflammatory statements you have delivered in the last two years, including in October 2005 when you said that Israel should be "wiped off the map."

Columbia has over 800 alumni currently living in Israel. As an institution we have deep ties with our colleagues there. I personally have spoken out in the most forceful terms against proposals to boycott Israeli scholars and universities, saying that such boycotts might as well include Columbia. More than 400 college and university presidents in this country have joined in that statement. My question, then, is: Do you plan on wiping us off the map, too?

FUNDING TERRORISM

According to reports by the Council on Foreign Relations, it's well documented that Iran is a state sponsor of terror that funds such violent groups as the Lebanese Hezbollah, which Iran helped organize in the 1980s, the Palestinian Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

While your predecessor government was instrumental in providing the U.S. with intelligence and base support in its 2001 campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan, your government is now undermining American troops in Iraq by funding, arming and providing safe transit to insurgent leaders like Muqtada al-Sadr and his forces.

There are a number of reports that also link your government with Syria's efforts to destabalize the fledgling Lebanese government through violence and political assassination.

My question is this: Why do you support well-documented terrorist organizations that continue to strike at peace and democracy in the Middle East, destroying lives and civil society in the region?

PROXY WAR AGAINST U.S. TROOPS IN IRAQ

In a briefing before the National Press Club earlier this month, General David Petraeus reported that arms supplies from Iran, including 240 mm rockets and explosively formed projectiles, are contributing to "a sophistication of attacks that would by no means be possible without Iranian support."

A number of Columbia graduates and current students are among the brave members of our military who are serving or have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. They, like other Americans with sons, daughters, fathers, husbands and wives serving in combat, rightly see your government as the enemy.

Can you tell them and us why Iran is fighting a proxy war in Iraq by arming Shi'a militia targeting and killing U.S. troops?

FINALLY, IRAN'S NUCLEAR PROGRAM AND INTERNATIONAL SANCTIONS

This week the United Nations Security Council is contemplating expanding sanctions for a third time because of your government's refusal to suspend its uranium-enrichment program. You continue to defy this world body by claiming a right to develop peaceful nuclear power, but this hardly withstands scrutiny when you continue to issue military threats to neighbors. Last week, French President Sarkozy made clear his lost patience with your stall tactics; and even Russia and China have shown concern.

Why does your country continue to refuse to adhere to international standards for nuclear weapons verification in defiance of agreements that you have made with the U.N. nuclear agency? And why have you chosen to make the people of your country vulnerable to the effects of international economic sanctions and threaten to engulf the world with nuclear annihilation?

Let me close with this comment. Frankly, and in all candor, Mr. President, I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions. But your avoiding them will in itself be meaningful to us. I do expect you to exhibit the fanatical mind-set that characterizes so much of what you say and do. Fortunately, I am told by experts on your country, that this only further undermines your position in Iran with all the many goodhearted, intelligent citizens there. A year ago, I am reliably told, your preposterous and belligerent statements in this country (as in your meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations) so embarrassed sensible Iranian citizens that this led to your party's defeat in the December mayoral elections. May this do that and more.

I am only a professor, who is also a university president, and today I feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for. I only wish I could do better.

Praying with Borat

My father’s best friend (dating back 60 years to their childhood in Israel) has become quite friendly with Borat – aka Sacha Baron Cohen – since the latter moved to LA a year or two ago. So when the Jewish holidays rolled around this year, and Sacha’s brother (an electronic artist from the UK incidentally) decided to visit and asked his bro to find them a temple to attend, Sacha turned to my dad’s buddy who in turn called my father and asked whether he would mind dialing in a favor at the temple (its being just before the holiday, of course, all the seats at the “good” temples were already taken). My father – who found himself in complete hysterics at the goofy Kazakh speaking Hebrew in the theater last year – jumped at the chance, naturally. So when Yom Kippur rolled around, there we were…praying with Borat.

To see a room full of stiff, ascetic septuagenarians and octogenarians ogle all over this pop culture phenomenon of crudeness is just surreal. All these orthodox men approaching him in the middle of services – introducing themselves, thanking him for his comedic genius. I’ve never seen anything like it. Deep into the second day he busts out the smelling salts, shoving them into the faces of the statues around him – a pandemonium of snickering and giggles propagates. Unbelievable.

Not surprisingly, the guy’s got an amazing voice – it towers above everyone else’s (but the cantor’s) and fills the room with glorious song and prayer. He could be a tenor in Italy for Christ’s sake. The cantor eventually invites him up to the bimah where they sing together, the old man clearly starstruck like the rest of us. He later thanks our special guest publicly before the entire congregation…this time for his voice, not his jokes. We are all glad that he has joined us on this once somber holy day.

Borat may not gel in the Deep South, but on Olympic Blvd. in Beverly Hills, at orthodox shul, he’s just another one of the boys.

Some genius – precisely, Marc Ecko, the guy who brought you the video hoax of himself tagging the wing of Air Force One – has come up a plan re: Barry Bond’s record-breaking ball #756: he’s putting its fate in your hands.

You have three options – send the ball to Cooperstown, imprint the ball with a big fat asterisk then send it to Cooperstown, or launch it into space never to be seen or heard from again. Absolutely Genius.

Vote here. Voting starts today and lasts for a week.

(Note: asterisks are your friends.)

Another Osirak?

After a week and a half of sketchy reports and mass confusion, it seems some facts (read: speculation) re: Israel’s supposed strike on Syria are now emerging. If the rumors are to be believed, we’re looking at a brazen unilateral strike reminiscent of Osirak. It most likely will be years before the truth is known, but one thing’s certain – something, something momentous, seems to have occurred here…


Israelis ‘blew apart Syrian nuclear cache’

Secret raid on Korean shipment

From The Sunday Times (of London)
September 16, 2007

Uzi Mahnaimi in Tel Aviv, Sarah Baxter in Washington and Michael Sheridan

IT was just after midnight when the 69th Squadron of Israeli F15Is crossed the Syrian coast-line. On the ground, Syria’s formidable air defences went dead. An audacious raid on a Syrian target 50 miles from the Iraqi border was under way.

At a rendezvous point on the ground, a Shaldag air force commando team was waiting to direct their laser beams at the target for the approaching jets. The team had arrived a day earlier, taking up position near a large underground depot. Soon the bunkers were in flames.

Ten days after the jets reached home, their mission was the focus of intense speculation this weekend amid claims that Israel believed it had destroyed a cache of nuclear materials from North Korea.

The Israeli government was not saying. “The security sources and IDF [Israeli Defence Forces] soldiers are demonstrating unusual courage,” said Ehud Olmert, the prime minister. “We naturally cannot always show the public our cards.”

The Syrians were also keeping mum. “I cannot reveal the details,” said Farouk al-Sharaa, the vice-president. “All I can say is the military and political echelon is looking into a series of responses as we speak. Results are forthcoming.” The official story that the target comprised weapons destined for Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shi’ite group, appeared to be crumbling in the face of widespread scepticism.

Andrew Semmel, a senior US State Department official, said Syria might have obtained nuclear equipment from “secret suppliers”, and added that there were a “number of foreign technicians” in the country.

Asked if they could be North Korean, he replied: “There are North Korean people there. There’s no question about that.” He said a network run by AQ Khan, the disgraced creator of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, could be involved.

But why would nuclear material be in Syria? Known to have chemical weapons, was it seeking to bolster its arsenal with something even more deadly?

Alternatively, could it be hiding equipment for North Korea, enabling Kim Jong-il to pretend to be giving up his nuclear programme in exchange for economic aid? Or was the material bound for Iran, as some authorities in America suggest?

According to Israeli sources, preparations for the attack had been going on since late spring, when Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad, presented Olmert with evidence that Syria was seeking to buy a nuclear device from North Korea.

The Israeli spy chief apparently feared such a device could eventually be installed on North-Korean-made Scud-C missiles.

“This was supposed to be a devastating Syrian surprise for Israel,” said an Israeli source. “We’ve known for a long time that Syria has deadly chemical warheads on its Scuds, but Israel can’t live with a nuclear warhead.”

An expert on the Middle East, who has spoken to Israeli participants in the raid, told yesterday’s Washington Post that the timing of the raid on September 6 appeared to be linked to the arrival three days earlier of a ship carrying North Korean material labelled as cement but suspected of concealing nuclear equipment.

The target was identified as a northern Syrian facility that purported to be an agricultural research centre on the Euphrates river. Israel had been monitoring it for some time, concerned that it was being used to extract uranium from phosphates.

According to an Israeli air force source, the Israeli satellite Ofek 7, launched in June, was diverted from Iran to Syria. It sent out high-quality images of a northeastern area every 90 minutes, making it easy for air force specialists to spot the facility.

Early in the summer Ehud Barak, the defence minister, had given the order to double Israeli forces on its Golan Heights border with Syria in anticipation of possible retaliation by Damascus in the event of air strikes.

Sergei Kirpichenko, the Russian ambassador to Syria, warned President Bashar al-Assad last month that Israel was planning an attack, but suggested the target was the Golan Heights.

Israeli military intelligence sources claim Syrian special forces moved towards the Israeli outpost of Mount Hermon on the Golan Heights. Tension rose, but nobody knew why.

At this point, Barak feared events could spiral out of control. The decision was taken to reduce the number of Israeli troops on the Golan Heights and tell Damascus the tension was over. Syria relaxed its guard shortly before the Israeli Defence Forces struck.

Only three Israeli cabinet ministers are said to have been in the know ? Olmert, Barak and Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister. America was also consulted. According to Israeli sources, American air force codes were given to the Israeli air force attaché in Washington to ensure Israel’s F15Is would not mistakenly attack their US counterparts.

Once the mission was under way, Israel imposed draconian military censorship and no news of the operation emerged until Syria complained that Israeli aircraft had violated its airspace. Syria claimed its air defences had engaged the planes, forcing them to drop fuel tanks to lighten their loads as they fled.

But intelligence sources suggested it was a highly successful Israeli raid on nuclear material supplied by North Korea.

Washington was rife with speculation last week about the precise nature of the operation. One source said the air strikes were a diversion for a daring Israeli commando raid, in which nuclear materials were intercepted en route to Iran and hauled to Israel. Others claimed they were destroyed in the attack.

There is no doubt, however, that North Korea is accused of nuclear cooperation with Syria, helped by AQ Khan’s network. John Bolton, who was undersecretary for arms control at the State Department, told the United Nations in 2004 the Pakistani nuclear scientist had “several other” customers besides Iran, Libya and North Korea.

Some of his evidence came from the CIA, which had reported to Congress that it viewed “Syrian nuclear intentions with growing concern”.

“I’ve been worried for some time about North Korea and Iran outsourcing their nuclear programmes,” Bolton said last week. Syria, he added, was a member of a “junior axis of evil”, with a well-established ambition to develop weapons of mass destruction.

The links between Syria and North Korea date back to the rule of Kim Il-sung and President Hafez al-Assad in the last century. In recent months, their sons have quietly ordered an increase in military and technical cooperation.

Foreign diplomats who follow North Korean affairs are taking note. There were reports of Syrian passengers on flights from Beijing to Pyongyang and sightings of Middle Eastern businessmen from sources who watch the trains from North Korea to China.

On August 14, Rim Kyong Man, the North Korean foreign trade minister, was in Syria to sign a protocol on “cooperation in trade and science and technology”. No details were released, but it caught Israel’s attention.

Syria possesses between 60 and 120 Scud-C missiles, which it has bought from North Korea over the past 15 years. Diplomats believe North Korean engineers have been working on extending their 300-mile range. It means they can be used in the deserts of northeastern Syria ? the area of the Israeli strike.

The triangular relationship between North Korea, Syria and Iran continues to perplex intelligence analysts. Syria served as a conduit for the transport to Iran of an estimated £50m of missile components and technology sent by sea from North Korea. The same route may be in use for nuclear equipment.

But North Korea is at a sensitive stage of negotiations to end its nuclear programme in exchange for security guarantees and aid, leading some diplomats to cast doubt on the likelihood that Kim would cross America’s “red line” forbidding the proliferation of nuclear materials.

Christopher Hill, the State Department official representing America in the talks, said on Friday he could not confirm “intelligence-type things”, but the reports underscored the need “to make sure the North Koreans get out of the nuclear business”.

By its actions, Israel showed it is not interested in waiting for diplomacy to work where nuclear weapons are at stake.

As a bonus, the Israelis proved they could penetrate the Syrian air defence system, which is stronger than the one protecting Iranian nuclear sites.

This weekend President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran sent Ali Akbar Mehrabian, his nephew, to Syria to assess the damage. The new “axis of evil” may have lost one of its spokes.

(Note: The British Observer now states that up to eight F-16s & F-15s, pictured above, were involved in the strike.)

Wishing you lots of health and happiness...

The Best Ever

Allow me to begin by saying that this list is completely, utterly 100% biased. It reflects nothing but my own personal prejudices, and skews heavily toward the era through which I’ve lived.

That said, inspired by my brother’s now ten-year-old list which lives on in infamy (and obsoletism), here are my Top 100 Films of All-Time:

1. Goodfellas
2. Star Wars (original trilogy)
3. Casablanca
4. Ferris Bueller's Day Off
5. L.A. Confidential
6. The Lord of the Rings (trilogy)
7. The Breakfast Club
8. American Beauty
9. Magnolia
10. Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
11. The Princess Bride
12. Die Hard
13. The Usual Suspects
14. The Shining
15. The Wizard of Oz
16. Raiders of the Lost Ark (trilogy)
17. Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil
18. The Anniversary Party
19. Top Gun
20. Back to the Future (trilogy)
21. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
22. Spy Game
23. Good Will Hunting
24. Stand by Me
25. Eyes Wide Shut
26. Dazed & Confused
27. Sexy Beast
28. Finding Neverland
29. 2001: A Space Odyssey
30. Goldfinger
31. Chinatown
32. Traffic
33. A.I: Artificial Intelligence
34. American History X
35. North by Northwest
36. Swingers
37. The Green Mile
38. Patton
39. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
40. Beverly Hills Cop (I & II)
41. Oliver!
42. Contact
43. Ronin
44. The Graduate
45. Alice in Wonderland (Disney)
46. The Untouchables
47. A Few Good Men
48. Ghostbusters
49. The Matrix
50. Lethal Weapon (I & II)
51. The Silence of the Lambs
52. The Godfather (I & II)
53. Spartacus
54. Amadeus
55. Terminator 2
56. Apocalypse Now
57. Casino
58. Edward Scissorhands
59. The Virgin Suicides
60. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
61. The French Connection
62. The Thin Red Line
63. Rain Man
64. Toy Story (I & II)
65. Boogie Nights
66. Goonies
67. Jerry Maguire
68. Scent of a Woman
69. Gladiator
70. Beetlejuice
71. Fargo
72. War Games
73. Memento
74. Saving Private Ryan
75. Donnie Brasco
76. Pulp Fiction
77. Dog Day Afternoon
78. What About Bob?
79. Twelve Monkeys
80. The Hunt for Red October
81. Total Recall
82. Heat
83. Manhattan
84. King Kong (2006)
85. Black Hawk Down
86. The Piano
87. A Beautiful Mind
88. Billoxi Blues
89. Mary Poppins
90. Miller's Crossing
91. Three Kings
92. Kill Bill: Vol. 2
93. Midnight Run
94. Swimming with Sharks
95. Sunshine (1999)
96. What's Eating Gilbert Grape
97. Scarface
98. Forrest Gump
99. The Insider
100. A Christmas Story

The Boys Who Love the Girls Who Love the Spotlight

Vanity Fair on the male hangers-on who attach themselves to the partying H’wood starlets of our day, for fun, fame and frenemy freakiness.

Kevin Federline, Pete Wentz, Steve Aoki, Benji Madden, Cisco Adler, and Joel Madden get down in Brett Ratner's basement disco. Photograph by Brett Ratner.

A Time to Serve

TIME Magazine leads this week with a proposal to institute a non-compulsory, non-military, national volunteer program. The program would be multi-faceted, and would aim to attract participants both young and old through financial-based incentives.

It strikes me as a fine idea. Too often in this country, you have kids blindly shuttling from high school and AP exams to college and a major they care or know little about. We have no so-called “gap year”, as they do in many other Western countries, so our kids rarely stop and take an opportunity get out into the world, find out what they really want to do, and – most of all – think of and help someone other than themselves.

This could be a great catalyst for change. And every American would benefit.

Read the full proposal here.

A Bit of Fiction

My dear friend Roi Sagir from Nahariya, Israel wrote this short story for an Israeli publication some two years ago, and now it’s been translated into English. I had no idea he was such a talent with the pen, but it hardly surprises me…

(warning: contains risqué material)


I, Fahed

by Roi Sagir

I’m a Jew, but I look like an Arab. Even in Israel there are places in which I look like an Arab. I have a black beard, black eyes and black hair. I don't wear a black suit, I don't wear a black skullcap or a black hat, so I cannot be considered to be a member of the "Shas" party ultra-orthodox Jewry. On the bus to Ramat Hasharon there are a number of women who see me and their makeup peels off their wrinkles from fear. I enjoy traveling to Ramat Hasharon, although I have nothing to do there. In Germany too, just like Ramat Hasharon, I'm an Arab.

This morning I took the underground train toward central Munich. Eva was also traveling on the train. She's German, with handsome features, light hair and expensive shoes. Some 900,000 people travel on Munich's underground train on a regular workday, waiting in 92 stations. The underground was built ahead of the 1972 Olympics. Eva sat in the train and read a book. She was on her way to work. She's a graphic editor in a feminist culture magazine. She has tenure and well-formed opinions.

I sat next to her. The train had already stopped in two stations. People boarded and disembarked, boarded and disembarked, with extinguished looks in their eyes and correct conduct. A regular silence, similar to the silence of yesterday and the day before yesterday. I peeked at Eva's book. The words Die Zweite Intifada were written on the top of the page.

Black Bird

I asked Eva whether the book she was reading was interesting. She examined me with her green eyes and said it was. I continued to pester her and asked for the author's name. She showed me the cover and it turned out to be a biography of Arafat. "Arafat," I said, "mmmm." She ignored my remarks, checked the author's name and said it. I asked her what she thought of Arafat. She answered that she didn't agree with everything in the book, and stretched with self-importance.

I smiled at her and scratched my black beard. I asked her what she thought about the conflict. She said that the Palestinians are miserable, that they are victims. I presented myself as Fahed, and asked whether we could meet up again sometime. She thought about it a bit. Before she got off the train we decided to meet in the evening.

I waited for her at a café on Ludwigstrasse. When she showed up, I took a chair and offered her a seat. Then I ordered us drinks. She chose a colorful drink in a large glass with a stem and shiny sticks sticking out of the orange liquid. She offered me the pineapple. I refused. She moved uncomfortably in her chair, looked around and bit her lips. Three men were sitting on the bar and most of the tables were empty, except of two. After looking at the tables in the café, she told me about her work and presented her opinions, of which she was very proud. The magazine she was working for covered exhibitions, installations and published progressive and radical editorials – so she said. Mainly, she added with her back straight and a raised finger, the works of women in developing regions.

She asked whether I objected to female circumcision. I answered that it was barbaric. And what do I think about veils? I told her that they, the women, choose themselves to wear veils. She cleared her throat.

"And family pressure!" she said decisively.

I was silent. Her green eyes stared at mine and she demanded a response with sealed lips.

I wiped my sweaty palms on my trousers and escaped her stare. Maybe she doesn't want to be the little woman tonight, I thought. I tried to guess what Fahed would have done when the manlystand encountered such resistance.

I squeezed my feet and said angrily, "family, what do you understand about the Arab family?" She flinched. "Maybe I don't understand," she said and added an apologetic giggle. "Maybe you should tell me a little about it, Fahed."

My cock quickly became hard. I sipped my beer slowly, enjoying the warmness in my lower body.

"I have five siblings," I started telling her on my great family at home. Then I was telling her on myself. "It's sometimes hard in Germany, but I'll be finished with my studies soon and I'll go back, no problem. It's better at home, but also here in Germany, it's nice here. Don’t be offended."

"No, no, I'm not offended, it's alright," she laughed. "You're cute."

I stretched my shoulders back and look around toughly. I then slightly scrunched my mouth with self importance and said, "You know, here in Germany people have a lot of money, but they don't know how to give respect. I mean, not everyone, but a lot of people. Look, people here don't look out for each other, every person is on his own. For us, the entire family is behind you, whatever you do."

Eva softened up and answered quietly, "The culture is slightly different here, Fahed, in Germany the law protects you. But I don't want to talk to you about these things now." And then she put her hand on the center of the table and asked, "Do you feel comfortable with me, Fahed?"

Continue reading I, Fahed.

This is Ridiculous

Feist appeared on Letterman to sing “1234” – my favorite song from her latest album “The Reminder” – and just check out the talent who showed up to back her with “oohs” & “aahs”, and hand claps and arm-warmers:



The gaggle includes members of the Broken Social Scene (Feist is also a member of this supergroup, of course), The New Pornographers, Mates of State, The National, Grizzly Bear and Nicole Atkins. Leslie is quite the muse, it would seem.

Time Warp

The NY Times takes a look at the style and fashion of Mad Men, one of my fav shows on the tele these days…


A Return to That Drop-Dead Year 1960

By RUTH LA FERLA
August 23, 2007
NY Times

“I’M from Bay Ridge. We have manners,” Peggy, the pony-tailed secretary, scolds the colleague who has just propositioned her in “Mad Men,” the new drama on the cable channel AMC. Do Peggy’s colleagues at Sterling Cooper, the turbo-powered advertising agency where she works, fall a little short in that department?

No matter. They have style.

The “girls” in the steno pool, the nakedly striving junior executives, the smooth-talking bosses and their stay-at-home wives have done their best to acquire the veneer of graceful gestures that stand in for real courtesy. Their mannerisms, and their sleek appurtenances, come with the turf: the steel-and-glass landscape of Madison Avenue in 1960, where burled wood and frosted-glass-panel interiors form a sumptuous backdrop against which the players stride about in sheaths and glen plaid suits.

Taking it all in, viewers may find themselves hooked, not just on the show’s artfully shaded characterizations and plot twists, but on its insistent attention to detail. To a style aficionado, “Mad Men” is that rare TV show in which an ashtray, a lipstick or an aerosol tin gets star treatment, and is a protagonist in its own right.

Why not? “The story is told in the details, and those details have their own life,” said Matthew Weiner, who conceived and wrote the series. Spiffed up by amber lighting, the camera lingering almost lewdly on a whiskey tumbler, a gilded compact or the polished surface of a conference table, those details reflect the growing materialism of the Eisenhower years.

Jaeger-LeCoultre watches, Delman pumps and Buick sedans are as essential to the action as a glistening smile or arched brow — projections of the characters’ idealized selves. His hair slicked with Brylcreem and flashing cuff links, Don Draper, Sterling Cooper’s brooding creative director, can imagine himself an impenetrably suave Lothario. In her scarlet-lined kimono, Midge, his mistress, can convince herself that she is a faintly louche, spirited adventuress. Floating into a party, Betty, his wife, can play the suburban princess in crinolines and pearls.

That fixation on objects, surfaces and status signifiers also holds up a mirror to the fetishistic obsessions of the present day. It would hardly seem alien to an aspiring red-carpet queen swinging an outsize Balenciaga tote, or to an ambitious young Manhattan trader girded for battle in a Hugo Boss suit.

Or, for that matter, to a fashion addict, who would surely note that the show’s aura of pulled-together formality is in step with the look of the runways, which returned this fall to mannerly 1950s-inflected tailoring.

From a modern vantage, it is easy to forget that 1960 was a watershed. An election loomed, the Pill became widely available, and there dawned a conviction, one later promoted by Andy Warhol and his ilk, that image trumps content, that style and substance may in fact be all but interchangeable.

The seeds of that notion were planted during the newly prosperous postwar years. Happiness then was not some hard-won spiritual attainment. In Don’s glib assessment, it was rather “the smell of a new car ... freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams: ‘Whatever you’re doing, is O.K. You are O.K.’ ”

In such a climate, a presidential candidate could turn unembarrassed to an agency like Sterling Cooper to rev up his image. Who knew better than Madison Avenue’s tastemakers that putting him across was largely a matter of packaging? As Don is told by Roger, his mentor: “Consider the product: He’s young, handsome, a Navy hero.

“Honestly, it shouldn’t be too difficult to convince America that Nixon is a winner.”

Like Nixon’s infamous five o’clock shadow, a dusting of grit mars the otherwise sleek surfaces of “Mad Men.” That is by design, said Mr. Weiner, a former writer and producer of “The Sopranos.” Not a single prop is an afterthought, he said. “The metal fixture that clasps like a clothespin onto the guest towel — my grandmother had it, my mother had it,” Mr. Weiner said. “It’s actually written into the script.”

Roughly $2.5 million went into the filming of each episode. “All of that money has been funneled onto the screen,” he added, down to the conference tables coated in cigarette ash, and the homely touches bestowed on the characters — wrinkled shirts, sweat stains, ill-applied makeup — that lend the show an air of authenticity.

“The period is usually very glamorized,” Mr. Weiner said. Production teams, he pointed out, generally look to films like “The Best of Everything,” or Vogue or Architectural Digest, to ferret out examples of the crystal tumblers, towering beehives and pristine swing coats thought to typify the period.

“I told them that’s not the way it works,” Mr. Weiner said. “We are not doing a show from the perspective of the movies. We are doing a show about the people who watch those movies. Often they are imitating what they see.”

Imperfect creatures, they mix and match at home, placing a streamlined silver-tone coffee brewer in front of rustically patterned cafe curtains. Their drawers are full. So are their garbage pails.

Even their hair and accessories are not always tidy or up to date. “We looked at Vogue, but we also looked at the Sears catalog,” Mr. Weiner said. In the idealized world of a ’50s movie, Don might drive a Cadillac. In “Mad Men,” he drives a Buick LeSabre. In “The Best of Everything,” Hope Lange is coiffed to perfection, not a hair out of place. On “Mad Men,” chignons tumble, pageboys wilt.

“The secretary has to have a hairstyle that will basically degrade over five days of the week,” Mr. Weiner explained. “And each character has a closet — she will wear the same six dresses during a single season.”

At times throwaway gestures betray an infatuation with Hollywood and distinguish the characters from their modern counterparts. Women deftly roll down their stockings and shut their compacts with a definitive click; men flick at their lighters and habitually tug at their ties. As Mr. Weiner pointed out, they loosen the knots in private, but snap them back into place the moment a female enters the room.

An uptight move, it did not betoken good manners exactly. But it was good style.

The L.A. Model

An interesting glimpse into the shaping of L.A. as we know it today…

We're 'Pasadena-izing'

By and large, Los Angeles is growing just the way it is supposed to.

By William Fulton
August 26, 2007
LA Times

William Fulton is the publisher of the California Planning & Development Report, the president of Solimar Research Group and a senior scholar at the School of Planning, Policy and Development at USC.

New York is not Tokyoizing. Chicago is not Shanghaizing. And Los Angeles is not Manhattanizing.

True, the density of L.A.'s population is increasing, especially downtown, in the Mid-Wilshire district and in Hollywood. But carving out a few thousand condos in old downtown buildings is hardly proof that L.A. is "Manhattanizing." If anything, the city overall is "Pasadena-izing" -- becoming more of a collection of centers around which new housing (condos and apartments) and commercial spaces are being built.

Los Angeles ran out of raw land more than 20 years ago and therefore had to move beyond the traditional suburban ideal of single-family homes on tree-lined streets. So it, along with older suburbs stretching from San Fernando to Westminster, is doing what cities have done throughout history -- building up instead of out to accommodate the housing needs of a growing population and an ever-changing set of construction and space requirements for businesses.

This isn't always pretty. But the end result is what L.A. needs to be -- a more urban city.

Some critics, however, contend that development in L.A. is more out of control than ever. The opposite is the case: New real estate development is not dispersed around the city but is largely concentrated near rail transit lines and busway stations. The resulting centers vary in size and scale: Some are like villages -- as along Ventura Boulevard throughout the San Fernando Valley -- while a few -- downtown and Century City -- are taking on Manhattan-like densities. But together they add up to a Los Angeles-style approach to urbanism, one in line with the basic concepts of L.A.'s planning policies adopted more than 30 years ago.

In the 1970s, when L.A.'s suburbs began sprouting, the city adopted, in 1974, an innovative general zoning plan that called for high-density development around 38 centers in the city, connected by transit, that would absorb most of the growing population. These centers would allow permanent preservation of the vast fields of single-family houses located between them.

The "centers concept," as it was called, was the brainchild of Calvin Hamilton, city planning director from 1964 to 1986. At a time when planning orthodoxy argued that cities had to be "mono-nuclear" -- built around one extremely dense center, like Manhattan -- L.A.'s plan was nothing less than revolutionary. Hamilton's visionary plan acknowledged that L.A. was "poly-nuclear" -- a place with many centers, of varying sizes, all of which had to be strengthened for the city to accommodate new growth.

Blueprint from the original 1970s
“Concept Los Angeles General Plan”

Over time, L.A. has become more dense. But this hasn't always happened around the centers identified in Hamilton's plan -- Westwood, Century City, Warner Center in Woodland Hills, among them. Oftentimes, developers had the political juice to build tall buildings wherever they wanted, whether their ideas followed the city plan or not, in large part because of the size of the city's 15 councilmanic districts. Each council member effectively serves as the mayor of a city with a population of close to 300,000. Running in that kind of district requires a lot of campaign money, which developers are more than happy to provide.

The growth around the Beverly Center is a good example of what developers used to get away with, general plan or no general plan. The area is not one of the city centers named in Hamilton's scheme. It wasn't targeted for a rail transit station -- and still isn't today, even in the most pie-in-the-sky long-range plans. Yet once construction of the Beverly Center began in the early 1980s, the surrounding area built up with other high-density retail and housing development

This kind of rogue development happens far less today. That's not because L.A.'s politicians have had a spine implant. Rather, it's happening because the construction of L.A.'s rail transit lines has made Hamilton's designated city centers far more attractive places to build. Indeed, in the last decade, more and more large-scale development in L.A. has occurred around rail transit -- especially the Red Line, Los Angeles' subway.

"Manhattanization" is occurring where it can -- mostly downtown and to a lesser extent in Mid-Wilshire and Hollywood -- because these locations can absorb greater density. They are transit-rich and already have a strong backbone of jobs, housing and services. This makes them more attractive to politically powerful developers.

The rest of the metropolitan constellation is densifying too, but at a much different scale. The prototype for most of this growth in Los Angeles and Orange counties is Pasadena, which has a texture of three- to five-story buildings, a fabulous mix of housing, retail, office buildings and cultural institutions, a lot of parking garages and great "walkability." The result, citywide and regionwide, is a rich urban mosaic, with a few extremely dense centers, dozens of smaller-scale downtowns, hundreds of villages and vast swaths of single-family neighborhoods that are unlikely to change.

Blonde is as Blonde Does

From this weekend’s Miss Teen USA competition:

The Largesse of Largo

I’m headed to the Fairfax supper club Largo tonight to see and hear up close and personal my musical hero Aimee Mann (rock the fuck on?), and here I stumble upon what seems to be a new upcoming film put together by Flanagan, the proprietor, spotlighting the slew of amazing performances that have gone on there over the years. The venue's artist caliber vs. intimacy ratio is unmatched in this city.



Tonight should be killer.

The American Left's Silly Victim Complex

Maybe it's because the author of this piece, Matt Tiabbi (a contributing editor/columnist at Rolling Stone and author of Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire) is a member of the movement he slams, or maybe it's because Adbusters (the anti-consumerist activist publication) is the vehicle, but this scathing indictment of the current state of American “liberalism" rings especially true.

If the well-intentioned left is to realize any of its goals or greater potential, it may want to heed this call to action...

The American Left's Silly Victim Complex

by Matt Tiabbi

May 23, 2007

Adbusters

The biggest problem with modern American liberalism may be the word itself. There’s just something about the word, liberal, something about the way it sounds – it just hits the ear wrong. If it were an animal it would be something squirming and hairless, something that burrows maybe, with no eyes and too many legs. No child would bring home a wounded liberal and ask to keep it as a pet. More likely he would step on it, or maybe tie it to a bottle-rocket and shoot it over the railroad tracks.

The word has a chilling effect even on the people who basically agree with most of what it stands for. I myself cringe, involuntarily as it were, every time someone calls me a liberal in public. And I’m not the only one. When I called around for this article about the problems of American liberalism to various colleagues who inhabit the same world that I do – iconoclastic columnists and journalists who’ve had bylines in places like The Nation – they almost universally recoiled in horror from the topic, not wanting to be explicitly linked in public with the idea of the American left.

“Fuck that,” responded one, when I asked if he wanted to be quoted in this piece. “I’d rather talk about my genital warts. I’d rather show you pictures of my genital warts, as a matter of fact.”

“Ugh. Not sure I want to go there,” read one e-mail.

“I really wish I wasn’t associated with the left,” sighed a third.

When the people who are the public voice of a political class are afraid to even wear the party colors in public, that’s a bad sign, and it’s worth asking what the reasons are.

A lot of it, surely, has to do with the relentless abuse liberalism takes in the right-wing media, on Fox and afternoon radio, and amid the Townhall.com network of newspaper invective-hurlers. The same dynamic that makes the junior high school kid fear the word “fag” surely has many of us frightened of the word “liberal.” Mike Savage says liberalism is a mental disorder, Sean Hannity equates liberals with terrorists, Ann Coulter says that “liberals love America like O.J. loved Nicole.” These people have a broad, monolithic audience whose impassioned opinions are increasingly entrenched. In the pseudo-Orwellian political landscape that is modern America, to self-identify as a liberal is almost tantamount to thoughtcrime, a dangerous admission that carries with it the very real risk of instantly and permanently alienating a good half of the population, in particular most of middle America. That reason alone makes it, in a way, wrong and cowardly to abandon liberalism and liberals. If Ann Coulter wants to call all of us fags, well, then, fine, I’m a fag. For the sake of that fight, I’ll stay a liberal till the end of time. But between you and me, between all of us on that side of things, liberalism needs to be fixed.

At a time when someone should be organizing forcefully against the war in Iraq and engaging middle America on the alarming issue of big-business occupation of the Washington power process, the American left has turned into a skittish, hysterical old lady, one who defiantly insists on living in the past, is easily mesmerized by half-baked pseudo-intellectual nonsense, and quick to run from anything like real conflict or responsibility.

It shies away from hardcore economic issues but howls endlessly about anything that sounds like a free-speech controversy, shrieking about the notorious bugbears of the post-9/11 “police state” (the Patriot Act, Total Information Awareness, CARNIVORE, etc.) in a way that reveals unmistakably, to those who are paying close attention, a not-so-secret desire to be relevant and threatening enough to warrant the extralegal attention of the FBI. It sells scads of Che t-shirts ($20 at the International ANSWER online store) and has a perfected a high-handed tone of moralistic finger-wagging, but its organizational capacity is almost nil. It says a lot, but does very little.

The sad truth is that if the FBI really is following anyone on the American left, it is engaging in a huge waste of time and personnel. No matter what it claims for a self-image, in reality it’s the saddest collection of cowering, ineffectual ninnies ever assembled under one banner on God’s green earth. And its ugly little secret is that it really doesn’t mind being in the position it’s in – politically irrelevant and permanently relegated to the sidelines, tucked into its cozy little cottage industry of polysyllabic, ivory tower criticism. When you get right down to it, the American left is basically just a noisy Upper West side cocktail party for the college-graduate class.

And we all know it. The question is, when will we finally admit it?

Here’s the real problem with American liberalism: there is no such thing, not really. What we call American liberalism is really a kind of genetic mutant, a Frankenstein’s monster of incongruous parts – a fat, affluent, overeducated New York/Washington head crudely screwed onto the withering corpse of the vanishing middle-American manufacturing class. These days the Roosevelt stratum of rich East Coasters are still liberals, but the industrial middle class that the New Deal helped create is almost all gone. In 1965, manufacturing jobs still made up 53 percent of the US economy; that number was down to nine percent in 2004, and no one has stepped up to talk to the 30 million working poor who struggle to get by on low-wage, part-time jobs.

Continue reading The American Left's Silly Victim Complex.