perfidy

Steve of Begging to Differ takes time to remind us, with a short film, that Europe is not homogenous and also that Italy is one seriously messed up place with the chaos and the Begnini fellow and the FOOTball d'hoy glavinating.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer is reporting one of Senator Mike DeWine's (R-OH) female staffers maintained a blog chronicling her sexual adventures in Washington. The blog has apparently been removed by its host site, but wonkette has the archive. The interesting part isn't that this staffer had sex, at times with senior officials. The interesting part is that at least one of these senior officials paid for it. Like with cash. Peeled off a big wad.

I'll spare you all the obvious remarks about Washington whores, screwing the people, and the other metaphors that exist wherever sex and power meet. What is remarkable is that the men who expressed an emotion to this woman were "douches", but the ones who paid her cash to nail her in the ass were somehow more tolerable.

The last episode of the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" universe of shows (okay, two shows, "Buffy" and "Angel") ended last night with the series finale of "Angel."

Not afraid to say I got a little teary watching the end of a saga I've enjoyed for eight full years. "Buffy" was one of the best shows on TV for most of its run (the last season was spotty), and "Angel" was just getting great again after a rough last season, which of course was a perfect time for the WB to cancel it. F**kers. And Joss Whedon ended the series with a Butch & Sundance cliffhanger.

Tacitus has an "Angel" open thread if you're feeling nostalgic (or curious).

Though brgdt of Female Planet will have my head for this, I wish George Lucas could learn to leave things well enough the hell alone.

Think back to the final scene of "Jedi," either the original version or the new enslickened one foisted on the world a few years ago. Who were the three ghostly figures standing by the bonfire?

Were they these guys? Or do you remember something juuuuuust a little different about one of them?

Image thanks to Aint' It Cool News.

Given that the first day that gay marriage was legal in Massachusetts was coincidentally the same day as the 50th anniversary of the decision in Brown vs. Board of Education (May 17, 2004), answer me this.

The Massachusetts decision has been decried as base judicial activism which usurped legislative power by construing a civil-rights decision possibly (or probably) at odds with the explicit wishes of a majority of the population. How is that functionally different from the Brown decision, which did the same thing on a far larger scale and yet is hailed as a towering landmark in the history of the US Supreme Court and a great and just victory for civil rights? Is it really possible to argue that, if put to a vote on the same day in 1954, a majority of the nation as a whole would have agreed to move forward with widespread national school desegregation with "all deliberate speed" or any speed at all, without the Supreme Court's "activist" decision?

How are the two different?

NDR, the polymathic mind behind the blog "I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts" has made a change of venue. His new home is The Rhine River, wherein he will be focusing on some different material than previously, especially his ongoing doctoral research into the Rhine region as well as questions of national and regional identity in Europe. Check out the posts"Amnesia Union" and "The Shame of Being German" for a sample of his now less-bad thoughts.

Additionally, he's blogging Colonial House here and here, and also on the ongoing shameful genocide in the Sudan.

It would have made sense thirty years ago: take a phenomenal country singer with an outstanding batch of songs, lock her in a room with a top-notch rock band, roll tape, and see what happens. When Gram Parsons hooked up with Emmylou Harris, we saw a glimpse of how great that could have been, but GP had two strikes against him: he was the first person to fuse country and rock and therefore wasn't taken seriously at the time; and he was kind of a wuss. That great experiment could have turned out so much better.

So why did it take thirty years for someone to try again? For her new album, Van Lear Rose, Loretta Lynn tapped Jack White of the White Stripes (a huge fan) to produce, arrange, and play guitar, and assembled a crack team of musicians to help out. The results are amazing. Lynn wrote thirteen great songs for the sessions, and the band raises a sound that evokes the Rolling Stones circa Sticky Fingers.

Now seventy years old, Loretta Lynn has been languishing for years in that sort of dim career twilight where country icons go once the Nashville Establishment can't quite accept them anymore without a twinge of embarassment. She's joined there by luminaries like Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, and George Jones. But where Willie and Dolly have recently staged comebacks (and where George just doesn't give a shit), Lynn hadn't done much. Her first "comeback" record, 2000's Still Country was nothing special, and to all appearances her next stop was some obituary page a decade hence.

Or so you would think. As it turns out, Loretta Lynn has a lot of gas left in her tank. Like Johnny Cash before her, who made some of the best music of his career after hooking up with the legendary rock and rap producer Rick Rubin, Lynn has teamed with Jack White to revitalize her career and creativity. In the process, she has released one of the all-time greatest country albums I can remember. Van Lear Rose has got it all: a cheatin' song; a killin' song; a couple God songs; two (!) country-classic punning song titles; a drinkin' song; and an answer song (! When's the last time someone wrote an answer song?). But rather than simply go through the motions and touch all the bases, Lynn and White rip into the album' s thirteen songs with a vengeance-- the amps are turned up, the drums are loud, and Lynn sings like it was still 1970.

I do not kid about "Van Lear Rose" being among country's all-time best ever. Country records have always tended to be a few singles surrounded by lazy tossed-off filler, and no matter how good those few singles are, even the best full albums drag in the middle. When's the last time you sat through George Jones' classic I Am What I Am waiting to hear "Bone Dry"?

(In fact, it occurs to me that the final argument that Elvis was really a country star lies in the fact that he didn't craft albums so much as compile singles into LPs long after rock artists had moved on to making whole records. But I digress.)

Part of a great country record is whether it can get to you emotionally. Well, I am happy to report that Van Lear Rose made me cry, hard. I remember the last time a country album made me cry. It was 2001, and I was living in a basement apartment in Queens and working a thankless gofer job in the entertainment industry. After a hard week, I came home on Friday night, poured myself a stiff whiskey and put on some Johnny Cash. Two hours later I was eyes-deep in self pity, weeping along in a whiskey haze to Johnny Cash singing "Unchained." The difference between then and now is this: Cash made me cry because his songs made me feel bad for myself, made me see myself in the song. That's easy. Lynn has done the harder thing and made me cry for her; for her song on its own terms.

The one that did it it was "Family Tree." Written from the perspective of a wife confronting the woman who her husband left her for, the song manages to simultaneously to be righteous and pathetic. From the wife's perspective, lines like

I didn't come to fight
If he was a better man I might
But I won't dirty my hands on trash like you.
Bring out the babies' daddy
That's who they've come to see
Not the woman who's burning down our family tree.

sound like thundering denunciations, as in fact they are. But later in the song, Lynn complicates matters:

Their daddy once was a good man
Until he ran into trash like you.
Take a look at the baby's face and tell me who loves who.
I brought along his old dog Charlie
And the bills that's overdue
'Cause y'all been working and we need money too.

Suddenly the scene is much more tawdry: a barefoot woman standing in a yard with children and a dog waving "past due" notices and looking for a handout. This is expert songwriting, backed on the album by an outstanding performance, and it made me cry like a kid without candy.

Back to front Van Lear Rose is consistently great, and made all the richer for the interplay of Lynn's and White's iconoclastic musical personalities. Standouts include "Family Tree," the title track, the priceless White/Lynn duet "Portland Oregon," ("Portland Oregon and sloe gin fizz/ If that ain't love then tell me what is") the plaintive solo "Miss Being Mrs." and the spirited answer song "Mad Mrs. Leroy Brown." White leaves his musical stamp all over the place, from the straining-at-the-leash guitar chunk of "Have Mercy" to the rollicking lo-fi piano groove to "Mad Mrs. Leroy Brown," and Lynn answers with vocal performances as strong and as nuanced as anything she has ever done. In fact, in a few places she sounds more like frenetic howler Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (almost half a century her junior) than the sweet Kentucky Girl who sang "Coal Miner's Daughter." The talent, technique and abandon on display are absolutely staggering. Few performers of her age have even tried an experiment this daring, and fewer still have created music that can stand with the very best of an already stellar five-decade career.

China has pulled the plug on its moon mission planning, citing excessive cost as the reason. They are still intending to erect a space station, though.

This should be right up Ross' ally - software and economics. A fascinating read.

Blackfive has an email from a Marine Colonel in Iraq:

A little more than one week ago the world awoke to the shocking and graphic images of the horrific treatment of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of their U.S. captors at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. Global condemnation was swift and the Arab street was whipped into a mad frenzy as anti-western television stations ran the photos nonstop 24 -7. No other message would penetrate for days. No manner of reconstruction successes or steps towards sovereignty would seal the rift that these terrible photos had opened in the hearts and minds of many in the Middle East. To many, it was hard proof of what they had already believed about the United States all along.

Within days, the President apologized to the world for the horrendous acts of a few misguided soldiers that cast a dark shadow on all of their 135,000 compatriots. The Department of Defense announced that it would put together a system of compensation to repay victims of the abuses and the United States Congress launched into full investigative mode. . . . These investigations have so far resulted in criminal or administrative actions against at least 12 individuals, including the relief of the prison chain of command and criminal referrals of several soldiers directly involved in abuse. General Courts-Martial will be convened as early as next week as charges have already been brought against a handful of the soldiers involved in the outrageous acts. Unfortunately, with the election season now upon us, there are those in Washington who see political gold in professing their righteous indignation. As the volume of their shrill voices continues to drown out reason, many have lost sight of the real story here. Donald Rumsfeld said it best last week when he testified before the United States Senate. "Judge us by our actions", said the Secretary of Defense. Watch how Americans, watch how a democracy deals with wrongdoing and scandal and the pain of acknowledging and correcting our own mistakes and weaknesses. And then after they have seen America in action -- then ask those who preach resentment and hatred of America if our behavior doesn't prove the lies in the falsehood and slander they speak about our people and way of life. Above all, ask them if the willingness of Americans to acknowledge their own failures before humanity doesn't light the world as surely as the great ideas and beliefs that first made this nation a beacon of hope and liberty to all who strive to be free. And believe it or not, this is exactly what has happened. Iraqi media, almost unbelievably, have in recent days begun to editorialized astonishment at how the United States has responded. No covers ups. No denials. The President of the United States, the world's most powerful man, formally apologized to the people of Iraq. The U.S. Congress grilled a senior member of the Administration and all the while the U.S. media was allowed to report on the unfolding story with full freedom and access. "Why does Arab media fail at self criticism and why can't Arab human rights NGOs pressure Arab governments the way their counterparts do in America?", asked the host of satellite news channel al-Arabiy's (one of the harshest critics of the United States) "Spotlight" news program. The follow up commentary was even more astounding, given the source. "The Americans exposed their own scandal, queried the officials and got the American Government to accept responsibility for the actions of its soldiers," stated the host before asking her guests why this sort of open and responsive action isn't taken in the Arab world.

There's much more. Go read it all.