July 2008 Archives
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Op-Ed
A New Beijing, in Focus
Don’ be distracted by the hubbub surrounding the impressive buildings Beijing is constructing for the Olympics. It’s the people of the Chinese capital who need your attention.
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Spoofs & Satire
Re: Cephalopod
Now that Congress has approved domestic wire-tapping, no one can prevent the U.S. from becoming a surveillance state. No one, that is, except for [email protected].
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Listening
Alphabets
As one of the founding members of the Wu-Tang Clan, GZA (sometimes Genius) has meaningfully contributed to what many will always consider the biggest and best hip-hop group of all...
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Listening
Playing With Fire
The biggest music news from the past week has to be that ABKCO Music & Records, Inc., holder of the Rolling Stones’ publishing rights, is suing Lil Wayne and his label...
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Listening
Ran
Hailing from Calgary, Azeda Booth has just released In Flesh Tones, its first full-length album. On its web site, the band describes itself as “too skittish for space rock, too...
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Listening
Glorious Ballad of the Ignored
My familiarity with Pas/Cal has largely been based on a precious few songs heard over the years as well as a few concert posters in a friend’s apartment....
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Listening
The Geeks Were Right
“I like the Faint.” That was my introduction to the Nebraskan New Wave five-piece, a four-word description on a friend’s Amazon wish list years ago. I don’t know...
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Of Recent Note
Staycations
When vacating isn’t an option, you could always consider a holiday in your own vicinity. The TMN readers and writers offer travel tales from lands closer to home.
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Reading
Pause for a Fallen Companion
Despite a recent loss, I do have some books for you to heed. You can take my word for it—in any event, it’s the only word I am...
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Gallery
The Dalai Labrador, 1996-2008
Success is often accomplished in a team. At The Morning News, one long-running and successful team is that of Robert Birnbaum and Rosie, his faithful canine companion and co-interviewer, who passed away on July 22, 2008.
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Announcements
Weekend Edition
We’re trying something new today. Friday’s afternoon headlines will be called the “Weekend Edition” from now on, packed full of our favorite long stories from the week (what’...
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The Non-Expert
Smoke and Mirrors
Experts answer what they know. The Non-Expert answers anything. In this week’s installment we explain why the objects in passenger-side mirrors are closer than they appear: It could be something you ate.
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Listening
Church Under the Stairs
Broken Social Scene don’t make albums anymore. No, that Canadian group hug now presents, or at least one of their members presents them—gives them a formation, arms them,...
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Listening
So Fast
“So Fast” is well-punctuated, well-announced, and sufficiently well-thought of that it is the first track on Julie Doiron’s reissued Loneliest in the Morning. Ten years after the release and...
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Listening
The Old Days
This matinee performance relies on the stage disintegrating, tumbling, torn down by actors who demand something sleek and so un-Dr. Dog. From a just-out fifth album, the lament of “The...
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Listening
Stay Positive
One can’t help but get swept up by it all. This is a rock n’ roll life-affirmer that’ll last for months, way past the stadiums where we sang,...
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Listening
Antibodies
Thank God for dance music. And guitars. “Antibodies,” from Poni Hoax’s new album Images of Sigrid, is like that workout tune LCD Soundsystem penned for Nike. It pumps hard...
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New York, New York
The 11:11 to Penn Station, or Exodus
The Long Island Railroad is New York’s lifeline in the summer—a fleet of rescue vehicles destined for the beach. For some, though, it’s also a means to find freedom. Reporting from every station down the line.
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Reading
The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head
I have had the pleasure of speaking with Louis Begley three or four times—pleasures additional to having read nearly all his novels. Thus it is with great anticipation that...
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Reading
The Strong Man
If you thought Edward Meese, John Ashcroft, and Alberto Gonzales were shameful, you might want to take a short stroll down memory lane in this authoritative and apparently the first...
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Reading
The Delighted States
It is apparent from Adam Thirwell’s (Politics) subtitle (“A Book of Novels, Romances, & Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents, & Accompanied by Maps, Portraits, Squiggles, Illustrations, &...
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Reading
On the Laps of Gods
Some Americans may find the continuing revelations of the United States’s heinous injustice and craven exploitation shocking and distasteful. I find many of them, including the massacres at Rosewood...
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Reading
Shining City
I confess I am intrigued that The Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley, who is not someone who features an outstanding sense of humor, wrote that he couldn’t stop laughing...
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Reading
Final Salute
Rocky Mountain News reporter Jim Sheeler won the Pulitzer Prize for the story on which this book is based. Marine Major Steve Beck has the onerous task of personally notifying...
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Reading
The Spies of Warsaw (Audio)
I have already enthusiastically noted the publication of Alan Furst’s 10th novel. In a recent chat with the author, he mentioned the excellence of the audio versions of his...
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Reading
Swan Peak
James Lee Burke is a fine crime-story writer, and this is another one of his Dave Robicheaux novels. Most of them were set in New Orleans—which was an important...
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Reading
Cost
Roxana Robinson (Sweetwater) belongs to a small but important subspecies of humanity who can translate their imaginations into vivid and compelling prose. In raw numbers their population on our planet...
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Reading
The Journey Home
Having been published to accolades on distant shores, it took a while for Dermot Bolger’s harrowing and gritty depiction of late-century Dublin to make it to America (kudos to...
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Reading
The Turnaround
Receiving a new George Pelecanos novel wreaks havoc on my well-ordered universe. I immediately set aside all but my most urgent responsibilities and appointments until I have turned the last...
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Reading
Rising, Falling, Hovering
As many commentators suggest, the idiosyncratic C.D. Wright is a school or movement of one, connecting the personal with the political (the war in Iraq, the post-Katrina debacle in...
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Reading
Moyers on Democracy
One of the puzzling aspects of the roiling cultural waters of late-capitalist America is that Bill Moyers, a mild, thoughtful, and well-spoken Christian, should serve as the feared left-wing demon...
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Reading
One Man’s America
As a talking head, George F. Will does present himself as an arid and smug and, dare I say, tight-sphinctered Caucasian. His writing, though (except for his humorless desiccations of...
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Reading
The Chattering Classes
It’s really noisy out there. “Conservative bloggers jab Obama on foreign languages.” (Huh?) Christie is getting divorced. There is a new cell phone. Angelina had twins. Microsoft cut the...
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Gallery
Baby’s First Internet
Not sure how to explain the internet to your young ones? Presenting a series of nursery rhymes to teach children how to comport themselves on the online.
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Announcements
Summer Staycations
This month’s Of Recent Note is already here, and we’d love for you to take part. This month’s assignment is: “Summer Staycations” You missed the boat to...
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Repeat as Needed
Stuck in My Head
We’ve all had songs we could listen to it for days on end—and have, much to the annoyance of anyone within earshot.
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Announcements
Summer Vacation
Deep in the dog days, we are going on vacation this week to conserve energy and work on some exciting new projects for TMN. We will resume publishing next Monday,...
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Spoofs & Satire
A Survivor’s Journal
America weathered Y2K, Viagra junk mails, and Web 2.0. But will it survive the next technological crisis threatening civilization?
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Listening
When We Embraced
When I was in jail last night it was dark, raining, and roofless—with an abundance of cell-phones. I woke up from this dream with a hangover, glad not to...
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Listening
Knowing Me, Knowing You
I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you, but ABBA will never tour again. Mamma Mia!, the musical and upcoming film that samples heavily from their...
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Listening
Gold, Tan, Peach, and Grey
I rarely find music I (wrongly) assume to be indie rock so stirring and spirited. Said the Gramophone find that in “Gold, Tan, Peach, and Grey,” wherein Bodies of Water “…...
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Listening
Kevätrumpu
Dusty and spiritual, Finnish duo Paavoharju represent Scandinavia with something churned up and surreal in “Kevätrumpu.” Pavvoharju don’t just wander and drift amongst their collage of noise, they...
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Listening
Chemtrails
Beck’s latest album, Modern Guilt, is ambitious but it sees his sound reduced, filtering out some unnecessary digital noise from his previous work, 2006’s The Information; cell phone rings...
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Albums of the Year
The Top 10 Albums of 1989
Because album lists shouldn’t happen only once a year. Rounding out the ‘80s, music from the year America chose wrong.
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Stations
Kingsbridge Road, 4 Train
Once clear of Yankee Stadium, the 4 train runs north toward Van Cortlandt Park along a thoroughfare named by a society matron in a fit of pique.
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Reading
W.A.R.: The Unauthorized Biography of William Axl Rose
Not being a fan of Guns N’ Roses, or whatever motherlode of music they mined, I nonetheless accept that the lead figures of commercially successful bands can’t help but...
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Reading
Worried Sick
Two things seem indisputable: American healthcare costs are irrationally inflated and Americans are not commensurately healthy. Nortin M. Hadler, M.D (The Last Well Person: How to Stay Well Despite...
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Reading
Mixing It Up
Man of letters and contrarian Ishmael Reed has a substantial body of literary work; this book anthologizes various of Reed’s op-eds for The New York Times and Playboy. Reed...
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Reading
The Radical Jack London
Jack London, best known for his beloved dog tales, The Call of the Wild and White Fang, was a deeply committed progressive voice, and this anthology makes a good argument...
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Reading
Where Three Roads Meet
This latest edition of Canongate’s Myth series has Sigmund Freud conversing with blind prophet Tiresias as he lays dying of cancer. In addition to Freud’s drugged retrospective, the...
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Reading
Federico Fellini: The Book of Dreams
As the title indicates, this 500-plus-page tome is taken from the notebooks that cinema titan Fellini kept by his bedside for more than 30 years. The director of classics La Dolce...
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Reading
The World According to TomDispatch
If you have not been introduced to TomDispatch, the useful and informative web site edited by Tom Engelhardt, this anthology is a good opportunity to become acquainted. Among the many...
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Reading
The Drop Edge of Yonder
Small-press newcomer Two Dollar Radio offers up Rudolph Wurlitzer’s fifth novel, reportedly the author’s transmogrification of a screenplay of a modern-day western entitled Zebulon. The commentary on Wurlitzer’...
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Reading
The Complex
Historian Chalmers Johnson warns: Americans who still think they can free themselves from the clutches of the military-industrial complex need to read this book. For example, the gimmicks the Pentagon...
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Reading
The Pornography of Power
By any standard Robert Scheer, who currently edits TruthDig.com, is a highly regarded journalist working within the admirable tradition of American muckraking. Bringing his 40 years as a journalist to...
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Reading
The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri
David Bajo’s debut novel features mathematician Philip Masryk, who, despite two marriages, has carried on a longtime love affair with book conservator Irma Arcuri. She vanishes, leaving him her...
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Reading
Slumberland
Paul Beatty’s Ferguson W. Sowell, a.k.a. DJ Darky, voyages to Berlin in pursuit of collaboration with reclusive avant – garde jazzman Charles Stone. His search in the exotic...
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Reading
Open City No. 25, Summer 2008
Thomas Beller and Joanna Yas edit this Manhattan-based literary publication, and this edition features the usual buffet of unknown (to you) writers with a few exceptions—in this case the...
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Reading
The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal
If you don’t own Vidal’s National Book Award-winning United States: Essays, 1952 – 1992, a compendium of his admirably provocative polemical prose exhibiting his vast erudition, you can dip into his...
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Reading
Sleeping It Off in Rapid City
Ten books of poetry form August Kleinzahler’s oeuvre—this edition samples from them as well as adding a few. Kleinzahler is famous (at least in poetry circles) for a...
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Reading
What Cynthia Ozick’s Been Reading
Cynthia Ozick responds to my inquiry about her recent literary encounters: Two electrician-boys were here yesterday, installing robust new wiring for an air conditioner, and keeping me from my desk;...
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Gallery
The Bear in Repose
Fresh from trips to Paris and Helsinki, the Bear takes a moment to relax at home.
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Lisa Whiteman
William Collick & Muhammida El Muhajir
Hometown: Philadelphia Currently residing in: Brooklyn Occupation: Co-Owners of Frank White cafe. William is also in experiential marketing for Audi USA and Muhammida is in PR/marketing and a filmmaker. ...
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Notes From the Exit Row
The Vacation Question
We vacation to remove ourselves from our everyday experience—but what satisfies the itch more: huddling in a Cold War housing block or lounging poolside at Sandals? A look at the line between far away and too far away.
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America, America, Burning Bright
The Republican Speaks of Jungles
The presidential election continues to bring forth policy promises and attempts at soul-bearing honesty.
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Profiles
Takin’ Care of Jesus
There’s a movement afoot to rewrite rock’s best songs with Christian lyrics, and you haven’t heard about it. Enter the world of “parodeities,” and learn some deuteronomy.
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Listening
Bruno’s Torso
After signing to Sub Pop back in ’06, Brooklyn-based Death Vessel was expected to release something shortly after. Now, two years down the road, the label debut is slated for mid-August....
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Listening
666
There will probably always be a foolish, rebellious, adolescent part of my consciousness that will try to act out by imploring me to slam dance, play with fire, and tempt...
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Listening
Sunshine Kid
While perusing Radiohead’s Dear Air Space blog the other day, I came across an entry by someone calling himself “Colin,” who implored readers to seek out a new album...
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Listening
One of Us
Known as one of the most influential bands to emerge from the British punk scene in the late ’70s, both for their music as well as their Situationist politics, Wire...
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Listening
Oh! You Pretty Things
If you’re anything like me, you can’t get enough David Bowie. Except of course for the whole Tin Machine thing. What was he thinking? Whatever. A new covers...
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Personal Essays
The Dream Vacation
When appointments and schedules get in the way of travel plans, it’s easy to think of the summer as a lost cause. But it doesn’t have to be that way.