The Woodsman, in theaters now… Coach Carter, opening Jan. 14, 2005
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Month: January 2005
There’s an undeniable buzz in the air as January 30th, the date of the upcoming Iraqi elections, rapidly approaches. It’s much akin to that feeling of excitement one gets around the holidays as you watch presents slowly accumulate underneath the family Christmas tree, and they just keep accumulating, and you’re all, “Wow, how many of those presents are for me, and what did I get?”
And since you’re such a simpleminded bastard, you hold a press conference, and you talk about how excited you are about your presents. You prattle on and on about how you “think elections will be such a incredibly hopeful experience for the Iraqi people.” And you add that
14 of Iraq’s 18 provinces “appear to be relatively calm.” The four remaining provinces “are places where the terrorists are trying to stop people from voting,” [you] said. “So I know it’s hard. But it’s hard for a reason. And the reason it’s hard is because there are a handful of folks who fear freedom.”
And then this Grinch-like Brent Scowcroft asshole, who served under your dad as his national security adviser, and who just now apparently decided to fucking betray you, starts trying to take a bunch of the presents away and opens them up and shows you that there’s coal inside the sloppily-packaged boxes. And then you go, “Wow, ‘coal’ is a bad metaphor for ‘dissent and civil war’, and the gift boxes are an even worse metaphor for ‘free and stable elections!'”
So, anyway, Scowcroft goes on:
“The Iraqi elections, rather than turning out to be a promising turning point, have the great potential for deepening the conflict,” Scowcroft said. He said he expects increased divisions between Shiite and Sunni Muslims after the Jan. 30 elections, when experts believe the government will be dominated by the majority Shiites.
Scowcroft predicted “an incipient civil war” would grip Iraq and said the best hope for pulling the country from chaos would be to turn the U.S. operation over to NATO or the United Nations — which, he said, would not be so hostilely viewed by Iraqis.
But you? You’re sticking to your guns; you’re a stubborn, close-minded simpleton, after all. You’re staying with those numbers you cited above, how 14 of the 18 extant provinces are “safe” and “calm.” And, yeah, there are those four troubled regions, but you know what? Four out of eighteen, thats less than a quarter of the Iraqi geographic spectrum.
But your math, as usual, fucking sucks, and is distorted to no end, and doesn’t accurately take into account the depth of the problem. Because what you’ve left out of your simpleminded assessment of reality is the key fact that, get this, those four troubled provinces together contain more than half the population of Iraq.
When even Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, the commander of your ground forces in Iraq acknowledges this issue, it might help to pay attention. Particularly when he adds,
“I just can’t guarantee that everyone will be able to go to a poll in total safety,” he said. “I cannot put a bubble around every person walking from their home to the polling site.”
Because, while we’re dealing with tired clichés and bad metaphors, that “bubble” General Metz is talking about is so obviously wrapped around you, chump.
Categories
Made of Clay
The following are troubling sentences taken out of context from Clay Aiken’s sure-to-be-smash hit, Learning to Sing: Hearing the Music in Your Life, his memoir-cum-self helper-cum-religious manifesto. All quotes courtesy Amazon’s “Search Inside This Book.”
Page 5: She replied that a wife was someone who would cook for me and wash my clothes and love me, and I said to her, “I’m already married.” Mom laughed and said, “To whom?” And I said, “You, Mama!”
Page 38: I was so conflicted.
Page 65: Little boys don’t wake up and say, “Gee, my yanking that little boy’s underpants out of his corduroys is mean-spirited…”
Page 96: For some reason I’ve rarely been able to say “I love you” straight to his face.
Page 126: I felt out of control. I was this big, wet mess, trying to crawl into an old woman’s arms.
Page 145: Jeff trusted me to run a camp of 150 kids.
Page 197: That I never need to see another video with a pretty young girl dressed like a hooker.
Page 224: I met some people who were Moravian.
Page 229: Determing what faith a child will have is a decision that should be made at home, not at the YMCA camp.
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Lady Metroland’s Guide to the Jet-Set
Rule 1: Whilst attending an event with Mohamed Al-Fayed, avoid photo ops at all costs.
Jennifer Love Hewitt and al-Fayed open the Harrods January 2004 Sale.
Lucy Liu and al-Fayed open the Harrods January 2005 Sale.
Lucy Liu and al-Fayed open the Harrods January 2005 Sale (cont.).
[Big ups TK…]
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This is the sound The O.C. makes
You’re going to write the perfect three-minute pop song. You’ve been saying this to yourself since you saw Beck open for Beth Orton at that secret show he did at the El Rey for her a few years back, only, for you, it wasn’t a secret show, because you knew about his playing an intimate acoustic set hours in advance. And when an excited hush fell over the floor when Beth Orton came out to announce her opening act, you smiled knowingly. Your friends said you glowered, but that was most likely because you thought Orton’s Central Reservation was such a letdown. You have nothing against Beck.
Besides, he’s the old guard. You’re all about Rooney, now, and The Walkmen, and labels like Sub Pop. You adored Eric’s Trip way back when, and you’ve been listening to Minnesota’s slowcore riot act Low well before they first appeared on “Music From the O.C. Mix 3: Have a Very Merry Chrismukkah“. Fuck, you had that original EP before the word “Kranky” was being whispered by every other record-buyer at Amoeba. You know droning music, and you’re not even Finnish like that Mika Vainio motherfucker. That shit’s just noise. Static. Like Felix Kubin on fucking heroin. You know this because you got yourself a Nord Lead years ago, just so you could create your own take on the percussive mathematic chaos of labels like Schematic and Warp. You were going to outshine Autechre.
But then you ended up having to work seventy-plus hours a week at your marketing firm during that product launch for Coke’s newest clear soda, and you lost interest. You fucking hated clear soda. You did, however, develop a severe drinking problem, in that other sense of consuming fluids. And started to appreciate the way that vocal-based indie music better complemented your commute on the fucking 10 freeway as you rolled into work later and later after those long nights out, and you tuned off KCRW and KXLU and popped in the latest Doves record. That somehow led to your getting, finally, that old Unkle record from 1998, which you had ignored for so long, because you never liked DJ Shadow, even when he did his own production work, much less his manning the decks for that cross-eyed James Lavelle motherfucker as he did on this record…but then you heard Ian Brown sing on that remake of that one song, and Richard Ashcroft, and Thom Yorke, and you were hooked. It was like the Britpop fad from the mid-90s, all NME and shit, but, somehow, cooler. Like, Flaunt– or index-caliber. And so you bought the soundtrack to Jonathan Glazer’s “Sexy Beast” because Unkle collaborated with South on it. And you grew to love South, too. Those beats were so slinky. And the guitars, so synthetic. You traded in your Nord Lead for a Fender Stratocaster and an amp. You couldn’t really figure out which effects pedals to get, so you winged it, and fucked around with the sounds as they ran through your G4 laptop.
And it all sounded like shit. It certainly didn’t sound like Interpol’s first record.
You had somehow failed to capture that mélange of angst and self-loathing and morose despair that ran throughout “Untitled”. Instead, you had penned a series of asinine ditties that sounded more like the fucking Shins, which was ok, except you weren’t into Sub Pop just yet, so it wasn’t ok at the time. You were a wreck. You hated yourself, and your friend Leslie, who had played drums on the record in certain parts, invited you over to her place in Los Feliz to watch this new Fox TV pilot for which she had done some of the casting. And when The O.C. began, and you heard those first few strains of Phantom Planet singing their rapturous hit “California”, you were hooked. Really, it was, just…rapturous (and yes, you fucking hated the DFA up to this point, so re-treaded disco beats had been done to death as far as you were concerned, and you were instead eagerly seeking out guitar hooks).
Phantom Planet, man…You still hate Jason Schwartzman. He was at the Wiltern once while you were watching Damien Rice play, and he just looked so fucking smug. Then he made some small talk with the bandmembers, and they ushered him backstage, and you really, really hated him. You fucking love Damien Rice. And you’re going to write the perfect three-minute pop song about that. It’ll be like that song that girl group wrote about David Duchovny in 1998, only less stalkerish. Probably more like the song Ben Gibbard wrote about Evan Dando in 2001 as part of the build-up to his later Postal Service success. You could totally do that. Three minutes. That’s all you need. Now for some inspiration…sixty fucking minutes thereof.
Actually, I’ve never seen The O.C.; I’m sure it’s pretty good.
The O.C. airs at 8PM EST on FOX.
Earlier: You can’t stop R.O.C.K.ing, can you? You just can’t.
Categories
Insensitive Headline of the Day
Residents Trickle Back, but Falluja Still Seems Dead
[The New York Times, Jan. 6, 2005]
Small Talk: Indonesian Social Welfare Minister Alwi Shihab confers with Colin Powell (Reuters)
And, yes, this is totally taken out of context. “Giving aid”, “saving face”, blah blah blah. We just love us some good old Colin Powell, that’s all.
From US Weekly, January 10, 2005:
“Three days later, [Angelina] Jolie strolled around a market near Beirut, Lebanon. ‘[My son] Maddox is Buddhist, so I’m making Christmas a time where he learns about new countries,’ she said recently.”
Feline survivor : A cat who survived the tidal wave, walks among the debris in search of food on the worst hit Thai island of Phi Phi. (AFP/Saeed Khan)
RELATED: One-year-old Hannes Bergman of Sweden
ALSO RELATED: Tween Karl Nilsson of Sweden
ALSO, ALSO RELATED: German baby, another German baby, German Nickelodeon fans, and brave, brave Petra Nemcova (practically German (Czech) and likely developmentally disabled (super-attractive)).
