Sunday, March 30, 2014

Hejira

Today's biggest news in Iraq?  All Iraq News, citing Independent High Electoral Commission deputy chair Kate' al-Zawbae as the source, reports the Board of Commissioners of the IHEC have withdrawn their resignations.   Last Tuesday brought the news that the entire board of the Independent High Electoral Commission was submitting their resignations.

This was especially surprising since parliamentary elections are supposed to take place April 30th.  Yesterday,  Mohammad Sabah (Al Mada) reported the commissioners say there are three possibilities:

1) Parliament passes some form of immunity that would bar the commissioners from being prosecuted for their decisions regarding who can run for office.

 2) The election law itself can be modified.

 3) The elections can be cancelled. 

Apparently, there was a fourth option the commissioners didn't consider: Withdraw their resignations.


The second biggest news out of Iraq is probably a contest winner.



All Iraq News notes Sattar Sa'ad, after three months of competing, has won The Voice Arabia singing contest and that it was announced on Saturday's broadcast which also included singer Ricky Martin performing two songs.  (Ricky wasn't competing, he was a musical guest the way American Idol has musical guests or the way The Voice on NBC has musical guests -- this show is a variation of The Voice.)  Kadim Al Saher --  a popular Iraqi singer, songwriter and poet, here for a YouTube channel devoted to his music, acted as Sattar's coach and Sattar now has "a brand new car and a recording contract with Universal Music Group."  Nick Vivarelli (Variety) reports:

Aired by satcaster Middle East Broadcasting Corporation (MBC), The Arab version of “The Voice” wrapped with Saad draped in an Iraqi flag on stage receiving the trophy from his coach, Iraqi pop music sensation Kadim Al Sahir.
Saad’s victory, which sparked celebrations in the streets of Baghdad, earned him a record contract with Universal Music Group.





Gulf News notes, "Following his crowning, he expressed his joy, thanked his supporters and coach who he said believed in his talent from the start."




Click here to stream him performing on Saturday's broadcast.


Turning to violence.  Through yesterday, Iraq Body Count counts 959 violent deaths so far this month.


Today?  At least 36 reported deaths.  National Iraqi News Agency reports security sources say 2 suspects were killed in Hamrin, Anbar Operations Command announced they killed 5 suspects in Nuaimiya, Joint Operations Command stated they killed 9 suspects "east of Falluja," Diyala security source states they killed 1 suspect in Buhriz, an al-Qayyarah roadside bombing left 1 Iraqi soldier dead and two civilians injured, a Jurf al-Sakhar bombing left seven police members injured, a second Jurf al-Sakhar bombing left 3 Iraqi soldiers dead,  1 craftsman was shot dead in Al-Asaiwid Village, "3 young people" were kidnapped and 2 were killed "in al-Qaeam district," 1 person was shot dead in Taji (two more were wounded), a Yusufiya roadside bombing left 1 person dead and six more injured, a Mosul roadside bombing left 2 police members dead and a third injured, an Ein al-Jahash Village battle left 7 police members dead and nine more injured, a Ramadi suicide bridge bomber took his own life and the lives of 2 Iraqi soldiers and 1 police member with nine more people left injured,

Margaret Griffis (Antiwar.com) counts 56 dead today.  Her count would mean over 1,000 dead in Iraq for March.  In fact, Antiwar.com will probably have around 1500 deaths in their final tally because they have included the killing of suspects.


I'm traveling in some vehicle
I'm sitting in some cafe
A defector from the petty wars
That shell shock love away
-- "Hejira," written by Joni Mitchell, first appears on her album of the same name

 The number of US service members the Dept of Defense states died in the Iraq War is [PDF format warning] 4489.

On this week's Law and Disorder Radio,  an hour long program that airs Monday mornings at 9:00 a.m. EST on WBAI and around the country throughout the week, hosted by attorneys Heidi Boghosian, Michael S. Smith and Michael Ratner (Center for Constitutional Rights) topics  addressed include Barack's lying about the NSA spying, professor James Petras joins the hosts to discuss Ukraine and attorney Dima Khalidi joins the hosts to discuss the university crackdowns on student speech.



New content at Third:




Kat's "Kat's Korner: Pretenders' last classic" and "Kat's Korner: When (Cloud) Nothings Matter" went up earlier today.


The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.






 




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Kat's Korner: When (Cloud) Nothings Matter

Kat: In an alternate universe, Kurt Cobain never died.

So grunge survived Billy Corgan's drama trauma tantrums and Eddie Vedder's inherent superficiality.


In this universe, Billie Joe Armstrong was the rule and not the exception so strong women like Tori Amos and the Deal sisters didn't result in the male panic that led to the abomination that was rap metal and Fred Durst's tiny limp bizkit.

No, grunge survived and thrived and, in that universe, Liz Phair's just released Let On Me (her response album to the Replacements Let It Be) and Cloud Nothings' just released Here and Nowhere Else.

But something happened, blame it on Olivia and Peter and the entire Fringe gang, somehow Cloud Nothing's album crossed over into our universe and will be released on Tuesday.




Listening to Here and Nowhere Else it's as if Mothers Spears and Timberlake told their  children to do their homework instead of trying to make a buck off them.

Yes, people, it's as though music never ceased to matter and kids still grew up wanting to play instruments.

While Jayson Gerycz wails away on drums and TJ Duke thumps that bass, Dylan Baldi steps up front on guitar and vocals on the eight tracks that make up the new album.

"I go outside and see all these things that should be real," Dylan sings on the opening track "Now Here" while also noting, "You're not the same as me but I know we share a thing."  Suddenly, we're back in the glorious land of grunge.

Not just because of the powerful music which finds the band playing like they're in danger of slipping off a turntable stage but also because of the what's being said with lyrics.

Robin Thicke and Justin Timberlake never seem more fake and uninterested in women than when they do their little boy vulgar talk in those high pitched voices that drip with all the sexual desire of a "You go, girl!" on daytime talk TV (which is to say: none at all).

Kurt got it.  Billie Joe got it.  Even Evan Dando got it.

What interested a number of women (and some men) in those and other guys sexually was the thought that we could get in there, get in their heads.  That we could know them and relate.  So Evan and the Lemonheads offering up "Big Gay Heart," for example, left us gloriously amazed as we pondered that levels existed in the blond cover boy that we'd never imagined.

Unlike today's squeaky voiced boyz who mistake vulgarity for dirty talk, grunge boys didn't have to try to be sexy, they just had to be.

Back then, you understand, genuine was something everyone strove for.


By contrast, today's Land of Timberlake is all artifice and leads down a gender constrained  road that takes you back to the fifties.


If you doubt it, just watch that God awful Cheerios commercial.  You know the one, where the bee Buzz reads gay?  And a male trying to act like a 50s man (read bastard) -- attempts to bully the perfectly happy Buzz bee.  Nelly strips Buzz of his wand -- I don't even want to go into the phallic nature of that -- and then he's forcing Buzz into a bondage outfit and lecturing him on how to speak.

That this ever flew as a commercial for cereal, let alone as an ad for children, shows just how disgusting our culture has become.

Whatever Buzz is before Nelly gets his hands on him, Buzz seems very happy.  So you'd have to be a pretty huge homophobe -- or self-loathing gay -- to want to pick on Buzz to begin with.

That's before you get into 39-year-old Nelly and his creepy nature veering back and forth between high school bully and Mr. Herbert, the pedophile on Family Guy.

You didn't get that in grunge, grunge wasn't backwards, it was now.

It wasn't peer pressure or bullying, it was being.

And how the country's been harmed in the years since it's gone.

Kurt and Tori were the gods of grunge.  But so many made contributions to the notions of who and what we were and could be.  For example, Courtney Love found a way to musically address body shape and societal demands in a manner that was never off-putting the way Lena Dunham constant braying is. It was a message of empowerment while Lena's just off-key warbling some bastardization of Whitman's Song of Myself.

Grunge required a sense of awareness but also an absence of vanity.  An absence of vanity, not of ego.  The id and the ego were all over grunge.  But vanity?  If you couldn't surrender it, you couldn't pen "Basket Case" or "Me and a Gun" or "Heart Shaped Box."

If you couldn't set vanity aside, you were stuck in the masks and poses of years past (which have all returned) where pretense was all that mattered.

Greg Dulli got it and his best work with the Afghan Whigs didn't try to deny the conflicts within or put the inner beast on a leash and serve it salt peter.

On their new album, the Cloud Nothings' "Psychic Trauma" taps into that, both with its musical loping stumble, and its lyrical point of view. With that and the confessional vomit of "Pattern Walks," the band does what the best grunge has always done, says it's okay to be f**ked up because, really, aren't we all?

"Trouble needs a home, girls, trouble needs a home, trouble needs a home, girls, will you give her one?" asks Tori on "Trouble's Lament," the single to her upcoming Unrepentant Geraldines (drops May 13th).  And it's why Tori ever mattered and why she has a career while so many of her peers were long ago discarded. Like a giant she stands because she chronicles the human condition while, all around her, everyone else is posing and pretending.

Authenticity used to matter.  And Cloud Nothings has it.  They couldn't serve up artifice right now if they tried.  They're too busy being real.


And in our universe, you can hear them Tuesday when Here and Nowhere Else drops.


 It starts right now
That's the way I was before
But I can't be caught
How I was those days anymore
I'm learning how 
To be here and nowhere else
How to focus on 
What I can do myself

 I'm not telling you all I go through
I'm not telling you all I'm going through 
I'm not telling you all I'm going through
I feel fine 


Somewhere in America, 16-year-old Aaron Spears, who just wanted Samantha to like him -- and maybe for her to want to play with Mr. Happy --  feels it's going to be okay.


















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Kat's Korner: Pretenders' last classic

Kat:  "Everybody chokes," insisted Chrissie Hynde (in "Sense of Purpose"), "when they see someone cut down in their prime."  Then they must have been weeping buckets in 1990 when Pretenders released Packed! because that was the last solid studio album they did.

That album was really something but, when it was released, it was attacked as derivative.  Today, it needs to be seen as one of the band's classics -- along with Pretenders, Learning To Crawl and Get Close.  The band's self-titled debut established who they and their front person (Chrissie) were.  The band's third album (Learning To Crawl) demonstrated Chrissie could both carry on (two of the members were dead) and create art -- she wrote nine of the amazing songs on the album while also bringing a startling new context to the soul classic "Thin Line Between Love and Hate").  Get Close found the band all over the place but doing so damn much -- especially with the last six tracks which are one revelation after another.

All three sold well and then came Packed! which was released in May of 1990 and was in the cut-out bins by August of the same year.  You couldn't give the album away.

Which was so shocking because Chrissie wasn't writing retreads, these were some of her finest songs and she and the band seemed to be having a blast on the album, performing with a confidence that carried over from the last project.

In the years since that album's failure, Pretenders have only released four other studio albums.  None of which have been very good and only one of which sold (1994's Last of the Independents -- which really sold because "I'll Stand By You" was used in the Demi Moore film GI Jane).  Their last attempt was Break Up the Concrete in 2008 which I panned and which is one of the worst albums ever -- not just of 2008, but ever.  The musical stylings of, for example, William Shatner are better than Break Up the Concrete.


But Packed! actually wasn't the last great album by Pretenders.

Five years later, in 1995, the band offered one last classic (so far).  But it wasn't a studio album, it was a live one, The Isle of  View.




As we all know, Barbra Streisand and others love to 'sweeten' their live vocals by redoing them in the studio. So most live albums aren't really live anymore.  They're also not often anything that works as an album.

I'd thought, for example, that Sarah McLachlan would pull it off in 1999 with Mirrorball.  She didn't.  Her two disc set was erratic -- apparently in order to dispel the slams that all of her songs sound alike.  If only. And maybe it would have helped if she'd stuck to one concert to pull the performances from?
Leaving aside Tori Amos' official bootlegs of her Legs & Boots tour, there's really nothing like The Isle of View.  
Chrissie (on rhythm guitar and lead vocals) and original drummer Martin Chambers are joined by band members lead guitarist Adam Seymour and bassist Andy Hobson as well as Damon Albarn on piano, John Metcalfe on viola, Louise Fuller and Richard Koster on violins, Ivan McCready on cello and Mark "Will" Smith on percussion.

The album is amazing.  And I was reminded of that when we went to New York this week to see the United Nations Security Council briefing on Iraq.  Later that day, we went into Academy Records & CDs (near Fifth Avenue, I don't know where, look it up, it's worth visiting).  And while going through the CDs. I was listening to the couple near me.  

Not eavesdropping, they were too loud for me to be accused of eavesdropping.  And I really hated the guy who was telling the woman that Danny Goldberg wrote "this f**king fantastic book called Wonderland Avenue about how he hung out with The Doors in the early sixties when they were huge and . . ."  First, it's Danny Sugarman, from the West Coast.  Danny Goldberg is a music executive (who was NYC based in the late 60s, C.I. told me, and a very good friend of the great rock writer Lillian Roxom).  Sugarman also didn't hang out with The Doors "in the early sixties" -- they weren't around in the early sixties.  He hangs with them starting in 1966.  The only thing more annoying than the invented facts was the puffed up manner in which the man was speaking. 

Why are the ones so full of themselves always the ones who are so wrong?

I was in the Js and not moving, they could go around me, damn it.  At a first visit to any music store, I go through alphabetical and don't miss anything.  Here, I also had Wally following several letters behind.  (Wally's good but he's a child of the downloads.  People my age can scan a row of vinyl or a row of CDs in seconds.)  So they finally get the idea and go around me and I'm spared his further insight into why "Charlton Heston is the f**king best actor of all time!  Epic!  Epic in The Ten Commandments!"

But I'm scanning quick and soon enough they're only a few feet away.  As I get closer, he's expounding on how Bio-Dome is really "far superior to Citizen Kane and other similar films of that ilk" and I'm wondering how the woman got trapped with him when I hear her gasp.

Thinking she stumbled while attempting to escape his jawboning, I put a finger on the spine of the CD case I'd just scanned and look over.  She's holding a CD.


The Isle of  View.

"This is the best CD I've ever heard!" she exclaims.

I'm about to go back to scanning when he says, "Yeah, she did good with 'I Love Rock and Roll' but she didn't write it and she really hasn't left an impact."

The woman's jaw drop as she stares at her idiot.  So I jump in, finger still on CD case spine, with, "Joan Jett did 'I Love Rock & Roll!'  Chrissie Hynde's hits include 'Brass In Pocket,' 'Middle of the Road,' 'Back on the Chain Gang,' 'Show Me,' '2,000 Miles,' 'Don't Get Me Wrong,' 'My Baby,' 'Never Do That,' 'I'll Stand By You' and, with UB40, 'I've Got You Babe'."

I then went back to my scanning as the woman explained the album meant more to her "than Dusty In Memphis and Surfacing combined.  I lived on this album after my worst break up."

And as she spoke about the album, track-by-track, I kept scanning but found myself nodding along.

It's the strongest material the band has being performed live.  

And, most important, it's not rushed.  

Chrissie's confident enough to explore the songs and find new moods and variations.  

The Dusty In Memphis mention?

I can see it because that Dusty Springfield classic was like a gentle awakening and this is the book end to that, a calm closing to a vivid day.

Live albums rarely work as albums.  The Rolling Stones have probably issued more live albums than anyone but there's not even one I consider to be as good as even  their worst studio work.

But Pretenders managed to create a classic in what is an unyielding format and The Isle of  View only becomes finer with each passing year.

The band's last two studio albums faltered musically because everything was so rushed -- Loose Screw by trying to find a groove in the forced breeding of reggae and electronica and Break Up the Concrete by sounding like rockabilly from an 8-year-old-girl who spent the last 4 hours mainlining Pixy Stix before racing around the room on a sugar high.  With The Isle of View, Chrissie was commanding the moment, not unable to keep up with it.


To pull this into the now, if you've heard "Dark Sunglasses," Chrissie's working a similar vibe on that and if she pulls it off for the entire Stokholm album (supposed to be released in June), she may have yet another classic on her hands.  I think that's something we could all celebrate.













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