At long last

An odd aside

From a NYT article on the new Bob Woodward book:

The book, bought by a reporter for The New York Times at retail price in advance of its official release, is the third that Mr. Woodward has written chronicling the inner debates in the White House....

Seems someone's pissed they didn't get a freebie.

Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?

The ol' Lysistrata strategy:

Colombian gangsters face sex ban
Wives and girlfriends of gang members in one of Colombia's most violent cities have called a sex ban in a bid to get their men to give up the gun.
more

Žižek's Impossible Realism

Slavoj Žižek on Israel's wars on its neighbors:

Let's try a mental experiment and imagine that, instead of Lebanese women and children, the human shields used by Hezbollah were Israeli women and children. Would the IDF still consider the price affordable and continue the bombing? If the answer is "no," then the IDF is effectively practicing racism, determining that Jewish life has more value than Arab life.
***
The problem courted by Israel in its continuous display of power is that this display will be soon perceived as a sign of its opposite, of impotence. This paradox of power is known to anyone who has had to play the role of paternal authority: In order to retain its force, power has to remain virtual, a threat of power.
***
It is those who evoke the Holocaust who effectively manipulate it, making it an instrument for today's political uses. The very need to evoke the Holocaust in defense of Israel's actions implies that its crimes are so horrible that only the absolute trump-card of the Holocaust can redeem them.

Art is a Cat

Jerry Saltz takes on the neo-Cartesians:

In the days just after September 11, painter Gaylen Gerber reported the "small victories" he felt going to the Art Institute of Chicago and simply "looking at shiny plastic furniture from the '60s and '70s that in some way, maybe because of its superficial and ultra-clean look, made me feel a little better."

Gerber was experiencing the ways in which art tells you things you don't know you need to know until you know them. He was in touch with how art can be "a vacation from the self," in critic Peter Schjeldahl's words, or a journey to it; how it's a system for mapping, reflecting, prospecting, and creating consciousness. Art is a region where protocols are invented or suspended and things one doesn't understand change one's life. That's why those shiny chairs cut through the gloom, a ceramic pot can vie for greatness with the Sistine Ceiling, and the Vietnam Memorial channels a nation's remorse even though it is based on the one thing that most Americans purport to loathe: abstraction.

Art is often political when it doesn't seem political and not political when that's all it seems to be. Neither Andy Warhol nor Donald Judd made overtly political art. Yet both changed the way the world looks and the way we look at the world. That's because art creates new thought structures. Imagine all the thought structures that either would have never existed or gone undiscovered had all of Shakespeare been lost. Art does far more than only meet the eye. It is part of the biota of the world. It exists within a holistic system.

Crazy from the Coffin

Building on a piece from the soundtrack to the film Preparati la bara! (Ferdinando Baldi, 1968) [aka Django, Prepare a Coffin!], Gnarls Barkley has the hit of Summer '06... though it also has similarities to an old tune by Harvey Scales.

Hear for yourself in these mp3s:

• Gianfranco Reverbi, "Nel cimitero di tucson" (Preparati la bara!, 1968)
• Harvey Scales & the 7 Sounds, "Love-itis" (from the Shakin' Fit! compilation)