BillSaysThis

Feminist icon Camille Paglia uses her review of Barry Miles’ Zappa in the New York Times as a platform to pontificate on Zappa’s importance, whereas I’d really rather have had an actual review of the book. Silly me.

Ashcroft says judges threaten national security by questioning Bush decisions; judges continue to ignore the man who couldn’t beat a dead Democrat in a Red state four years ago.

Frist to Democrats: Stop Blocking Judges, or in other words, we (Republicans) were happy to filibuster to our heart’s delight when you (Democrats) were making nominations but now that we have the hammer forget it.

Alberto Gonzales, responsible for torture is acceptable/Abu Ghraib memos, nominated to be Attorney General

4th Amendment? Screw it: U.S. Govt.: We seize servers, you can’t complain

JRobb analysis of how the Bush Crew continues to ignore reality on the ground in Iraq, which will have major repercussions in the months to come, probably within our borders.

Happy 500, Mike, and thanks!

King Abdullah II of Jordan pens a surprisingly well-balanced essay on the opportunity to move forward on the Palestinean/Israeli conflict: The Road From Here

Crumbling dirt and gravel are spread all over my jeans

As I sit behind a huge rocker wider than I am tall and

Taller than I am wide, a gnarly old tree in front of me.

I’m waiting for the sound of searching footsteps to

Move far enough away that I can’t hear them moving

These people looking for me mean business and their

Business is meaner than I want to imagine and by all means

I want to stay strayed from their sight.

My chest is heaving, heavy breathing and I try to mute the

Sound so I can avoid the attention but my nerves are

Flaring as my head keeps churning from side to side.

These men (women?) chasing me have the wrong impression

The wrong idea and I should be home resting on a black couch

Instead of evading these people in black wearing sunglasses that

Hide their roaming eyes from the late morning sunshine that even

I can see cutting through the tree’s branches and leaves.

Three hundred yards off I hear a stream rushing over rocks

So I argue with myself, is the sound is the noise loud enough

Close enough to cover me if I run to it, away from their guns.

Deciding is difficult, should I hear the spanging of bullets near me

I’m sure the fear will be as much as I can bear and more, yet

Sitting in place and not moving will not be wise much longer

The wrong thing to do and yet I am paralyzed with my brain racing

Right here between a rock and a hard place, for sure.

Want some insight into how marketers in general, and Republicans in particular are using the latest methods to get inside your wallet and your vote? Check out frontline: the persuaders from PBS and author Douglas Rushkoff, and if you’ve missed the broadcast in your area fear not since our wonderful public broadcasters will have the entire show online as of Friday. Brings out some really disturbing yet useful to know information.

Pam relates a wonderful Firm Source of Pride, always good to read something so positive.

The art of recording music has been born and revolutionized time after time in just the last century and a bit. One man, with a beautiful heart and a soul that was simply musical, is little known to the lovers of modern music but made undisputable contributions to several of those revolutions and helped give us an amazing amount of many different types of hugely popular music.

Tom Dowd and the Language of Music is a loving biography of that man, made in the months before Dowd passed away, during a time when he was still making new music with modern talent in his mid-70s. He began as a recording engineer when Atlantic Records was founded in the late ’40s, built the first real commercial stereo and multi-track studios and took to the computerized studios of the ’90s and later like he was born to it.

Who did Dowd record? Jazz and R&B artists like John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, and Otis Redding. And rockers, man did he work the board magic for rockers: Eric Clapton (both The Cream and Derek and the Dominos), The Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Young Rascals, The Drifters, Bobby Darin, Dusty Springfield, Rod Stewart and Cher. So many more, just an awesome discography.

There isn’t too much detail about the technical aspects of what Dowd did, though he does go back to the original Layla tapes and give a little taste of how the individual tracks fit together in the mix. Some discussion of his pioneering work in stereo and multi-track recording. Lots of interviews with artists he worked with–Clapton talks about believing so much more in Dowd’s musical instincts than his own and Gregg Allman cannot say enough about Dowd as a man. Plus his important partners at Atlantic Records, his boss and company founder Ahmet Ertegun, producer Jerry Wexler and protege Phil Ramone.

A sweet taste of the last half century of music. A portrait of a man who was a key piece of connective tissue across musical eras and genres.

Recommended

Earthquakes will stay in San Jose, at least for 2005, and continue playing their home games in the matchbox that is Spartan Stadium.

Weren’t special charges supposed to go the way of the Dodo with the corporate governance reforms of the last couple of years? Guess not.

Could John Malone be thinking of bidding for News Corp.? Malone is a pretty cagey veteran of the cable TV industry and has more experience building, buying and selling both cable systems and networks and playing the Wall Street game than anyone else. One wonders how he might change the level of political bias at Murdoch’s empire if this comes to pass–I have to admit to being uninformed on Malone’s political leanings.

Captology: What John Kerry was sorely missing! [via Doc]

[A letter to the editors, NY Times]

Michael Denis (Letters, 11/7/4) asks that New Yorkers “consider the opinion of those who feel that abortion is murder and that homosexual marriage is wrong. You may not agree with these positions, but to dismiss our beliefs is to invite further division.” He goes on to ask for “real dialog.”

I do disagree with those positions but would ask him and his fellow believers to explain how to surmount this divide, how to have a real dialog, without simply giving in; deriving one’s life rules from a literal belief in the Bible seems to leave little room for compromise. Further, even if abortion remains legal and gay marriage becomes so, Denis does not need to avail himself of them while under his regime we have no choice. What, I ask, is more the middle ground, allowing individuals to choose for themselves or having one side decide for all?

I’m willing to give Lorne Michaels the benefit of the doubt but really: Reality Contest for ‘Saturday Night Live’ Berth.

There is a concept in animation called the Uncanny Valley, a term coined by Japanese roboticist Doctor Masahiro Mori, which says that the human mind works in such a way that it responds to images or robots or other human-looking objects which are close but not quite close enough to true humans very negatively. As computer-generated animated films (or video games) get better and better at depicting reality, the makers need to take care not to fall in to it.

I bring this up because the visual quality seen in The Incredibles makes it clear that the years remaining until films can jump across the valley is probably measured in single digits. Comparing the images of humans and other objects like trees and ocean waves, I thought that the Pixar staff probably lowered the human characters’ resolution; they certainly seem somewhat more wooden and less detailed.

Even so the film has the highest quality I’ve seen yet in a feature-length animation. And writer-director Brad Bird (previously acclaimed for The Iron Giant) makes superb use of it for the first Pixar film that features only human characters. The basic story is superheroes versus would be supervillain, though with the added fillip of the superheroes being husband and wife with their three kids plus one superhero buddy. Craig T. Nelson was a terrific choice as Bob “Mr. Incredible” Parr, the other outstanding voicework comes from Bird as supercostume designer Edna Mode.

Bird uses the family subplot as counterpoint to the main story though one of my complaints is that the main conflict doesn’t feel hefty enough. If this were, like so many action movies, the first screen version of a well-established comic book and telling the origin story that might not even be worthy of mention but Bird said that he didn’t make Incredibles to launch a series. Over half the movie goes by before we truly meet Syndrome (Jason Lee voicing a credible villain) and I was wondering if there was going to be a single bad guy, or just the story of a man beaten down by modern life.

Because if anything, the script goes all out showing how our litiginous, all victims culture deals with people who stand out from the crowd. Not just by shutting all the superheroes down with lawsuit after lawsuit and the government pushing them into witness relocaiton-like programs but with the small details of the Parrs’ lives. Bob must cram his huge body into a tiny car and drive to work at a tiny job where he is berated by a tiny boss and sit in a tiny cubicle; son Dash must hide his speed instead of even competing in sports and daughter Violet retreats so far into shyness that no one notices her becoming invisible at the least attention.

How good they all feel when forced to confront Buddy “Syndrome” Pine! No problem with lawsuits since the action is off on a tropical island where there are no innocents. Even when the action moves back to the big city, no one stops to think about shutting down and letting Syndrome have his way. I’m tempted to say this is another small flaw but by the last scenes Bird has dialed the action and pace up to where it’s immaterial.

recommended

After what manager Rafa Benitez called their best outing of the season three days ago against Deportivo La Coruna in Champions League play, today saw their worst as the Reds went down 0 – 1 home to Birmingham, though without Gerrard, Cisse and Baros and only Kewell up front as striker one does wonder where the goals were expected to be had.

Cars: When they say teaser trailer, they mean it. Still, next year’s Pixar/Disney release (the last of their collaborations?) looks interesting from this couple of minutes. People are Cars, get it? No plot revealed at all in this clip and no way to even know if the featured cars will be characters in the film.

• Novelist Jane Smiley: Red Staters are willfully ignorant and the answer is not to move right or left but to pound them over the head with Bush Crew mistakes and outrages. Hmm.
• For my homie, America
• What will voters think if we are still at war against terror four years from now, if Osama bin Laden or Zarqawi is still videotaping the occasional taunting message? I’m hardpressed to find exit polling to back this up but I have to think that somewhere between 5-10% of Bush’s votes were won on the don’t change horses in war time reasoning, which was enough to swing the election. If Iraq is semi-stable, real democracy or not, but there are still Islamist terrorists killing people and disrupting economies regularly, will that argument work again?
  
• Not explicitly about the US or the election but an editorial in today’s Times on the murder of Theo Van Gogh by Muslim extremists in the Netherlands raises the issue of managing diverse, even extreme, groups in a multiculural society. Seems applicable to the US as well because I find little difficulty in imagining Red/Blue conflict finding its way to violence in the near term, and not necessarily from the Red side–there are already groups and individuals on the Left here using such abominable tactics. I’d surely love to see the Times editorial board propose some concrete actions that might help solve the problem, or at least start down the path to solution, rather than just taking the easy way out as they have.
• We’re already seeing Hillary Clinton, Al Gore and John Edwards mentioned as early/potential frontrunners for the Dems in 2008 but with no incumbent VP to take the nod (and a Constitutional Amendment that would allow Schwarzenneger to run that soon nearly impossible), who are the likely Republican prospects?
  

• Looking at the more expansive county level voting maps, all the talk of Red and Blue states is wrong: the division is very starkly big city Blues versus everything else Reds.
• The way his supporters seem (to me) to idealize Bush is strangely amusing and scary. All the talk about values and morality being the key to his victory strike me as hypocritical, which is nothing unusual even if the pundits are surprised.
• Lou Dobbs made a very cogent point on TV yesterday. He said there is no such thing as a political mandate, that the phrase was made up by Bill Clinton, and what Bush has is a legislative majority that will enable him to put most of his agenda through Congress. I think Grover Nordquist must be having wide-awake wet dreams the last 24 hours.
• Bush will need an awfully powerful magic wand to fund the financial aspects (Social Security privatization, making permanent the recent tax cuts, eliminating the stub of an inheritance tax still on the books) of his second term agenda.