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Thursday, September 16, 2004 |
Guitar solo tab for "I Wanna Be Sedated"
Mark Frauenfelder:
Here is Johnny's guitar solo on the Ramones' "I Wanna Be Sedated":
E-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-|-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-|0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0|-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
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(Via Crooked Timber) [Boing Boing]
10:34:43 PM Permalink
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The New Yorker
Having a New Yorker subscription is a distinctly mixed blessing. On the one hand, you have lots of great stuff to read. On the other, there is lots of great stuff to read. On the West coast, copies almost always arrive late in the week -- I don't think I've ever gotten one earlier than Wednesday. And this week, because of the 3-day weekend last week, I ended up getting an issue on Monday and another on Wednesday!
I find if I don't read the thing pretty quickly, I wont' read it at all. Kind of like the way blog entries flow through the aggregator. So the other night I sat down and read a few pieces at once.
This week there's a great profile of Gillian Welch, a really deep, interesting piece. Welch is a good songwriter and singer, and is really a "two-person band named Gillian Welch," along with her partner David Rawlings. The article tells the story of her childhood, schooling in Santa Cruz, etc. As always in pieces about her, the dubious, silly notion of "authenticity" comes up. She writes songs that address the same issues, sound like, and are certainly deeply influenced by various Bluegrass performers and strains. But some people don't like that:
Some people like to say that as the daughter of musicians in Los Angeles she has not right to play music they regard as reserved for people who grew up in poverty or, anyway, among laborers.
What a very strange notion that is, that an artist has to write stuff constrained by her birth circumstances? I just find that so bizarre. They have a great answer for it, but the weird thing is that it has to be answered at all:
In response, Rawlings likes to bring up Ernest Hemingway. "You read 'The Old Man and the Sea,' and you like it," he says. "Then you find out that not only is the man who wrote it not a commerical fisherman, he isn't even a Cuban. Do you not like it now?"
That's a pretty strong answer, but then it's weakened in the story by bringing up some supposed mystical connection Welch has to bluegrass because maybe her birth mother (who gave her up for immediate adoption) was from North Carolina. What hooey, and it does weaken the right answer: that what makes good art is the quality of the art, not the ancestry or the "authenticity" of the person who created it. Either the bluegrass is good as it is, as a piece of art, no matter who sings it, or it isn't.
6:22:36 PM Permalink
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Islam is changing . 9/11 and Beslan...
Islam is changing . 9/11 and Beslan are leading millions of Muslims to question their faith. It could be the start of a Reformation... [Arts & Letters Daily]
Arts & Letters Daily actually changes the headline from the original "Can Islam Change?" to "Islam is Changing," which is not necessarily representative of the actual article. It's an interesting piece, and a bit hopeful. The truth is, if Islam doesn't change, we're in for an even more dangerous future.
In Pakistan, however, the mullahs are still predominantly hardline and are locked in a virtual civil war with reformers. The contentious issue here is the Hudood Ordinance, which states the maximum punishments for adultery (stoning), false accusation of adultery (80 lashes of the whip), theft (cutting off the right hand), drinking alcohol (80 lashes) and apostasy (death). The ordinance was imposed on Pakistan in 1979 by the military ruler Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, under pressure from Islamic parties. It makes no distinction between rape and adultery; thus women who are raped often end up being whipped while the rapists are exonerated. Girls who have reached the age of puberty are treated as adults. Worse, women are not allowed to give evidence on their own behalf. Among the high-profile injustices was the case in 1983 of 15-year-old Jehan Mina, raped by an uncle and his son. She was sentenced to ten years in prison and 100 lashes, reduced to three years and 15 lashes in view of her age. In 1985, a blind maidservant, Safia Bibi, was sentenced to a similar punishment. In both cases, the girl's pregnancy was used as proof that the sex act had been committed but the men were acquitted on the benefit of the doubt. Several women have been sentenced to death by stoning, the most recent being Zafran Bibi in Kohat in 2002, although that sentence was quickly overturned on appeal.
Elsewhere, the focus is not so much on Islamic law as on Islam as a whole. In a general election last March, the Malaysian prime minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, argued that Islam was almost totally associated with violence and extremism and needed to be formulated anew. He called his new concept "Islam Hadhari", or progressive Islam. It was pitted against the "conservative Islam" of the main opposition party, the Islamic Pas. For the first time, the governing coalition won more than 90 per cent of federal parliamentary seats. Pas, and its version of Islam (full implementation of the sharia, without modification; a leading role in the state for religious scholars; and so on), were routed.
Badawi, who is a trained religious scholar, took the term "hadhari" from Ibn Khaldun, the 14th-century Muslim historian and founder of sociology. The term signifies urban civilisation; and Islam Hadhari emphasises economic development, civic life and cultural progress. When Muslims talk about Islam, says Abdullah Mohd Zain, a minister in the prime minister's department, "there is always the tendency to link it to the past, to the Prophet's time". Islam Hadhari gives equal emphasis to the present and the future. "It emphasises wisdom, practicality and harmony," says Zain. "It encourages moderation or a balanced approach to life. Yet it does not stray from the fundamentals of the Koran and the example and sayings of the Prophet."
6:06:50 PM Permalink
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UPI: Iraq casualty count 17,000 short
"Nearly 17,000 service members medically evacuated from Iraq and Afghanistan are absent from public Pentagon casualty reports commonly cited by newspapers, according to military data reviewed by United Press International. Most don't fit the definition of casualties, according to the Pentagon, but a veterans' advocate said they should all be counted." (09/15/04) [Rational Review News Digest]
5:12:34 PM Permalink
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Dick Cheney on invading Iraq: "would have been a mistake"
Dick Cheney in a post-mortem on the first Gulf War at the Soref Symposium, 4/29/1991:
I think that the proposition of going to Baghdad is also fallacious. I think if we were going to remove Saddam Hussein we would have had to go all the way to Baghdad, we would have to commit a lot of force because I do not believe he would wait in the Presidential Palace for us to arrive. I think we'd have had to hunt him down. And once we'd done that and we'd gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and his government, then we'd have had to put another government in its place.
What kind of government? Should it be a Sunni government or Shi'i government or a Kurdish government or Ba'athist regime? Or maybe we want to bring in some of the Islamic fundamentalists? How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the government once U.S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable?
I think it is vitally important for a President to know when to use military force. I think it is also very important for him to know when not to commit U.S. military force. And it's my view that the President got it right both times, that it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq.
The Vice President seems to be forgetting things -- must be the onset of Alzheimers. Let's do him a favor and send him into early retirement so he can spend more time with his family. [Jim Gilliam]
3:25:39 PM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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