| |
|
Sunday, September 25, 2005
|
|
Sokie writes "This afternoon the Seattle City Council passed a resolution advocating the terminiation of the Seattle Monorail Project. This follows a recent recommendation by the mayor that the project be scrapped. Lacking city support, the project looks to be dead and the city council will request that the state legislature formally terminate the project during their next session. City councilman Richard Conlin noted that the $1 million per week tax collection required by the SMP would be enough to eliminate fares on the city's bus network."
(Via Slashdot.)
11:02:39 PM 
|
|
Good piece in Slate about why No Direction Home, and most stuff about Dylan ignores the rest of the story. Partly it's because the shadow that great great those 60s albums -- Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde (all released within a space of less than 14 months) -- casts is so big and so dark. Partly because it is true: Dylan only rarely hit those heights again (though when he did, he did pretty well indeed). But I like this close to the Slate piece:
In any case, Dylan, for all his efforts to keep living his life and making new music, remains trapped by our '60s fetish, with even serious, well-intentioned directors like Martin Scorsese complicit. In one scene in No Direction Home, a young folkie, peeved that Dylan has gone electric, sniffs: "I like his earlier records … but this I just can't stick." The audience is meant to feel superior to this shortsighted purist, knowing as we do that Dylan was then creating his greatest work. But although the film can offer ironic distance on this stooge, it betrays no awareness that at some level it shares the same blinkered vision.
11:01:47 PM
|
|
Wapo.com: Defense Spending Is Overstated, GAO Report Says:
The Pentagon has no accurate knowledge of the cost of military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan or the fight against terrorism, limiting Congress's ability to oversee spending, the Government Accountability Office concluded in a report released yesterday.
The Defense Department has reported spending $191 billion to fight terrorism from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks through May 2005, with the annual sum ballooning from $11 billion in fiscal 2002 to a projected $71 billion in fiscal 2005. But the GAO investigation found many inaccuracies totaling billions of dollars.
"Neither DOD nor Congress can reliably know how much the war is costing
and details of how appropriated funds are being spent," the report to
Congress stated. The GAO said the problem is rooted in long-standing
weaknesses in the Pentagon's outmoded financial management system,
which is designed to handle small-scale contingencies.
(Via Fables of the reconstruction.)
9:16:18 PM
|
|
"An extraordinary appeal to Americans from the Bush administration for money to help pay for the reconstruction of Iraq has raised only $600...Contributors have no way of knowing who will receive their donations or even where they may go, after officials said details had be kept secret for security reasons." (Source) Don't feel too bad for Halliburton, though. They stole more money than that from the U.S. taxpayers before breakfast. Indeed, before 12:01 a.m.
Actually, this ties in very well with what is on C-SPAN right now - the "Rally to Honor Military Families" which was mentioned in almost all the press coverage of yesterday's antiwar demos, and given equal coverage on MSNBC this morning before it even took place. The crowd at this rally seems to consist of a few dozen people at most (the
Washington Post
says 100; I won't quibble); I think there are more people on the stage (all of whom, rather bizarrely, are wearing identical maroon polo shirts marking them as Gold Star Family Members). On a related amusing note, the Post quotes the FreeRepublic spokesperson from yesterday as saying they expected 20,000 people at this rally. Yeah, nice try, Freepers! I hope you didn't rent enough portapotties for 20,000 people - those things are expensive! You could have used the money to up that $600 voluntary donation total mentioned above.
(Via Left I on the News.)
9:11:07 PM
|
|
Spent the afternoon at the Oakland Museum, taking in the Baseball as America exhibit and other artworks. Very enjoyable exhibit.
I think there are only three things that America will be known
for 2,000
years from now when they study this civilization: the
Constitution, jazz music and baseball. They're the three
most beautifully designed things this culture has ever produced. --Gerald Early, scholar
7:00:49 PM
|
|
A much smaller demonstration Saturday by military families supported administration policy in Iraq. About 150 to 200 demonstrators gathered on a corner of Pennsylvania Avenue between the Capitol and the White House.
(Via NPR Programs: All Things Considered.)
Disgusing that NPR gave a couple hundred demonstrators as much coverage as the as many as 100,000 anti-war demonstrators who showed up.
6:54:47 PM
|
|
Last night I watched the complete Scorsese Dylan documentary, No Direction Home. It was lots of fun, though it missed the mark for me in a lot of ways.
First, as longtime Dylan nut, I'm very very familiar with the biography, so for me most all the facts presented weren't new. The focus on the sixties stuff does no justice to the fantastic work Bob did after the motorcycle wreck. This includes the Basement Tapes, Blood On the Tracks, the remarkable tours of 75/76 and 79/80, and some great performances in the 90s' The early 60s focus, oddly enough, reinforces that whole "voice of a generation" thing that Bob sort of shies away from. Finally, I'd like to have heard more about the craft of the songwriting and performing, that Bob was pretty generous in discussing in the first volume of the memoirs.
What I'd really like to see more of is that fantastic 1966 Tour with the Band footage. That stuff was just riveting. I bought my first copy of bootleg '66 material -- the so-called "Royal Albert Hall" concert -- some 34 years ago, just about this time of year (my first quarter in college). I loved that stuff immediately. Bob was challenging, revolutionary. I'd stand those 1966 performances as art with any work of art in world history, and they wouldn't have to hang their head. The story has long been that Dylan and Robertson and Howard Alk destroyed this footage when they edited Eat the Document in 1967. It's a blessing that that's not so, and I'm looking forward to the day they become available in their entirety; hopefully soon.
That said, the Dylan interview is terrific. Bob is not wary, not suspicious, open, and seemingly honest in his narration. He's fun, but he does hold his humor back it seems to me. I liked the moment where he says about his two early girlfriends, "they brought out the poet in me," but there's not enough of that humor in the interviews. That aside, the most fascinating moments were where he talked about himself as an artist and performer. It's always been too easy to take him as sort of a "natural" who doesn't work at his crafts; it's fun when he discussed the crafts and shows how he works.
Now, I may be giving too much of myself up, but I do like the protest stuff he wrote in 1962 and '63. (I love his singing then, too.) But when I look at the world to day, I see that there's a truth in some songs that is even more evident today than it was when wrote them. Songs like Only A Pawn In Their Game, Masters of War, With God on Our Side, A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, Only a Hobo, and (in a different vein) It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) pretty much formed my political philosophy (along with the Bible some other strange stuff) back when I was in High School, and in all the years since, I haven't seen anything to show me they're wrong. These are great songs.
[By the way, one thing hit me that I hadn't realized before. Bob talked about being near Martin Luther King when he gave the I Have A Dream speech at the March on Washington, and they showed Bob singing When the Ship Comes In at that demonstration. Bob doesn't sing that song much, and the other notable time he sang it was at his appearance at Live Aid in 1985. I've never realized it, but I know that Dylan chose that time and place to sing the song remembering the earlier performance.]
The world is a better place for this documentary, and I'm glad we got it. But we've had too much looking back from Dylan over the last couple years: the memoir, a couple Bootleg Series albums, other old concerts released to venues like Starbucks. What we need is some new Dylan work, and I hope there's some of that in the pipeline.
6:52:29 PM
|
|
It's Banned Book Week!
Intellectual freedom can exist only where two essential conditions are met: first, that all individuals have the right to hold any belief on any subject and to convey their ideas in any form they deem appropriate; and second, that society makes an equal commitment to the right of unrestricted access to information and ideas regardless of the communication medium used, the content of the work, and the viewpoints of both the author and receiver of information. Freedom to express oneself through a chosen mode of communication, including the Internet, becomes virtually meaningless if access to that information is not protected. Intellectual freedom implies a circle, and that circle is broken if either freedom of expression or access to ideas is stifled.
5:09:41 PM
|
|
Opponents of gay marriage are largely motivated by their firm belief that such unions are displeasing to God and that only divinely-approved marriages should be permitted. How long will it be, however, before they start fighting for other kinds of...
(Via About Agnosticism/Atheism.)
9:54:07 AM
|
|
|
© Copyright 2005 Steve Michel.
Last update: 10/1/2005; 12:09:30 AM.
|
|
|
