General Interest Review 00018

Music from Big Pink

"Music from Big Pink" is a rock album released in 1968 by The Band. Alternately well-plotted, shambolic, uplifting and a downer, this set picks up and runs with the great contradictions in Dylan (sound like an accident, plan like it's the shuttle liftoff), and to some extent The Beatles (so arty, yet so popular). The music and simplistic ensemble moniker is made to conjure a back to basics feel, to a time when even the facial hair felt a little more organic. In the great tradition of Hank Williams, Muddy Waters, Ray Charles, ad naus., the listening public is supposed to believe that they just ambled down off the mountain to see what all the hollerin' was about. The inside jacket photo on the original LP features the quintet mixed in with the local townsfolk -- as if they hadn't just blown into a town a few months earlier. In reality they'd been struggling to get to this point all along. Still, at the height of psychedelia, it's easy to see how anything that didn't sound druggy, orchestrated and conceited was a nice change of pace.

The Band was content to be that simple pivot to a hazeless time during the sessions in Big Pink, with tempos that don't really get above a shuffle, and that deceiving flat production that makes all those interwoven flourishes sound like they're being played by five guys just standing around smoking and looking at their watches. Their next record, which bordered on bloated in a few spots, would pull back the curtain and show all the thought they put into their music, but as is the case for most beloved first albums, the low expectations of obscurity and technical nascency leave room to add a little bit of the swagger at the heart of what makes rock so appealing in the first place.

General Interest Review 00017

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

"The Snows of Kilimanjaro" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway. Reading as the recollections of a writer wounded on safari, lying on his deathbed, the story treats mortality as a tightrope walk. For once in his life, with nothing better to do, he turns inward and looks back at a life lived in full but all-too-often not recorded. As the man is a writer, he laments his inability to properly record all the thoughts he's had, the people he's observed, and what great copy it all would've produced.

It's easy to assume the writer is a shade of Hemingway himself. Living for the moment, on safari, memories of the Great War, memories of Paris, the trappings of the upper classes he's fallen in with. And, really, so be it. To get too caught up in reading into Hemingway's own thoughts is to show that Hemingway is an interesting character. But we already knew that.

The story's real strength is the sensitivity of his tenuous thoughts knowing it will all be over soon. Trivial arguments with his wife somehow fit seamlessly along what-does-it-all-mean yearnings of a life that could've held more. And the whole array of sorrow, resignation and instant humility is conveyed in a single sentence: "So this is how you died, in whispers that you did not hear."

General Interest Review 00016

Nadal Malik Hasan

Nadal Malik Hasan is an Army psychiatrist accused of opening fire on fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, Tex., last week. The shooting spree killed more than a dozen and left scores more injured. Consensus appears to be forming around a group of common indicators that led to his behavior. His behavior was erratic, he was a Muslim fanatic, he was borderline psychotic. All of these elements add up to tell a familiar tale. A tragic event divorced from the norm in our culture is caused by behavior that is practically unknowable to so-called normal people.

But little mention has been made about the conditions within the system in which Hasan was operating. He entered the military by his own choosing, but existing within an extremely rigid, top-down system that has little tolerance for diversity doesn't seem a cakewalk. Add to that the military's policy in recent years and its conflict with his Muslim faith. Wars are of course fought against governments, but the people that bear the effects of war are the citizens. And religion is an outlet to interpret those effects, especially in the Muslim world, where religion is deeply intertwined with everyday life, and where the United States' wars are currently waged. After the death of an innocent relative, where else would someone go to get answers about a situation that seems to have none? The U.S. military wages intense propaganda campaigns in its current warzones of Iraq and Afghanistan to try to stamp out the influence of these clerics. But how is a heavily armored action figure a better alternative to a sensitive, non-foreign human being?

Faced with confusion and increasing isolation, Hasan likely found himself in a similar situation to the victims of military wrath. It is not irrational to feel mentally squeezed by watching death and destruction on a huge scale perpetuated by a force that is supposed to be doing good. Faced with destruction of people's livelihoods he felt intertwined with, he needed answers. So he sought out a cleric to get those answers. He likely wanted a human perspective from an increasingly mechanical structure that demanded he fall in line. This is hardly unknowable behavior to a population that wants answers about lesser matters from faith leaders.

Hasan's full-out snap was indeed a horrific act, and obviously rare in the U.S. military. (Despite the rise in post-traumatic stress-related killings - another new reality in this new warfare). But equally commonplace for that mighty military is broad destruction and devastation, an inescapable condition for people who happen to live where we choose to bomb. Within a system capable of propagating neverending hell, the effects are bound to leave a mark on those charged with carrying out these murderous machinations.

General Interest Review 00015

Reality (political)


Political reality is the collection of outside forces that exist around a specific policy proposal, pushing toward demise, or, in a few unlikely examples, acceptance. In American politics, the environment is normally characterized by factors like public sentiment (and, by extension, re-election prospects), the opinions of interest groups, and seemingly unrelated issues that appear sporadically to either bolster or defeat the larger issue. This reality is normally observed by people involved in pushing or defeating the policy proposal. Crucial to this conception is the idea that there is only one way of acting within the political system, even though that same system is often characterized as dynamic, and even complex.

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel crystallized the sentiment in today's New York Times surrounding the health care debate:
“I’m sure there are a lot of people sitting in the shade at the Aspen Institute — my brother being one of them — who will tell you what the ideal plan is. Great, fascinating. You have the art of the possible measured against the ideal.”

Within the debate surrounding health care, this political reality has been observed repeatedly both by opponents and realists like Emmanuel. The main guts of the proposal, which would mandate health care for everyone and institute checks on the current system overrun completely by private insurance companies, have been called too radical a reform for the public. This hinges on the public option, which has already been Reviewed, but also on the general sentiment that the public at large will not tolerate a system with increased government involvement.

But it turns out there are other realities to contend with, they simply don't get mentioned. There is the reality of polling. In almost every poll conducted about health care reform, there is an overwhelming consensus that the current system must be changed. The facts are pretty basic -- the system leaves millions without health care, and costs far too much. The change could take the form of one of two options in a general sense. One is the eradication of the current private insurance companies, and speedy replacement by a more fragmented market. This is unthinkable given the power of the current insurance companies and health providers, their control vested in one fifth of the entire economy. So the other choice is to attempt to offset the private companies with another kind of health care provider in another sector, namely the public one. Given the reality of the entrenched industry that is supposed to be reformed, a public-based change is the only remotely feasible choice for reform, which, given the reality of public sentiment, should be overwhelmingly popular.

Yet even a policy that has been watered down from what most people who truly want change desire (and falls far short of the guarantees on health care delivered by the rest of the so-called industrialized world) is considered unfeasible due to outside circumstances beyond anyone's control. There is a breakdown of government to respond to the will of the people. This breakdown is the political reality, though it is rarely characterized that way.

Instead, we are told fringe issues like abortion threaten to topple the bill. A proposal that might allow public health plans to pay for abortion occupies a minuscule fraction of the bill. Additionally, this proposal is scarcely change. Health care plans already available in the private market allow for abortion coverage. The health care bill is a tome of data and proposals, with entire sections that would be thought capable of arousing more venom than a solitary proposal about an issue having little to do with the stated focus -- health care costs and access to coverage.

But this is political reality, accepted without question, acknowledged only with resignation, pedaled in service of only those who benefit directly from inaction. The health care bill is likely to pass only after a legislative group is assembled to move around the political reality and make a deal. The last resort of an antidemocratic group. Undoubtedly, they'll be sitting in the shade.

General Interest Review 000014

$100 million

$100,000,000 is a lot of money. There is not much outside of government programs with that kind of price tag. A private voyage to space from Russia is one of them. A large country estate recently put on the market in Charlottesville, Va., called Albemarle is another. Recently, Michael Bloomberg added the New York City mayoralty to the list.

Bloomberg, the billionaire founder of ubiquitous business media behemoth Bloomberg, Inc., was elected to New York's highest office for the third time this week on the back of this enormous sum. New Yorkers were treated to an astoundingly ubiquitous campaign. There were negative ads. And there was the kind of personalized targeting that makes you, and only you, feel completely anonymous. ('So I am a middle-income single mother who takes the subway to work and cares deeply about the environment after all,' a New Yorker might think when reading a Bloomberg mailing. 'How nice to be reduced to a sentence.')

The mayor - as people get to be known when they hang around that office long enough - ran straight through a couple hurdles to get to his third term. First, there was New York City law. The law said mayors are supposed to serve two terms. Bloomberg wanted to serve a third. So he got support from the city council, and changed the law. The public didn't get to vote.

Next, there was Bill Thompson, the largely unknown city comptroller. That's where the money came in. A negative ad blitz, it turns out, can cost about as much as you want if you have the money. Bloomberg attacked Thompson, suggesting he felt threatened. This included starting a web site dedicated to Thompson's alleged fiscal policy, Thompsontaxhike.com. Usually the point of political advertising is to reinforce your own name so voters will remember it when they go to the polls. That's apparently not necessary when you're the two-time mayor and the richest man in New York all at the same time. The idea apparently is to get them thinking about Bloomberg even when they're thinking about Thompson.

Thanks mostly to his sizable investment, Bloomberg was expected to trounce Thompson in this week's election. He didn't. He won with 50.6 percent. Thompson received 46 percent. Only half the people were convinced. Many interviewed mentioned the term limit change. Others sounded like usual schmos about local politics -- they didn't wanna vote for either SOB, but they voted for the guy who would at least get this guy outta there.

But what Bloomberg's third term represents had to be in the subconscious of at least some who rejected him. As the richest man in New York and a shaper of opinion at the head of his media company, Bloomberg is one of the makers of the universe. These people are typically not out in public. They pull strings through money they disperse to foundations and political campaigns. They whisper in politicians' ears at charity cocktail receptions. They get their way quietly, but no one realizes it until they're dead. Legends are concocted, public squares named after them. And all are left to marvel at what they achieved, even though they didn't realize it at the time.

Typically politicians are not in this realm. They make the decisions, but only based on who can twist their arm the most effectively. By nature of their debt to the public for votes, politicians are forced to pull hair and poke eyes in the sandbox of governing day-to-day. And they make public enemies in doing so. With his relatively popular mayoral stint thus far, Bloomberg brought the masters' subtle ways into the public sphere. If eight years had been enough, perhaps he would've been looked on as an effective broker, and ultimately a genuinely benevolent billionaire, as opposed to the haughty ones who give money but can't be bothered to do any real work. He would've been seen as a man of legendary mettle who could bridge the gap between the two worlds -even when he had the kind of money that allowed him the luxury of not having to worry about it. Now, he's remade the world to his liking by yanking the strings of influence in the public light. The voters, recognizing what has transpired, were reminded all too directly that those strings are out of their grasp. Maybe Bloomberg thought he was sealing his fate. But even after $100 million, only half the voters agreed with him at the ballot box, and that feels a little more ambivalent than a grand narrative ought to.

General Interest Review 000013

The War on Drugs (band)

The War on Drugs are a Philadelphia-based rock band with one album under their belt on the independent record label Secretly Canadian. That means they have okay distribution, and that their record is available at that cool record store in town where all the snobs work. The War on Drugs' sound is sort of like the political war on drugs. Two disparate elements that were never really thought as working together coalesce to make a relatively fresh sound. Instead of war and drugs -- never thought to be paralleled because it would be hard for a human army with tanks and bombs to systematically dismantle opiates and narcotics -- the band synthesizes that transporting, dreamy sound created with a lot of organs and effects pedals, and terse, tart, over-it lyrics and vocals in the vein of one Bob Dylan circa mid-60s. The rambling vocal thing has been done over noise before, but never with such a blatant Dylan impression and floating-in-an-ocean sound so closely intertwined.

It's a good idea given the ancestral connection between the 80s noizies and Dylan. And, on wax, it works out about right. The howling blues-rock-honky-tonk band that backed Dylan's trochaic tirades during that period was the obvious choice at the time. The expressive power of the music alone conveys respect for the past, and a willingness to kick it all to the curb somehow at the same time. But the feeling of the music matches up with the words part pretty well here too. Seething. Adrift. Trying to lull the chip on your shoulder like a snake charmer. That kind of thing. And the ambling nature of the lyrics means nothing seems out of place when a little reverb forces a note to trail off the beat. The whole thing makes me ready to see Spacemen 3 back Dylan, but for now I'll take what I can get from these inspired guys.

General Interest Review 00012

Legitimacy (political)

Political legitimacy in the classical sense is the act of a public giving consent to a leader to govern them. By extension, the public also gives consent to the system of government in place. For a functioning democracy, legitimacy is one of the most basic requirements. The public votes for their leadership, and the leadership carries out the work of governing with a mind toward the people.

But this year the eyes of the world were transfixed on two cases that batted around legitimacy like it was an easily discarded ideal. A hurdle that merely had to be leapt over on the way to more pressing matters. Following elections in Iran and Afghanistan, outside parties declared elections legitimate, but there was much turmoil in the public itself as to whether the elections were legitimate. Without the consent of a majority of the public, the game changes when these so-called leaders claim to speak for such amorphous entities as "Afghanistan" and "Iran."

Iran was the more clear-cut example of the complete refusal to acknowledge any public interest in governing. In an election with a huge turnout, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the reigning regional instigator and total crackpot, was said to have defeated Mir Hussein Mousavi, a member of Iran's more-centrist-than-the-hard-liners political establishment. Mousavi was shown to be gaining significant ground in polling, but the lead evaporated literally into thin air with the actual
election, leaving Ahmadinejad with more than 60% of the vote. This is a landslide in most political systems, and is especially huge given what followed. With charges of fraud unrefuted by the ruling establishment (controlled by the Supreme Leader) Mousavi's supporters -- and anyone else who found themselves offended by the lobsided tally that was released -- took to the streets, and were forced to confront police despite the peaceful nature of most the protest.. Immediately, Ahmadinejad's legitimacy was called into question. But the Supreme Leader, who backed Ahmadinejad in the election, wouldn't even entertain remotely the notion of a smeared election. The Supreme Leader rules on the basis that he is entrusted with the government by Allah, making it rather difficult for a devout Muslin to rationally argue something he says. But so many in Iran seemed to see through this thin veil of reasoning that it's difficult to see how the Supreme Leader could entrust the practical side of running his government to a President that was forced to watch as police beat back his opponents' supporters in increasingly bloody streets. Ahmadinejad obtained legitimacy not from the people, but from a force sent to overrule the people.

In Afghanistan, the situation was even more uphauling to democratic principles -- and slightly more tedious. Afghans braved threats of violence spread far and wide by the Taliban to vote for a new leader, only to find that the vote had been declared overwhelmingly fraudulent in many areas. Unlike in Iran, the crimes were laid out specifically. Ballots were invented for voters that did not exist, ballot boxes were not even delivered to some locales, and thousands of claims of fraud were filed with the government. A UN commission, after much delay, publicly acknowledged findings that there was widespread fraud. The U.S. eventually encouraged now-tainted president re-elect Hamid Karzai to accept a runoff with challenger Abdullah Abdullah -- the least he could do to let the public weigh in again given the Tora Bora-sized cave the allegations put him in.

But then Abdullah pulled out. And the U.S. found itself conferring legitimacy on Karzai. Obama said the result corresponded with Afghan law. Whether there is a provision calling for fraudulent claims to be completely discarded in the Afghan Consituation is not even the point. With American involvement, it is apparent that Afghan law need not exist.

First the U.S. openly encouraged Karzai to submit to a challenge that had a remote poppy field of a chance of bringing some form of legitimacy to his new term. But with Abdullah's candidacy the allegations of fraud apparently evaporate as well. You could make the argument that Abdullah Abdullah conferred legitimacy, but he didn't sound like he was too resigned about things when he said this is only the beginning of change in Afghanistan.

Obama's reasoning is semi-clear. In order to speed the decision about how many more troops to send to Afghanistan, he needs a clear Afghan government to broker with. Absent from that sentence is the word legitimate government. The people's voice has still yet to be heard resoundingly, but apparently that is beside the point when the so-called security of the region is at stake.

This forces the Americans into a parallel with the Supreme Leader -- a place either side probably doesn't want to find themselves. By ignoring legitimacy in the service of supposed higher means, democracy has been cast off in both cases. Calling a system democracy because there is an election does not make it so, no matter how great the strength of the power that says it.

So what of the will of the Afghans? They are worse off than the Iranians in many ways -- empowered to vote only to see their hopes evaporate with fraud. They cannot even take to the streets because they know they will meet violence from the Taliban. At least in Iran there was the hope that a large enough crowd and enough Western media presence would keep the fighting to a minimum. Maybe the best place to look for that is among the rubble in the villages recently bombed by both the Americans and the Taliban. To the average Afghan, it must be gratuitously clear that the political tightrope the U.S. is trying to walk matters nil in the face of more destruction and devastation.

And in both cases, of course, the vanquished election results leave a certain conclusion. The collective public will never even know who they truly voted in.

General Interest Review 00011

Great Expectations (film)

Great Expectations, a film based on the Charles Dickens novel of the same title, was released in 1998. It benefits from glorious acting by Anne Bancroft playing the Miss Havisham character, and wonderful cinematography under the direction of Alfonso Cuaron. Ethan Hawke and Gwynteth Paltrow also star, with both turning in acceptable but not dazzling performances.

The film is basically an "update" of the novel, grafting the basic story -- about a boy who has an encounter with a convict, meets an old, embittered rich woman and her daughter, receives riches from an anonymous benefactor, and becomes unknowingly entangled with all of them -- into modern day America as opposed to 19th century England. It is an understatement that much has changed in the years since Dickens wrote the novel. The world has become faster, and more spread out, we are constantly told. There is more social mobility and opportunity. Oddly, though, the update of the movie shrinks the world presented in the book to five or six people and a lot of flat characters hovering around them.

The movie strikes gold turning the Pip character into an artist. There is no better a place to showcase the quick mobility and tumultuous turn of fortune than through a high stakes world like art. But the film allows itself to slip into a pastiche about the treacherously superficial art world during these scenes. To be sure, this has a Dickensian ring of social commentary, but missing are the complex web of relationships that moves the Pip character toward his final revelation. In the book, Jaggers -- who handles Pip's affairs via his anonymous benefactor -- is a much more consequential character than the lawyer encountered in the movie. Herbert, Pip's friend in London who helps him through the years of longing for Estella and development from pauper to gentleman, is also absent.

The subplot involving the convict, Magwitch, who is eventually revealed to be Pip's benefactor is also glossed over. In the book, Pip struggles with his embarrassment of Magwitch, and comes to see the good in him later -- when it is too late. This is crucial to the framework of the story, which is based around the ideas, and, yes, expectations, that are cast by social station. In the movie, we get a rather tidy death of Fin's benefactor by mob men. It never turns out that there is any connection between the convict and Miss Havisham and Estella, giving a vacant feeling to their story entirely. It makes the ending feel a bit like an afternoon thunderstorm on a hot summer day. It was a bit violent there for a moment, but now it's all over and, hey! the weather's even a little nicer now. Since Fin never has time to consider his relationship to his benefactor, he doesn't have to think about the unexpected turns of his life, and how they indicate that expectations mean virtually nothing compared to qualities like honor and loyalty.

The movie people probably saw these changes as tweaks. Necessary ruffles in the plot in order to make the whole thing a bit more commercially acceptable. After all, people don't want to watch anything where they have to use their brain. Those movies are such downers. But without the depth of the plot, it's impossible to get the whole picture. In the end, we're left with the two would-be lovers looking on each other as equals. They think nothing of what has happened to them in the past, letting it fall away like a dream. This is a far cry from the book, where Pip and Estella are only able to get together after their experience heals them of their worry over expectation.

The two works are obviously different, but one was popular with a mass audience in the 19th century, and one was marketed to a mass audience at the end of the 20th century. As expectations for time periods go, the film would likely have been a deeper work. Its audience was probably more educated, and certainly more used to grasping the kind of ideas that the novel put forth. But like all expectations, it appears they were a bit too high to live up to.