Category: Arts and Letters

Songs of Love and Hate.

“Cohen has explored the theme of love as an all-consuming flame, both destructive and creative, from the outset of his career — a painting of St. Bernadette in flames appears on the back cover of his first album — and that tortured ambiguity flickered throughout the evening. ‘If he was fire, then she must be wood,’ Cohen sang in ‘Joan of Arc,’ but the old ladies’ man himself has always been dry wood, burning up, consumed by the same flame, dying endlessly. Cohen is a battered philosopher of eros, and the beauty and horror of much of his poetry derives from his alternately exhausted and triumphant response to the demigod of sex.“

Rumors of the Death of a Ladies’ Man have been greatly exaggerated: From the bookmarks, and based on the current tour that’s recently been immortalized on the very listenable Live in London, Salon‘s Gary Kamiya sings the praises of one of his idols, Leonard Cohen. “‘Looks like freedom but it feels like death/ It’s something in between, I guess,’ Cohen sings in ‘Closing Time.’ That knife edge, that balancing act between the intolerable and the redemptive, is where Cohen lives, both in his work and in his performances. He is a fearless explorer of darknesses of all kinds, mostly erotic and romantic, but also, and increasingly, political and spiritual. For Cohen, without darkness there is no light — a credo summed up in his song ‘Anthem,’ with its exquisite chorus ‘Ring the bells that still can ring/ Forget your perfect offering/ There is a crack in everything/ That’s how the light gets in.’“

But Wait, It Gets Worse.

‘How many fingers, Winston?’

‘Four. I suppose there are four. I would see five if I could. I am trying to see five.’

‘Which do you wish: to persuade me that you see five, or really to see them?’

‘Really to see them.’

‘Again,’ said O’Brien.

Perhaps the needle was eighty — ninety. Winston could not intermittently remember why the pain was happening. Behind his screwed-up eyelids a forest of fingers seemed to be moving in a sort of dance, weaving in and out, disappearing behind one another and reappearing again. He was trying to count them, he could not remember why. He knew only that it was impossible to count them, and that this was somehow due to the mysterious identity between five and four. The pain died down again. When he opened his eyes it was to find that he was still seeing the same thing. Innumerable fingers, like moving trees, were still streaming past in either direction, crossing and recrossing. He shut his eyes again.

‘How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know. You will kill me if you do that again. Four, five, six — in all honesty I don’t know.’

‘Better,’ said O’Brien.

Hard to believe, but, this morning, the recent grisly revelations of Dubya-era torture practices became even more horrifying. As we’ve gleaned more info over the past few days, certain obvious and troubling questions kept popping up. Why, as indicated here, would higher-ups insist on additional waterboarding sessions for Zubadayah, even after the CIA agents at hand thought the suspect “had given up all the information he had“? Also: Mind you, even one session of torture is reprehensible — and illegal — enough. But what more did the powers-that-be think they were going to get out of these suspects after ten waterboardings? Twenty? One hundred?

Well, now we know. Not only did Dubya apparachiks conceive a torture regime well before it was approved (and before they had any prisoners on hand — see also the new and unredacted Armed Services Committee report), but they tortured their suspects into the ground because they were trying to prove a false positive, i.e. that there was some serious operational link between Iraq and Al Qaeda that could be used to sell the second Gulf War. (See also the forged Habbush letter.)

“‘There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used,’ the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. ‘The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.‘”

So, in short, it would seem the suspects held by the CIA were tortured over and over again because they would not concede that two plus two equals five.

Really, how much lower can these assholes sink? What could they possibly do that would cause more violence to our ideals, or that would make our cherished role as a beacon of freedom seem any more ridiculous in the eyes of the world, than what they’ve already done?

Once again, I’m reminded of Lincoln’s famous remark to the Indiana 14th: “‘Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.‘” At the very least, somebody, or somebodies, better go to jail for a loooong time for this. Anything less is simply unacceptable.

Grasp of Thanos.

Speaking of NASA, somebody page Jim Starlin (and file this next to the Great Eye): Another holdover from last week, The agency’s Chandra X-Ray Laboratory captures an eerie and beautiful galactic “hand” reaching across the cosmos. “[T]he display is caused by a young and powerful pulsar, known by the rather prosaic name of PSR B1509-58…The space agency says B1509 — created by a collapsed star — is one of the most powerful electromagnetic generators in the Galaxy. The nebula is formed by a torrent of electrons and ions emitted by the 1,700-year-old phenomenon. The finger-like structures are apparently caused by ‘energizing knots of material in a neighboring gas cloud,’ NASA says.”

Opie and the Old Ones.

Word comes down from the gibbering many-eyed oracles of Hadith that Ron Howard will be directing The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft as his next project after Angels and Demons. “Created by Mac Carter and Jeff Blitz, [the] book borrows elements from Lovecraft’s life, such as his family’s struggle with mental illness and his own bouts with writer’s block, and transforms the young writer’s darkest nightmares into reality when he comes across a book that puts a curse on him and lets the evils he conjures up loose on the world.“

Hmm. On first glance, I’d think Ron Howard is exactly the wrong director to handle the depraved tentacled deities and slavering profane minions of the Cthulhu mythos. Then again, his last movie was Frost/Nixon, so perhaps he’s developed a taste for it.

A Farewell to “Sen. Oddball.”

“I always let the other fellow have my way.” Sen. Claiborne Pell (D-RI), 1918-2009. “[H]e was best known for his sponsorship of the 1972 program that has helped 54 million low-income and moderate-income students attend college. He also sponsored the legislation that founded the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities.”