Australian Songwriter Paul Kelly Sings the Hits, from A to Z

A stood for "Adelaide," singer-songwriter Paul Kelly's ode to his hometown in Australia, and "Anastasia Changes Her Mind." The B's included the wry warning "Be Careful What You Pray For" and "Before Too Long," one of Kelly's best early songs, from his 1986 Australian double album, Gossip. And the D's ran the range from "Deeper Water," with its opening memory of Kelly's dad teaching him how to swim, to the rock-bottom account "Dumb Things." The latter was originally cut as seething electric garage for 1988's Under the Sun. But at Rockwood Music Hall in New York on September 26th, Kelly played it as solo self-recrimination – "I lost my shirt/I pawned my rings/I've done all the dumb things" – with his nephew, singer-guitarist Dan Kelly, adding amp jangle and plaintive harmonies.
This show, the first of two at Rockwood and the end of a brief U.S. visit, was "the speed-dial version," as Paul put it, of From A-Z, a live alphabetical retrospective of Kelly's life's work as Australia's Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello combined, in narrative candor, trap-door wit and devotion to rock's country, folk and blues roots. Kelly was already a welcome alternative in the New Wave Eighties to the Joe Jackson-Graham Parker model – less acidic, with strong local color in his tales – with his band Paul Kelly and the Dots and on his 1985 solo debut, Post, which included one of this show's F's: the homesick ballad "From St. Kilda to Kings Cross."
All of His Best, Up to L
There is no evening long enough to cover the best of Kelly. Tonight he only made it to L, with M-Z promised for the second Rockwood show. Even that's not enough: Kelly usually does From A-Z as a four-gig stand. (He will be back in the U.S. next year and plans more full-length engagements.) But even in this hastened form, Kelly's storytelling – framed by pithy guitar hooks, with a grainy conversational magnetism in his singing – revealed his unique spin on a world of echoes: Hank Williams, Willie Dixon, Paul Simon, Lou Reed. Before performing 1989's "Everything's Turned White," Kelly acknowledged his debt to Raymond Carver's short story "So Much Water, So Close to Home" (Kelly used that title in his chorus). And Kelly explained how the lesson of Irving Berlin's "White Christmas" – how to write a holiday classic about absence and missing – inspired "How to Make Gravy," a tender letter from a jailbird who won't be home for the family feast.
Much of what Kelly played at Rockwood is on the two-CD set, Greatest Hits: Songs From the South Volumes 1 & 2 (Gawd Aggie) a previous Australian release out here on October 25th. The A-Z Recordings (Gawd Aggie) is an 8-CD anthology, released in Oz last year, of live recordings from Kelly's alphabet shows over the past half-dozen years. And Kelly's 2010 autobiography, How to Make Gravy: A-Z, A Mongrel Memoir (Penguin Global), is his engaging way with a stage anecdote gone long. The book is especially strong on how and why the songs get written, like the riff analysis in Keith Richards' Life minus the knives and rock-pirate action. (The A-Z Recordings and How to Make Gravy are available at Amazon.)
Leaps and Bounds
Missing from the D's at Rockwood was "Darling It Hurts," a Sixties-beat dynamo from Gossip with its chorus pun on Darlinghurst, a Sydney neighborhood. But representing L, E and F were the exuberant "Leaps and Bounds," the hilariously despairing "Every Fucking City" and a succinct example of Kelly's ingenuity with opposites, "From Little Things Big Things Grow," from 1991's Comedy. The melody is a lullabye, the rhythm is a waltz. But the subject is moral strength: an aboriginal man who fought an entire government for the return of ancestral lands – and won.
There was also a new song, so new Kelly hasn't formally cut it yet (although there's a live version in the A-Z box). "I Keep Coming Back for More" was a dark bluesy thing about good intentions, punishing returns and a stubborn hope for just reward. Those are endless subjects, and they are already in a lot of Kelly's songs. But he hasn't run out of compelling variations – or letters.
David Fricke @'Rolling Stone'

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The Future of West Bank Terrorism Is Jewish

I was having a conversation with my mother on Sunday. Like many American Jews of her generation, her politics are to my left on pretty much everything -- except Israel. We got to talking about the settlements in a future/hypothetical State of Palestine. She asked: Post-statehood, why can't Israel just tell the settlers that now they're citizens of Palestine? If you live on one side of the border, shouldn't you just be Israeli; and on the other side, you're Palestinian?
And I sympathize! Life should work like that. And to some extent, it will: both sides agree in principle to negotiated land swamps during final-border negotiations, in order to -- for the purposes of this conversation -- incorporate the biggest and most contiguous settlement blocs (Ma'ale Adumim, for instance) into Israel. Lots of settlers live in the West Bank because successive Israeli governments made it financially sensible to settle there, rather than out of an ideological project of preventing the State of Palestine from ever existing.
But here's why Israel really does have to uproot most of the settlements.

After setting the fire in the early-morning hours, vandals spray-painted the words "revenge" and "price tag" on the walls of the mosque in the Bedouin village of Tuba-Zangaria.

Similar messages have been left in the West Bank, where attackers have burned mosques, cars belonging to Palestinians and olive trees. They have also vandalized an Israeli army base and the Jerusalem home of an Israeli anti-settlement activist.

Monday's mosque attack didn't happen in the West Bank. It happened in northern Israel. But what's happening there is a lagging indicator of what's happening in the West Bank. So says the Shin Bet. This is from a September 13 Ha'aretz piece:

Extreme right-wing Jewish activists in the West Bank have moved from spontaneous acts against Arabs -- following the demolition of Jewish homes by Israeli authorities, or terror attacks against Jews -- to organized planning that includes use of a database of potential targets, according to new analysis by the Shin Bet security service.
The small groups of Jewish extremists are difficult to infiltrate and carry out surveillance on Arab villages and collect information about access points and escape routes in the villages. They are also collecting information about left-wing Israeli activists.

This is a potential future, if the IDF and Israeli intelligence do not treat these settlers like they do Palestinian terrorists: imagine a Palestinian state that incorporates thousands of Israeli settlers as part of a final-status deal. Suddenly, the State of Palestine includes among its citizenry lots of wealthy, ethnically separate people who live in enclaves and stockpile weapons*. Unless Palestine bulldozes lots of access roads, they will have access to numerous transit routes.
They are not ethnic separatists in a traditional sense. They don't merely believe that they ought to live in the political entity known as Israel -- actually, in many cases they don't recognize Israeli political authority. They believe they must live in the West Bank for religious purposes. And their premiere political project is to stop the West Bank from falling under Palestinian sovereignty. Failing that, their premiere political project will be to roll that Palestinian sovereignty back. The only way to do that is the way that Palestinians have tried for decades on Israel: terrorism.
What Israelis, Palestinians, Americans and all other interested parties need to consider is what happens after the first incidents of Jewish terrorism inside the State of Palestine. Palestine will need to retaliate, as any state does. You can imagine a Palestinian defense or interior minister even picking a deliberately provocative title for an operation to uproot Jewish terror cells, like, say, Operation Defensive Shield. You can also imagine what will be on the minds of those Palestinian security forces: payback.
Suddenly we can imagine televised images of Palestinian cops in riot gear and soldiers in armor attacking people who look like -- and, probably, in many cases, are -- Jewish civilians. Women and children. The pressure on any Israeli government to retaliate will be overwhelming. The race to the violent bottom will accelerate.
Uprooting settlements will be emotionally wrenching work. We know this because the IDF already does it. And for its efforts, the settlers vilify the IDF; they also infiltrate it in the hopes of preventing settlement destruction. There will be many cries about making this-or-that part of the West Bank "Judenrein," designed for maximum emotional resonance. (It's been a standard settler tactic for decades.) But outside of incorporating select settlements into Israel through negotiated land swaps, the alternative is a continuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after a (hypothetical) final status deal.
*When I was younger, my father had an apartment on Avenue J in Brooklyn's Midwood neighborhood. It's one of the commercial hearts of a rather, ah, conservative part of Jewish Brooklyn -- during the Second Intifada, you could see wheatpasted posters of Meir Kahane on streetlamps and the sides of buildings. When we'd go to get sandwiches at the deli, we'd see tzedakeh (charity) boxes on the counters. The small placards accompanying the boxes had pictures of snarling dogs. Their legends advertised that donations were needed to help our fellow Jews in Judea and Samaria defend themselves against the Arabs.
"Huh," I remember once saying to my dad after we left the deli, "so they buy Rottweilers for the settlers?"
"Are you kidding me?" he responded. "That's to buy them AK-47s."
Spencer Ackerman @'Attackerman'

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Slow Scan to Moscow (1986)

Joel Schatz has wire-rimmed glasses and an Old Testament-sized beard. A big head of curly black hair flecked with gray adds a few extra inches to his sixfoot-two frame. "This trip we're about to take," he says enthusiastically, "is so important that I've even gotten a haircut." Its effects are not noticeable.
Joel is sitting in the study of his San Francisco apartment, where most of the furniture consists of pillows on the floor. The largest thing in sight is an enormous reflector telescope, which can be pivoted around on its pedestal and aimed out a high window, Joel explains, "to remind me of my place in the cosmos. We're all voyagers out there.
"If I had millions of dollars I'd build neighborhood observatories all over the world. And at each one I'd have good conga drums, so people could drum together as well as observe."
The object of Joel's attention at this moment, however, as it is much of the time, is his four-pound, briefcase-size Radio Shack Tandy Model 100 portable computer. "I bought this machine for $399. For $1.82 a minute - $1.82! - I can send a telex message to Moscow. This technology is going to revolutionize human communications! Think what it will mean when you can get thousands of Americans and Soviets on the same computer network. Once scientists in both countries begin talking to each other on these machines they won't be able to stop. And we'll be taking a running leap over the governments on both sides.
"I'm not a scientist," Joel adds. "I've only owned a computer for four months. I don't understand how they work. I'll leave that to other people. I'm just interested in how they can improve communication on this planet."
Joel has already made three trips to Russia in the last year and a half to work on two types of U.S.-Soviet electronic exchanges. One has been large screen two-way TV broadcasts, known as "space-bridges." The other has been a link between a Moscow apartment and a southern California radio studio, in which an odd assortment of people ranging from TV mogul Ted Turner and an Oakland, California, fireman to poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko and a Moscow faith healer have talked to one another live, over U.S. and Canadian radio stations. In a few days, Joel is leaving for Moscow again. Intrigued by the novelty of his various missions, I have invited myself along. A day or two before our departure, I stop in at Joel's apartment again, and find him staring at the display screen of the Radio Shack computer. He is stumped by the latest message to appear in his "electronic mailbox": LOOKING FORWARD TO SEEING YOU. PLEASE BRING SLOW-SCAN TV EQUIPMENT AND TECHNICIAN.
"Slow-scan television!" says Joel. "Jesus! Where are we going to get one of those!"
Slow-scan television is an inexpensive technology that has been used by American scientists for 20 years or so. Basically it allows you to send a still picture over a telephone line. This means you can send visual images long distances without buying time on a space satellite, which costs thousands of dollars an hour.
"Well," Joel scratches his head, "if they want slow-scan, we better give them slow-scan. "
During the next day Joel arranges for the loan of a slow-scan from a Colorado manufacturer who is interested in world peace (and would also doubtless like to sell some of his machines to the Soviet Union). The manufacturer assures him that the equipment is simple to operate, and that all the instructions are in the box.
"If the Soviets want a technician," says Joel, "we're going to have to bring him in by TV.
The slow-scan apparatus is sealed in a waist-high cardboard carton. We are to change planes in London, but at the San Francisco airport, Joel checks the box directly through to Moscow. He then squeezes into a phone booth, connects his Radio Shack computer to the receiver, and dials his electronic mailbox to check for messages one last time before we leave the country. On the flight to England I ask Joel, who is 48 years old, about his life before he started doing U.S.- Soviet electronic exchanges...

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Adam Hochschild @'MotherJones'

Former Mossad chief: Iran far from achieving nuclear bomb

Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan said Monday that a military strike on Iran was "far from being Israel's preferred option," telling the Council for Peace and Security that "there are currently tools and methods that are much more effective."
Dagan also said Iran's nuclear program was still far from the point of no return, and that Iran's situation is "the most problematic it has been in since the revolution" in 1979.
But Israel's strategic situation is also "the worst in its history," he warned, adding that Israel itself has contributed a lot to this deterioration. As an example, he cited Deputy
Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon's decision to humiliate the Turkish ambassador last year by demonstratively seating him on a low chair.
Dagan made his remarks on the same day that visiting U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta passed on a clear message from his boss in Washington: The United States opposes any Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.
At a joint press conference with Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Panetta stressed that any steps against Iran's nuclear program must be taken in coordination with the international community.
The United States, he said, is "very concerned, and we will work together to do whatever is necessary" to keep Iran from posing "a threat to this region." But doing so "depends on the countries working together," he added.
He repeated the word "together" several times in this context.
Panetta cited Iran's nuclear program as number one on the list of issues he had discussed with Barak. He voiced concern not only about the nuclear program, but also about Iran's support for terror, its efforts to undermine regional stability and the fact that it had supplied weapons that were used to kill American soldiers.
At the press conference, which took place at Defense Ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv, Panetta also stressed America's deep commitment to Israel's security.
His message for Barak, at their second meeting in two weeks, appeared to be simultaneously embrace and restrain: America is standing by Israel, but an uncoordinated Israeli strike on Iran could spark a regional war. The United States will work to defend Israel, but Israel must behave responsibly.
Washington has been worried by statements various senior Israeli officials have made recently that seemed to take an aggressive line on Iran. The issue has taken on new urgency because, in the view of many Western military experts, the window of opportunity for an aerial assault on Iran will close within two months.
In normal winter weather conditions, it would be very difficult to carry out such a complex assault.
During his visit, Panetta also urged Israel to conduct negotiations on a two-state solution with the Palestinian Authority. Earlier, in a conversation with American journalists on the flight over, he had warned that Israel was suffering regional isolation following the crises in its relations with Turkey and Egypt.
Asked by reporters why the United States refuses to free Jonathan Pollard, who is serving a life sentence for spying on Israel's behalf, Panetta replied merely that there is much opposition to freeing Pollard from within the administration, given the serious crimes of which he was convicted. Consequently, he said, U.S. President Barack Obama "and others" have made it clear that it won't happen.
Panetta also met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as with senior PA officials in Ramallah. He made his way Tuesday to Egypt, where, according to reports in the Arab media, he will also discuss the release of Israeli-American Ilan Grapel, who was arrested a few months ago on suspicion of espionage.
Amos Harel @'Haaretz'