Tuesday 31 August 2010
Leonard Cohen - Bird On A Wire (DVD)
Thirty-eight years after it was completed, a 1972 documentary following Leonard Cohen—the enormously influential poet, folk musician and, since 2008, member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—on tour in Europe finally has its moment. Originally made as a promotional film for the artist, whose record sales were meager at the time, Bird on a Wire was produced and edited by Tony Palmer, then famed for his seminal 1968 documentary All My Loving, an eye-opening dissection of rock n' roll that featured, among others, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Donovan. In Bird on a Wire, Palmer neatly captured the tour itself––threadbare, fraught with technical difficulties and emotional upheavals––but on first viewing, Cohen balked at the bare bones honesty of the film and demanded a complete re-edit from another source. The result was so disastrous that the film opened and closed on the same day, was forgotten about, then lost. In 2009, 294 cans of celluloid labeled “Bird an a Wire” were found locked in a Hollywood warehouse and immediately shipped to Palmer, who set about re-creating the original film he made all those years ago. The work is a visual poem—Palmer’s camera followed Cohen without judgment, opening the floor to the man as well as the artist. Today’s exclusive clip shows the music legend during an abortive attempt to ask a young German fan out on a date.
Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire by Tony Palmer is available now on DVD. Tony Palmer tells us more about his first meeting with Cohen here.
I still have a video of this great documentary.
He is such a smooth talker in the clip above..."breakfast" indeed!
United States Gives Itself High Marks on Human Rights, but What Comes Next?
This month, the United States submitted an assessment of its human rights record to the UN Human Rights Council as part of the UN’s newest human rights mechanism, the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). Unsurprisingly, its report immediately caught flak from the right and the left. Nationalists and conservatives at the Wall Street Journal and Heritage Foundation complained we should not bother to subject ourselves to scrutiny by states with lesser human rights records and that by doing so we give ammunition to autocrats who can mock our shortcomings. Progressives applauded the administration for participating seriously in a multilateral process but lamented the failure to address a host of human rights deficits.
In our view, the administration’s report perhaps tries too hard to please everyone and in doing so falls short of what it could have achieved if it had taken a more critical and honest approach to some of the more troublesome elements on the human rights agenda. It deserves praise for engaging in serious consultations around the country with critics and victims alike to prepare its findings. Its political instincts, though, were apparently to mute self-criticism in order to forestall attacks from the U.S.-can-do-no-wrong crowd while simultaneously highlighting progress since 2009 as a way to remind voters at home and constituencies abroad that it is different from the Bush administration.
The real test, however, is how this administration will address such ongoing and thorny issues around detention policy, impunity for torture, immigration and protection of civilians caught in conflict. On these matters, the report offers very little...
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‘Drainspotting’: Japanese Manhole Cover Art
These aren’t your average manhole covers. In Japan, they actually look pretty, not those cast-iron monstrosities on sidewalks.
Photographer Remo Camerota has gone around the land of the rising sun and snapping away at these gorgeous street art, publishing an award-winning book Drainspotting while he’s at it.
The book, which is also released as an iPad app, took the award for Best Art Book at the NY Book Festival.
The adorned manhole covers feature anything from firemen to birds to flowers. It’s a beautifully simple idea to liven up city streets—just plaster typically ugly urban structures with colorful, vibrant art.
Photographer Remo Camerota has gone around the land of the rising sun and snapping away at these gorgeous street art, publishing an award-winning book Drainspotting while he’s at it.
The book, which is also released as an iPad app, took the award for Best Art Book at the NY Book Festival.
The adorned manhole covers feature anything from firemen to birds to flowers. It’s a beautifully simple idea to liven up city streets—just plaster typically ugly urban structures with colorful, vibrant art.
Max Tannone - Dub Kweli - Your Gospel
The Secret Killers: Covert Assassins Charged With Hunting Down and Killing Afghans
"Find, fix, finish, and follow-up" is the way the Pentagon describes the mission of secret military teams in Afghanistan which have been given a mandate to pursue alleged members of the Taliban or al-Qaeda wherever they may be found. Some call these “manhunting” operations and the units assigned to them “capture/kill” teams.
Whatever terminology you choose, the details of dozens of their specific operations -- and how they regularly went badly wrong -- have been revealed for the first time in the mass of secret U.S. military and intelligence documents published by the website Wikileaks in July to a storm of news coverage and official protest. Representing a form of U.S. covert warfare now on the rise, these teams regularly make more enemies than friends and undermine any goodwill created by U.S. reconstruction projects.
When Danny Hall and Gordon Phillips, the civilian and military directors of the U.S. provincial reconstruction team in Nangarhar province, Afghanistan, arrived for a meeting with Gul Agha Sherzai, the local governor, in mid-June 2007, they knew that they had a lot of apologizing to do. Philips had to explain why a covert U.S. military “capture/kill” team named Task Force 373, hunting for Qari Ur-Rahman, an alleged Taliban commander given the code-name “Carbon,” had called in an AC-130 Spectre gunship and inadvertently killed seven Afghan police officers in the middle of the night.
The incident vividly demonstrated the inherent clash between two doctrines in the U.S. war in Afghanistan -- counterinsurgency (“protecting the people”) and counterterrorism (killing terrorists). Although the Obama administration has given lip service to the former, the latter has been, and continues to be, the driving force in its war in Afghanistan.
For Hall, a Foreign Service officer who was less than two months away from a plush assignment in London, working with the military had already proven more difficult than he expected. In an article for Foreign Service Journal published a couple of months before the meeting, he wrote, “I felt like I never really knew what was going on, where I was supposed to be, what my role was, or if I even had one. In particular, I didn't speak either language that I needed: Pashtu or military.”
It had been no less awkward for Phillips. Just a month earlier, he had personally handed over “solatia” payments -- condolence payments for civilian deaths wrongfully caused by U.S. forces -- in Governor Sherzai's presence, while condemning the act of a Taliban suicide bomber who had killed 19 civilians, setting off the incident in question. “We come here as your guests,” he told the relatives of those killed, “invited to aid in the reconstruction and improved security and governance of Nangarhar, to bring you a better life and a brighter future for you and your children. Today, as I look upon the victims and their families, I join you in mourning for your loved ones.”
Pratap Chatterjee @'Alternet'
How Google Unwittingly Helped Propagate the Misleading "Ground Zero Mosque" Label
As the inane controversy over the Cordoba House, the Islamic community center being planned in Manhattan, gained momentum, the facility quickly came to be known as the "Ground Zero Mosque." And that label is misleading because it's not at Ground Zero and it's not a mosque.
Where the label started, who knows? Cable news (read: Fox) seems like a good bet. But what's interesting, as the Nieman Journalism Lab points out, is how it came to stick.
When a handy label like "Ground Zero Mosque" emerges, it's immediately attractive to bloggers and editors because it's short and a little provocative. And once it becomes the accepted, if inaccurate, term for the thing, then not using it means sacrificing the easy searchability of the piece you've written.
Poynter ethicist Kelly McBride zeroed in on that idea of search-engine optimization, noting that the AP is being punished for their stand against the term “ground zero mosque” by not appearing very highly on the all-important news searches for that phrase. In order to stay relevant to search engines, news organizations have to continue using an inaccurate term once it’s taken hold, she concluded.
There's a positive feedback loop that reinforces the popular term and it's hard to break out of because, with web traffic as the currency of digital media, optimizing the stuff you publish for search engines is a real revenue consideration.
How do we fix this? I don't know. It would be nice if Google could somehow flag certain terms as epithets or weasel words, but I'm pretty sure that's beyond its capacity and the company doesn't seem very interested in assuming editorial responsibility for anything anyway.
More likely it will just be a matter of responsible media outlets thinking twice before adopting whatever slangy, loaded term gets bandied around on cable news. On that count, my colleague Morgan, who refused to use the label at the height of the controversy, did a better job than I.
Andrew Price @'Good'
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