Saturday, April 26, 2008
ONLY 3 MORE DAYS!!
Rolling Stone.Com Review
Dominance isn't just a fetish for Madonna, it's her religion. It's no accident that she opened each show on 2005's Confessions on a Dance Floor tour by clenching a riding crop in her hand, jerking a gagged male dancer around by a leather leash. And she never puts down the whip: Since 1986's True Blue, Madonna has claimed writing or production credits on every one of her songs, even when she worked with dance-music artists such as William Orbit, Mirwais Ahmadzaï and Stuart Price. So itís surprising that her eleventh studio album — her final one for longtime label Warner Bros. — is an act of submission. For Hard Candy, Madonna's midlife meditation on her own relevance, she lets top-shelf producers make her their plaything.
A songwriting team of American chart royalty helps Madonna revisit her roots as an urban-disco queen. Madonna isn't even the star on the first single, "4 Minutes": Timbaland and Nate "Danja" Hills provide a clanging whopper of a beat, and her vocal bobs alongside Justin Timberlake's, fighting not to drown in the brassy funk of a marching band. Timberlake is the album's melody doctor, and he steals from his own broody "What Goes Around . . . Comes Around" on Madonna's "Devil Wouldn't Recognize You." Madonna co-wrote but didn't co-produce the Timberlake-Timbaland team's five songs, which smack more of their creators' stamps than her own. The songs are solid, but slightly anonymous, as though they could be stripped down and peddled to other singers.
The creative tension between Madonna and the Neptunes' Pharrell Williams crackles. Williams bangs on paint cans to generate the beat on the innuendo-laden opener, "Candy Shop", and pumps up the thumpy self-empowerment anthem "Give It 2 Me" with clubby synths that trumpet one of Madonna's favorite life-dance-sex metaphors: "Don't stop me now, don't need to catch my breath/I can go on and on." "Heartbeat" pulses like "Lucky Star," and the soulful "Beat Goes On" (which features an uninspired Kanye West cameo) is one of a handful of tracks with bells and whistles — the classic disco "toot-toot, beep-beep" — traceable to two of Madonna's touchstones: Chic, whose Nile Rodgers helped steer her early career, and Donna Summer.
Like Confessions, Hard Candy celebrates dance as salvation, but even the euphorically groovy "Heartbeat" and "Dance 2night" strike wistful notes. Although the uptempo set features no ballads, the dominant lyrical themes — regret, yearning, distrust — are far from upbeat. Morphing from a syncopated shuffle into a lathery, orgasmic hysteria, Pharrell's "Incredible" is a challenging song about longing for a relationship's idyllic beginning. There's a melancholy pining in Timbaland-Timberlake's lush "Miles Away," which implies that all is not peachy in the house of Richie. "You always have the biggest heart when we're 6,000 miles apart," Madonna sings. International pop megastars — they're just like us!
The album's weakest moment is its most emotionally vapid. Madonna dips into Español for the painfully literal "Spanish Lesson." She has said the music was inspired by a Baltimore dance called the Percolator but seems more indebted to Timberlakeís fast-strummed "Like I Love You." Fortunately, there's also the bass-popping retro-boogie "She's Not Me," where Madonna imagines her lovers feeling buyers' remorse for being seduced by a copycat who "doesn't have my name." The offender who's "reading my books and stealing my looks and lingerie" could be any young pop starlet. But it also seems like an oddly timed barb at Madonna's now-fallen successor, Britney Spears, who has teamed up with many of the guys on Hard Candy — Pharrell, Danja and (ahem) Timberlake — and Madonna herself.
Madonna can still scoff at wanna-be's half her age because she's stayed so flexible with her sound. (She's performed a similar feat with her body, devoting herself to a yoga regimen that's made her impossibly elastic — name another near-fifty-year-old who can still rock a hot crotch shot on her album cover.) Even when she wrestles with Pharrell's abrupt stylistic changes or lets herself get absorbed in a Timberlake melody, Madonna still finds her way back on top. The atmospheric closing track, "Voices," poses the question "Who is the master, who is the slave?" before its operatic wind-down ends in a dramatic bell toll. The answer to both questions is still Madonna.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Monday, April 21, 2008
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Bordine's Spring Expo
Went Dreaming with Jimmy at Bordines today. One of my favorite places to roam and think of what is possible.
Friday, April 18, 2008
Thursday, April 17, 2008
The Pups
Experimenting a bit with the ole' MacBook... the pups are the test subjects!
Don't they look cute.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Which Doll is the Nice Doll
This psychology test appeared on an MSNBC special called "A Conversation About Race," conducted by psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark. Very sad.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Sunday, April 13, 2008
"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State." - Thomas Jefferson
Friday, April 11, 2008
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Long Days Ahead
Report: McCain's Profane Tirade At His Wife
John McCain's temper is well documented. He's called opponents and colleagues "shitheads," "assholes" and in at least one case "a fucking jerk."...
Three reporters from Arizona, on the condition of anonymity, also let me in on another incident involving McCain's intemperateness. In his 1992 Senate bid, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by his wife, Cindy, as well as campaign aide Doug Cole and consultant Wes Gullett. At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain's hair and said, "You're getting a little thin up there." McCain's face reddened, and he responded, "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt." McCain's excuse was that it had been a long day. If elected president of the United States, McCain would have many long days.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Monday, April 7, 2008
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Looking Up... from the Cellar
Is the "Magic Over"???
April 2, 2008, 9:46 am
America’s Global Image Stops Sinking in Latest Poll
By MIKE NIZZA (BBC)
The image of America abroad, which has been battered in recent years by an unpopular war and other policies, appears to have stopped deteriorating, judging by a worldwide survey by the BBC and GlobeScan:
While views of U.S. influence in the world are still predominantly negative, they have improved in 11 of the 23 countries the BBC polled a year ago, while worsening in just three countries.
The average percentage saying that the U.S. is having a positive influence has increased from 31 percent a year ago to 35 percent today, while the view that it is having a negative influence has declined from 52 per cent to 47 percent.
Looking just at the countries that have been polled in each of the last four years, positive views of the U.S. eroded from 2005 (38% on average), to 2006 (32%), and to 2007 (28%); recovering for the first time this year to 32 percent.
Israel, Iran and Pakistan were even more unpopular abroad than the United States, rated negatively by more than 50 percent of respondents.
Russia, which has begun an image burnishing campaign of its own, showed the greatest rebound in the poll, with 37 percent of respondents viewing the country positively, up from 29 percent a year earlier.
A total of 17,457 people were interviewed in 34 countries between October and January, the BBC said; the margin of sampling error varied from 3.4 to 4.6 percentage points, depending on the country.
Last June, the Pew Research Center’s survey of attitudes towards the United States showed a deepening of distrust in the Muslim world, a trend somewhat reflected in the BBC-GlobeScan survey released today. Negative views have grown in Egypt and Lebanon, but positive views have grown in Turkey and Indonesia; even so, the figures in those countries remain more negative than average.
Kurt Volker, a State Department official who has been nominated for NATO ambassador, told the BBC that the American gains are “a lagging indicator of what we are doing, working together with European governments and other elites.”
Steven Kull, a polling expert the University of Maryland, had a different take, saying that the upcoming presidential election may be playing a role. “Views of the U.S. are being mitigated by hope that a new administration will move away from the foreign policies that have been so unpopular in the world,” Mr. Kull said.
But that theory was doubted by Nikolas Gvosdev of The National Interest back in January, when The Christian Science Monitor covered the presidential candidates’ plans for addressing the issue. “People have bought into a narrative that all this negativity is the result of one man, or maybe two men in the White House, the president and vice president,” he said. “But to suggest that on Jan. 20, 2009, everything will change to the world’s liking doesn’t take into account how the world has changed.”
Other experts have suggested that American policies regarding the Middle East, national security and Iraq would have to drastically change before hearts and minds would follow. Otherwise, it’s “Mission: Impossible,” as one observer termed Karen Hughes’s effort to address the problem as the State Department’s chief of public diplomacy.
She stepped down in November without many concrete signs of progress, while another diplomat was left disenchanted after trying hard to reverse the trend, as a Times article on her resignation summarized:
“This is the conundrum that I faced every day,” Price Floyd, a former State Department public affairs official, wrote in an op-ed article in The Fort Worth Star-Telegram in May, after he left the department. “I tried through the traditional domestic media, and, for the first time, through the pan-Arab TV and print media — Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, Al Hayat — to reach people in the U.S. and abroad and to convince them that we should not be judged by our actions, only by our words.”
Is a full recovery even possible? Not according to Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner of France. “It will never be as it was before,” he said in an interview with The International Herald Tribune last month. “The magic is over.”
April 2, 2008, 9:46 am
America’s Global Image Stops Sinking in Latest Poll
By MIKE NIZZA (BBC)
The image of America abroad, which has been battered in recent years by an unpopular war and other policies, appears to have stopped deteriorating, judging by a worldwide survey by the BBC and GlobeScan:
While views of U.S. influence in the world are still predominantly negative, they have improved in 11 of the 23 countries the BBC polled a year ago, while worsening in just three countries.
The average percentage saying that the U.S. is having a positive influence has increased from 31 percent a year ago to 35 percent today, while the view that it is having a negative influence has declined from 52 per cent to 47 percent.
Looking just at the countries that have been polled in each of the last four years, positive views of the U.S. eroded from 2005 (38% on average), to 2006 (32%), and to 2007 (28%); recovering for the first time this year to 32 percent.
Israel, Iran and Pakistan were even more unpopular abroad than the United States, rated negatively by more than 50 percent of respondents.
Russia, which has begun an image burnishing campaign of its own, showed the greatest rebound in the poll, with 37 percent of respondents viewing the country positively, up from 29 percent a year earlier.
A total of 17,457 people were interviewed in 34 countries between October and January, the BBC said; the margin of sampling error varied from 3.4 to 4.6 percentage points, depending on the country.
Last June, the Pew Research Center’s survey of attitudes towards the United States showed a deepening of distrust in the Muslim world, a trend somewhat reflected in the BBC-GlobeScan survey released today. Negative views have grown in Egypt and Lebanon, but positive views have grown in Turkey and Indonesia; even so, the figures in those countries remain more negative than average.
Kurt Volker, a State Department official who has been nominated for NATO ambassador, told the BBC that the American gains are “a lagging indicator of what we are doing, working together with European governments and other elites.”
Steven Kull, a polling expert the University of Maryland, had a different take, saying that the upcoming presidential election may be playing a role. “Views of the U.S. are being mitigated by hope that a new administration will move away from the foreign policies that have been so unpopular in the world,” Mr. Kull said.
But that theory was doubted by Nikolas Gvosdev of The National Interest back in January, when The Christian Science Monitor covered the presidential candidates’ plans for addressing the issue. “People have bought into a narrative that all this negativity is the result of one man, or maybe two men in the White House, the president and vice president,” he said. “But to suggest that on Jan. 20, 2009, everything will change to the world’s liking doesn’t take into account how the world has changed.”
Other experts have suggested that American policies regarding the Middle East, national security and Iraq would have to drastically change before hearts and minds would follow. Otherwise, it’s “Mission: Impossible,” as one observer termed Karen Hughes’s effort to address the problem as the State Department’s chief of public diplomacy.
She stepped down in November without many concrete signs of progress, while another diplomat was left disenchanted after trying hard to reverse the trend, as a Times article on her resignation summarized:
“This is the conundrum that I faced every day,” Price Floyd, a former State Department public affairs official, wrote in an op-ed article in The Fort Worth Star-Telegram in May, after he left the department. “I tried through the traditional domestic media, and, for the first time, through the pan-Arab TV and print media — Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, Al Hayat — to reach people in the U.S. and abroad and to convince them that we should not be judged by our actions, only by our words.”
Is a full recovery even possible? Not according to Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner of France. “It will never be as it was before,” he said in an interview with The International Herald Tribune last month. “The magic is over.”
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
SCORTCHED EARTH
The Long Defeat
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: March 25, 2008 (NYT)
Hillary Clinton may not realize it yet, but she’s just endured one of the worst weeks of her campaign.
First, Barack Obama weathered the Rev. Jeremiah Wright affair without serious damage to his nomination prospects. Obama still holds a tiny lead among Democrats nationally in the Gallup tracking poll, just as he did before this whole affair blew up.
Second, Obama’s lawyers successfully prevented re-votes in Florida and Michigan. That means it would be virtually impossible for Clinton to take a lead in either elected delegates or total primary votes.
Third, as Noam Scheiber of The New Republic has reported, most superdelegates have accepted Nancy Pelosi’s judgment that the winner of the elected delegates should get the nomination. Instead of lining up behind Clinton, they’re drifting away. Her lead among them has shrunk by about 60 in the past month, according to Avi Zenilman of Politico.com.
In short, Hillary Clinton’s presidential prospects continue to dim. The door is closing. Night is coming. The end, however, is not near.
Last week, an important Clinton adviser told Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen (also of Politico) that Clinton had no more than a 10 percent chance of getting the nomination. Now, she’s probably down to a 5 percent chance.
Five percent.
Let’s take a look at what she’s going to put her party through for the sake of that 5 percent chance: The Democratic Party is probably going to have to endure another three months of daily sniping. For another three months, we’ll have the Carvilles likening the Obamaites to Judas and former generals accusing Clintonites of McCarthyism. For three months, we’ll have the daily round of résumé padding and sulfurous conference calls. We’ll have campaign aides blurting “blue dress” and only-because-he’s-black references as they let slip their private contempt.
For three more months (maybe more!) the campaign will proceed along in its Verdun-like pattern. There will be a steady rifle fire of character assassination from the underlings, interrupted by the occasional firestorm of artillery when the contest touches upon race, gender or patriotism. The policy debates between the two have been long exhausted, so the only way to get the public really engaged is by poking some raw national wound.
For the sake of that 5 percent, this will be the sourest spring. About a fifth of Clinton and Obama supporters now say they wouldn’t vote for the other candidate in the general election. Meanwhile, on the other side, voters get an unobstructed view of the Republican nominee. John McCain’s approval ratings have soared 11 points. He is now viewed positively by 67 percent of Americans. A month ago, McCain was losing to Obama among independents by double digits in a general election matchup. Now McCain has a lead among this group.
For three more months, Clinton is likely to hurt Obama even more against McCain, without hurting him against herself. And all this is happening so she can preserve that 5 percent chance.
When you step back and think about it, she is amazing. She possesses the audacity of hopelessness.
Why does she go on like this? Does Clinton privately believe that Obama is so incompetent that only she can deliver the policies they both support? Is she simply selfish, and willing to put her party through agony for the sake of her slender chance? Are leading Democrats so narcissistic that they would create bitter stagnation even if they were granted one-party rule?
The better answer is that Clinton’s long rear-guard action is the logical extension of her relentlessly political life.
For nearly 20 years, she has been encased in the apparatus of political celebrity. Look at her schedule as first lady and ever since. Think of the thousands of staged events, the tens of thousands of times she has pretended to be delighted to see someone she doesn’t know, the hundreds of thousands times she has recited empty clichés and exhortatory banalities, the millions of photos she has posed for in which she is supposed to appear empathetic or tough, the billions of politically opportune half-truths that have bounced around her head.
No wonder the Clinton campaign feels impersonal. It’s like a machine for the production of politics. It plows ahead from event to event following its own iron logic. The only question is whether Clinton herself can step outside the apparatus long enough to turn it off and withdraw voluntarily or whether she will force the rest of her party to intervene and jam the gears.
If she does the former, she would surprise everybody with a display of self-sacrifice. Her campaign would cruise along at a lower register until North Carolina, then use that as an occasion to withdraw. If she does not, she would soldier on doggedly, taking down as many allies as necessary.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Monday, March 24, 2008
Scandal Rocks Detroit!
Detroit Mayor Charged With Perjury
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: March 24, 2008
DETROIT (AP) -- Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, a one-time rising star and Detroit's youngest elected leader, was charged Monday with perjury and other counts after sexually explicit text messages surfaced that appear to contradict his sworn denials of an affair with a top aide.
Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy also charged the popular yet polarizing 37-year-old mayor with obstruction of justice and misconduct in office.
Former Chief of Staff Christine Beatty, 37, who also denied under oath that she and Kilpatrick shared a romantic relationship in 2002 and 2003, was charged with perjury and obstruction of justice.
In all, Worthy authorized a 12-count criminal information.
"This case was about as far from being a private matter as one can get. Honesty and integrity in the justice system is everything. That is what this case is about," Worthy said at a news conference.
"Just when did honesty and integrity, truth and honor become traits to be mocked, downplayed, ignored, laughed at or excuses made for them? When did telling the truth become a supporting player to everything else?"
The charges could signal the end of Kilpatrick's six-year career as mayor of one of America's largest cities.
Perjury is a felony, punishable by up to 15 years in prison. But for Kilpatrick, a conviction also would mean his immediate expulsion from office. The Detroit City Charter calls for any elected official convicted of a felony while in office to be removed.
Kilpatrick has said he would not resign and last week said he expects to be vindicated when all aspects of the scandal are made public.
The mayor was expected to hold a news conference at noon.
Worthy said she expected the mayor and Beatty to turn themselves in by 7 a.m. Tuesday.
Worthy has said she and her staff have pored over more than 40,000 pages of documents since January, when the Detroit Free Press published excerpts of sexually explicit text messages sent to Beatty's city-issued pager in 2002 and 2003.
The messages contradict statements Kilpatrick and Beatty gave under oath during a whistleblowers' trial last summer when each denied a romantic relationship.
My Habibi
Went for a Hike with
the Razor.
Never a Dull Moment.
Tossed her favorite toy,
The Stick, into a pile...
of sticks. She found "hers"
anyway.
Good Dog!!
Rome-In
Hooked.
Watched Rome with Jeff tonight.. first 2 episodes. Bloody, Nasty, Treacherous. Washington another day.
I think Jeff liked it though, so will have to watch the rest. Great Series.
Not Jim's genre, so will line up Carnivale' and Weeds. Love them ALL.. no worries here!
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Saturday, March 22, 2008
BREAKING NEWS!! BREAKING NEWS!! BREAKING NEWS!! BREAKING NEWS!! BREAKING NEWS!!
Madonna’s ‘Hard Candy’ hits shelves April 29
Album will be singer’s last release for Warner Bros.
LOS ANGELES - Madonna has dubbed her final album of new material for her longtime Warner Bros. label “Hard Candy,” and will release it on April 29, her publicist confirmed on Tuesday.
The album, which features such songs as “Candy Store” and the first single “Four Minutes,” is the follow-up to ”Confessions on a Dance Floor,” which debuted at No. 1 on the U.S. pop chart in November 2005.
The title and release date were first reported by Entertainment Weekly’s Web site, and the details were confirmed by Madonna’s spokeswoman, Liz Rosenberg. Entertainment Weekly quoted Rosenberg as saying the 49-year-old singer “loves candy.
4 Minutes
Ok, so you can't SEE Madonna as it's not even her in the video (it's a clip from Nelly Furtado and Justin Timberlake for Promiscuous), but I can barely HEAR her either... hope this is not a sign that "Hard Candy" is going to be Rotten. No matter, you can rest assured I will be picking this up the Instant it hits the shelfs!
Full review to follow.....
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Raw Story | Nick Juliano | April 7, 2008 12:11 PM