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Stuff We Like

  • Jack Rose's Luck in the Valley

    Jack Rose

    Jack Rose died suddenly in December, leaving behind a nice body of work including Kensington Blues, Raag Manifestos, and Two Originals. Noted mostly for his American Primitive solo guitar music, Rose’s previous two records Dr. Ragtime and Pals and Jack Rose and the Black Twig Pickers present a shift to a full-bodied sound featuring other players. Luck in the Valley, released last month as his last album, continues this progression. It is tempting to read the pathos of his death into songs like the excellent “Blues For Percy Danforth”, which sounds closer to his earlier Takoma-inspired work. And in a way, it would be nice to hear more “serious” tracks that can be linked up into some kind of meaning-of-death constellation. For fans with this mindset, Luck in the Valley might be disappointingly happy. But it would be unfair to begrudge Rose’s last album for emphasizing fun and enjoyment over theoretical depth. John Fahey infamously dismissed his earlier work as “cosmic sentimentalism,” a criticism that seems to strike more at the expectations of listeners than the quality of his music. If we move beyond considering Rose’s songs as spiritual mood enhancers, there is a lot of good music to enjoy on Luck. Rose sounds like he was having a good time at the end.  -- Scott Coomes

  • Thump Culture

    Thump Culture

    Described by its creator — talented illustrator Neill Cameron — as "a martial arts rom-com slice of life soap opera," this webcomic is about the lives of the people who run and participate in an alternate universe fight club known as "The Thump." The story, at least the first part of it, aligns itself with the perspective of Catriona, a down-on-her-luck paramedic whose life turns around when she responds to an ad that leads to her becoming The Thump's resident nurse. I like her, because she's spunky and doesn't have inhumanly pneumatic bodily proportions. Equally charming is Alex, who videotapes the fights to later sell on the internet to "a certain kind of teenager that'll lap that shit up." Read the comic, cry when you hit the last page and realize you're all caught up and now have to wait for future installments which might not ever come due to Cameron's being a kickass illustrator who now gets paid for his awesome skills, and then check out Cameron's personal site, which offers a nice peek into his process.  -- Erin Price

  • The Form of Paranoia in All the President's Men

    Woodward and Bernstein

    All the President's Men is rightfully known as the best movie about journalism ever made, but it's most notable for not focusing its paranoia in the form of several nefarious people. The last film in director Alan Pakula's "paranoia trilogy" (which includes Klute and The Parallax View), All the President's Men is notable in the genre for never depicting the agents of paranoia that torments reporters Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman). Yes, we know them to be agents of the Nixon Administration, but because they're never seen in the movie, it's never clear exactly what constitutes a victory in the fight against corruption. We know that the reporters' lives are in danger, but from whom? The CIA? FBI? Deep Throat says "everybody is involved," after all. Woodward and Bernstein's reports eventually result in the imprisonment and resignation of Nixon and his cronies, yet Pakula downplays it with the perfunctory rattling off of punishments on The Washington Post's press in a manner fitting the lack of closure of lenient punishments for a few solitary figures. The institutional rot went deeper and will persist as long as culprits remain identified. You may not see anyone over your shoulder, but that doesn't mean they're not somewhere.  -- Eric Freeman

From the Vault

Things that died in 2008.

Our president pledged as primary candidate to staunchly defend individual civil liberties and curb the domestic intelligence abuses of the Bush Administration. As the Democratic candidate, he hedged. As president-elect, he made stunning about-faces, notably on immunity for telecommunications companies who cooperated with Bush's illegal requests. Now, as president, he's continued as many of Bush's abuses as he's curtailed. Also, there was a time when John McCain wasn't an unprincipled, dishonorable bigot. He was quite the man, when he was a man. Then came a succubus to hasten his by then inevitable decline.

drink deep

Jun 5, 2009 1

Obama On Islam: Reduction and Relevance in Political Rhetoric

Kevin Hilke

U.S. President Barack Obama’s speech “to the Muslim world” from Cairo University earlier this week has provoked a variety of predictable reactions from the right, most of which impugn Obama for admitting points of view other than that of U.S. interest when thinking through global affairs. By this rationale, Obama’s admission that the Islamic societies of the past were crucial to generating and preserving the ideas that underpin what we call “the west” becomes nothing more than a sheepish “apology” to “terrorists.” Criticism from the left has been almost as uniformly boring and predictable. An intriguing and problematic exception comes from Foreign Policy’s David Rothkopf, a former Clinton Administration official whose readings of events are often simultaneously refreshing and myopic.

Apr 7, 2009 0

Engagement Is a Policy

John Collins

Engagement can be seen as a tactic insofar as it helps us accomplish discrete goals, but after eight years of Bush’s Mideast bungling, vigorous engagement itself must be our foreign policy goal. Prior to a policy of concerted and constant engagement, we will be in the dark as to what our policy ought to be, as it will necessarily have to be directed towards positions and shaped by factors that we don’t currently understand. Seeking this understanding, though, is an active process that offers one significant agency and influence. Because our policy is rooted in our evolving understanding, engagement offers us major potential to deeply influence policy long before it’s made. Obama understands the potential to shape policy processes before they begin, and so has made engagement not just a policy, but the policy of the United States.

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