I reviewed Cher's CHRISTMAS, Dolly Parton's ROCKSTAR and Ann-Margret's BORN TO BE WILD. Is it my last review of the year before I do my year-in-review? I'm not sure. I'll need to check my notes. I thought there was one more album I was going to review.
Anyway, Jill Mapes (PITCHFORK) writes:
Right now, Liz Phair is in a good place with Exile in Guyville, her 1993 debut that catapulted her to the center of alternative music. “To have it still resonate in the culture is a mixed blessing,” she tells me one afternoon, calling from her home in L.A. “Sometimes we’re getting along, sometimes we’re not. But these days we’re like those couples who have been together a long time and we just really appreciate each other.”
Earlier this month, the 56-year-old kicked off a tour performing the classic album in its entirety, a brief but meaningful run of shows that she says could be the last time she presents the record as a full “immersive experience.” That’s not to say it’ll be the last time Phair mines the Guyville era for material—her forthcoming second memoir, Fairy Tales, will have her revisiting that time in her life, too.Three decades later, Guyville has never stopped being relevant
as a rejection of indie rock beta-male fuckery, but also as an
affirmation of something bigger: embodied female sexuality and a
hard-won sense of autonomy. “Flower,” my personal favorite track,
remains a shocking song about desire in part because of how simple and
viscerally spoken it is: “I want to fuck you like a dog/I’ll take you
home and make you like it,” Phair sing-speaks over sparse chords and her
own girlish backing vocals. “That song ripped a hole in my universe,”
she says now, adding that it made her preppy and proper family very
uncomfortable.
My favorite song from EXILE IN GUYVILLE right now? "Divorce Song."
Closing with C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
We can't afford YOUTUBERS lying. If someone wants to vote Green, fine. If they want to vote however fine. But we need to know what our vote means. We're not voting Green because there is a plan by the Republican Party to strip people of their rights. That's dreamers -- and that's even the children of immigrants -- children born in this country -- that the Republican Party thinks they can strip of citizenship. 'B-b-b-but the Constitution!' Doesn't matter. Nothing does with an illegal and corrupt Supreme Court. We saw it with ROE. We saw it when it rewarded the hate merchant Lorie Smith out of Colorado. 'It would deny her religion if she had to design a website for a same-sex marriage but this Court opinion is not to be expanded upon, honest, pinky promise.' It's already being used to deny the rights of gays and lesbians. And the GOP extremist goal is to overturn marriage equality. Why? Because they believe it is the first time the government has recognized legal rights for gays and lesbians. They think if they overturn this, they can overturn anything. They have also defined same-sex relationships -- living together, marriage, dating, what have you -- as pornography. They don't do that for straight relationships. But they do it for same-sex relationships and their plan is to further attack LGBTQ+ rights by doing that and arguing that free speech does not apply to pornography. They want to now move on to outlawing birth control. They think they have the perfect Court to do this with. They think they can achieve all their dreams and rebuke every advance this country has made in the last 70 or so years on race, gender and equality.
That's why we're not voting Green. If you are, we ask that you make demands of your party's eventual nominee. Building a political party is reason enough to vote for the Green Party. And we're not going to hiss at your or fault you for it.
So much didn't get addressed last week. Take Project 2025. Various
extreme right think tanks got together and came up with this 'project'
(planned assassination of checks and balances and of rights and
liberties). Few outlets have bothered to discuss it. Kyle Kulinski
didn't avoid the topic.
Project 2025 is the action plan for the hate merchants of the fright-wing to put into play immediately upon election of a Republican president. It would decimate the federal government by turning jobs over to patronage and making them exist -- or not exist -- on the whim of the president. It would launch attacks on the rights of immigrants, people of color, all women and the LGBTQ+ community.
The illegitimate Supreme Court would most likely back everyone of the items on this agenda. They're an illegitimate Court with filled with corrupt justices (most infamously Crooked Clarence Thomas) and they're not just bought off by the wealthy, they also have no respect for precdent -- for the very thing our laws are built upon. The demonstrated that with DOBBS and Clarence Thomas' concurring opinion on DOBBS included a wish list of other laws he'd like to see overturned. Guess what? Project 2024 checks off Clarence's wish list.
This should be huge but people don't want to discuss it. In the few times that it is discussed, it's just the elimination of federal jobs that gets discussed.
Project 2025 should scare everyone -- even mentally competent Republicans should be scared by it -- if there are any left.
Democrats should be bringing up Project 2025 on every media appearance they make because we doubt nothing would turn out more voters in the fall of 2024 than the knowledge of what an extreme group of Republicans are planning.
Iraq and the United States are negotiating an agreement that could
result in the return of small units of American soldiers to Iraq on
training missions. At the request of the Iraqi government, according to
General Caslen, a unit of Army Special Operations soldiers was recently
deployed to Iraq to advise on counterterrorism and help with
intelligence.
WHO said it sent a joint team with the U.N. to the hospital Saturday to “assess the situation on the ground, conduct a rapid situational analysis, assess medical priorities and establish logistics options for further missions.” The team, who spent one hour inside the hospital, described the hospital as a “death zone” and the situation as “desperate.”
The U.N.-WHO team said they saw a mass grave with more than 80 people buried there at the hospital.
“Lack of clean water, fuel, medicines, food and other essential aid over the last 6 weeks have caused Al-Shifa Hospital — once the largest, most advanced and best equipped referral hospital in Gaza — to essentially stop functioning as a medical facility,” WHO stated in a press release. “The team observed that due to the security situation, it has been impossible for the staff to carry out effective waste management in the hospital.”
Recapping some of Saturday's events, THE GUARDIAN notes:
More than 80 people were killed on Saturday by double Israeli strikes on the Jabalia refugee camp, Gaza’s health ministry said. “At least 50 people” were killed in an Israeli strike on early Saturday morning at the UNRWA-run al-Fakhouri school in the Jabalia refugee camp a Gaza health ministry official said. Another strike on a separate building in the camp killed 32 people of the same family, 19 of them children, according to the official.
Médecins Sans Frontières strongly condemned a “deliberate attack” on a convoy evacuating its staff members and their families, which it said had resulted in one death and one injury. The convoy was attacked on Saturday, as it was trying to evacuate 137 people, from MSF premises located near Al-Shifa hospital.
Thousands of demonstrators, including family members of hostages kidnapped by Hamas, marched into Jerusalem on Saturday in angry calls for the Israeli government to do more to bring their relatives home. The march capped a five-day trek from Tel Aviv and represented the largest protest on behalf of the hostages since they were dragged into Gaza by Hamas on 7 October.
Twelve people have been killed after Israeli tank fire hit the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza on Monday, according to the health ministry in the territory, which is controlled by Hamas.
Among the dead are patients who were being treated at the hospital and a member of medical staff, the ministry said.
Palestinian journalist Anas al-Sharif, who is inside the hospital, told CNN that Israeli tanks were outside the main hospital gates, as well as other locations near the hospital.
The UK-based rights group says it has determined that two Israeli strikes last month that killed 46 people in Gaza “were indiscriminate attacks or direct attacks on civilians or civilian objects, which must be investigated as war crimes”.
The incidents probed by Amnesty were an attack on Saint Porphyrius Church in Gaza City on October 19 and another on a home in the Nuseirat refugee camp the following day.
“These deadly, unlawful attacks are part of a documented pattern of disregard for Palestinian civilians and demonstrate the devastating impact of the Israeli military’s unprecedented onslaught has left nowhere safe in Gaza, regardless of where civilians live or seek shelter,” said Erika Guevara Rosas, Amnesty director of global research, advocacy and policy.
“We urge the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor to take immediate concrete action to expedite the investigation into war crimes and other crimes under international law opened in 2021,” Guevara Rosas added.
During its investigation, Amnesty said it spoke to more than a dozen people, including survivors, and reviewed satellite imagery and open-source audio-visual material.
Biden’s op-ed should put to rest any claim that the US’s failure to call for a ceasefire in Gaza is a mistake or misunderstanding. Rather, the United States sees crushing the resistance of the Palestinian people as critical to the US’s global strategy. He writes:
As long as Hamas clings to its ideology of destruction, a cease-fire is not peace. To Hamas’s members, every cease-fire is time they exploit to rebuild their stockpile of rockets, reposition fighters and restart the killing by attacking innocents again. An outcome that leaves Hamas in control of Gaza would once more perpetuate its hate.
In Biden’s worldview, the precondition for “peace” is a total surrender by the Palestinians. While he refers to Hamas, what he really means is that so long as the Palestinians believe it is possible to resist an occupying force that has dispossessed them of their land and illegally occupies it, American imperialism will continue its efforts to arm Israel and bomb the Palestinians into submission.
Having bluntly declared the US’s total support for Israel, Biden goes on to add, with consummate imperialist hypocrisy, “There must be no forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, no reoccupation, no siege or blockade, and no reduction in territory.”
This, as everyone knows, is precisely what the Israeli government is doing. Israeli officials have made clear that their aim is, in the words of Israel’s agriculture minister, “Nakba 2023,” or as Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said, to expel the Palestinian population to “tent cities” in the Sinai desert. As for a “siege or blockade,” that is already happening, with the support of the Biden administration.
The entire population of Gaza has been subjected to mass hunger, dehydration and the total collapse of medical care. The people of northern Gaza, instructed to flee or face death, are being told to once again relocate further south. And after every atrocity by Israel, the United States declares, “Israel has the right to defend itself.”
Then, earlier this morning, the news broke that Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, essayist, and poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine, Anne Boyer, has resigned from her post, writing in her resignation letter that “the Israeli state’s U.S.-backed war against the people of Gaza is not a war for anyone” and that she “won’t write about poetry amid the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering.”
Here is Boyer’s extraordinary resignation letter—in which she takes direct aim at the language used by her (now former) employer in its coverage of the war on Gaza—in full:
I have resigned as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine.
The Israeli state’s U.S-backed war against the people of Gaza is not a war for anyone. There is no safety in it or from it, not for Israel, not for the United States or Europe, and especially not for the many Jewish people slandered by those who claim falsely to fight in their names. Its only profit is the deadly profit of oil interests and weapon manufacturers.
The world, the future, our hearts—everything grows smaller and harder from this war. It is not only a war of missiles and land invasions. It is an ongoing war against the people of Palestine, people who have resisted throughout decades of occupation, forced dislocation, deprivation, surveillance, siege, imprisonment, and torture.
Because our status quo is self-expression, sometimes the most effective mode of protest for artists is to refuse.
I can’t write about poetry amidst the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.
If this resignation leaves a hole in the news the size of poetry, then that is the true shape of the present.
—Anne Boyer
Sandy English (WSWS) explains:
Boyer is a poet and essayist, the author of 10 books, and the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. Her resignation and letter have struck a blow against the pretensions of the New York Times—which has supported the slaughter in Gaza in its editorial policy and reporting—to be evenhanded and “objective,” instead of what it is, an organ of CIA-Pentagon-White House propaganda that invariably sides with oppressor against the oppressed, essentially pro-imperialist yellow journalism.
As the World Socialist Web Site noted on the resignation—almost certainly coerced—of another New York Times writer, Jazmine Hughes, earlier this month for signing a writers’ petition calling for a ceasefire in Gaza:
“The Times is itself complicit in this world-historic crime. The protest letter [signed by Hughes] cited an October 14 op-ed by the paper’s Editorial Board entitled ‘Israel Can Defend Itself and Uphold Its Values’ which, while weakly calling upon the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to attempt to ‘minimize’ civilian casualties, declared that the Israeli regime deserved the unequivocal support of the United States and its allies in prosecuting its war against the people of Gaza.
“At the same time,” the WSWS pointed out, “the Times systematically downplays the war atrocities of the Israeli military. While it cannot avoid reporting on the massive scale of death and suffering being inflicted on Gaza, it employs a crude sleight of hand in its coverage.”
Boyer’s phrases, “sanitized hellscapes” and “warmongering lies” are precise and excoriating. They rip the veil off the official lying and chloroforming of public opinion by the Times, the country’s flagship liberal publication.
Kat's "Kat's Korner: Seasoned entertainers (Dolly Parton, Ann-Margaret and Cher)" went up Sunday. The following sites updated:
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Idiot of the week2 days ago
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PRISCILLA2 days ago
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