swing that shit over to the left.

Last week I learned from an unlikely source that there's a religiously-led movement afoot to make it ok to say the L-word in public in the US.

And now yesterday I read in the Sunday Washington Post that a "Berkley-based rabbi" Michael Lerner has also gone on the liberal offensive with a new book called The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country From the Religious Right.

Can this be happening? Geez, a chimp takes a little multi-point hit in the polls and suddenly all the bleeding hearts come out of the woodwork...

"Hello from Ulsan!"

From: "jim cooper"
To: James.Covey
Subject: I said Venus, ... Vee, Venus
Date: Sun, 26 Feb 2006 05:42:38 -0400

Hello from Ulsan!

Well we've arrived, and in one piece. We've been treated okay so far.
We'll see, had an amazing meal Saturday night. We met all the other
teachers at the school, and had a nice time. We actually stayed up until
10:30PM. We've been eating all kinds of great food, and it's so cheap.

Anyway, we gotta scoot!
Take care,
Jim

"pho the love of Dartmouth"

Damn, it's about time I clued in... there's phine Vietnamese phood to be had about a 15-minute walk from my house in Austenville. I think I let Liz Feltham's review of Pho Hoang Minh deter me from giving it a chance. She wrote in mid-December '04, not long after it opened, that she feared "should Pho’s remain where it is" [i.e. not the Halifax side of the harbour] "it is destined to become just another Chinese takeout, losing all of the Vietnamese menu’s characteristics."

Perhaps I should have given some attention to the storm of controversy (scroll past the unintentionally hilarious first letter) that erupted in the letters section of The Coast in response to her review. One Dartmouth resident wrote "There are many people who appreciate and patronize Pho’s, right here in Dartmouth. We would like nothing more than for it to be prosperous right where it is. " Based on my visit there tonight, more than a year later, I'd say that's exactly what's happening. There are still 32 Vietnamese items on the menu, and the spring rolls, as Liz promised, were indeed "very, very good."

the revolution will be dramatized.

The cover of the Daresalam DVD (handy plot summary here) quotes an LA Weekly review that calls the film a "poignant essay on civil war in modern-day Chad" — but the oddity is that, while it was made there, by a director from Chad, it's actually set in Tanzania. I feel rather ignorant for not remembering that Dar es Salaam is that country's capital.

I only realized the error in the quote when I began to do some background reading after watching the film last night. I had wondered why the film avoided showing any apparent landmarks in the city constantly referred to as "the capital" — I'm suppose now it's because those scenes, while set in Dar es Salaam, were shot in N'Djamena.

"Daresalam ends on a note of unironic optimism more radical than all the calculated nihilism served up on Western movie screens," enthuses Ernest Hardy in that LA Weekly piece, and that much is true enough. But what I really enjoyed about this film was that it was a fascinating peek into a culture I know little about (despite my childhood relationship with a missionary family that had spent years in the Chad Republic). It reminded me of all those enjoyable hours spent with low-budget foreign films at good old Wormwood's Cinema.

Is our media really vigilant?

I've been remiss in not giving props already to what I think is the best feature article to run in The Coast in months if not years. Stephen Kimber's "Paying for power" doesn't just hit the nail on the head when it comes to the dirty details of campaign/party financing in Nova Scotia—it is also a total throw-down on the sorry state of provincial political coverage in the Nova Scotia media.

So is our media really vigilant?

The short answer is no.
The long answer is no too.

For more on the long answer, read the article...

"butcher's hands; gentle souls"

Munich is the first Steven Spielberg picture in almost twenty years that, to my mind, is virtually unblemished. Thanks in large part to Tony Kushner, he finally has a script whose literary intelligence is equal to his considerable visual intelligence, and for that reason, the subtlety of this film may be lost on much of his usual audience. In Eric Bana—excellent once again—he has a lead who is able to register convincingly the soul-damage wreaked by vengeance.

It's a flawless thriller, technically—no director moves objects and people around in three dimensions like Spielberg does—but it also has much to offer in moral insight. Spielberg does not propose to tell us what can be done to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but what he does articulate most firmly (and perhaps a little obviously by times—this is my one small reservation) is that we go down the path of violence in an attempt to take back control, but inevitably, it is violence that takes us.

all of my friends are floating away.

All the jokes about Jean-Chretien-style goodbyes are done, now, and after several months of life in Limbo (a.k.a. rural New Brunswick) my dear friends Becka and Jim are off on their two-year South Korean adventure. I know they're going to take the world of ESL instruction by storm, but I'm going to miss them terribly. I did already, really. And this event is going to be weird without Becka.

The supporting cast for the send-off at YHZ this morning included Becka's bro Garrett, as well as Rebecca and Katrina. Thanks to Kat and the Porters for providing wheels (it's always fun driving the minivan).

"we're Quartango. there's four of us, and we play tangos."

Fucking hell. I was starving for that, just starving, and I had no idea. It's been a while, before tonight, since I've been to a proper, formal concert, I don't know how long... but too long.

Montréal's Quartango are just what they seem: double bass, piano, violin, and bandoneon (it's like an accordion, but it doesn't do chords) — and they play the tango and variations thereon. Tonight, in a CBC Radio Two recorded Debut Atlantic event, they played Woodlawn United Church with the help of soprano Janice Jackson, who, in this refined music critic's opinion, totally kicks ass.

We all know how bad high-culture low culture can be (does the world really need, e.g., another symphony orchestra collaboration by some washed-up middle-of-the-road pop artist). But the right mix of stylistic verve and proper technique completely brings to life a form like the tango. I was fully engaged on every level for two hours.

Here's where I could pretend to be this total musical sophisticate and say something like "the inevitable second-half performance of 'La cumparsita'" except, I totally did not know before tonight the actual name of the "national anthem of tango" as group leader Denis Plante put it. But yeah, you know, "that tango song"? For future reference that's "La cumparsita."

Is it too late for a new year's resolution, 6 or 7 weeks in? This year — proper, classical-ish concerts. At least every couple of months. Surely to God I can take in 6 good concerts this year. I know I'll be happier if I do.

"good night, and good luck."

Television in the main insulates us from the realities of the world in which we live. — Edward R. Murrow

Of the various aesthetic constraints that George Clooney operates under for the duration of Good Night, and Good Luck. — including black & white cinematography, and a total absence of exteriors — the most interesting is the absence of a musical score. Mind you, the action, such as it is, is punctuated by the occasional vocal performance by Dianne Reeves (playing a chanteuse in the Columbia recording studio a floor below CBS TV's news operation), and the songs offer some witty commentary between cinematic chapters. But there is no instrumental score. It's as if Clooney et al were aware that the script had to stand on its own merits — to blemish even a few lines with emotional string-pulling would have been to sell out the spirit of Murrow. Mind you, Clooney has no reservations about romanticizing Murrow as a hero, with David Strathairn, flawless in the lead role, delivering movie-star cigarette poses and noble head-cocking... But it's an intellectual hero he wants us to recognize, and on the hero's own terms. In that he succeeds admirably.

starving for news

Of all the Turin Olympics stories I've seen so far, this is clearly the funniest. The sublime moment in TSN.ca's article "No gold medal for Olympic food" is the caption they chose to run with the photo. I laughed so hard I choked. Sometimes TSN.ca reads like a high school paper...

Ladies and gentlemen, just so we're clear... THIS is Italian food...

"a food fight between the humanities and the social sciences"

"The scholarly food fight over how to define the lunch pail class and what Democrats can do to win back their affections - if, that is, they ever lost them"

Again with the Thomas Frank... Sunday's Boston Globe had a piece by Christopher Shea called "Who are you calling working class?" in which he talks about the ongoing faceoff between Tom Frank and Larry Bartels (pictured) over who exactly constitutes the working class in America, and whether the Democrats have really lost a substantial segment of them to the Republicans.

For your convenience, links to some supporting material:

• Larry Bartels' Sept '05 APSA paper [PDF format]: "What’s the Matter with What’s the Matter with Kansas?"
• Bartels' further comments in The Daily Princetonian, Oct 19/05: "Bartels attacks book on red states"
• Tom Frank's response [PDF format]: "Class is Dismissed"
  

typical Saturday night.

Many of you have asked, "James, what's it like being a swinging bachelor? Tell us about your dynamic lifestyle and exciting weekends!" Well, a dear friend sent me this candid snap, and I thought I would share, as it's worth a thousand words, if I do say myself.

"Love. Shall we deny it when it visits us? Shall we deny what we are given?"

I went to see The New World last night. Terrence Malick's films, I was reminded again, are strictly for people who get poetry, at some level. And not just any poetry, but a certain, some might say dated, aesthetic. His points of reference are not pop-culture but rather the American Poetic Tradition: Emerson, Whitman, on down the line through Stevens.

So often people say that his two most recent films are too slow, too long, in need of an edit, etc... but I find them perfectly economical. Malick assumes that we want to focus on something meaningful, gives us something to focus on—and then pares away all the distractions that he can. We know just as much as we need to know about the supporting characters, and no more. The name "Pocahontas"—too freighted, not mentioned. Pidgin English—too easy, belies what Malick wants to say about his heroine, so he doesn't go there... instead, she talks in a surprisingly convincing beautiful second-language prose. As Stevens put it, "One grows used to the weather, / The landscape and that; / And the sublime comes down / To the spirit itself..." What is left is a reflection on the cruelties and mercies of non/human nature, and ultimately, of love.

Maybe I'll get back into web design.

This made my freaking day.

"welcome to 2002, james."

from one curmudgeon to another

Thomas Frank gave H.L. Mencken a big sloppy posthumous kiss in this Sunday's Wash Post. The book he was reviewing (Mencken: The American Iconoclast, by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers) does look promising. Adding that one to my post-school-term reading list...

By the way, Mr. Frank does have his own nice little website now.

superbowl sunday

Congratulations to the NFL on successfully editing the words "cum" and "cocks" out of the Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up" and "Rough Justice" on the Superbowl halftime show.

For me the highlight of the game was another awesome turkey dinner at Geoff and Jenny's place, complete with many Budweisers and Mississippi Mud Pie (Mr. President, you make good Choices).

something's burning

People are already asking me what I think of the reaction to the notorious Muhammad cartoons, but I feel completely ill-equipped to answer. Someone even asked me Saturday why Islam is so much more "extreme" than other religions. It's an easy question to ask when you are a member of the Western society that has affected/shaped/violated the Islamic world in such extreme ways, and you don't have to live with the consequences on a daily basis. When I think about the embassy torching in Damascus, I just feel torn up inside. I hope that the angry people who did it come to feel some regret. I wish there was some sign of the same thing from this misled, or vicious, Danish newspaper editor.

There are some intelligent voices popping up on this question. Juan Cole, in particular, offers the perspective that is missing from most Western media. If you're just wondering what the hell happened, the coverage in The Independent has been especially good.

munro day (chris have murphy upon us)

Yes, Friday was Munro Day, that blessed annual celebration that only Dalhousie University observes, thanks to this man.

(Check it out: Wikipedia has a bio about George Munro and even an entry for Munro Day.)

My Munro Day got off to a nostalgic start thanks to an email I received out of the blue Thursday from Graeme Gunn, editor of Halifax magazine... they're revamping/relaunching as a bi-monthly insert in the Sunday Herald...

They are starting with a music issue to coincide with the 2006 Juno Awards, and he asked me for a back-page editorial. Suddenly I'm writing about the '90s Halifax music scene for the first time in three years. Spent the first couple of morning hours Friday banging out a rough draft. Did a little combing through the archives and found out what I was doing 10 years ago yesterday. Sometimes these things write themselves.

groundhog day

Yesterday a famous rodent came up out of his hole and called for three more months of human rights suppression. Call me crazy but I had this weird sense of deja vu.

You know, it's a year to the day since I received one of the stranger middle-of-the-night calls I can remember. My friends Tyler (who was in India at the time) and Margaret (who was working in Tibet) had made plans to vacation together in Nepal. Tyler emailed me on February 1 to tell me that her plane had been turned around in mid-air and sent back to Delhi when the Kathmandu airport was shut down, after Gyanendra had sacked the government. But Margaret was trapped in Tibet by snowed-out roads, had left her cell phone behind, and had no way of knowing that the reason she couldn't get through on the phone to the Kathmandu Guest House was that the Nepalese king had cut all the lines.

I took Margaret's call around 3 in the morning -- she had turned to me to try to get a message through to Tyler. "Don't go to Nepal, Margaret," I said into my cellphone, in my bed in Halifax, Nova Scotia. "There's a coup in Nepal. Go home."

It's a mad, mad globalized globe.

snow day

The snow is back, and so is my blog, in testament to the fact that I am as subject to peer pressure as the next guy. Alright, already, I'll update my g-dd-mn blog from now on.

Now leave me alone -- I have to study my Arabic.