U2 back in bombastic form

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

U2
How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
Universal, 2,548 yen

U2 returns to big, bombastic form with its first studio album in four years, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.

The Irish quartet seem to have abandoned any pretense of trying to experiment or move in new directions and settled down to the formula that has always served them best: soaring anthems belted out over intense, echoing, layered guitar grooves backed by a whipcrack rhythm section.

The opening cut and first single "Vertigo" grabs the listener with a muscular hook and harrowing pace as Bono belts out some cliches about "swinging to the music." Despite the inane lyrics, the song serves notice that U2 is back and ready to rock in a way they haven't since Rattle and Hum.

The 24 years that have passed since their debut album have done little to diminish Bono's ability to go from a whisper to a scream, nor has his ego receded. As usual, the album winds up with the man who has the biggest collection of ugly eyeglasses this side of Elton John talking directly to God on "Yahweh." After that, the closing track, the Indian raga-tinged "Fast Cars" seems like a bit of an afterthought.

The death of the singer-lyricist's father in 2001 has obviously sparked a bit of reflection as parental love pops up as a theme on several cuts, especially the best of the album's ballads, "Sometimes You Can't Make it on Your Own."

Bono's high-profile political activism colors much of the material here as well. Bumper sticker-worthy lines such as "Where you live should not decide whether you live or whether you die" in the song "Crumbs from Your Table" are hardly ambiguous. That is not to say that the message interferes with the music--far from it. The call to arms "Love and Peace or Else" rides the top of a dangerous John Lee Hooker riff that makes it one of the strongest songs on the album.

The Edge has plenty of echoboxes and digital delays and isn't afraid to use them. He and longtime producer have layered rhythm guitar tracks that propel even the more pedestrian tunes like "City of Blinding Lights" forward.

How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb is everything a U2 album should be: Grandiose, pompous, loud, dynamic and driving. It is about as subtle as a sledgehammer between the eyes, and nearly as effective.

Joni Mitchell
Dreamland
Warner, 2,520 yen

Dreamland supposedly marks Joni Mitchell's final retirement from what she has referred to as the "cesspool"--the modern music industry. The 17-track compilation showcases some of the best and worst of her eclectic four-decade career "stoking the star maker machinery behind the popular song."

The best is very good indeed with jazzy gems like "Help Me," hits like "Big Yellow Taxi" and "You Turn Me On I'm a Radio" and more recent orchestra-backed performances of her early folk classic "Both Side Now" and "For the Roses."

The worst comes in the form of the sweet-voiced songstress' ill-advised '80s duet with Billy Idol, "Dancin' Clown," though it is not wholly without merit, at least as a curiosity. Curiouser still are the sins of omission--no "River" or "Court and Spark" and nothing from the creatively brilliant commercial flop Mingus.

A good introduction to a complex and challenging body of work by a unique talent, but not much different in the choice of material from her Hits and Misses compilation of a few years ago

The family that steals together, stays together
Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
Hot Plastic
By Peter Craig
Hyperion, 341 pp, 13.00 dollars
Fraudster, confidence artist, sharpie, flimflam man, grifter, hustler--call him what you want, but the clever guy who makes his living by pulling the wool over the eyes of his victims instead of pulling a gun on them has always been a popular cultural icon.
Never mind for a moment that the heroic thief of popular fiction, who robs exclusively from the rich and corrupt, bears little resemblance to the real crooks who line their pockets with the life savings of gullible seniors and struggling families. The guy who is able to cheat, lie, trick and fast-talk the hapless mark into handing over his cash is admired for getting something for nothing, using only his wits and a snappy line of patter.
Peter Craig's Hot Plastic shows us the evolution of fraud and credit card technology in the 1980s by following the growth of top-notch grifter from teenage tagalong to international pro, and also introduces a family of thieves whose sum is both greater and less than its parts.
Hot Plastic opens cinematically, with a man bleeding from a gunshot wound into a stolen coat in a stolen car being smuggled by his partner past the watchful eyes of the police, and proceeds in flashbacks tells us how he got there.
Kevin Swift starts out on the road with his father at age 12. His mother has just died and his dad is fresh out of prison. An obsessive kid with few social skills, Kevin has a number of personality tics, including a pathological need for rigid order in the matter of packing and unpacking suitcases and an insistence on eating nothing but pancakes and sliced oranges, that seem to be a reaction to the otherwise complete disorder of his life.
Kevin's father, Jerry, is a small-time crook traveling the United States pedaling fake credit cards with real numbers, running up huge charges on stolen card numbers and generally living off the land, stealing whatever he needs one way or another. At first, Jerry tries to keep his work a secret from Kevin, but by the time Kevin turns 15, the two are working partners. With Kevin laid low by the flu the day a major deal is to be made, Jerry is forced to hire a hooker to babysit. Colette isn't much older than Kevin and the boy develops a lasting crush on her even as she is falling for Jerry. The three start working together, with Colette teaching Kevin how to shoplift, a craft in which he eventually surpasses her--to the extent where he regularly steals the family groceries a cartload at a time.
After a few years, Colette falls out with Jerry over her ambition to move into more elaborate, lucrative and longer-term cons and he and Kevin settle down in Los Angeles with Jerry's new wife. Kevin, in school for the first time in half a dozen years, finds it a struggle, and eventually one of Jerry's scams blows up in his face, landing him in prison and leaving Kevin on his own.
A few years later, after his own brush with jail, Kevin flees to Europe with Colette. Eventually, the three are reunited for a final scam they hope will allow them to retire.
Each of the three main characters are drawn in detail with their unique voices and very real identities and motivations hidden beneath all their deceptions. The odd love triangle breeds divided loyalties and wholly believable conflicts that shape the fabric of the characters and story. Craig never cheats on plot details by pulling story elements out of thin air, but instead gradually, and with an enviable subtlety, develops his complex plot to its de rigueur, yet still surprising, shock ending.
Hot Plastic has all the Hollywood playfulness of The Sting compellingly combined with the dark grittiness of Jim Thompson's The Grifters.

Dumb all over, a little ugly on the side

People outside the United States and many within it often look at the USA with its mindless fundementalist fanatics, daytime talk shows, tabloids, conspiracy kooks and Paris Hilton, not to mention the White House, and ask "How dumb are Americans?"

Well according to this basic scientific literacy poll done by the U.S. National Science Foundation the answer is "pretty frickin' dumb"

According to the survey:

• 65% of Americans either don't know or don't believe that Evolution is a valid scientific theory.
• 25% believe that the Sun goes around the Earth
• 52% believe that humans once coexisted with dinosaurs
• 46% don't know how long it takes for the Earth to go around the Sun

A little Kristmas music
Jesus was a capricorn
He ate organic food
He believed in love and peace
And never wore no shoes
Long hair, beard and sandles
And a funky bunch of friends
Reckon we’d just nail him up
If he came down again

Chorus:
'cause everybody’s gotta have somebody that they can look down on
Somebody they can feel better than at any time they please
Someone doin’ somethin’ dirty decent folks can frown on
If you can’t find nobody else, then help yourself to me

Eggheads cussing rednecks cussing
Hippies for their hair
Others laugh at straights who laugh at
Freaks who laugh at squares
Some folks hate the whites
Who hate the blacks who hate the klan
Most of us hate anything that
We don’t understand

--Oil empire heir, Rhodes scholar, chopper pilot, studio janitor and Billy the Kid impersonator Kris Kristofferson

Hardboiled detective strictly softheaded
Drop Dead My Lovely?
By Ellis Weiner
New American Library
277 pp, $23.95
By Kevin Wood
Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

After falling off a ladder and under several boxes of books while searching for a Ross MacDonald novel, Peter Ingalls, mild-mannered recluse and bookstore clerk, wakes up a new man. He pockets a handsome insurance settlement, rents himself an office and puts this ad in the newspaper:
“Gumshoe…Dick…Shamus…Flatfoot – Put them all together, they spell Peter Ingalls, P.I.”
Thus begins Ellis Weiners’s Drop Dead My Lovely, a marvelous satirical homage to Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and all their literary descendents in the hardboiled detective genre.
Speaking and dressing like Humphrey Bogart in the “The Maltese Falcon”, Ingalls can certainly talk the talk: All the “dames” he meets are addressed as “doll” or “angel” while the men are “soldier” or “chief” and the first person narration is straight out of cinema noir. Ingalls constant asides about “the code” and the importance of remaining loyal to his client are off-the-rack standard issue in hardboiled private eye fiction, but are presented here with a cockeyed touch certain to amuse anyone who has ever skimmed a Robert B. Parker novel. Like most of the people he meets, Ingalls secretary isn’t sure what to think of him.
“”Um…Pete”
There it was. That “um.” I’d been hearing it all my life. The party of the second part was about to pop some frequently asked questions. “What? You’re on the air, kid.”
“Seriously. What’s up with you?”
“Come again, doll?”
“That. The way you talk. With all these ‘dolls’ and ‘angels.’ And these zoot-suity clothes. And the hat. This whole hardboiled thing. Are you serious or what?”
“Yeah, people ask me that all the time.”
“So? What do you say?”
“I say I’m just a guy trying to stay clean in a dirty world. I’m a professional, and wear what the professionals wear. Anybody who doesn’t like it can send an email to their congressman.”
Stephanie suddenly looked sly. She said, one con artist to another, “Come on, Pete. You can tell me. This is a put-on, right?”
“Lady,” I said, “you’re looking at a man who doesn’t do put-ons. Why? In self-defense. Because life as we know it is a put-on. The more you learn about the world, the more they change it into something else while you’re in bed reading The New Yorker. The more convinced you are that you know the score the bigger the pie they’re baking to hit you in the face with out on the street. All a mug can do in a world like this is be as deliberate as possible. In everything. Which brings us to the present conversation.”
She widened her eyes and recoiled a bit, and I thought, Well, well, Ingalls. Maybe you touched a nerve. Maybe this slice of the boss’s worldview hit home. Then she said, “Wow. You’re even more f----- up than I am.””
While Ingalls has the patter down, as a detective he is strictly softboiled, all fedora and no .45. He doesn’t seem to like he could detect water if he fell out of a boat – he constantly takes no for an answer, getting the brush-off from almost everyone he tries to question. He gets beaten to a pulp by a timid publishing executive and doesn’t recognize clues when he steps in them, thinking a pool of dried blood is brown paint. He consistently put two and two together and comes up with 22.
Fortunately for Ingalls, the aforementioned secretary, aspiring actress Stephanie Constantino, is a natural snoop and all-around busybody with investigative instincts worthy of Phillip Marlowe and a streak of Brooklyn toughness and foulmouthed vulgarity thrown in for good measure.
While much of Drop Dead My Lovely is given over to poking fun at the conventions of the hardboiled genre, it is also a clever murder mystery that hinges on Ingalls apparent cluelessness. All the standard Chandleresque plot elements - - greed, infidelity, seduction and betrayal – rear their heads as Ingalls stalks the mean streets of Manhattan, never quite getting it right.
Weiner has an obvious affection for the genre, and manages to remain respectful of its strengths while lampooning it. His knack for creating memorable supporting characters – loutish homicide cop Henry David Thoreau, television ranter Darius Flonger, his neglected manic-depressive wife Catherine and her man-eating friends – serves him well and prevents the book from becoming a one note joke along the lines of Steve Martin’s noir tribute “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” The mystery genre is home to many successful series and Weiner set himself up for a sequel at the end. With luck, Peter Ingalls next case will be as entertaining, ironic and sharp as his debut.

From the Daily Yomiuri, Nov. 14, 2004

Family portrait in Kimono from Nov. 17, 2004 

Flipping the bird
Bravo to the Mirror for such fine investigative reporting. Parrots really do live to ripe old ages


F*** THE NAZIS, SAYS CHURCHILL'S PARROT
Jan 19 2004
EXCLUSIVE
By Bill Borrows

SHE WAS at Winston Churchill's side during Britain's darkest hour. And now Charlie the parrot is 104 years old...and still cursing the Nazis.

Her favourite sayings were "F*** Hitler" and "F*** the Nazis". And even today, 39 years after the great man's death, she can still be coaxed into repeating them with that unmistakable Churchillian inflection......


Who said it?
"The national government will maintain and defend the foundations on which the power of our nation rests. It will offer strong protection to Christianity as the very basis of our collective morality. Today, Christians stand at the head of our country. We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit. We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theatre, and in the press - in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess during the past years."

















- Adolf Hitler -

WHY MOVE TO CANADA?
(Why not, eh?)
Reasons to move to Canada, as cited by www.canadianalternative.com:
1. Canada has universal public health care.
2. Canada has no troops in Iraq.
3. Canada signed the Kyoto Protocol environmental treaty.
4. More than half of Canada's provinces allow same-sex marriage.
5. The Canadian Senate recommends legalizing marijuana.
6. Canada has no law restricting abortion.
7. Canada has strict gun laws and relatively little violence.
8. The United Nations has ranked Canada the best country to live in for eight consecutive years.
9. Canada abolished the death penalty in 1976.
10. Canada has not run a federal deficit since 1996-97.

Hacking the vote
This is not just some tree-hugging nut job saying the vote was stolen, this Dick Morris. But does the so-called liberal media even care? No, they are busy telling us how Bush has a mandate because 51 percent voted for him "the largest number of people to ever vote for a president." Well guess what? The 48 percent that voted for Kerry also constitutes the largest number of people ever to vote against a sitting president.
These kinds of computer problems are unlikely to be isolated incidents

Voting with your feet
We've already had one letter from an American blogospherian over at Atrios asking about immigration to the Great White North.
(See this guide and this commentary with its broad collection of excellent links and a questionaire on the idea)
This official government questionaire will help you figure out if you qualify as a skilled worker

While I heartily encourage all red-state (Jesusland) progressives to move to Canada, I think the best all around solution (barring a sudden epidemic of common sense among red state voters) would be for them to mover to Maine, Michigan or Vermont and demand seccession and entrance to Canadian Confederation.

Provinces dammit, not states! PROVINCES!! 

Well apparently it was fixed

don't belive me, check out the numbers

I must share this admirable concession one with you

Adam Felber concedes the election with admirable grace:
"I concede that I overestimated the intelligence of the American people. Though the people disagree with the President on almost every issue, you saw fit to vote for him. I never saw that coming. That's really special. And I mean "special" in the sense that we use it to describe those kids who ride the short school bus and find ways to injure themselves while eating pudding with rubber spoons. That kind of special.
I concede that I misjudged the power of hate. That's pretty powerful stuff, and I didn't see it. So let me take a moment to congratulate the President's strategists: Putting the gay marriage amendments on the ballot in various swing states like Ohio... well, that was just genius................"

What happens next

For my blue state friends and progressive and liberal bloggers trapped in the red zone, Slate has kindly published this timely and handy guide on How to Move to Canada

My suggestion is that Paul Martin ought to pick up the phone tomorrow and offer Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine a chance to join our Confederation as a single province. Next year we'll extend the same offer to Massachusetts and Minnesota,then Rhode Island, then Connecticut, Wisconsin and finally New York. Secession and assimilation into Confederation will have to be done slowly, a state or two at a time to allow them to get used to the shock of universal health care, properly run elections and currency that comes in more than two colors.

After being glued to election coverage on CNN and the internet(s) all day, I went to work the night shift at the paper. Our late Tokyo edition goes out at midnight and Ohio was still tied. I got home at 1:30 and turned on the TV and did what any sensible intelligent politically-aware individual anywhere in the world does the night of a U.S. presidential election -- I drank a half a bottle of irish whisky before the ice cubes could melt and muttered obscenities to myself while I watched the good guys concede "for the good of the country" so that the "healing could begin." Then I went to bed and tried not to cry myself to sleep.

Please tell me the fix was in
Tell me it was the Diebold machines, tell me it was missing absentee ballots in Florida, tell it was voter intimidation and disenfranchisement, tell me it was little green men from the planet Zorgo using a mind control ray. Tell me the election was rigged, because the alternative is just too depressing to contemplate.

The U.S. presidential election saw a record turnout of about 60 percent of eligible voters, nearly 115 million. This means that unless the polls were rigged, 59 million Americans are stunningly ignorant, easily-led, bloodthirsty reactionaries who believe God talks to George W. Bush.

This means that fear, superstition, knee-jerk flag waving, intolerence and blind faith trump reason, science and egalitarianism in public discourse and politics in America.

I'm a Canadian that lives in Tokyo. For me the Bush presidency has been like have a belligerent drunken hillbilly for a next door neighbor. He sits on the porch in his undershirt, spitting tobacco juice on your driveway while he cleans his gun collection and lets his pack of hounds dump on your lawn. The whole neighbourhood hates and fears him.
After four years of this a "for sale" sign goes up next door and you're overjoyed. A few weeks later, a guy comes to your door and says he's thinking seriously of buying the hillbilly's house. You chat and he seems like a decent, reasonable person. You begin to hope. Then a few days later, with a "yeehaw" the hillbilly sets fire to the sign and tells you he's decided to stay after all and proceed to tell you that you better take that durn fence down and move it closer to your house before he gets mad.

Election day is upon us - let the lawsuits begin

I am a lonely visitor.
I came too late to cause a stir,
Though I campaigned all my life towards that goal.

I hardly slept the night you wept
Our secret's safe and still well kept
Where even Richard Nixon has got soul.
Even Richard Nixon has got
Soul.

Traffic cops are all color blind.
People steal from their own kind.
Evening comes to early for a stroll.
Down neon streets the streaker streaks.
The speaker speaks, but the truth still leaks,
Where even Richard Nixon has got soul.
Even Richard Nixon has got it,
Soul.

The podium rocks in the crowded waves.
The speaker talks of the beautiful saves
That went down long before he played this role
For the hotel queens and the magazines,
Test tube genes and slot machines
Where even Richard Nixon got soul.
Even Richard Nixon has got it,
Soul.

Hospitals have made him cry,
But there's always a free way in his eye,
Though his beach just got to crowded for his stroll.
Roads stretch out like healthy veins,
And wild gift horses strain the reins,
Where even Richard Nixon has got soul.
Even Richard Nixon has got
Soul.
I am a lonely visitor.
I came to late to cause a stir,
Though I campaigned all my life towards that goal.

-"Campaigner" by Neil Young

Why I like Canada better than our neighbour to the south reason #726

Sensible laws designed with Peace, Order and Good Government in mind instead of fear-mongering to stop progress toward Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness

Everything you want to know about Sumo

One nation, one people, one leader

Billmon at the whisky bar has the best take on the new bush loyalty oath I've seen so far

"John Kerry - Superhero"
the rude pundit tell it like it is - Kerry (wounded three times in Vietnam, hockey player, Harley rider) is ten times tougher than Bush (cheerleader, choker on pretzels, inept bicyclist)