Today's Stories

March 6-8 , 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Harlots High and Low

Chris Floyd
Tangled Up in Karl

Uri Avnery
Remember Ophira?

Dave Lindorff
Kiss the Banks Goodbye

Mark Weisbrot
The Crisis vs. the Dogma

David Ker Thomson
Against Work

Phil Aliff
Soldier Suicides

Rebekah Ward
Georgia Injustice: Another Young Life Wrecked

Tracey Briggs
How Capitalism Feels in the Head

Dean Baker
Depression Nostalgia?

Wajahat Ali
The Pakistani Monster

David Michael Green
Smart is the New Stupid

David Macaray
The Minimum Wage Revisited

Michael Dickinson
On Financial Fools Day

Susie Day
Line in the Sand

Bob Sommer
Echoes of the Townhouse Explosion

Website of the Weekend
Chimp Torture in Louisiana

March 5 , 2009

James G. Abourezk
This Time It's Mrs. Clinton's Turn

Kathleen and Bill Christison
U.S. Military Aid to Israel

Robert Weissman
Wall Street's Best Investment: Paying for Public Policy

Patrick Cockburn
My Day at the Terror "Charity"

William Blum
Being Serious About Torture...Or Not

Robert Fantina
From Iraq to Afghanistan: Augmentation All Over Again

Saul Landau
The Unseen Crisis

Benjamin Dangl
Striking a Blow Against the Beer Cartel: a Grassroots Victory in Utah

Christopher Brauchli
The New Leaders of the GOP

Website of the Day
The Angola 3: 36 Years of Solitude

March 4, 2009

Marjorie Cohn
Blueprints for a Police State

Mike Whitney
Blowing Up the Economy: How Securitization Lit the Fuse

Ron Jacobs
The Banality of Occupation: the Rand Papers

Ashley Smith
War by Another Name

Joanne Mariner
Obama's War on Terror

Dan Bacher
The California Water Wars: Why It's Not a Conflict Between Fish and People

Mark Engler
Will the Winds of Change Reach El Salvador?

Franklin Lamb
"What's Hezbollah Done for Us Lately?"

Cal Winslow
Slugging It Out in California

David Mandelzys
Apartheid Week

Website of the Day
Guantánamo: the Definitive Prisoner List

March 3, 2009

Conn Hallinan
Ethnic Cleansing and Israel

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
The Long, Dark Night of Pakistan

Brian M. Downing
The Changing Game in Afghanistan

Robert Larson
External Damnation: Companies are Designed for Destruction

Daniel P. Wirt, MD
Single-Payer Health Reform

Russell Mokhiber
Burn Your Health Insurance Bill!

William Loren Katz
Obama, One Ape and Two Newspapers

Kathy Sanborn
The Lazy Man's Guide to the Economic Crisis

Pauline Imbach
A New Start for the World Social Forum?

Christopher Ketcham
The Best Journalism You'll Write is Priceless

Website of the Day
The Surveillance Self-Defense Project

March 2, 2009

Andrea Peacock
A Poisoned Town's Shot at Justice

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama's Budget

Peter Lee
Pakistan Lurches Toward the Abyss

John Blair
Locking Down Big Coal

Peter Morici
Treasury's Flawed Plan for Citigroup

Uri Avnery
10 Ways to Kill Fatah

Michael Donnelly
Resistance to the War on the Wild

Fred Gardner
The Judge Who Ruled Marijuana is Medicine

Sonia Nettnin
Middle East Medical Mission Heroes

Andrew Lehman
A New Deal for the Web

Website of the Day
Pentagon Papers II?

Feb. 27 - March 1, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Is Nancy Pelosi Really Against War Crimes?

Harry Browne
Where the Cheats Have No Shame

Anthony DiMaggio
From Bush to Obama: Seven Years of Wartime Propaganda

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Dennis Ross and Iran: the Fox and the Chicken Coop

Mischa Gaus
The Banks' War on Workers

Felice Pace
The Economy and the Big Picture

Mike Whitney
Is Free Market Capitalism Possible Without Accountability?

Lee Sustar
Blaming the Autoworkers

Peter Lee
The Other Side of the Coin in Afghanistan

Nicole Colson
Ruining Young Lives for Profit

Roger Burbach
Et Tu, Daniel? The Betrayal of the Sandinista Revolution

Rannie Amiri
King Abdullah Has No Robes

Missy Beattie
Owning Disaster

Dave Lindorff
America's Stupid Health Care Debate

Robert David Steele Vivas
Intelligence for the President--and Everyone Else

John Ross
Teotihuacan Gets Mickey-Moused

Ralph Nader
Civic Heroism Awards

Yves Engler
Haiti's Harsh Realities

Alan Farago
The Story of Leonard Abess, Banker

Zulfikar Majid
Understanding Kashmir

David Yearsley
Don't Stay Up Too Late, Johan!

Charles R. Larson
Sleeping with Dogs

Kim Nicolini
Spitting at Dark Times: Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky"

Lorenzo Wolff
So You Wanna Be a Garage Rock Star

Poets' Basement
Puthoff, Payne, Gaffney and Gray

Website of the Weekend
Sleep Now in the Fire

February 26, 2009

Dave Lindorff
Obama's Address to Congress

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Military Mephistopheles

Patrick Cockburn
Did the US Learn Anything in Iraq?

Mike Whitney
The Geithner Put

Eamonn McCann
"Make Bono Pay Tax"

Tim Wise
Eric Holder and the Whitewashing of Racism

Tom Barry
Napolitano's Hard Line

Harvey Wasserman
Obama's Excellent Atomic Omission

Adam Turl
The Enemies of Unions and the Lies They Tell

David Macaray
When People are Fired Illegally

James McEnteer
Rush to the Rescue: Limbaugh's Secret Plan to Save the Economy

Website of the Day
The Carbon Casino

February 25, 2009

Chris Sands
Afghanistan: Chaos Central

M. Shahid Alam
Israel in 1948: Poised for Expansion

Chris Floyd
Obama's Non-Withdrawal Withdrawal Plan

Dave Lindorff
Wall Street and Bernanke: the Blind Leading the Blind

Norman Solomon
The Slow Pullout Method

Rachel Godfrey Wood
Neoliberals Do The Amazon

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Teacher and Student: the New Class Struggle

Ron Jacobs
It Ain't Over Till It's Over

Nadia Hijab
The First Waltz

Dennis Loo
The Water Line

Website of the Day
Hitchens Gets Stomped by Syrian Nerd

February 24, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
How the Economy was Lost

Uri Avnery
Coalition Theory

Peter Morici
Is Nationalization Inevitable?

Jonathan Cook
Arab Parties Face Most Hostile Knesset in History

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
The Man Who Shouldn't be King (of Afghanistan)

Andy Worthington
Who is Binyam Mohamed?

Brian Horejsi
Crisis Creates Hope for Reality

Julia Stein
I was a Writer for the Government

Norm Kent
How Judges Disgrace the Bench

Rachel Smolker /
Brian Tokar
Biofuels, Promise or Threat?

Dennis Loo
The Water Line: Doing What Must be Done

James McEnteer
The Oscar for Denial

Website of the Day
How to Destroy a Fox News Anchor

February 23, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Language of Looting

Mike Roselle
On Cherry Pond: Going Up Against Big Coal in W. Virginia

Patrick Cockburn
The New War in Iraq

Franklin Spinney
Obama Steps on the Pentagon Escalator

Einar Már Guðmundsson
A War Cry From the North

Ralph Nader
How Credit Unions Survived the Crash

Jordan Flaherty
A New Orleans Intifada?

Helen Redmond
Ted's Table: Kennedy and the Corporate Lobbyists Craft a Health Plan

Dennis Loo
The Water Line

Harvey Wasserman
Jet Crashes and Nuclear Reactors: Feds Ignore a Serious Risk

Terry Lodge
The Intelligence is Wrong

Website of the Day
BadCreditReport.Com

February 20 / 22, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Lawyer's Tale

Michael Neumann /
Osha Neumann
Remove Our Grandmother's Name from the Wall at Yad Vashem

Ismael Hossein-zadeh
Herbert Hoover Copycats

Paul Craig Roberts
Bill of Rights Under Fire

Linn Washington Jr.
The NY Post's Chimpanzee Cartoon

Saul Landau
On the Road Again

Marjorie Cohn
War Criminals Must be Prosecuted (And Their Lawyers Too)

Binoy Kampmark
Cricket and Cartels: the Fall of Sir Allen Stanford

Dave Lindorff
Using the Recession to Hammer Workers

David Yearsley
Edward Said's Greatest Musical Writings

David Macaray
A Closer Look at the Employee Free Choice Act

James McEnteer
Last Mambo in Minnehaha

Rick Salutin
A Canadian Looks at Obama

Wayne Clark
South Carolina Nears the Abyss

Richard Rhames
Got Farms?

Stephen Martin
Silver Mist Descending

Mitu Sengupta
Slumdog Millionaire's Dehumanizing View of India's Poor

Charles R. Larson
Slumdog Reality?

Richard Morse
Carnival Ramble in Haiti

Lorenzo Wolff
Desperation in an Unavoidable Groove

Poets' Basement
Three Poems of Tu Fu (Trans. K. Rexroth)

Website of the Weekend
Ron Paul: What If the People Wake Up?

February 19, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
The Cleanser: Lobbyists Whistle Up Cordesman to "Prove" Israel Waged a Clean War in Gaza

Harry Browne
How Ireland Went Bust

Robert Bryce
Why the Promise of Biofuels is a Lie

Brian M. Downing
The Winding Road: From Western Europe to Kyrgyzstan

Fred Gardner
The DEA Chief's $123,000 Flight

Andy Worthington
Obama's Uighur Problem

Wajahat Ali
Aftermath of a Beheading

Laura Carlsen
A New Attitude at the White House Toward Bolivia and Venezuela?

Deb Reich
Gaza: Choose Life!

Christopher Ketcham
Crisis? What Crisis?

Website of the Day
Taking Back NYU

February 18, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
President of Special Interests

Mike Whitney
Trouble at Treasury

M. Shahid Alam
Afghan Pitfalls

Patrick Cockburn
A Real Surge at Last

Conn Hallinan
Death's Laboratory

Dave Lindorff
Whatever Happened to Antitrust?

Rannie Amiri
The Perils of Blogging in Egypt

Gareth Porter
Pushing Back Against Petraeus on Pullout Risks

Eric Hobsbawm
Remembering V. G. Kiernan

Christopher Brauchli
The Pope's Predicament

Martha Rosenberg
It's the Cymbalta Stupid

Website of the Day
Red Gold

February 17, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Oligarchs' Escape Plan

Mike Whitney
The Global Ditch

Ralph Nader
The One-Dimensional Congress

Joanne Mariner
Benchmarking Obama: How to Evaluate the New Administration's Counter-Terrorism Policies

John Ross
Commodifying the Revolution: Zapatista Villages Become Hot
Tourist Destinations

Belén Fernández
The Venezuelan Referendum From the Back of a Pickup Truck

Mats Svensson
Who is a Terrorist?

David Macaray
Why America Needs Labor Unions

Gregory Vickrey
$400 in Change

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
Another Hamastan?

Michael Dickinson
Unrest in Istanbul

Website of the Day
Take a Stand for Open Access

February 16, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq Reconstruction: the Greatest Fraud in US History?

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
The Truth About Colombia's New Emperor

Paul Craig Roberts
Who Remembers Guns and Butter?

Uri Avnery
Livni's Bitter Options

P. Sainath
The Meltdown: Whose Crisis Is It?

Dedrick Muhammad / Michael Brown
White Recession, Black Depression

Carla Blank
A New New Deal for the Arts

Patrick Irelan
Venezuela Ends Term Limits

Dan Bacher
Is Delta Pumping Driving Salmon and Orca Decline?

Fidel Castro
Chavez's Clarion Call

Harvey Wasserman
Hail to the Spleef: Did George Washington Smoke Pot?

Website of the Day
Mining Black Mesa

February 13 - 15, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
On the Rocks

Joshua Frank
The Myth of Clean Coal

Mike Whitney
Geithner's Coming Out Party

George Ciccariello-Maher
Venezuela's Term Limits: More Hypocrisy From the NYT

Nikolas Kozloff
Venezuela Beyond the Referendum

Brian M. Downing
Pakistan on the Brink

Paul Craig Roberts
Deficit Nonchalance

Christopher Ketcham
Israel's Ball Boys

Ron Jacobs
At a Campus Sit-In Against Israeli Occupation

Dave Lindorff
Why Can Judd Gregg See What Obama Can't?

Alan Maass
Lincoln at 200

Chuck Spinney
Grassley Sounds Off on Obama's Man at the Pentagon

Phil Gasper
Mr. Darwin's Reluctant Revolution

Stephen Lendman
A Short History of Business Handouts

Charles Thomson
Tate Cruises: Caveat Emptor on the High Seas

Kathy Sanborn
The Suicide Rush

Saul Landau
Bowled Over

Len Wengraf
The Nightmare in Somalia

Harvey Wasserman
Striking a Blow Against Nuclear Power

David Macaray
An Easy Call for Obama on Joining a Union

Tom Stephens
Four Freedoms, Four Changes

Seth Sandronsky
Lincoln and the Collective Mind

David Yearsley
On the Road Again

Lorenzo Wolff
Freaking Out With Danny Barnes

Kim Nicolini
The Body of the Worker: What "The Wrestler" Says About the State of America

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Buknatski and French

Website of the Weekend
The Iranian Revoution and the US Dual Containment Policy: a Presentation

Weekend Edition
March 6-8 , 2009

The Musical Patriot

Sonic Fakery in "Slumdog" From the Mozart of Chennai

By DAVID YEARSLEY

A. R. Rahman’s two-fisted Oscar haul a couple of weeks ago was richly deserved.  Without his soundtrack, Slumdog Millionaire would have been largely unwatchable. It was the palliative of Rahman’s score that allowed the movie’s grim images of poverty and violence to be served up as entertainment.  Even more skillful and necessary was the way his music energized the film’s central conceit—Redemption by Game Show—with a kind of urgency and excitement that the narrative nonsense itself could hardly sustain.
      
Rahman was already a commercial phenomenon of global significance before his marketability went stratospheric thanks to Hollywood’s rituals of shameless hype. His soundtrack sales had surged past the 100 million mark only a decade after he began scoring films in Indian in the early 1990s.Brisk business on iTunes, where the soundtrack became the top-selling album in the days following its Oscar victories and high billboard rankings, are music to the ears of the Mozart of Madras. Rahman was so-dubbed by Time Magazine in one of the silliest appropriations of the diminutive Austrian’s brand power since they started wrapping those little marzipan balls covered in chocolate with his (Mozart’s, not Rahman’s) bewigged head.

To his credit Rahman, a seemingly modest and likable fellow, acknowledged the arbitrariness of industry awards, especially the infamously fickle and foolish Oscar.  On his triumphant return to India last week Rahman was asked to comment on the fact that his musical guru, Ilayairaaja, has never been recognized by Hollywood’s dubious Academy.  “Ilaiyaraaja sir and his music are beyond the Oscar limits. The international music community knows the supremacy of Raja sir in Indian film music. He has already proved his talents through symphony and Thiruvasagam oratorio. So there is no need to compare him with just winning some award.” Who needs the Oscar when one reigns supreme in India? Composer of a staggering 850 film scores and some 5,000 songs over a thirty year career, Illaiyaraaja has raked in many Indian film awards but never the mother lode from California’s distant shores.
      
Rahman’s productivity is nearly as impressive. Last year alone saw the release of seven films for which he provided the music. Slumdog Millionaire was his only English-language movie though the opening section is in Hindi. Surrounded by keyboards, Rahman often works on a half dozen soundtracks at the same time.

This year ten films are moored at his musical dock ready to take on his cargo of high-energy synthesizer sound inflected with Indian rhythms, and various Asian and world music melodic touches. The Slumdog Millionaire resonates with a facile spirituality thanks to Rahman’s abundant use of the human voice put through slick echo effects and kindred “enhancements.”  Here’s betting that cinematic freighters from across the world will seen lining up in the Bay of Bengal for product from Rahman’s Chennai studios, said to be the most advanced in Asia. Rahman’s music is highly produced, highly packaged, and highly effective: his is the sound of India’s high tech transformation. One could almost imagine after seeing this film that the class and religious divisions of Indian it depicts could be dissolved by this soundtrack alone.

The fast-paced often jerky visual style of Slumdog Millionaire, self-conciously influenced by music videos, already presents events on screen as comfortingly fictional, even fantastical. The squalor of the slums is never to be confused with the real thing, even if the movie is shot on location.  With its chugging drum beat, reverb-enhanced tenor incantations over a shimmering synthesizer haze wafting past like incense, the opening music imbues the proceedings with a mythic quality from the start. The soundtrack confirms that the unsteady camera is not that of the documentary-filmmaker but of the fiction-maker.  Thanks to this repetitive, hypnotic music saturated in longing and possibility, we always know we are in safe hands.  Our time in the slums, in the interrogation rooms, in the gangster palaces, cesspools, customer service phone centers, and Who Wants to Be A Millionairestudio will never be too unsettling. The film’s excursions into faux realism never threaten cinema verité.

Brutality in the film is always softened by music, even when that music is pumped up on adrenaline. With the rush of Hindu fanatics across the train tracks to our child protagonist’s slum in the early phase of the film we again hear the locomotive action of Rahman’s music, this time with  syncopated drum beats, portentous throbbing in the middle range of the texture, and chromatic tinges from the keyboard. This music presages doom while promising to avert it. The soundtrack not only readies as for the killing of our hero Jamal’s mother but assures us that the partially slow-mo massacre about to be staged for our benefit will be pantomime, reenactment, a necessary plot point with a whiff of pathos.  The soundtrack lets us know both what to expect and that it won’t be too horrible to watch. Yes, we are in for a few minor jolts, but they are about as inconvenient and unthreatening as those Jamal gets while being “tortured” by the police for allegedly cheating on the game show. In the massacre the visual style aestheticizes the violence into harmlessness. For its part the music provides the images with the aura of manageable terror even while assuring us that the force and surety of Rahman’s beat will pull us through the savagery. Let the massacre scene run in real time and without music and watch the theatre empty.

The funky track that springs Jamal and his bad brother, Salim, from the villians’ lair running a begging ring, also gives the game away.  Thanks to Rahman’s mastery of the tonalities of easy excitement there’s never a doubt we are watching kids in a disco-fairy tale rather than desperate children—or even desperate characters—running for their lives.  Similarly, Rahman helps convert a harrowing fall from a train, with Jamal being dangled by his brother from atop the carriage by a rope around his feet, into a swashbuckling romp rather than the deadly accident it most certainly would have been. Throughout the movie’s two hours Rahman’s music provides the aural anesthetic to the dangers implied, if never honestly confronted, by the images. The soundtrack’s numbing energy is that of a video game rather than evocative of the unpredictable and menacing obstacles that the film consistently and opportunistically evades. Even the long and devastating shots of the Mumbai slums we see when the boys return to their home city so that Jamal can find the love of his life, still in the clutches of the bad guys, are given the sonic airbrush by Rahman’s music. All is about as threatening as an issue of National Geographic.

The overlap in musical styles between the Millionaire game show theme and Rahman’s other synthesized action strains is only one of many clues that the unbridled fantasy of instant riches, paid off big time and with utter predictably at the end of the movie, is hovering over the slums from the very beginning of the movie. Though the music occasionally gestures towards the monumental, this is not an epic: the happy end is always just around the corner.

The closing Bollywood dance number staged during the credits releases the true inner urges of the film towards the escapism of musical revue. The whole film is like a jack-in-the-box:  spurred on by the music, it winds itself up, but it is really no surprise when the clown finally pops out. The denouement reunites Latika and Jamal in a train station. At the head of hundreds of dancers gathered behind them on the platform they work out a simple and cheery choreography to Rahman’s song, “Jai Ho.” For this giddy masterpiece Rahman got the Oscar for best original song; both its music and lyrics are his. Not even music and lyrics great Cole Porter, four times nominated for the best original song award, could bring home that bacon. 

“Jai Hoi” draws together the optimistic and comforting strains of the soundtrack as a whole into a final burst of euphoria. The lyrics are a jumble of sentimental images like “I counted the stars till my finger burned.” The music , too, is a heart-warming mix of world music flourishes, disco energy, buoyant synthesizer countermelodies, and full-throated crooning above yearning harmonic shifts.  The final number is not simply a generic nod to Indian film traditions, and the fact that the filmmakers use the credits as a cover for what might superficially seem to be a sudden escape from the supposed imperatives of believability cannot disguise the truth about this movie and its music. The finale confirms what the screen has been telling our eyes and the music our ears for two hours: that even miserable poverty can be overcome by a bright lights and a techno beat and that redemption is always only one high-tech hymn away.

David Yearsley teaches at Cornell University. A long-time contributor to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, he is author of Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint His latest CD, “All Your Cares Beguile: Songs and Sonatas from Baroque London”, has just been released by Musica Omnia. He can be reached at dgy2@cornell.edu   

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