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Today's Stories October 30 - Nov. 1, 2009 Jeffrey St. Clair / October 29, 2009 Michael Neumann Mike Whitney Gary Leupp Conn Hallinan Marshall Auerback Laura Flanders Eamonn McCann David Macaray Mark Weisbrot Stephen Soldz Christopher Brauchli Website of the Day October 28, 2009 Moshe Adler Dave Lindorff Frank Joseph Smecker Alexandra Early M. Shahid Alam Vijay Prashad John Ross Franklin Lamb Gregory Travis Susan Galleymore Website of the Day October 27, 2009 Mike Whitney Patrick Cockburn Stewart J. Lawrence Alan Farago Ralph Nader Dave Lindorff Bouthaina Shaaban Brian M. Downing Elections in Afghanistan, the Second Time Around Iain Boal Carl Finamore Jayne Lyn Stahl Website of the Day October 26, 2009 Bill Quigley / Paul Craig Roberts Uri Avnery Mike Whitney Michael Snedeker Shamus Cooke David Michael Green Martha Rosenberg Patrick Bond Binoy Kampmark Website of the Day October 23-25, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Christopher Ketcham Jeff Gore Gareth Porter Jayne Lyn Stahl Saul Landau Mike Whitney Nikolas Kozloff Ron Jacobs Russell Mokhiber Missy Beattie Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Stephen Lendman David Ker Thomson Rannie Amiri Ronnie Cummins Norm Kent Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Lorenzo Wolff Ben Sonnenberg Kim Nicolini Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 22, 2009 Dan Pearson / Jonathan Cook Paul Craig Roberts The US as Failed State Mark Engler Johann Hari Brian M. Downing Eric Toussaint Tom Mountain Israel Shamir Charles Thomson Website of the Day October 21, 2009 Pam Martens Linn Washington, Jr. Liaquat Ali Khan D. K. Wilson Franklin Lamb Norman Solomon Stephen Fleischman Patrice Higonnet Binoy Kampmark Kevin Coval / Website of the Day October 20, 2009 Sharon Smith Tariq Ali Mark Brenner Bouthaina Shaaban Michael D. Yates Dean Baker Dave Lindorff John Ross Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Kevin Zeese Gilad Atzmon Website of the Day October 19, 2009 Mike Whitney Greg Moses John Ross Michael Donnelly Jayne Lyn Stahl Eric Walberg Russell Mokhiber Barbara Rose Johnston John V. Whitbeck Christopher Ketcham Website of the Day October 16-18, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Saul Landau Paul Craig Roberts Carl Ginsburg Ralph Nader Nikolas Kozloff Carlo Galli Dave Lindorff Catherine Rottenberg
/ Neve Gordon Marshall Auerback Nicola Nasser Windy Cooler James L. Secor Ron Jacobs Wes Jackson Jesse Lerner-Kinglake David Ker Thomson Against Leaders Missy Beattie Emily Ratner Stephen Martin Michael Snedeker Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Peter Stone Brown Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 15, 2009 Andrew Cockburn Brian M. Downing Ramzy Baroud Danny Weil M. Idrees Ahmad Margaret Kimberley Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Harvey Wasserman Nirmal Ghosh Charles R. Larson Website of the Day October 14, 2009 Michael Neumann M. Reza Pirbhai Gareth Porter Paul Craig Roberts John Strausbaugh Fortress Moon Ralph Nader Dean Baker Charles Modiano Nadia Hijab Walter Brasch Website of the Day October 13, 2009 Peter Linebaugh Shamus Cooke John Ross Brendan Cooney Frida Berrigan Yves Engler David Macaray Dave Lindorff Mark Weisbrot Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Binoy Kampmark Website of the Day October 12, 2009 Pam Martens Mike Whitney Martha Rosenberg Jessica Arents Eamonn McCann Bill Hatch Sen. Russell Feingold Niranjan Ramakrishnan Gideon Levy Iyad Burnat Alan Cabal Dan Bacher Website of the Day October 9-11, 2009 Alexander Cockburn James Bovard Kathleen and Bill Christison Andy Worthington Marc Levy Tariq Ali Mike Whitney Paul Craig Roberts Alan Nasser Jack Z. Bratich Steve Breyman David Michael Green Dave Lindorff Paul Buchheit Jim Goodman Missy Beattie Michael Leonardi Nadia Hijab Mel Packer David Macaray James T. Phillips Charles R. Larson Michael Donnelly David Yearsley Lorenzo Wolff Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 8, 2009 Saul Landau Paul Fitzgerald / Linn Washington, Jr. Marshall Auerback Dave Lindorff David Rosen Chris Darimont / Misty MacDuffee John V. Walsh Stewart Lawrence Charles R. Larson Website of the Day October 7, 2009 Brendan Cooney Paul Craig Roberts Dean Baker Jonathan Cook John Stanton Joanne Mariner Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Stephen Lendman Sen. Russell Feingold Mary Lynn Cramer Website of the Day October 6, 2009 Mike Whitney Gareth Porter Jonathan Cook Boris Kagarlitsky Iain Boal Ron Jacobs John Ross Michael Dickinson Stephen Fleischman Ira Glunts Missy Beattie Website of the Day October 5, 2009 Pam Martens Mike Whitney Paul Craig Roberts Harry Browne Sara Mann Omar Barghouti Shamus Cooke Brenda Norrell Fred Gardner Binoy Kampmark Copenhagen Blues: McChrystal and the Afghan Trap Website of the Day October 2-4, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Saul Landau Diana Johnstone Greg Moses William Blum Brian Cloughley Russell Mokhiber John Ross Ellen Brown David Ker Thomson David Macaray Gary Engler Robert Fantina Lisa Stolarski / Naomi Archer Anthony Papa Joe Allen Harry Browne Ron Jacobs Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
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Weekend Edition The Musical PatriotNot Loud Enough by HalfBy DAVID YEARSLEY My limited knowledge of rock and pop of the 70s and 80s came to me like second-hand smoke. The musical tastes of my two younger sisters drifted through the house, brought there on vinyl bought in record shops across the water in Seattle. Like a child of smokers, I didn’t mind these emissions into the household atmosphere, but I never inhaled them deeply. When a series of superannuated English bands launched North American tours in the 80s my sisters were there. Before and after these concerts, the groups’ LPs got much play in our house. The Who, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks: all passed through our corner of the United States and my sisters went off to hear them, well supplied with ear plugs by my mother, who only gave them permission to go to these concerts on condition that they preserve their hearing from the onslaught. Whether this protection was deployed I do not know, but I doubt it. The title of Davis Guggenheim’s new rocumentary, It Might Get Loud, which convenes three guitarists in a rock and roll summit, puts its finger on the horror that my mother feared. But the inconvenient truth for the film maker is that his latest film doesn’t live up to its title. It never does get loud. The gauges for decibel level, musical intensity, and creative filmmaking remain for the most part supine, only occasionally pushing into the mid range. As It Might Get Loud confirms, much of Spinal Tap draws inspiration from Led Zeppelin and its guitarist, Jimmy Page. Page (born 1944) is the elder statesman of the trio of summiteers of disparate ages assembled by the documentary to play music and talk about it: he is joined by The Edge (born 1961); and Jack White of the band the White Stripes and more recently The Raconteurs (born 1975). In the present documentary a younger Page is heard decrying the critics who gave Led Zeppelin’s second album only a paragraph-long review and a bad one at that. Likewise, the Spinal Tap album Shark Sandwich got a two-word review: “Shit Sandwich.” Whereas Jimmy Page could dare to solo with a violin bow draw across his guitar, Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap picked up the violin itself and used it for the same purpose. And even enveloped in apocalyptic distortion emanating from his solo, Tufnel still had sharp enough ears to break off his improvisation and tune one wayward string on the violin, then resume his sublime rock and roll oration. In this scene everything was said about questionable obsession with fine details in the context of overpowering loudness. Spinal Tap makes it impossible to see and hear the phallic strumming, the tight trousers and the overwhelming maleness of rock’s history without irony. But this is also where Spinal Tap rides to the rescue. It redirects many of detours into pretentiousness of It Might Loud towards comedy. Like Don Quixote riding out in the second volume of Cervantes’ novel to discover that he is famous throughout the land, Spinal Tap rocks its way into It Might Get Loud, if only for few telling seconds. Jack White admits that when he saw This is Spinal Tap he didn’t laugh, he cried because it was so true, and for a fleeting moment we see on the screen the fictional rockers who have now become central figures in rock history. It is Spinal Tap that allows us to laugh at It Might Get Loud when, as happens a little too often in the course of its 97 minutes, the traffic in platitudes becomes too heavy. The opening of It Might Get Loud follows the individual players as they converge on the meeting point as if headed for the tournament grounds. Jack White sits in the back of the limo on his way to what sounds like an intergenerational showdown. When asked what the outcome will be, White responds, “Probably a fist fight.” One can see the arch look in his eye and readily sense that White is making fun of the genre of pre-bout hype. White continues in a mischievous vein. Rather than respect for his rock and roll elders, he’ll get what he can out of them: “I’m going to trick them into showing me all their tricks.” But there is never a hint of conflict or disagreement. Rather, a spirit of camaraderie soon prevails, and this gentle quality is the most endearing aspect of It Might Get Loud. Though Jimmy Page has made piles of money from his recordings and as titan of the guitar would seem to have a reputation to protect, he does not try to hide his weaknesses. There is charisma and great facility in his playing, but he dispenses with the bravura. These three guitarists, even with the film crew crowded just beyond the edges of the frame, can’t help but have fun, but this sense of shared enthusiasm and its musical results, are continually cut short to make way for long reveries on the struggles and heroics of yore. Instead of musical competition or the new perspectives that this meeting might have offered on the individual players or on rock and roll in general, Guggenheim devotes his attention to the past. We return to the English country house where Led Zeppelin recorded its wildly successful albums. Similarly, a pseudo-English castle (somewhere in Los Angeles) is the backdrop for Spinal Tap’s interviews. Inside the house in It Might Get Loud Page conjures the ghost of drummer John Bonham. A drunken Bonham asphyxiated on his own vomit, a death satirized in Spinal Tap when the band recounts how their second drummer Eric Stumpy Joe Childs choked on someone else’s vomit. The Skiffle craze of the 1950s is deftly parodied in Spinal Tap, and revisited again in It Might Get Loud. Here Guggenheim offers us interesting footage of a teenage James Page skiffling on a British television talent show, answering the host’s question about what he wants to do with his life, since one can’t pay the bills with music, by saying that he was going on to study “biological science.” Lucky for Page he didn’t follow that professional path. The meeting at school, where bands such as U2 and were forged, occupies much of the non-summit minutes with the Edge: the limitless possibility of youth, from a chance meeting in the corridors or in a class meeting to world fame. This too is sent up in Spinal Tap, where the founding members of the band recall those early days, then flub the very first song they wrote together those many years before. Near the beginning of the film It Might Get Loud presents opposing views of musical technology from its characters, and the audience thinks that this fundamental philosophical difference might play out in interesting ways once their representatives meet and begin to make music with one another. The Edge revels in the gadgetry of the guitar and its amplification. He recounts how his brother built his first guitar, and then expounds on the complexity of his pedal and various other controls of his current set-up. The obsession with collecting guitars and technology is skewered in Spinal Tap, too, when lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel tells documentarian Marty DiBergi that he shouldn’t even look at a pristine guitar that’s never been played and has “still got the ol’ tagger on it.” By contrast Jack White claims that technology is a hindrance to creativity, that musical machinery is not a conduit to expression but a barrier to be overcome. At the beginning of the film he has a nine-year-old boy dressed just like him in three –piece suit with fedora kick a guitar lying on the ground into snarling chords. A father gives his son a lesson not in basic chords or other building blocks of his craft but in the aesthetics of the boot on metal. But these opposing views of technology submerge almost before they have risen even to the surface, and no compelling theme is provided as replacement. The youngest of the three guitarists, Jack White, is the real star of this show. He cites Son House’s “Grinnin’ In Your Face” as his favorite song of all time, and admits that the reason the White Stripes dressed up in goofy outfits and affected an awkward stage presence was so that they, as white performers, could get away with playing the blues. In one short sentence, White explains the dramaturgic paraphernalia of rock and roll as a vital distraction from the underlying problem of racial politics. But even this is treated in Spinal Tap with the band guarding against suggestions that they are “too old and too white.” Aside from the fact that Spinal Tap has stolen in advance so much of the thunder of Might Get Loud, the main problem with this documentary is that the meeting of the three guitarists, convened in a kind of ad hoc living room set up in the middle of a cavernous studio, occupies only a miniscule portion of the movie. Moments like the one in which White and The Edge bask for a glorious moment in Page’s proud chords are few and far between. Only in the final scene of the movie do the three rocksters strap on their guitars and get ready to tackle that classic counterculture hymn, “The Weight.” At last we get a full performance of a piece of music with three guitarists strumming away. Jimmy Page admits to his younger colleagues that he can’t sing, though he does allow himself contribute the first note of the chord built up at the end of each chorus of the song. But even this one tune granted the patient audience isn’t at all a sublime forum for rock and roll guitar. There’s plenty of strumming, but not a trace of improvisation, no room given for the vaunted soloist’s art. The title of the film is taken from a line of warning spoken by The Edge, as he shows us one of his many guitars and the effects he can achieve with his battery of electronics. Perhaps out of deference to what I suspect is a largely nostalgic, even middle-aged audience, the documentary never achieves the loudness or even narrative energy its title would like to suggest. Staid hagiography and Hall of Fame snippets of the history of rock and roll vastly outweigh the bursts of brilliant energy, brimming with creativity and beauty and destruction, that flash now and again across the screen. The summit itself is eerily devoid of energy, as if rock and roll itself is ready for the museum. If Pete Townsend or any other old and deaf rocker happens to the movie theater to see It Might Get Loud, he’ll need his hearing aids not his earplugs. This film never bothers to allow its creative stars to crank it up together. It Might Get Loud doesn’t even get close to ten on the amp. Forget about eleven. David Yearsley teaches at Cornell University. 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
Inside the New Print Edition of Our Subscriber-Only Newsletter! Obama and Black America Ten months into Obama-time, the plight of black Americans is terrible. Yet overwhelmingly they rally behind the president. In a powerful report from the Deep South Kevin Alexander Gray asks the question: what should the black political agenda be? Mark Rudd counterposes “organizing” with “activism” and describes what it will take to build a movement. H. Bruce Franklin gives a chronology of the march into Afghanistan. Get your new edition today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! CounterPunch books and t-shirts make great presents.Order CounterPunch By Email For Only $35 a Year !
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Now Available from CounterPunch Books! Yellowstone Drift:
"Powerful and shocking ..
Waiting for
Lightning
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