Today's Stories

December 5 / 7, 2008

Brian Cloughley
Shambles in Afghanistan

December 4, 2008

Ece Temelkuran
Inside the Ergenekon Case

Ralph Nader
Turning Crisis into Opportunity: Who Will Seize the Moment?

Harry Browne
The Bush-Obama National Security Strategy

Eamonn Fingleton
The American Car Industry: a Riposte to the Knockers

Conn Hallinan
The Syria Attack

Mike Whitney
Fiasco in Somalia: Another CIA Cock-Up

Stewart J. Lawrence
Obama and Latinos: Richardson, Alone, is Not Enough

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Message to Obama: Stop Killing Afghanis

Karyn Strickler
Show Us the Green, Before We Show You the Money

Jennifer Matsui
Obama-Cola: the Great National Temperance Beverage

Website of the Day
"He Ain't Got Laid in a Month of Sundays..."

December 3, 2008

Andrew Cockburn
What's Wrong with the U.S. Military

Sheldon Rampton
Mormon Homophobia: Up Close and Personal

Robert Weissman
Nationalize GM

Yifat Susskind
From Mumbai to Washington

William Blum
The Obama Bummer: Vote First, Ask Questions Later

Alan Singer
The Ghost of the Defunct Economist

David Macaray
Trampled Under Foot at Wal-Mart

Martha Rosenberg
Born With a Statin Deficiency? Line Forms to the Left!

Mats Svensson
The Crimes Have No Period of Limitations

Website of the Day
Why Bill Richardson's Nomination Should be Opposed

December 2, 2008

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Kettle of Hawks

Paul Craig Roberts
The New Arms Race

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
The Mumbai Terror Attacks: Is Pakistan to Blame?

Sarah Anderson /
John Cavanagh
Skewed Priorities: How the Bailout Dwarfs Spending on Other Global Crises

William Blum
The Mythology of the War on Terrorism

John Ross
Mexico's Drug War Goes Down in Flames

Dave Lindorff
A Tale of Two Terror Attacks

Nicola Nasser
A Peace Process That Makes Peace Impossible

Steve Conn
Operation Redskin Removal

Robert Bryce
Coal Hard Facts

Website of the Day
Country, Funk, Soul

December 1, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
From Baghdad to Mumbai, by Way of Pakistan

Damien Millet /
Eric Toussaint
Obama's Economic Team: Records of Failure

Vijay Prashad
The Fires in South Asia

Deepak Tripathi
Obama's Foreign Crises

Joshua Frank
Madam Secretary Clinton and the Middle East

P. Sainath
The Unlikely Martyrdom of Free Market Jihad

Alan Farago
The Right's War on Regulators

Binoy Kampmark
Sydney's Ball and Chain

Chris Genovali
Silent Fall

David Michael Green
Hope You Die Before You Get Old

Stephen Martin
The Chinese are Coming, the Chinese are Coming!

Website of the Day
Robert Rubin: Coward, Liar or Both?

November 28-30, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Time of Trouble

Mike Whitney
The Obama "Dream Team": Rubin Clones and Other Fakers

Ted Honderich
What is the Meaning of Obama's Election?

Tom Kerr
Preserving Filthy Lucre (Or Becoming My Dad)

Mike Ely
The Conquest of New England

David Yearsley
Hymns of the Conquest

Deepak Tripathi
Uproar in Police-State Britain

Sonja Karkar
Gaza's Death Throes

Ramzy Baroud
Salvation in a News Broadcast

Robert Weitzel
Israel's Settlement on Capitol Hill

Robert Roth
Can We Create a Movement for Change?

Carlos Fierro
Obama and the End of Racism?

David Macaray
How to Kill a Union

David Rosen
A New Sexual Agenda

James Cockcroft
Indigenous People Rising

Stan Cox
The Most Disappointing Gift

Steve Conn
Talking Turkey About College Basketball

Stephen Martin
The Electromagnetic Pulse and Economic Warfare

Richard Rhames
Busty Bimbettes, Bombs and Brand Obama

Kim Nicolini
Women as Products and Cannibalistic Achievers

Lorenzo Wolff
A Battle Cry for the Confused and Vulnerable

Poets' Basement
Woods, Harrison and Corseri

November 27, 2008

Tariq Ali
The Assault on Mumbai

Steve Hendricks
Thanksgiving We Can Believe In: Justice in Indian Country

Ralph Nader
Open Up Those Corporate Tax Returns

John Walsh
The Root Cause of the Crisis of 2008

Dave Lindorff
The Department of Homeland Lunacy

Christopher Brauchli
Thanks A Lot, Mr. Meese: How Alberto Gonzales Learned to Get You to Pay for His Legal Bills

Matthew Koehler
Giving Thanks for Burned Forests

Website of the Day
John Trudell: "Crazy Horse We Hear What You Say"

November 26, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Obama Letdown

Alan Farago
Bailouts and the New Math

Stanley Heller
Don't Bail Them Out, Take Them Over

Kevin Zeese
The Real Cost of the Bailout

Steve Conn
Now It Can Be Told (Except in North Carolina)

Ray McGovern
Kafka and Uighurs at Guantánamo

Ron Jacobs
King George is Gone: Now It's Time to Organize

Eric Walberg
Obama's Odious Entourage

Martha Rosenberg
Pay No Attention to That Turkey Being Slaughtered (Or How Sarah Palin Created a Whole New Generation of Vegetarians)

Matt Siegfried
Back to the Future With Barack

Website of the Day
"Every Time I've Compromised, I've Lost"

November 25, 2008

James Abourezk
Of Arrogance, Bailouts and the Big Three

Ralph Nader
Don't Suppress Carter

Patrick Irelan
PBS Reports for Big Oil on Venezuela

John Ross
Obama in Bedlam

Fred Gardner
Dr. Goodwin and the Infinite Con

Dan LaBotz
The Auto Crisis: a Big Caravan to Washington?

Tom Barry
Napolitano and Immigration Policy

Norman Solomon
The Ideology of No Ideology

Richard Morse
Memo From Haiti: Where the Culture of Corruption Meets the Corruption of Culture

Chris Strohm
The Missing Rules of Engagement in Cyberwar

Website of the Day
Green vs. Green?

November 24, 2008

Mike Whitney
You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

Pam Martens
The Rise and Fall of Citigroup

Laray Polk
Bush's Library: the Kurds, Oil and Missing Records

David Ker Thomson
American Friends: With Friends Like These, Who Needs Canadians?

Uri Avnery
Likud Rising

Joe Mowrey
Deprivation and Desperation in Gaza

Ramzi Kysia
An Administration in Search of a Progressive: the Team Obama Should Have Picked

Kevin Zeese
The Causes of the Auto Crisis

Dave Lindorff
Rescuing the Blob: Idiots and Bailouts

David Macaray
Seven Reasons You Should Join a Union

Howard Lisnoff
Inaugurations Past and Present

Website of the Day
I Hate the Beatles

November 21 / 23, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Honeymoon is Looking a Bit Wan

Michael Hudson
Paulson's Cascade of Lies

Mike Whitney
Time to Move to Plan B ... If There is One

Barbara Rose Johnston /
Holly M. Barker
Cautionary Tales From a Nuclear War Zone

Serge Halimi
The Gloom of Empire: Downhill All the Way

Alan Farago
The Suburbs March On

Ralph Nader
Changing With Retreads: the Third Clinton Administration

Saul Landau
When Old Axioms Don't Apply

Robert Bryce
From LBJ to Obama: the End of Texas Dominance

Shannon May
Ecological Crisis and Eco-Villages in China

Binoy Kampmark
The End of the Yugo

Jack Ely
The Fate of the West's Wild Horses

Ramzy Baroud
The Rights of Women in War Zones

Missy Beattie
Why Vote, Anyway?

Larry Portis
Women Soldiers Serving in (and Barely Surviving) the Israeli Army

James McEnteer
Colombia's Laboratory of Failure

Christopher Brauchli
A Tale of Two Whales

David Yearsley
Real Swords, Fire and Don Giovanni

Adam Engel
Power Down

Ron Jacobs
The Continuing Saga of the White Album

Lorenzo Wolff
Honky Tonk Heroes: When Country Got Real

Poets' Basement
Raza Ali Hasan

Website of the Weekend
Lips and Fingers

November 20, 2008

P. Sainath
The Jurassic Auto and Idea Park

Brian McKenna
How Dow Chemical Defies Homeland Security and Risks Another 9/11

Paul Craig Roberts
What Uncle Sam Has to Say to His Creditors

Andy Worthington
How Guanántamo Can be Closed

Peter Lee
India Doubles Down in Afghanistan ... Maybe

Dr. Eyad al-Serraj
At the Erez Crossing

Sen. Russ Feingold
The Bush Pardons

Lance Selfa
Who Made the New Deal?

Ray McGovern
Keeping Gates

Benjamin G. Davis
Ending Torture; Prosecuting the Torturers

Tracy McLellan
Obama's Crony Democracy: the Return of Tom Daschle

Website of the Day
Finally, a Victory for Palestinians

November 19, 2008

M. Shahid Alam
Obama and the Politics of Race and Religion in America

Mario A. Murillo
Holder, Chiquita and Colombian Death Squads

Martine Boulard
Escaping the Dollar's Shadow

Robin D. G. Kelley
Will Obama be the First "Freedom" Democrat?

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi
Obama and the Iron Cage

Jonathan Cook
Who Will Stop the Settlers?

Steve Conn
Spare Change or No Change at All

George Wuerthner
The NYT and the Beetles of Mass Destruction

Michael Winship
This Just in From Middle Earth

Stephen Martin
The Other Side of the Pleasure-Dome

Website of the Day
An Important Holiday Message From Kristen Johnston

November 18, 2008

Chellis Glendinning
Cheering for Morgan Stanley

George C. Wilson
Perils of Pakistan: Will It Prove to be Obama's Cambodia?

Franklin Lamb
Who Will Evict Israel from Lebanon: Hezbollah or the UN?

Bill and Kathleen Christison
The Irresponsibility of Appointing Hillary Clinton Secretary of State

Roger Burbach
Orchestrating a Civic Coup in Bolivia: How Bush Tried to Bring Down Morales

John Ross
Drilling vs. Direct Democracy in Mexico

Wajahat Ali
Is Obama the Muslim World's Superman?

Damien Millet /
Eric Toussaint
What Really Happened in Washington? The G20 and the Inconsistent Script

Marc Gardner
When Mooning is a Sex Crime

Eric Walberg
Courting the Bear: a New Era for Russian/Western Relations?

Wendy Williams
The Bottled Water Con

Website of the Day
Where's Zappa When We Need Him?

November 17, 2008

Michael Hudson
Bankers Shake Down Congress and the G-20

Paul Craig Roberts
When It's a Clear Day and You Can't See GM

Mike Whitney
Busted in Washington

Steve Conn
Where is Nader Country 2008? Mapping the Nader Votes

Andy Worthington
Closing Guantánamo: Advice for Obama

Jonathan Cook
The Real Goal of Israel's Blockade of Gaza: "They Are All Hamas"

Rannie Amiri
Dual Loyalties Will Doom Obama

David Macaray
Bailing Out the Automakers

David Michael Green
Twelve Victories

Charles Modiano
Sports Illustrated and Sexism: Tokenism or a New Day?

Website of the Day
The South Sea Bubble

November 14 / 16, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Heading for the First Hundred Days

Jeffrey St. Clair
How Bill Clinton Doomed the Spotted Owl: a Cautionary Tale for Greens in the Age of Obama

Mike Whitney
Paulson the Bungler

Sasan Fayazmanesh
RIP: the Experts, 1929-2008

Moshe Adler
Keynes: China's Greatest Export?

Anthony DiMaggio
Transcending Race?

Jean Bricmont
Cats, Dogs and Creationism

Sheldon Rampton
The Eisenstadt Hoax: a Real Life Example of a "Fake Fake"

Douglas Valentine
Let the Trials Begin!

Joseph Nevins /
Timothy Dunn
Barricading the Border

Tom Barry
Rahm Emanuel's Political Pragmatism on Immigration

Ron Jacobs
Che Guevara Meets Trashman: the Genius of Spain Rodriguez

Larry Portis
The State of the Israeli State

Mary Lynn Cramer Obama's Brain Trust: Seems Like Old Times

Sherry Wolf
The Myth of the Black/Gay Divide

Peter Cervantes-Gautschi
Secretary of Greed: How Larry Summers Championed Wall Street by Impoverishing the Mexican People

Jacob Hornberger
The Conservative Malaise: Hey, Brother, Can You Spare Some Habeas Corpus?

Lance Selfa
The Center-Right Nation Con

Benjamin Dangl
Vermont Against General Dynamics

Seth Sandronsky
Lifelines in Hard Times

Russell Mokhiber
Time to Give the Friends of Big Coal the Boot

Allan Stellar
Nuke a Gay Whale for the Navy

Kelly Overton
Get Thee to a Shelter: the Obamas and the Million-Mutt March

Martha Rosenberg
Why Mink are Cheering the Economic Crisis

Richard Rhames
Palling Around with Ray the Plumber

David Yearsley
How I Played Hooky from "High School Musical 3"

Lorenzo Wolff
Zach is Back: Songs of Hurt, Rage and Resistance

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Ford and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
The Eyes Have It

November 13, 2008

Pam Martens
The Two Trillion DollarBlack Hole

Vijay Prashad
Guilt by Participation: Sonal Shah's Membership Has Expired

Patrick Cockburn
Who is Paying for the Iraqi National Intelligence Service?

Jonathan Cook
The Withering Palestinian Economy

Ralph Nader
Obama and the Rogue Regime

Bill Quigley
McCain Owes America an Apology

Lee Sustar
Bailing Out the Big Three

Omar Barghouti
Boycotting Israeli Settlement Products

Steve Conn
More Alaska Fun

Howard Lisnoff
The Last Bastion of Hate

Jeff Cohen
What Indy Media Heroes Can Teach Us

Website of the Day
Who are the Obamagelicals?

November 12, 2008

Johanna Berrigan
Scattered Families: the Iraq Refugee Crisis

Steve Conn
The Big Mystery Election in Alaska

Patrick Bond
Against Volcker

Bokar Ture /
Dedrick Muhammad
Remembering a Black Radical in a Barack Obama America

Alan Farago
The Hispanic Vote in South Florida: Not Dyed Blue Yet

Dave Lindorff
Rescuing Joe Lieberman

Karl Grossman
Break Up Big Oil: Tyranny in the Tank

David Macaray
An Obama Litmus Test: Will Labor Have a Seat at the Table?

George Wuerthner
Act Now to Save America's Public Forests

Susie Day
Heavy Weather

Website of the Day
Does the Planet Have a Future? an Interview with Derrick Jensen

Weekend Edition
December 5 / 7, 2008

The Musical Patriot

Themantics From the Golden Past

By DAVID YEARSLEY

Nothing is more deeply embedded in the memories of pop culture’s children than the television theme song. Before the advent of musical notation, novice monks memorized the entire body of Gregorian chant, listening and singing many hours every day.  The t.v. generation had its core repertoire drummed into its skulls after school, in prime time, or on Saturday morning by an electronic box. This corpus of mediocre music will be lodged even unto Alzheimer’s in the mental hard drive of those so indoctrinated. That I know the words and melody to the theme song of Gilligan’s Island more profoundly than any piece by Bach is a fact that would send me reeling into depression if I thought about it too much.

Around each theme song orbits vast constellations, even galaxies, of mental associations. Play me Star Trek and I can smell the house I lived in when I was seven-years-old. I can see the phantom casserole my mother was trying to foist on me and my siblings under cover of darkened room, the dubious culinary concoction glowing in the warm flicker of the television. Energized by the soaring theme song in the opening credits, the Starship Enterprise hits warp speed. Life and an hour of Star Trek stretches before me. The casserole gets eaten without complaint.

The typical CD collections of television theme songs plays on just this kind of nostalgia, sometimes naive, but more often self-ironizing. Among the many other layers of enjoyment and disgust that attend such compilations is a bookish, trainspotting urge to demonstrate a command of this trite body of song. There is nothing more impressive and at the same time dispiriting than participating in a hum-off of theme songs or listening to a pop-junky virtuoso whistle merrily through his catalog of favorites.

Yes, there is also simple good fun to be had from this material. Why deny the appeal of trumpeter Clark Terry’s experiments with the theme from the Flintstones turning it into a pleasant bebop outing? By drawing on a nearly universal cultural reference, Terry made high-speed jazz accessible to many more than would otherwise have listened, though I suspect few, if any, ventured beyond it to the more demanding pleasures of Charlie Parker’s Koko and the like.

Aside from the way such uses of theme songs can play archly with the cultural associations they elicit in listeners, such musical practices also enjoy a rare advantage over other forms of expression. Treating material so ingrained in an audience allows the musician a reference point—a perhaps a series of reference points—against which to demonstrate her art and have it delight, uplift, and have it be judged and appreciated. In Bach’s many settings of the seminal Lutheran chorale A Mighty Fortress is Our God, he was treating a text and a melody that were the bedrock not only of Lutheran society but at the core of individual and shared human knowledge. Those listening could usually latch on to the reference point and thus be astonished by the composer’s engagement with the melody, even if they did could not follow all the contortions of his artifice.

In an age when the arts of memory have been ceded to Google, there is great potential in using material still thriving in the human mind, music accessible with an immediacy and emotional resonance that the internet still cannot provide.

Each generation has its own store of such melodies, accumulated when the memory was most receptive, from early childhood to the teens.  Born in the counterculture year of 1968 in Edmonton, Canada, jazz pianist John Stetch has now confronted one such chapter of the pop culture corpus with his most recent CD “TV Trio”. It is a masterpiece of transformative genius, a glorious exercise in defeating expectations and finding beauty in unexpected places. This recording is also complex but never pedantic commentary on musical memory and emotion. The repertoire is from the 60s and 70s and 80s, heard by the artist, I guess, either when the shows in question were in syndication or still in production. 

The disc kicks off with the theme from The Waltons, which ran on CBS from 1972 to 1981. The show was pure whitebread family values, projected most endearingly in the oft-parodied closing scene in which the numerous Walton kids, all bunking in the same room, wished each other good night as darkness descended on the cabin: “Good night Jim-Bob … Good night Mary Ellen … Good night John Boy” etc.  While wayward Jason Walton did do some honky- tonk piano playing over the run of the show, jazz is about the last thing you’d think of if you ever happen to think of The Waltons.

The original theme song is a fast waltz with a folksy, pastoral feel. It’s safe, cozy, reassuring. If the music evokes dance it is of harmlessly chaste variety: fragrant meadows and long skirts, not sweat and smoke. There is a diluted dose of Copland Americana in the harmony, and the melody is all disarming simplicity.

Stetch begins his rendition of The Waltons with a short piano introduction that tells us within in the first second that he’ll be cutting hard against the grain of the pop-culture trees he’s felled for milling on this CD.  He gets our attention with  brisk and bluesy right-hand riffs over a pedal point in the left hand.  The snap of Rodney Green’s snare then shatters the downhome idyll of Hollywood’s most endearing hillbillies.

When the familiar melody sounds forth in the tenor range it does so as if from the unconscious of the listener’s mind (that is, if he is of a certain right age). With Doug Weiss joining in on bass, Stetch’s thick, harmonically adventurous chords and bitingly syncopated rhythmic counterpoint completely reconfigure the theme and its meaning. Unmistakable, the tune has nonetheless been utterly transformed. Whereas the original is meant to sweep the viewer into an hour’s worth of rural nostalgia, Stetch’s reading is alert, always searching, hesitating, then jolting forward. Rather than calm and assurance we enjoy the greater pleasures of an edgy excitement. Whereas the theme, like such television programs themselves, has as its main goal reinforcing the comfortable, Stetch’s Waltons revels in the unexpected, the unpredictable, even the dangerous.  This Waltons,  like the rest of Stetch’s constantly delightful and imaginative CD is also a lot more fun than the original: complicated contrarian, beautiful, and alive.  And it’s a hugely swinging affair: after dissecting the theme, the stop-start arrangement is then let loose into an up-tempo feast, dripping with grease and garnished with be-bop filligree, before finally veering into a bumptious unison chorus with bass, accompanied by affirmative and groovy rim clicks on Green’s snare.

Never has a bit of charming Hollywood fakery been so magnificently relocated from its back-lot mountain to the gritty tenements of jazz. But Stetch is too filled with ideas to be satisfied with the simple transformation of a saccharine pop-culture original. There is also more complex, though still supremely fun, cultural commentary to be heard in this inspiring trio rendition.
      
When the theme returns it is dreamier, less sharply faceted, as if the brave pronouncements of the opening and the boldly confident improvisations are now feeling the pull of an irresistible nostalgia. The circulating harmonies of a tag, punctuated here and there by jagged chords, suggest a further drift to reverie. But a bluesy blast gives the last word to the prankster’s laugh, before a wink of a bass-tag ends these four minutes of delight, surprise, straight-ahead jazz joy, and wide-ranging commentary on a pop-culture standard.

The Waltons alone is worth the price of admission, and foretells in microcosm, though not in the specificity of ingenious detail, the riches to be reveled in on the subsequent tracks.

These include the rapturous flight of Star Trek, which affords opportunity both for an appreciation of the arranger’s seemingly limitless imagination and opens up plenty of unexplored space for ebullient, swinging improvisation. The ten-gallon heroism of Dallas is quashed, delivered instead as an elegiac, minor ballad.

The theme from All My Children, the shortest track on the album, finds exquisite beauty in the most unlikely place, leaving one to ask how this cheap day-time smut could have born the sweetest, most touching, of all songs.

The Price is Right begins as pure affirmation, but Come Sunday gospel touches quickly reveal another side to the rampant mid-morning consumer orgy. And behind Door Number Three: a fiercely swinging piano trio!
      
Stetch’s Flintstones is a minor bluesy thing, velvety and sardonic. If only Wilma had been this sexy.

Stetch begins his solo piano treatment of Sandford and Son by muting the original’s brash funk and examining it first as introspective prelude. There are, however, intimations of power, and these emerge gradually, periodically giving way to pointillistic images, which are in turn smashed by sledgehammer chords bringing us back to the junkyard.
      
There’s also the grooviest Love Boat you’ve ever heard; a fragmented Six Million Dollar, dismantled and put together as a demon Latin dancer; Rocky and Bullwinkle made to do an eccentric waltz stolen from those Waltons.

But what about those members of other generations who don’t recognize these tunes?        These listeners won’t have the same access to the emotional and musical complexities of Stetch’s engagement with this material.  His uplifting conversion of the banal to the complex and refined might well be lost on them.  What you are left with without this pre-history, not to say baggage, is simply this: glorious art.

And for children and adults of all ages it’s the perfect Christmas gift—to be unwrapped in front of the t.v.

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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