Tuesday, Apr 3, 2007 10:01 AM UTC2007-04-03T10:01:00Zl, M j, Y g:i A T
New music
Reviews of new music from Kings of Leon and Jarvis Cocker.
“Because of the Times,” Kings of Leon
I’ve seen rock ‘n’ roll’s future and its name is — relax, man, relax. Three albums into their young career, Kings of Leon haven’t yet turned out a classic, but “Because of the Times” makes me think they someday might. On their first two albums, 2003′s “Youth and Young Manhood” and 2004′s “A-Ha Shake Heart Break,” brothers Caleb, Jared and Nathan Followill, along with cousin Matthew Followill, worked a groove that blended the streamlined raunch of the early Rolling Stones with the throbbing bass lines and tense guitar interplay of New York indie rock. Not exactly original influences, but the band’s raw energy and rhythmic ingenuity made fresh goods from old materials. This time around the boys have extended their sound to include the chiming, echoing grandeur of classic U2 and the ominous throb of post-punk and new wave.
Epic-length album opener “Knocked Up” is a prime example of the band’s development, as guitars turn on a dime from delicate sparkle to dirty shrapnel and the rhythm section skitters with enough dance-floor energy to make a DJ jealous. For the third time in their young career, Kings of Leon have taken obvious sonic templates and avoided sounding derivative. How? Maybe it’s lead singer and main songwriter Caleb’s slurred, Southern howl, which moves from fevered lust on “Charmer” to wounded regret on “Arizona,” and in doing so, takes these ’80s sonic panoramas places that Bono never could. Or maybe it’s just the sound of honest enthusiasm, which can cover up almost any affectation. The album’s far from perfect, though — the repetitive love ‘em, leave ‘em, miss ‘em, need ‘em lyrical sentiments make me look forward to the day Caleb matches the wide-eyed creativity of his band’s music with less generic lyrics. There are also a couple of tracks (e.g., “Trunk”) in which the band’s newfound love for moody atmospherics is indulged at the expense of memorable melodies or riffs. Problems like that keep “Times” from being a stone cold winner, but this album is another firm step forward for an exciting young band.
Favorite track: “Black Thumbnail”
“Jarvis,” Jarvis Cocker
As the frontman for Britpop stars Pulp, Jarvis Cocker was responsible for some of the snarkiest, sharpest and best music of the ’90s. But since his band dissolved, we’ve only heard him in small doses — popping up on a Serge Gainsbourg tribute album, singing on an album of sea chanteys, sharing screen time in a Leonard Cohen doc — but it sounds like Cocker was woodshedding, because “Jarvis,” his first solo album, is a gem. (Listen to “Jarvis” tracks “Running the World” and “Don’t Let Him Waste Your Time.”) Whether it’s the sad-sack piano balladry of “I Will Kill Again” (with its uncomfortably familiar lines “log on in the nighttime/ drink a half bottle of wine/ buy a couple of records/ look at naked girls from time to time”) or the irresistible cabaret stomp of “Black Magic” — which cops the “Crimson and Clover’s” main riff to wonderful effect — Cocker has made an album that stands with his best music. He has dropped some of the irony that used to bog down his Pulp work, replacing it with sharper observations and even — gasp! — sympathy, both of which make him more believable when playing the roué, as he does on the beautiful “Baby’s Coming Back to Me,” written for Nancy Sinatra, or the role of a silver-throated, acid-tongued Jeremiah (the line “cunts are running the world” seems to sum up Cocker’s worldview). Drawing as it does from the orchestrated gloom-pop of U.K. faves like Scott Walker and Nick Cave, “Jarvis” is often a heavy listen, but when an artist bitches with such seductive complexity, wit and skill, you’d do well to listen.
Without Betty Dodson, America would be a lot less good at masturbating. Almost four decades ago, the sex educator, artist and feminist activist self-published her book “Sex for One” under the name “Liberating Masturbation” and began selling it at small feminist bookstores around the country. The book, a guide to pleasuring oneself, caught on like wildfire, teaching a generation of women and men about an act that was still considered shameful to a large cross section of Americans – and utterly mysterious to a huge number of others. It has remained a touchstone.
83-year-old Dodson still dispenses sex advice on her website, dodsonandross.com, and now Three Rivers Press is issuing “Sex for One” as an e-book for the first time ever. To mark the occasion we called Dodson to talk about how our attitudes toward masturbation have changed since 1974, when her book first appeared.
Your book has been out for 38 years, and people are still using it as a resource. That’s kind of incredible.
The book has a very long history. Originally, I had written an article for Ms. magazine [about masturbation]. They held it for a couple of years, and during that time I did a little self-publishing. I had a logo, which I called “Goddess Books.” It was so cornball, I can’t tell you, but I was thrilled by it. It was like a mimeograph. I sent it out everywhere, selling it for $2 and $3. The little checks were coming in from all over the world. I couldn’t get over it. I thought I’d get a couple of hundred checks. I got something like 4- to 5,000. So lo and behold I had enough money to go publish my own book in 1974, because publishers would laugh at me when I said I want to publish a book called “Liberating Masturbation.” They would laugh me out of their office.
And now it’s coming out in Kindle.
It’s amazing to me. It went all over via the women’s movement and coffee shops. I didn’t sell it to Crown until 1986. I couldn’t let it go, I couldn’t turn it over to anyone. I didn’t want anyone to touch my baby. And I knew they’d screw it up and, sure enough, the first version that came out, I hated it. The cover, the style, everything about it was nasty. When they decided to put it in paperback I became a bitch and I drove the art department crazy to make a cover that I could love, and I’ve got to say that cover is dynamite. The first time they had “Self Loving” in this stupid script, in faded pink, ugh, barf. It was so nasty. Once I got the cover that I liked, the book just went out and did what it did. I was getting letters and responses that said, “Oh thank you, thank you, I felt so guilty about this all my life.” I think the value of the book is that it broke through a lot of people’s guilt.
Obviously, the sexual climate was very different in 1974. How did people think about masturbation back then?
Who needed it? There was so much sexual freedom and there were so many groups and threesomes and couples getting together. It was very fluid in New York, L.A., San Francisco. I went to sex parties in the U.K., London, Amsterdam. I was one of the darlings of the jet set, so they’d invite me everywhere. I couldn’t have been happier. Then all of the sudden AIDS happened and the bottom crashed out of casual sex. That’s why the publisher in 1986 figured that they could finally deal with masturbation as the safest sex.
Do you think there’s less guilt associated with masturbation now?
I don’t think we’ve made any progress. If anything we’ve gone backwards.
What?! Really?
Well, you can at least say the word now. In certain circumstances you couldn’t say it at all, when I first started off. The response I got to using the word was people rolling on the floor laughing, and when I talked about teaching women how to masturbate, they was even funnier. What would you do to teach someone to masturbate? But it’s a physical activity that has an art to it. You don’t just grab it and whack it. It’s everyone’s favorite thing to do if you can’t get laid or you don’t have a delicious romantic relationship, but if we don’t incorporate masturbation into our relationships, we are going to lose sex anyway.
Why do you think it’s important to incorporate masturbation into a relationship?
You are only 20, wait until you are having sex …
I’m 28.
Oh, you’re an old man, I thought I heard you say 20.
No, I’m not quite that young and beautiful.
Oh now you really are too old. I was thinking of making a date with you but now you’ve got too much age on you.
I’m also a flaming homosexual, so that doesn’t really help us either. But in terms of the evolution of masturbation, in the last few decades, we’ve seen the rise of all these new sex stores, like Babeland and the Pleasure Chest, that try to make sex fun and not shameful.
They are little safe havens of sexual sanity. And they functioned the same way back in the ’70s for the women’s movement. There were feminist bookstores then because we were the only ones who were dealing with sex.
Porn is also much more accessible these days than it’s been in the past.
On the one hand it’s fabulous and on the other hand it’s a tragedy. Porn doesn’t factor female sexuality into it. All of these young guys are getting their sex information from porn and they have no other resource. And because young women don’t want to upset their boyfriend or make him feel insecure, just keep their mouth shut, suffer through it.
So you think porn has made young women less focused on their own pleasure?
Women have never been interested in their own pleasure. We can’t get there until we have women who make their own money. As long as women are going to be dependent upon men financially, we are going to make men happy. Or do our best because we need you to pick up the tab. Women go on the porn sites and what they come away with is, I don’t look like those girls so now I’m going to have to get my inner lips cut off and my asshole dyed and bleached and dyed pink.
I was talking to somebody recently who said that when she first learned to masturbate, it was the first time she realized that she didn’t need a man. How closely is masturbation tied to women’s rights?
I don’t think a woman can be fully sexual unless she does masturbate. What’s happening now is that these young girls don’t get around to it as teenagers. They give boys blow jobs to be popular and then when it comes to their turn, they have no idea what they want or what feels good. Can you imagine a young man not masturbating? I mean, I’ve had women in their 40s and 50s that have never even looked at their genitals, have never masturbated and they don’t know what a clitoris is.
But shows like “Sex and the City,” in which characters were always speaking openly about masturbation and sex toys, did get a lot more people to talk about female masturbation, right?
So they talked about vibrators and stuff but now look at all the young women wearing those stupid high-heeled shoes. That means they are going to have back problems later on, kiddo, and they are going to break their fifth metatarsal. No, “Sex and the City” didn’t do us any good.
What about “American Pie”?
Oh, please. No, that was not helpful. That just made it seem like masturbation is always a joke, and that’s why guys continue to laugh at it. If everyone were honest — that it’s the sex most of us are doing most of the time — we would treat it with dignity.
So what do you think is necessary in order to make people more comfortable with the idea of masturbation?
Bottom line, parents and caregivers must not interfere with a child’s natural investigation of their genitals. The first line of sexual repression is non-verbal. It’s the way your mother or caregiver diapers you and cleans and washes and handles your genitals as a baby. It’s whether she’s doing that with some love in her heart and she’s going “look at that cute little thing, oh that is so sweet,” or she is going “eww nasty, I’ll cut it off.” Those feelings have power. If a kid is caught masturbating, often the first message is, “That’s disgusting” or “Honey, that’s not a good idea. I don’t want you to do that too much.” Of course their kids will still do it, because it feels good.
Why do you think that it’s taken so long for a male sex toy, like the Fleshlight, to catch on.
Because a man who masturbates is a loser. He should be fucking. And part of men’s animalistic procreative drive is that they want to stick their penis in something. That is very primal. And now you don’t need to go into a store to buy it. You can do it online.
Why do you think that jerking off is still funny to people?
We make things funny when we are embarrassed. When we are embarrassed about something, we laugh. And if you laugh at something people are embarrassed about, you’re hip. We are ashamed of our bodies. We are ashamed of sex. We are ashamed of pleasure. The reason masturbation is so political is because if we take control of our sexuality, the church loses its power over us. The government loses power over us. We become free-formed thinkers.
One of the new television season’s most unsettling moments took place, as unsettling moments so often do, in a basement festooned with jars of pickled human fetuses.
Twenty seconds into a tour of this gruesomely decorated cellar, our skittery camera feed abruptly cuts out and, with an accompanying crunch of industrial music that could only have been composed by some dude wearing a black trench coat, we’re visually assaulted by an image that will haunt us forever: Connie Britton’s name, typeset in a bold, gothic font.
Now, the words “decidedly unscary lead actress provides unexpected fright” might very well appear somewhere in the series bible for “American Horror Story,” Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s gonzo FX drama set in a house in dire need of that diminutive psychic from “Poltergeist.” But deploying the tactic during the show’s main title sequence, using just Britton’s name? As her calming “Friday Night Lights” character, Tami Taylor, might have said, “That’s just clever, y’all.”
Not that anyone should be surprised when wildly imaginative content turns up during a program’s opening credits; these days, eye-popping intros can now be found on virtually any channel not named C-SPAN. And they aren’t picky. You see them setting up everything from big-budget premium-cable series such as HBO’s “True Blood” and Showtime’s “Dexter” to cultish hits such as IFC’s “Portlandia” and FX’s “Archer.” Reality and talk shows have them, and they even cling like remoras to the carcasses of the recently departed, as proven with NBC’s “Chuck” and Fox’s “Human Target.” While there are still many opening sequences that are as irritating as anything that has graced our sets since the dark, final days of “Small Wonder,” it’s also true that some of the best work being done on television today occupies the space once reserved for cheesy cast montages and explanatory ditties written by Alan Thicke.
“A lot of television main titles, from a design standpoint and a typography standpoint, are [still] profoundly mediocre, because they’re for goofy, silly shows,” says Kyle Cooper, the founder of Prologue, the influential design collective behind the instant-classic “American Horror Story” opener, as well as the one fronting its somber cousin “The Walking Dead.” “But mixed in, there’s some good things that get through.”
An increasing amount, actually. For those of us raised on a gluttonous diet of the programs now found on TV Land and conditioned to expect little more from opening credits than “… and Jerry Mathers as the Beaver,” flipping around the dial can make us feel as if a brave new world has sprung up overnight. And, even though the art of main title design on television has, in fact, been in the midst of a full-blown renaissance ever since Tony Soprano took his first drive through northern New Jersey in 1999, the number of quality openers seems to have skyrocketed on the sly. How else to explain that, in just 20 years, NBC has gone from the corny third-season main title sequence of “Blossom,” with its unfortunate misuse of flowery hats and Joey Lawrence, to the inspired paper cootie catcher gimmick of “Community,” which not only reveals the cast members’ names but also contains appropriately immature jokes, such as a drawing of a topless stick figure lady? And how is it that, in 1990, the painfully hideous bumper promo for the hideously painful “Club MTV With Downtown Julie Brown” was nominated for an Emmy — in the same category won in 2008 by the sublime animated opening sequence for “Mad Men”?
I may still be suffering from the concussive blow dealt by the intro to “Suddenly Susan” — a super-sized Brooke Shields stomping through San Francisco — so forgive me if I sound groggy when I ask: How exactly did opening credits become essential viewing?
“You could make a few different arguments,” says Chris Billig, executive producer at TCG Studio, the firm responsible for, among many other things, the purposefully discordant main title sequence of Showtime’s “Homeland.” “But I would make the argument that as television has become a more creative medium, it has drawn better talent. A lot of feature guys are willing to get involved in the creative process of television now. When you have that transition, you ultimately have a higher bar for your creative delivery.”
In recent years, of course, a number of directors and actors more often associated with cinema have dipped their toes in the foreboding waters of series television: notables like Martin Scorsese and Steve Buscemi (“Boardwalk Empire”); Dustin Hoffman and Nick Nolte (“Luck”); and Don Cheadle (“House of Lies”). But it has been a slow build to get to the point where a hugely successful movie guy like David Fincher would be willing to commit to the open-ended rigors of episodic storytelling, let alone with two-time Oscar-winner Kevin Spacey in tow. A film-to-TV transition by an A-lister would have been hard to fathom even just a dozen years ago, when networks were still the primary source of entertainment on the small screen. But then came “The Sopranos.” Fueled by its unprecedented success, HBO and other premium outlets, which aren’t as concerned about advertisers or the FCC, began rolling out the welcome mats — and wheelbarrows of cash —for creative types. A trickle-down effect soon extended to basic cable, broadcast television and beyond, and here we are at a moment in history in which a bidding war for the exclusive rights to air 26 episodes of Fincher’s upcoming political drama “House of Cards” ends with upstart Netflix ponying up $100 million.
With that kind of cash at stake, the folks from film have been arriving in droves. And not surprisingly, they’re refashioning television in their own image. “In features, people realize that every minute of screen time is precious,” says Cooper, who became a hero of typography fetishists everywhere for his meticulously crafted title sequence for the 1995 Fincher mindbender “Se7en.” “The titles can do more than just setting up people’s names.”
Like many others in his field, Cooper subscribes to the philosophy popularized by Saul Bass, who almost single-handedly created the art of main title design in the 1950s and ’60s with his stylized sequences for Alfred Hitchcock (most notably “North by Northwest”), Stanley Kubrick (“Spartacus”), Otto Preminger (“The Man With the Golden Arm”) and other auteurs. His theory: “You try to reach for a simple, visual phrase that tells you what the picture is all about and evokes the essence of the story.”
Evocative brevity is very much on display in Cooper’s masterful opening credits for “The Walking Dead.” In just 35 seconds, viewers learn pretty much everything they need to know about the series — namely, that it’s a creepy, yet frustratingly slow-moving, zombie drama set in a post-apocalyptic world in which the zombies are rarely the focal point.
Bass’ philosophy is also in play during the opening sequence for “Boardwalk Empire.” Karin Fong, a director and designer at industry alpha dog Imaginary Forces, worked closely with series creator Terence Winter to find the best way to clue in savvy HBO audiences to the world they’re about to enter. Ultimately, they decided on an impressionistic approach that might have left Sherwood Schwartz scratching his head: shots of Steve Buscemi, dressed in period garb, standing alone on a beach surrounded by bottles of liquor. “I think many of the best titles don’t duplicate what is shown in the narrative that follows but instead serve to intrigue and pull in the viewer with emotional impact,” says Fong.
Essentially, she’s talking about content branding, or creating images that will emotionally adhere viewers to a particular show, a once-flourishing technique that had been in hibernation on television for many years. During Saul Bass’ heyday, visually compelling intros weren’t uncommon (e.g., the cartoonish opening for the 1965-69 CBS series “The Wild Wild West”). But with rare exceptions — “Miami Vice,” for one — networks went in a different, more utilitarian direction with opening credits in the 1970s and ’80s. “Maybe people chose not to put their money into that part of the show, or they forgot that you can do a lot of other business there,” says Cooper (who, perhaps not coincidentally, did the main titles for the 1999 film adaptation of “The Wild Wild West”).
Business, of course, explains the general trend over the last few decades, especially on networks, of marginalizing opening credits. You can’t blame the suits for wanting to truncate the stale convention in favor of a few more seconds of advertising space each week. By the mid-1980s, main title sequences on television had become entirely predictable: neatly explain the premise of the show or the characters in 30 seconds or less, hopefully via an insidiously hummable theme song, à la the ragtime “Mr. Belvedere” tune that still rattles around in my head daily and drove one should-be YouTube star crazy enough to lip-sync it while sitting on the toilet. Even programming honchos knew that, by and large, opening credits had become something to skip over — or, worse, given how rapidly the cable universe was expanding, something to flip away from. The fear of viewer flight got so bad that one fed-up ABC executive, perhaps after seeing the intro to “Full House,” suggested that the network eliminate them all together.
In the late-1980s, when “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show” savaged tired openings on his groundbreaking Showtime series with lyrics that literally went “This is the theme to Garry’s show/The opening theme to Garry’s show/This is the music that you hear as you watch the credits,” the death knell had tolled for earnest title sequences. Producers who wanted their shows to land with Gen X — the target demographic advertisers coveted most at that time — needed to inject them with winking humor (e.g., “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”), genuine genius (David Lynch’s iconic lead-in to “Twin Peaks”) or extreme brevity (“Murphy Brown,” “Seinfeld” and “Frasier”). For the networks, the last technique resulted in slight upticks in viewer retention and ad revenue, and helps explain why shorter titles and cold opens are so prevalent on broadcast television in 2012.
“At the end of the day, the networks are about selling soap and shampoo and stuff like that,” says Billig, whose company worked with J.J. Abrams to devise the famously brief “Lost” sequence. “There’s always the question of ‘How much time do we allow for the main title?’” In the case of “Lost,” the answer is 12 seconds.
Since it’s unlikely that the networks will ever be able to greenlight show openings as daring as the ones increasingly found setting up the likes of “American Horror Story” and other cable shows, and since the threat of viewer retention still gives them nightmares, maybe ABC and its broadcast rivals should strive to lead the charge in a promising sub-development: main title sequences that change from episode to episode. “Weeds,” for instance, produces a completely original vignette each week that not only cleverly incorporates the show’s title but also hints at the content of the episode. The ridiculously ornate maps concocted for the “Game of Thrones” opening sequence, which won the prime-time Emmy for outstanding main title design last September, change from episode to episode, depending on where the action takes place. Of course, those perpetually watchable credits sequences are just variations on a hugely successful long-running gag from a network show. What fan of “The Simpsons” hasn’t sat through the opening credits hundreds of times to see what Bart Simpson writes on the chalkboard or what happens with the couch?
For now, those of us whose brains are still playing “The Brady Bunch” earworm on repeat can rest easy knowing that the trend toward more visually sophisticated opening credits should prevent the unironic explanatory theme song from making a comeback — although Zooey Deschanel’s adorkable throwback “New Girl” intro is a near-miss. Of course, this may dismay fans of shows sporting inscrutable main title sequences, and fans of camp, for that matter. In other words, “Homeland” viewers shouldn’t expect to hear Claire Danes rhyme “She knows her Hezbollah” with “Despite being bipolar” when the show returns for Season 2.
Anthony’s Shadid’s now unbearably poignant book, “House of Stone,” opens with a scene of carnage that will be familiar to anyone who read his coverage of the wars of the Middle East. As a reporter for the Washington Post in the summer of 2006, he arrived in the devastated Lebanese town of Qana to find that “Israeli bombs caught their victims in the midst of a morning’s work … the dead standing, sitting looking around, the village, its voices and stories, plate and bowls, letters and words, its history, obliterated in a few extended moments” of indiscriminate violence perpetrated by America’s favorite ally. As he wandered amid the devastation, he found a man mourning the death of his wife and five children. “‘I wish God would have left me with just one child,’ said the bereft former father.”
In its sympathetic detail, rhythmic language and political realism, the passage is pure Shadid. But the book quickly pivots from war into a ruminative “memoir of home, family and a lost Middle East.” From Qana, Shadid went on to visit Marjayoun, a village in southern Lebanon where his grandmother had lived as a girl before emigrating to the United States. When he saw that a half-exploded Israeli rocket had wrecked the abandoned house where she grew up, he promised to himself that he would rebuild it, to create what Arabic speakers call a bayt, not just a house, not just a home, but the enduring edifice of a family.
He needed one. Shadid’s success in becoming a Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent for the Post and New York Times had cost him his marriage and most contact with his 6-year old daughter. He took a leave from his job and launched on the project of rebuilding the house of Isber Shadid, his great-grandfather. It was a therapeutic venture in genealogy and home improvement intended to repair himself.
“House of Stone” is the very opposite of the war stories he told so well. As Shadid hires the workers and supervises construction, he excavates the history of his family and why they left the region once known as the Levant. The result is a braided tale of becoming and going. The story alternates between tales of his slow-motion construction project, with its tragic-comic cast of male artisans and suppliers, and finely etched flashbacks of the Shadid clan making its way in America in the 1920s, with the focus on his grandmother Raeefa, went on to become the wealthy matriarch of a family of strivers in Oklahoma.
Shadid starts his project by hiring Abu Jean, a master tradesman (maalim) whose prickly pride and constant promises to get the job done “tomorrow” leave Shadid smoldering with rage. But when Shadid realizes that Abu Jean actually cares more about him than the job, he finally understands the man. “He showed up every day to make me happy,” he writes in wonder. “Abu Jean cared about me.”
He discovers the rewards of small town life. He savors the local expressions (“Coffee without cardamon is like a bride without her gown,” a cousin tells him) and slows down to tend his small garden (hoquora). As the grounds around the house take shape, he marvels:
The olive trees were full of buds and the three pomegranates that Cecil had given me had managed to survive, sprouting a few leaves. I learned to respect the garden, where rituals and right action prevailed. Patience was requisite. There was redemption in silence. Seasons were restorative. A garden, I realized, heals.
But he admits he never quite feels at home. The people of Marjayoun take great pride in what their disapora had done, with different families accumulating fortunes in the Persian Gulf and the United States. “Yet there was a hint of resentment over their abandonment of their homes,” he writes. “No one came back to Marjayoun.” And still he tries. He thinks of Raeefa, crossing the ocean without her family. “Like my grandmother, I understood questions of identity, how being torn in two often leaves something less than one.”
When the house is done, he goes back to reporting. He goes to Libya where he is stopped by soldiers, thrown face down in the dirt. He hears one of them say, “Shoot them.” Expecting to die, he feels “emptiness, aridity, hopelessness, the antithesis of creation and imagination.”
He lives and has no thought but to return to Marjayoun and his finished home. Back among the olive trees, he exults in anticipation of his daughter’s imminent arrival, picturing her “suddenly grown, beside these trees and saying the words that I would one day teach her, words that would take her back to Isber’s world.”
That day will never come. On Feb. 16, just a few weeks before the publication of “House of Stone,” Shadid died while on assignment in Syria. This is the last testament of a superb reporter and citizen of the world who had the wisdom to find his bayt.
GlobalPost correspondent James Foley spent 44 days in captivity inside Moammar Gadhafi's Libya. This first chapter of his story originally appeared on GlobalPost. For the full series, click here.
There is a single main highway along which lies every major city between the rebel stronghold of Benghazi in the east and the capital Tripoli in the west. It snakes along the coast and passes through Ajdabiya, Brega, Sirte and Misrata, cities made world famous by months of back and forth, and deadly, conflict.
The four of us were riding in the back of a blazing red minibus at the beginning of April, approaching the strategic oil town of Brega, where the worst fighting of the conflict had been taking place. Our driver was a teenage boy, like his friend in the passenger’s seat. The so-called front in this war was always changing. But we had already passed the last rebel checkpoint and we knew whatever front existed was beginning to reveal itself.
Our goal was to learn, and then report, who was in control of Brega.
We were getting nervous. We knew the boys driving were scouting the road ahead, and maybe on their own initiative. Anton, the most experienced journalist in the group, mumbled something about it being risky. We could feel our guts begin to tighten. Manu and I looked at each other. But said nothing.
Two armed trucks raced toward us from behind, filling up our back window before soaring past. This was how the rebel convoys seemed to form, like schools of fish that hunted together, but have no clear leader or command structure.
Over a small hill we saw some men, boys really, standing around a sedan. We leaped out to do some interviews. Clare asked how far away Gadhafi’s forces were. The boy said 300 meters. 300 meters? I looked at Clare. It seemed impossible. But as a precaution, we hustled off to the side of the road. A static mortar or a rocket position could have easily dialed in on us from that distance. The small convoy rolled ahead, leaving us behind in what we thought was relative safety.
We watched the rebels push forward. They weren’t 200 meters away, at the rise of the next hill, when they sped back around. We watched for a second as they beared back down on us, followed by a barrage of machine gun fire. The loudest I had ever heard. Our small group of journalists — Anton, Clare, my fellow American, and Manu, a Spanish photographer — took off running.
“We need to get to the vehicles,” Anton shouted. But the rebel trucks were retreating too fast and the ones in pursuit were firing wildly. There were two Gadhafi military pickups — tan with large machine guns mounted on the back. The trucks were overflowing with armed men.
With all the bullets flying, we pressed ourselves as close to the ground as possible. The rebels faded into the distance and the Gadhafi trucks slowed to a stop. The shooting continued. The roar of bullets overhead sounded like machines eating up metal. AK-47 rounds ripped past us from less than 50 meters.
Libya: Tripoli scenes from the uprising:
I crawled back toward Clare and Manu, who were under several small trees. The shooting intensified. We tried to speak, to yell for each other. But the bullets tearing overhead deafened everything. In a corner of my mind I hoped that we were in a cross fire, that behind us the rebels were shooting back. I crawled forward toward a larger sand dune with my camera rolling. Anton crouched in front of me. The bullets streamed directly over my helmet and shoulders. This was no crossfire. They were shooting at us, and they were shooting to kill.
“Help, help,” I heard Anton cry. His voice was weak. My mind tried to convince me of something I knew was not true. Maybe he had just fallen and twisted something. Another barrage of bullets passed over me. “Anton, are you OK?” I shouted between bursts of fire.
“No,” he said, in a much weaker voice.
****
I’ve heard journalists say that Libya was the perfect war. A reporter could get to the front line, close enough to hear the shells coming in, and back to a comfortable hotel in Benghazi, with a solid Internet connection, by evening.
But in reality, this war was anything but perfect — something I’d soon come to learn. It was a war led by confusion, abductions and an oppressive sense of the unknown. This latest spasm of the Arab Spring had none of the idealism of Tunis or Cairo. For me, it began with a rifle butt to he head, which bled into weeks of uncertainty, crushing captivity and ended, however improbably, in a four-star hotel in the besieged Libyan capital.
Along the way, between blindfolds and quiet conversations with fellow captives deep inside the country’s brutal prison system, I witnessed the last gasps of the Gadhafi regime — a corrupt and corrupted system that for more than 40 years ruled this tribal, oil-rich land.
I had done several tours as an embedded reporter with U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. So, for me, the frontlines felt natural. And I believed it was my job. But the freedom with which you could maneuver was deceptive. There was no highly-trained U.S. platoon to escort you. And the rebels were said to be some of the worst trained soldiers in the world. Most had never held a gun before the end of February, when they stormed Benghazi’s “katiba” and took them by force.
I tried to hold farther back after a few close calls — a near miss by a Girad rocket, for instance, or a tank shell ripping over the heads of Manu and I outside Ajadibya. Our ears popped. But the front kept calling.
As is common among freelancers, Clare Gillis, a 34-year-old from Connecticut, Manu Brabo, a 29-year-old from Gijon, Spain, and myself had been sharing rides and interviews together for several weeks. Anton Hammerl, a South African photographer who covered much of Africa — from the townships during Apartheid to child soldiers in the Congo — came late to our little group.
With all the rebel offensives and retreats along the coastal highway, we felt we had to get to the front every few days or risk completely losing track of the story. So on April 5, we headed out.
Our plan was to try to get a sense of who was really controlling Brega, a strategic oil town that had been the scene of some of the most deadly fighting since the uprising began several months earlier. A rebel general told us that if the rebels took Brega, they would hold it without advancing right away, thus learning from earlier mistakes where they stretched themselves too thin and were forced into whole scale retreats.
But Brega was dangerous. Manu and I had been caught in heavy shelling outside the town days before. I had seen two shells bounce off the ground a hundred meters away. A rebel was killed by shrapnel to the head in the truck Manu and I had leaped into for escape. We went with them to the hospital, hugged the bawling comrades afterwards and shot some eerie photos of them washing blood off their grenades.
Still, Brega was where the front was, so we woke up early to beat the crush of reporters. The four of us went in a Mercedes van piloted by a teen. We stopped at the only manned checkpoint some 20 kilometers outside town, where a crowd of the usual disheveled men, many of them teens, milled about waiting for the real fighters to assemble. We got out into the early sunshine and told our driver he could leave us there. It was just after 10 a.m.
We waited. Usually, with shouts of “Allah Akbar,” a convoy would push ahead, and we’d jump into one of the rebel vehicles heading to the front.
The red minibus started moving and we hustled on. It drove ahead with us as its only passengers, the young driver and his friend in front looked nervously from side to side. We stopped after a kilometer to inspect two smoldering pickup trucks, blackened crisps in the road. It appeared to have been a rebel ambush.
“Hit by a Sam 7,” Anton said pointing out the expended launcher and wire guidance system leading to the cindered vehicles. I took note of his wealth of knowledge. He’d been forced to join the South African infantry as a young man and hadn’t relished it.
****
The firing continued all around us. The men had gotten out of their vehicles and were now approaching. “Anton!” I shouted again. He was silent. The terrifying reality grabbed hold of me. The soldiers firing probably didn’t know that we were reporters. Rebels didn’t dress in regular uniforms and many were often not even armed. I had to surrender or we’d all be gunned down.
I leaped up from where my head had been buried in the sand to face the group of wild men shooting uncontrollably — it seemed our only hope. I held up my hands and yelled, “Sahafa! Sahafa!” It was one of the few Arabic words I knew. It means “journalist.” I walked slowly toward them.
There were three or four skinny, Arab-looking soldiers carrying AK-47s and a larger, darker one to the right. My eyes drifted toward Anton as I stumbled past the dune ahead of me. He was lying face down in the sand, his body askew, cameras still strapped around his shoulders, his legs splayed out.
As soon as I reached the soldiers, the dark one slammed me across the chin with the butt end of his AK-47. I dropped my camera. He smashed his rifle down on my head. My helmet and Oakley sunglasses were thrown off and he punched me in the eye. Another one crushed my head several more times with an AK-47. All my instincts for self-preservation gathered within me. I went completely limp and complacent. The adrenaline was coursing so heavily through my body. I felt no pain.
I was thrown into the back of one of the pickup trucks. An Army boot pushed my face onto the floor. I glanced back and saw Manu and Clare being pulled off the ground.
A crazed looking soldier looked down and jeered at me in English, “You go on patrol! You go on patrol!” as if he knew exactly what we’d been trying to do. A cell phone was pushed close to my face. A picture was snapped. “Gadhafi Meia Meia,” a younger one said, thumping his chest, “Gadhafi 100 percent.” These words terrified me. After weeks of being with rebels who said things like, “Fuck Gadhafi,” with regular consistency, we had now found ourselves with the other side, the ones who had pledged their dying allegiance to the country’s dictatorial leader of more than four decades.
Clare and Manu were also forced down into the bed of the truck. Manu was face down and Clare, pushed against his side, was facing me. I looked at her for the first time. She had a purpled eye. She saw blood running from my scalp.
“Jim, are you OK?” she said, pleadingly. I nodded, and took stock of the blood pooling in the back of the truck. With a boot again on my face, my hands were bound behind me with a plastic cord. We sped away from the scene.
I’ve decided Rush Limbaugh must be a closeted Democrat. I can’t think of any other reason he would be leading the Republican Party over a political cliff by advising that they double down on the culture wars.
With new poll data showing that President Obama is quickly gaining ground among women voters, at least partly due to Republican extremism on contraception, Limbaugh told his listeners Thursday that the GOP would win the election if it’s decided on culture-war terms.
“Something tells me, that if the upcoming election could be decided on social issues, the Republicans could win that in a landslide, because we are on the right side of the culture war,” he said. “The problem is, we’re scared to death of it. The Republican establishment wants no part of it.”
Smart Republicans are indeed afraid of the culture wars – because they know they’re on the losing side. Sadly, there aren’t very many smart Republicans anymore; or at least there aren’t very many who will stand up to extremists in their base and say enough is enough on their jihad against birth control.
A majority of women voters, 51 percent, now approve of the job Obama is doing, according to the weekly Gallup tracking poll, up from a low of 41 percent last August (only 43 percent of men approve.) A Democracy Corps poll taken from Feb. 8-13 found Obama now leads Mitt Romney 65-30 among unmarried women, an 18-point swing since November. (Yes, Democracy Corps is run by Democrats, but they regularly deliver bad news for their party when their polls require it.) Women may also be behind some more bad news for Republicans: A majority of seniors, thought to be the party’s base, now view the GOP negatively, according to Democracy Corps. Most seniors happen to be women.
It’s not only women who disapprove of Republican extremism on contraception, though: a New York Times poll this week found that two-thirds of all voters support requiring health care plans to cover the whole cost of birth control – including almost three-quarters of women. By the way, Catholics support the measure 67-25. The only group that has a problem with it is evangelical Christians, the core of the GOP base.
Please remember that all three of those polls were taken before Thursday, when Rick Santorum’s money man Foster Freiss made his idiotic joke about aspirin serving as birth control (if it’s held tightly between the knees, a joke straight out of a ’50s locker room) and Darrell Issa assembled only men on a panel to talk about what women can do with their bodies.
That’s why Rush Limbaugh can’t even keep up the pretext that contraception is a winning issue for his party throughout an entire broadcast. During the very same show in which he told Republicans they’d win if the election was decided on culture-war issues, he also accused Democrats of starting the birth-control debate to hurt Santorum. But how can it hurt him if a culture war is good for Republicans? None of his callers asked him that question. Here’s more of what he said:
The whole point of bringing up contraception and trying to make it look like the Republicans want to ban birth control is simply something to excite the Democrat base, which has been depressed as it can be because their president has done a rotten job. The economy is in the tank.
Of course, Limbaugh is wrong about that too. The economy isn’t great, but it’s improving and voters are giving the president better marks for that, too. Also: the base isn’t depressed. The Democracy Corps poll found that Republican Party extremism combined with the improving economy is revving up the Democratic base again, pulling what they call the “Rising American Electorate” of young people, unmarried women and non-white voters back behind Obama and his party. Meanwhile, it’s the GOP base that appears depressed, with turnout either flat or down in every primary and caucus except South Carolina.
Even Michael Steele didn’t try to spin the bad news for his party on “Hardball” today. I did catch him trying to blame Obama for craftily making the contraception debate about…contraception. How dare he?
Here’s my “Hardball” conversation with Steele. I had the easy side this time.
I’ve seen rock ‘n’ roll’s future and its name is — relax, man, relax. Three albums into their young career, Kings of Leon haven’t yet turned out a classic, but “Because of the Times” makes me think they someday might. On their first two albums, 2003′s “Youth and Young Manhood” and 2004′s “A-Ha Shake Heart Break,” brothers Caleb, Jared and Nathan Followill, along with cousin Matthew Followill, worked a groove that blended the streamlined raunch of the early Rolling Stones with the throbbing bass lines and tense guitar interplay of New York indie rock. Not exactly original influences, but the band’s raw energy and rhythmic ingenuity made fresh goods from old materials. This time around the boys have extended their sound to include the chiming, echoing grandeur of classic U2 and the ominous throb of post-punk and new wave. 
As the frontman for Britpop stars Pulp, Jarvis Cocker was responsible for some of the snarkiest, sharpest and best music of the ’90s. But since his band dissolved, we’ve only heard him in small doses — popping up on a Serge Gainsbourg tribute album, singing on an album of sea chanteys, sharing screen time in a Leonard Cohen doc — but it sounds like Cocker was woodshedding, because “Jarvis,” his first solo album, is a gem. (Listen to “Jarvis” tracks “Running the World” and “Don’t Let Him Waste Your Time.”) Whether it’s the sad-sack piano balladry of “I Will Kill Again” (with its uncomfortably familiar lines “log on in the nighttime/ drink a half bottle of wine/ buy a couple of records/ look at naked girls from time to time”) or the irresistible cabaret stomp of “Black Magic” — which cops the “Crimson and Clover’s” main riff to wonderful effect — Cocker has made an album that stands with his best music. He has dropped some of the irony that used to bog down his Pulp work, replacing it with sharper observations and even — gasp! — sympathy, both of which make him more believable when playing the roué, as he does on the beautiful “Baby’s Coming Back to Me,” written for Nancy Sinatra, or the role of a silver-throated, acid-tongued Jeremiah (the line “cunts are running the world” seems to sum up Cocker’s worldview). Drawing as it does from the orchestrated gloom-pop of U.K. faves like Scott Walker and Nick Cave, “Jarvis” is often a heavy listen, but when an artist bitches with such seductive complexity, wit and skill, you’d do well to listen. 
38 years of self-love 
TV’s golden age of opening credits 
Anthony Shadid yearned for home 
When I was captured by Gadhafi’s forces 
Rush Limbaugh, secret Democrat 
The factory jobs aren’t coming back 
Jack Donaghy fears the 99 percent 
Tim and Eric’s comedy of repulsion 
Who is Newt’s sugar daddy really helping? 
“Eastbound and Down” heads to the Redneck Riviera 
