Darcy James Argue's Secret Society

There's a party in my mind

I've been a huge fan of Rachel Maddow since the star-crossed launch of Air America Radio back in early 2004.  She is now the last host standing from Air America's initial slate, and also the only host to emerge from the network who has successfully cracked the mainstream media bubble -- she is a regular commentator on MSNBC, and last Friday was invited back for her second stint guest-hosting Keith Olberman's Countdown.

Her radio program -- the best news show on the radio -- has been linked to in the "Redeye Newsfix" portion of the sidebar since back when her show was broadcasting at 5 AM Eastern. It now airs 7-9 PM most places -- but the best way to get it is to subscribe to the free podcast, courtesy San Fransisco's Green 960AM. (What you want is Hours Two and Three, which are 100% Rachel -- Hour One is a simulcast of MSNBC's Race to the White House.)

In addition to being an incredibly astute political commentator (Rhodes scholar, D.phil in political science) and entertaining radio host, Rachel is also a serious classic cocktail aficionado, one who is, like all right-thinking drinkers, especially partial to the whiskey drinks. So yeah, basically I am completely smitten with her, which is inconvenient as we are both taken, and also she is a lesbian.

Anyway, last night on her show, Rachel broke with format to deliver a long, incisive, and chilling analysis of where the Democratic race is headed if we don't have a candidate before the Rules and Bylaws Committee meets on May 31. If that happens, then the process ball will start rolling on the question of what to do with the results of the disputed primaries in Michigan and Florida. And once that ball starts rolling, it essentially cannot be stopped until the Democratic National Convention in late August.

I think Rachel is essentially correct -- Hillary Clinton has shown no intention whatsoever of dropping out of the race, and shows every sign of using the uncertainty her campaign has created around the fate of  the Michigan and Florida delegations as justification to take this fight all the way to the convention in Denver. That means that unless something incredibly dramatic happens with the superdelegates over the next nine days, we are in for three and a half more months of infighting, with no official Democratic candidate, culminating in what is sure to be a bloodbath on the convention floor.

I do not think this scenario bodes well for the eventual nominee's chances versus John McCain in November.

Here is Rachel's post on this, which outlines her argument in detail:

The Clinton strategy, as best as I can tell, is to stay in the race. You can't win if you don't play -- conceding the nomination is sure defeat, not conceding means there's still a chance.

The way for her to avoid conceding is for her to avoid conceding that the race is resolved.

As long as the Florida and Michigan dispute is alive, and it is being used as the basis of Clinton's claim that the nomination is unresolved, we should expect that Senator Clinton will stay in the race.

We should also expect that if the Democratic Party's committee system takes up the Florida and Michigan dispute through its rules as they stand now, Clinton's campaign will be able to keep the Michigan and Florida dispute alive until the convention. If there's a secret Democratic-insider plan to keep that from happening, it's time for that plan to become un-secret.

The pundit corps has been counting Clinton out and saying the race is over -- but saying it doesn't make it so.

If Clinton fights to stay in until the convention -- which seems utterly plausible to me -- then I believe the Democratic Party's nominee (Obama or Clinton) will lose the general election to John McCain. This last point is of course infinitely debatable -- but my take is that in November, the party that's had a nominee since February/March, beats the party that only got a nominee the last week in August.

There appears to be one, slim hope remaining to avoid this nightmare scenario:

[I]f the Democrats are to avoid a divided convention, the Florida and Michigan dispute will have to be taken off the table -- settled in a way that avoids the risk of a rules dispute that stretches the nominating contest out through the convention. I can think of only one way to do that, but there may be others.

Here's my way: based on my read of NBC's delegate math, I think if the Clinton campaign won 100% of what they wanted on the Florida and Michigan dispute, Obama could still clinch the nomination -- even according to the most pro-Clinton math -- if 90 of the remaining 210-or-so undeclared superdelegates declared for Obama.

If they so declared before May 31st, the Rules and Bylaws committee would have no reason to take up the Florida and Michigan dispute because it would be a moot point -- Obama's camp could concede every Clinton demand on the subject and still win the nomination.

Read the whole thing. Or (better), listen to the episode where Rachel lays out her argument in full (which begins at the 13:00 mark).

Rachel concludes by noting that the last three disputed conventions -- in 1968, 1972, and 1980 -- were complete electoral catastrophes for the Democrats. I really don't think we can afford to go 0 for 4.

UPDATE: Well, okay, sure, that is one way we could avoid a disputed convention. I'm not sure it would exactly be my first choice...

Seriously, Hillary, WTF?

No, really:

W.

T.

F.

Especially coming on the heels of this.

Nice place to visit

An Italian man who was trying to visit his American girlfriend was denied entry, then denied the right to return to Rome, and instead locked up in a Virginia prison for 10 days without charge or access to a lawyer.

Though citizens of those nations do not need visas to enter the United States for as long as 90 days, their admission is up to the discretion of border agents. There are more than 60 grounds for finding someone inadmissible, including a hunch that the person plans to work or immigrate, or evidence of an overstay, however brief, on an earlier visit.

While those turned away are generally sent home on the next flight, “there are occasional circumstances which require further detention to review their cases,” Ms. De Cima said. And because such “arriving aliens” are not considered to be in the United States at all, even if they are in custody, they have none of the legal rights that even illegal immigrants can claim.

[…]

Ms. Cooper said that at the airport, when she begged to know what was happening to Mr. Salerno, an agent told her, “You know, he should try spending a little more time in his own country.”

Another agent eventually told her to go home because Mr. Salerno was being detained as an asylum-seeker.

[…]

Ten days after he landed in Washington, Mr. Salerno was still incarcerated, despite efforts by Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia, and two former immigration prosecutors hired by the Coopers.

[…]

Luis Paoli, a lawyer hired by the Coopers, said there was no limit on detention while waiting for an asylum interview. But even after officials agreed the asylum issue had been a mistake, Mr. Salerno was not released.

America, fuck yeah.

[via Atrios]

Well New York City really has it all

The opening of the new Varvatos boutique in the husk of CB's went pretty much as expected, didn't it?

A section of wall from CBGB covered in band fliers has been preserved under glass, and in keeping with Mr. Varvatos’s image as a rock ’n’ roll designer — his models include Iggy Pop and Chris Cornell of Soundgarden — the store is decorated with rock memorabilia and also sells vintage vinyl records and audio equipment.

“The whole purpose of coming here was to retain part of the history,” Mr. Varvatos said in an interview, as bands sound-checked before the show, “so that anybody can walk in off the street and experience part of what was here.”

[...]

“We’re not trading on CB’s at all,” said Mr. Varvatos, whose stubbly looks and Detroit accent give him the aura of an ordinary rock fan made good. (He later corrected himself, saying: “Are we using the walls to help sell the clothes? Yes.”)

Also, could Arturo Vega (former lighting tech/t-shirt designer/hanger-on for the Ramones... oh, excuse me, "creative director") be any more of a dick? You be the judge:

On the sidewalk outside a handful of protesters complained about the effects of gentrification on the city’s music scene. Rebecca Moore, a musician who is one of the founders of Take It to the Bridge, an activist group that organized the demonstration, sparred loudly with Mr. Vega. Saying that Lower Manhattan is becoming “a playground for rich people,” she shouted: “Forty-thousand-dollar-a-month rents, $1,600 jackets and $800 pants are closing music spaces in New York.”

Smiling, Mr. Vega responded: “When you are good at what you do, money comes, people. Work hard and you’ll be able to afford.”

A chorus of boos drowned him out.

Go show Take It To The Bridge some love -- what they are doing is vital if Manhattan is going to have any music scene to speak of five years from now. And you think this pattern won't repeat itself in Brooklyn? It's already well underway.

Sing along with the common people

Good to see the efforts to turn Manhattan into America's largest gated community are proceeding as planned:

Once upon a time, Manhattan was an island of adult thrills and vices. In the national imagination, it was a place of artists, musicians, socialites, Wall Street bankers -- or of hustlers, runaways, addicts, murderers. But it was not on the radar of the typical white, middle-class couple as a place to raise children.

Now demographers say Manhattan is increasingly a borough of babies, and more and more of them are white and well-off.

The number of children younger than 5 in Manhattan has increased about 30 percent since 2000, said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. The increase is driven by white toddlers, whose numbers have gone up by 60 percent, according to the 2000 census and the 2006 American Community Survey, he said. For the first time since the 1960s, young white children outnumber their black or Hispanic counterparts in Manhattan, demographers say.

"It's surprising," Frey said. "It's a selective part of the white population, a lifestyle of people who want to have children and can afford to live in the city."

Indeed, according to Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College, the median household income for this group of children was $280,000 in 2005.

[…]

Alphabet City in the East Village, which a decade ago was famous for its post-punk scene and its heroin markets, now is rife with hipster preschools for tattooed and pierced rock-and-roll parents, and baby boutiques that sell $112 onesies made by Italian designers.

[…]

"I feel like a wartime profiteer," said Amanda Uhry, the founder of Manhattan Private School Advisors, which charges a $15,000 fee to help parents through admissions -- and whose business has tripled since 2002.

The close is almost too good to be true:

But young Theo Carlston is just happy to play at Citibabes, a SoHo club where parents can use the gym or have a manicure while their children take dance classes or French lessons.

"I'm hiding in my fort!" Theo shouted as his mother discussed the city her family is helping to create.

We've got five years, my brain hurts a lot

Happy Birthday, Iraq War! God bless America.

There's a growing feeling of hysteria

The hottest thing in classical music right now, by a country mile, is 26-year old Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who made his NY Phil debut a couple of nights ago. I couldn't make it, although I loved his account of Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra at Carnegie just a few weeks ago, and if you haven't yet seen that jaw-dropping video of Dudamel conducting the Mambo from West Side Story from the BBC Proms, you must. Dudamel is a product of the remarkable state-sponsored music education program called El Sistema, which enrolls more than 250,000 Venezuelan youths -- "Venezuela already has more schoolchildren in orchestras than on soccer teams."

Two good writeups of that hit -- one from Tony Tommasini in the NYT, and one from Peter Matthews at Feast of Music, who might just have been the only person in the audience at Avery Fisher Hall who had also attended a Todd P.-curated show the night before. Both reviews are notable for being among the few accounts of a Dudamel appearance that do not include a paragraph or two of hand-wringing about how the young conductor is morally compromised for not publicly denouncing Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez.

This is, as you may know, a bit of a hot topic in the classical sphere. In in his New Yorker column, Alex Ross writes "I wondered about the wisdom of putting on such a patriotic display at a time when other Venezuelan students have been protesting Hugo Chávez’s increasingly anti-democratic regime," and in a follow-up post on his blog, entitled "The Venezuela Problem," he adds: "What disturbs me [...] is that when politicians throw money at music, some in the classical business tend not to scrutinize the politics too closely."

Steve Smith, in reference to Chávez not being mentioned in a pre-concert discussion at Carnegie, writes:

[José Antonio] Abreu [founder of El Sistema], whose achievements in Venezuela unquestionably deserve respect, went on to say that similar programs were being launched in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston, and told the audience that he had urged the Carnegie Hall board to start presenting its artists in Venezuela.

Not that I wanted [Ara] Guzelimian [host of the chat] to get all Lee Bollinger here, but I did hope that some political context might be provided for the remarkable progress -- on both artistic and humanitarian levels -- that "El Sistema" has caused in Venezuela.

Instead, this was something like Dumbledore talking about opening Hogwarts franchises all over the world -- while He Who Must Not Be Named simply wasn't.

Neither Alex nor Steve take Dudamel himself to task for being insufficiently anti-Chávez, but Bob Shingleton (aka Pliable) of On An Overgrown Path has been far more vocal and persistent in his criticism. In this post, he writes: "The two photos show Venezuelan riot police facing university students during protests against Chavez’s decision to shut down opposition-aligned television station RCTV in May 2007. Perhaps DG will use them on the next Dudamel CD sleeve?"

Let me be clear -- I am not a fan of Chávez. Although democratically elected, his administration has taken a decidedly authoritarian turn, and people are right to be troubled. If Dudamel were to use his newfound international celebrity to take a strong public stance against Chávez's antidemocratic policies, I would certainly welcome it.

But I am also troubled by what I see as a certain double standard. It seems to me that many in the classical blogosphere are following the lead of conservative pundits in vastly inflating both Chávez's importance in the world and the extent of his antidemocratic activities. This led me to make some intemperate comments on certain threads, but I am frustrated by what looks an awful lot like hypocrisy.

I am not arguing that Hugo Chávez is a good guy. He is not. But compared to, say, Vladimir Putin, he's chump change:

Voting starts in Russian election

Polling stations have opened in the Russian capital, Moscow, as the country continues to vote in general elections over 22 hours across 11 time zones.

Eleven parties are competing for places in the lower house, the Duma - though it is not clear how many will secure the 7% needed to qualify for seats.

President Vladimir Putin's party is predicted to win, boosting his bid to retain power after leaving the Kremlin.

Opposition parties have accused the government of stifling their campaigns and of intimidation.

Independent monitors say their attempts to observe the poll have been hampered.

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) has abandoned its plans to send a big team of election observers to Russia after accusing the Russian government of imposing unacceptable restrictions and of deliberately delaying the issuing of visas. Russia has denied the claims.

Only a much smaller group of MPs from the OSCE's parliamentary assembly will be in attendance.

That means just 400 foreign monitors will cover 95,000 polling stations.

[...]

The largest party in the Duma going into the elections is United Russia, and it will be hoping to maintain its dominance against the challenge from the Communist Party, the Liberal Democratic Party, the Yabloko party and others.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is at the top of the United Russia party list - opening the possibility that he could keep a grip on power from parliament even after stepping down as president next year.

During the run-up to the election, demonstrations were forbidden, and opposition coalition leader (and former World Chess Champion) Garry Kasparov was jailed for five days for his role in an anti-Putin rally. He has called the election a "farce."

And who happens to have made an appearance at Carnegie Hall last night? Why, it's Valery Gergiev and the Kirov Orchestra! And what does Maestro Gergiev have to say about Putin?

But the biggest boost, says Gergiev, "comes from the sense of stability which Putin immediately brought to the country. We worked together in the most difficult years. Today the country is in better shape […]."

In this same article, we learn that Putin was personally responsible for directing $184 million worth of state funds towards the renovation of the orchestra's home, the Kirov-Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg.

Or how about this charming personal detail, gleaned from the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra's website:

He [Gergiev] reputedly has a direct line to Russian president Vladimir Putin (a fan of Gergiev's), and he and Putin are godfathers to each other's children.

Have any of the critics and bloggers writing about the Kirov Orchestra's current tour mentioned how they are troubled by Gergiev's "direct line" to Putin? (Especially given the farce of a Russian election currently underway?) Has anyone asserted: "Supporting [Gergiev], his [Kirov] orchestra, and other [Russian] cultural products is akin to saying that we love the produce of a nascent dictatorship"?

Anyone? Anyone?

I do not like to play the "if you are outraged about this, why aren't you outraged about that" game. But in this case, the parallel is too clear and the double standard too glaring to let pass without comment.

UPDATE: I did not know, at the time I wrote this, that Leterland proprietor David Adler had recently posted on both Gergiev/Kirov and the Dudamel-Chávez question. He has since weighed in in the comments to this post and on his own blog -- as always, David's thoughts are well worth reading.

UPDATE 2: Patrick J. Smith (The Penitent Wagnerite) responds.

UPDATE 3: More responses: Pliable (On An Overgrown Path). Matt Guerrieri (Soho The Dog).

Also -- I mentioned this in the comments, but just so nobody gets the wrong idea: It was certainly not my intention to single out Alex Ross or Steve Smith for opprobrium! The passages I quoted from Alex and Steve are, taken by themselves, entirely reasonable. But in order to point out the institutional double standard, which is hardly the fault of any one individual, I needed to pull some representative quotes from someone. I could have citied any number of critics, but I chose Alex and Steve precisely because (I hope!) they both understand that I have tremendous respect for their work and that no personal slight is intended.

UPDATE 4: MK (Tonic Blotter) has a humane and insightful take:

Dudamel is no Furtwängler or Shostakovich because Chávez is no Hitler or Stalin. But the basic choice is the same: Either: 1. confront the regime and risk retaliation which may force you into exile or worse, which will cause you to lose all influence at home and risk the undoing of all your previous efforts; or 2. find a way to deal with the system so that you can build something that will outlast the regime.

Read the whole thing.

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Smacks you in the head

T-Money takes one for the team.

Render your heart

It is somehow appropriate that Maher Arar was not able to personally attend a congressional hearing into his extraordinary rendition to Syria because "he is still on a U.S. government watch list."

Also, I know this will come as a big surprise, but Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher is a hack:

"Yes, we should be ashamed" of what happened in the case, Rohrabacher said. "That is no excuse to end a program which has protected the lives of hundreds of thousands if not millions of American lives."

And your evidence that sending suspects to be "interrogated" in countries who are even more permissive of torture than the US has saved "millions of American lives" is...

Oh, of course -- classified on national security grounds. But trust us -- torture saves millions of lives. Really it does. Don't you watch 24?

[via.]

Mesmeric full demolition

I haven't blogged on the conviction Thursday in Jose Padilla show-trial, because the whole thing is just too depressing. Almost 60 years after Project MKULTRA was launched, the US government is still inflicting Manchurian Candidate-style psychological violence on US citizens. The "enhanced interrogation techniques" they used are not designed to extract useful information from you. Instead, they are absolutely guaranteed to destroy your mind, just as surely as if they had lobotomized you.

There's a word for this -- it's called "menticide."

See also Hilzoy, Greenwald, Koch, and  Helmut.

Drown it

[Photo: Ben Garvin/Associated Press]

What Nick Coleman said.

If it wasn't an act of God or the hand of hate, and it proves not to be just a lousy accident - a girder mistakenly cut, a train that hit a support - then we are left to conclude that it was worse than any of those things, because it was more mundane and more insidious: This death and destruction was the result of incompetence or indifference.

In a word, it was avoidable.

That means it should never have happened. And that means that public anger will follow our sorrow as sure as night descended on the missing.

For half a dozen years, the motto of state government and particularly that of Gov. Tim Pawlenty has been No New Taxes. It's been popular with a lot of voters and it has mostly prevailed. So much so that Pawlenty vetoed a 5-cent gas tax increase - the first in 20 years - last spring and millions were lost that might have gone to road repair. And yes, it would have fallen even if the gas tax had gone through, because we are years behind a dangerous curve when it comes to the replacement of infrastructure that everyone but wingnuts in coonskin caps agree is one of the basic duties of government.

I hope you sleep well, Grover, because the families of those still missing won't.

But it's no laughing party when you've been on the murder mile

While I still think it's unlikely that anyone in authority "ordered a hit on Pat Tillman", this whole situation is just incredibly disturbing. Good on his family for keeping the pressure for these past these years, demanding real answers under what I can only imagine are extraordinarily difficult circumstances.

As serious as your life

Trust Kyle Gann to perceive a link between two seemingly unrelated groups of self-described "Very Serious People" -- insufferable Beltway wankers like Time's Joe Klein (AKA "Joke Line" -- oh, I'm sorry, was that insufficiently serious?) and insufferable serialist fundamentalists:

The thing I love about it is, of course, that "serious" has also long been the word that High Modernist composers use to distinguish themselves from composers who try to appeal to the audience, who think about accessibility, who are influenced by pop music, who don't build up dramatic climaxes, who appreciate Erik Satie and Virgil Thomson, who don't try to impress each other with the sophistication of their techniques. "Serious" is a condescending but tolerant-seeming word that connotes, well, yes, these postminimalists are composers too, and amateurs may find in them a certain entertainment value, but we must not forget, of course, who the really serious composers are.

Read the whole thing.

I walk on gilded splinters

Oh, yes, by all means let's celebrate the modern-day resurgence of the robber barons and backroom trusts and colonial pillagers and union-busters of the Gilded Age. And let us all praise them as great philanthropists and humanists so long as they toss the occasional coin towards their inferiors. Smashing, simply smashing.

His achievement required political clout, and that, too, is on display. Soon after he formed Citigroup, Congress repealed a Depression-era law that prohibited goliaths like the one Mr. Weill had just put together anyway, combining commercial and investment banking, insurance and stock brokerage operations. A trophy from the victory — a pen that President Bill Clinton used to sign the repeal — hangs, framed, near the magazine covers.

[...]

Only twice before over the last century has 5 percent of the national income gone to families in the upper one-one-hundredth of a percent of the income distribution — currently, the almost 15,000 families with incomes of $9.5 million or more a year, according to an analysis of tax returns by the economists Emmanuel Saez at the University of California, Berkeley and Thomas Piketty at the Paris School of Economics.

[...]

Other very wealthy men in the new Gilded Age talk of themselves as having a flair for business not unlike Derek Jeter’s “unique talent” for baseball, as Leo J. Hindery Jr. put it. “I think there are people, including myself at certain times in my career,” Mr. Hindery said, “who because of their uniqueness warrant whatever the market will bear.”

Huzzah huzzah. Pink gins all around.

(Also, Derek Jeter? Really?)

UPDATE: Okay, let me be even more explicit. Sanford ("Sandy") Weill, who is prominently featured in the article (including photo and interview clips)... the Sandy Weill of the "Joan and Sanford I. Weill Recital Hall," who is the Chairman of Carnegie Hall's Board of Trustees and was "honored at a huge fund-raising party that Carnegie Hall gave on his 70th birthday"... the Sandy Weill who proclaims "We didn’t rely on somebody else to build what we built, and we shouldn’t rely on somebody else to provide all the services our society needs"... that same Sandy Weill led Citigroup into a notoriously scandal-ridden period from which they have yet to fully emerge. He was up to his neck in the Enron, WorldCom, and Global Crossing shenanigans (as tig points out in comments, they had to pay a $120 million SEC settlement for helping Enron commit fraud), and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Of course, this part of the story goes completely unmentioned in the Times piece.

That BBC piece also has a quote from Amey Stone, who co-authored this (largely uncritical) biography of Sandy Weill:

"[Mr Weill] was very hands on and a very controlling manager who oversaw a lot of operations," she says. "He did have an aggressive style, he emphasised profits, he was very strict about divisions delivering profit goals. I think questions of ethics really took a back seat."

See also Chris Sullentrop's 2002 piece in Slate.

I try to find a way to make all our little joys relate without that ever-present hate

Please read Matana Roberts's reflective post "artistic love.", which was triggered by the tragic death of Take Toriyama.

People Suck

Someone outed Hotel Pianist? Gee, could you possibly get any more petty and vindictive? HP's blog was one of the most addictively entertaining things on the internet -- when I first discovered it, I couldn't resist delving into the archives -- "just... one... more... post... " Glad I caught it before she was forced to close up shop.

But still I keep your hand as a precious souvenir

If you live in New York, you've seen the ads for Bodies: The Exhibition at the South Street Seaport. You may also have wondered where the bodies on display came from.

I'd heard the rumors, but had been inclined to dismiss them -- they sounded far too sensationalistic and urban legend-y.

I was wrong:

Here in China, determining who is in the body business and where the bodies come from is not easy. Museums that hold body exhibitions in China say they have suddenly “forgotten” who supplied their bodies, police officials have regularly changed their stories about what they have done with bodies, and even universities have confirmed and then denied the existence of body preservation operations on their campuses.

Human rights activists have attacked the exhibitions, calling them freak shows that may be using the bodies of mentally ill people and executed prisoners. In June, the police in the city of Dandong, about 190 miles northeast of here, discovered about 10 corpses in a farmer’s yard. The bodies were being used by a firm financed by foreigners, the government said, that was illegally involved in the body preservation business.

Worried about a growing trade in illegal bodies, the Chinese government issued new regulations in July that outlawed the purchase or sale of human bodies and restricted the import and export of human specimens, unless used for research. But it is unclear how the regulations will affect the factories.

Premier Exhibitions, one of the world’s largest exhibition companies and the creator of “Bodies: The Exhibition’’ — now showing at the South Street Seaport in Lower Manhattan — declined to comment, saying it had not yet reviewed the regulations.