Nearly lost amid the fantastic PR (so far) and blind luck of Barack Obama’s Middle East tour – and the horror show that has been John McCain’s pathetic, flailing response to it – an astonishing story has developed in deepest Serbia this week. Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader who oversaw the rape of Sarajevo, the massacre at Srebrenica and the slaughter of more than 100,000 Muslims during the early 1990s, was finally captured in Belgrade after years in hiding.

The sizzle in this steak is partly in the circumstances: Karadzic, living under the name Dragan Dabic, was masquerading as a long-haired and bearded alternative-medicine guru who claimed to be able to treat everything from impotence to autism. (Thank goodness for that client who demanded an investigation after his erection not only lasted longer than four hours, but spent the whole time watching Judge Wapner and insisting it was “a very good driver.”)

Seeing Karadzic’s pompadour and sloe-eyed mug again, after all these years, couldn’t help but place Obama and McCain’s squabbling over Middle East politics into a fresh context. After all, here was a guy who, at the time of his disappearance in 1995, had been supervising a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing for four years. Here was a guy who, in cahoots with his buddy Slobodan Milosevic, brought nearly a decade of war, rape and outright genocide to the former Yugoslavia in order to make that land safe for a single ethnic group.

These were guys, in short, who needed to be Gotten Rid Of, and fast. Sounds a lot like the argument against Saddam Hussein, doesn’t it? Sure, if we’re talking about the aggressive, gassy Saddam of 1990-91, and not the boxed-in, sanctioned-to-his-eyeballs, no-fly-zoned (and, let’s not forget, no-WMD’d) Saddam of 2002-03. (more…)

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One of my favorite Popdose experiences to date came in the wake of Part 9 in our colleague Dave Steed’s wonderful “Bottom Feeders” series. He had identified his first CD purchase, and dozens of his readers spontaneously took the opportunity to share their firsts — CDs, LPs, singles, MP3s, etc. In a shameless attempt to replicate the Kumbaya togetherness of that key moment in Popdose history, I’m launching an occasional series inviting readers to share your experiences as fans, haters, critics and/or ignorers of some of the greatest acts in rock history.

The rules will be simple. Every few weeks I’ll choose an act, offer up a story about a particular song that has affected me, and then open up the request lines for you to talk about a song by the same act that has affected you, positively or negatively. (If you’d like to suggest an act for a future column and offer your own story – in essence, to take over the column for a week – please write me at jon.) I’m counting on you all; if you don’t play along, I’ll kill the column and I’ll be very, very disappointed in you.

Starting things off with an easy one, this week’s artist is U2, the song (for me) is “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” and here’s my story:

On March 9, 1987, I was a senior at Northwestern relaxing through the “study period” preceding winter-quarter exam week. I’d slept in that morning, and was walking into town (that’s Evanston, IL, for the uninitiated) just before lunchtime for my Tuesday ritual of checking out the new album releases at Vintage Vinyl. I had just descended the steps in front of Northwestern’s somewhat-famed clock tower when a black, late-model sports car pulled up in front of me and the driver yelled, “Cumshot!”

Now, only one guy had the Bush-ian temerity to nickname me “Cumshot,” or “Cumquat,” or “Cummilingous,” or choose your favorite: my friend/rival John Heilemann. John usually, but not always, got the better of me in our continual attempts to one-up each other as budding journalists, but he and I shared a giddy devotion to riding the crest of the pop-culture zeitgeist. So I walked up to the passenger window and Heilemann simply said, “Get in. I got it.”

“It,” of course, was The Joshua Tree, and Heilemann had gotten to the store first (bastard!). (more…)

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For four days now, the left side of the electorate has been scratching its collective head and asking itself, “Why don’t I think this is funny?” Of course, “this” is the cover of the current issue of the New Yorker; it has inspired all manner of hand-wringing and tsk-tsking – as well as a series of progressively more desperate attempts by the man who green-lit the gag, New Yorker editor David Remnick, to scream to the masses, “Would you people just lighten up?”

One general theme of the criticism is the fear that while the cartoon clearly was intended as satire, it might be “read” as true by a certain unsavory slice of the populace. This view is summed up in a cartoon by the Washington Post’s Tom Toles:

Another suggestion, particularly among lefties, is that the New Yorker has offended its target audience because it published an image that eventually might have been dreamed up anyway – by a magazine that caters to Obama haters rather than his likely constituents. Some have noted that they wouldn’t have been surprised to see such a cartoon, stripped of any ironic context, on the cover of National Review. Cartoonist David Horsey of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has lampooned such literalism, imagining a liberal’s fantasy of how National Review could offend its own audience: (more…)

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These days baby boomers, especially women, are in something of a panic. Demographically, professionally, financially and sociologically, they’ve been dominating American culture for nearly half a century now, while succeeding generations have waited, often impatiently, for them to get the hell out of the way. This summer, however, boomers confront the reality that whether they look to the left or the right, neither candidate for the highest office in our land represents their generation. One guy is old enough to be their dad’s little brother; the other guy wasn’t even out of kindergarten when Martin and Bobby were killed. Should Obama win the presidency and hold it until Generation X is fully ascendant in the political realm, the boomers’ entire presidential legacy will likely rest on the shoulders of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

I note this fact not (merely) to rub the boomers’ presidential mediocrity in their faces, but because I’m so sick to death of celebrating political and entertainment milestones that perpetuate the boomers’ vision of themselves as the most culturally significant batch of malcontents ever to walk the planet. The most recent of these is among the most egregious: last week’s release of a “30th-Anniversary Edition” of Billy Joel’s breakthrough album The Stranger. The release is timed, no doubt, to coincide with Joel’s pair of sold-out shows this week at the soon-to-be-torn-down Shea Stadium, a facility that (like Joel himself) has been sitting fat and happy on Long Island for far too long. This coalescence of events resulted in a lengthy, at-times humorous profile of Joel in the New York Times yesterday – an article whose accompanying photograph by Damon Winter revealed the full measure of Joel’s advancing age, in a manner similar to Richard Avedon’s iconic image of a dying Humphrey Bogart.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t really have anything against The Stranger, or Joel in general, and a fresh digital remastering is almost always nice. But if The Stranger is going to be offered up as the latest boomer nostalgia trip, then let’s really think about its significance.

Jason Hare will be the first to tell you that “Just the Way You Are,” the album’s leadoff and biggest hit, is one of the touchstones of ’70s Mellow Gold; in retrospect, it stands in the memory with certain other artifacts of middle-class pop culture in 1978 – The Goodbye Girl, say, or perhaps Barry Manilow’s Even Now album – as anecdotal evidence of a generation starting to go soft. Meanwhile, “Vienna” reflects the boomers’ ’70s-era shift from changing the world to an “I’m OK, You’re OK” self-help mentality, and “The Stranger” (apart from sounding like a perfect theme song for Eyes of Laura Mars or Looking for Mr. Goodbar) seems to warn against the very emotional openness engendered by boomer trends from Flower Power to disco. (more…)

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On the day we celebrated my daughter Catie’s first birthday, my good friend Robert Simonson came out to the suburbs for the party and marveled at the mountain of toys piled up on the living room rug. “Why does she need all these toys?” he asked, half rhetorically. “You know, the Shakers gave each child one doll made out of cloth, and those kids used their imaginations and made out just fine.”

In my continuing consumerist sprint to reject Robert’s admonition, last month I took Catie (now 6) to see an opening-weekend screening of Kit Kittredge: An American Girl. And what a glorious day it was! Having already dressed ourselves up and taken ourselves to a matinee of Wicked at Hollywood’s legendary Pantages Theatre, Catie and I booked across town to the Grove for the perfect nightcap to our daddy-girl culture-fest. After a leisurely and purchase-filled roam around American Girl Place, the colossal retail center of the AG empire, we crossed the street and settled into a pair of newfangled multiplex stadium-seats to take in the doll franchise’s first big-screen adventure.

Yes, it was a special time – made even more special because Felicity and Julie came along. Felicity is a proper, well-bred lass from the 1770s who believes fervently in animal rights but isn’t so sure about revolution – at least not until her father’s brash apprentice convinces her that even young ladies have a role to play in securing their rights. Julie, on the other hand, is a hippie chick from the 1970s who is mighty concerned about conservation (she saves eagles!) and the nascent women’s lib movement (she plays basketball on the boys’ team!).

Felicity and Julie are, of course, inanimate objects. Yet I know all of these biographical details about them because we’ve read the tie-in books that play such a large role in the American Girls’ runaway popularity. Up on the screen that night was the filmic story of yet another archetype, the depression-era heroine Kit – scion of the only FDR lovers in conservative Cincinnati, friend and defender of hobos, crusader for social justice in the face of police profiling. The message of Kit Kittredge is one of tolerance, of forgiveness, of judging not lest ye be judged…and, of course, of Girl Power!

In other words, Phyllis Schlafly’s worst nightmare. (more…)

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sit•com n. Informal
A situation comedy; a television comedy series involving a group of regular characters in everyday situations, often set in the home and/or workplace

For three seasons, Weeds was the very model of a modern pay-cable sitcom. Set in the fictional, cookie-cutter L.A. suburb Agrestic, it centered on widowed housewife-turned-pot dealer Nancy Botwin (played by goddess of stage and screen Mary Louise Parker) and her expansive circle of friends, family and…um…business associates, from her best customer Doug (Kevin Nealon) to her ambitious supplier/grower Conrad (Romany Malco). Neatly balancing Nancy’s dual roles as suburban soccer mom and dabbler in the seedy (no pun intended) world of illicit substances, Weeds was hilarious, sexy, sometimes even moving, and always good for a contact high. It also was (seemingly) confident in the one element that must, by definition, ground any situation comedy: its situation.

Beginning with last fall’s Season-Three closer, however, Weeds has audaciously – and, so far at least, disastrously – loosed itself from its sitcom moorings. Creator Jenji Kohan didn’t just shift the show’s setting; she burned the motherfucker down, destroying all of Agrestic’s “Little Boxes” in an inferno neatly tied to last year’s horrific California wildfires. Unfortunately, while most of the major characters survived the blaze, Kohan and the show’s writers seem to have left the funny behind along with the “MILFweed” in Nancy’s growhouse; as a result, Weeds has gone sadly (and with all apologies to Cheech & Chong) up in smoke. (more…)

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The stifling heatwave that gripped southern California for a full week blew away just in time for Robert Plant and Alison Krauss to fill L.A.’s Greek Theatre with music and people for two nights early this week. Unfortunately, while the music was quite wonderful, many of the concertgoers at Monday’s gig seemed kinda miffed – or at least nonplussed.

“I’m bored already,” a fiftysomething woman told my wife not four songs into the main attraction. Afterward, a man I’d never seen before sidled up to me and said, “I thought Plant was gonna play more of the old stuff. Didn’t you? I’d heard he was gonna do a solo set at some point.”

Apparently not. In fact, from a quick scouring of Plant-obsessive websites, it appears that Monday’s set was identical to the ones this new dynamic duo have been playing throughout their tour behind the magnificent Raising Sand album. Still, I’d guess that more than half the 5,800 souls who filled the Greek arrived expecting Robert Plant to be, you know, Robert Plant.

On those few occasions when Plant allowed a smidge of the old Zeppelin pomp to sneak into his voice or demeanor, a Pavlovian standing ovation would erupt. Most of the time, however, Plant remained a cool customer, reveling in the Southern-goth rockabilly-bluegrass concoction that he, Krauss, and producer/sideman T Bone Burnett have cooked up for this album and tour. And the plurality of patrons who had driven into L.A.’s Griffith Park expecting an evening of Cock Rock didn’t know what to do with themselves.

It’s a shame, really, because in their ambivalence they may not have noticed what a remarkable show the “Raising Sand revue,” as Plant has labeled it, truly is. Using the album’s riveting blend of R&B, early-rock and gospel covers as a springboard, Plant, Krauss and Burnett retrofitted classics from the Zep catalog (“Black Dog,” “The Battle of Evermore”) as well as a Ray Charles chestnut (“Leave My Woman Alone”) and a couple old-timey hymns. During one centerpiece of the set, Krauss’ always-virtuosic fiddle easily replaced the synths that once washed over Plant’s solo hit “In the Mood”; in mid-song she briefly banished contemporary music altogether to indulge in a couple verses of the 17th-century Child ballad “Mattie Groves.” (more…)

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Can you feel it? I feel it. You know what I’m talking about – that sudden jolt, that shock that has surged through the American consciousness over the past three weeks? It’s not the Democrats nominating a black guy for president…who didn’t see that one coming? It’s not gays getting married in California…though I do distinctly sense my own marriage being undermined.

No, I’m talking about the recent revelation that, back in the ’70s, there were people with loose morals! Don’t take my word for it; the (vaguely titillating) evidence is right there on CBS (CBS?!?) every Thursday night at 10 on Swingtown, a show that’s a veritable smorgasbord of bell bottoms, Playboy Club parties, soft rock, and archetypal placeholders that so far occupy the space where real characters should be.

There’s Grant Show, who already made the ’90s safe for promiscuity on Melrose Place, as an airline pilot intent on bringing the Mile High Club down to earth. There’s Jack Davenport, the onetime backbone of the awesome British sex-romp Coupling who wasn’t much of a swordsman (ahem) in the Pirates of the Caribbean flicks, as a family man struggling with the sexual revolution and his American accent.

There’s Molly Parker, who first gained notice playing a necrophile (necrophiliac?) in the Candian indie film Kissed, as a homemaker straddling ’50s suburban mores and the swingin’ ’70s. (It seems clear she’ll be straddling other things in the coming weeks, but that’s another story.) And then there’s the gorgeous Lana Parrilla, late of 24 and the short-lived Windfall, as Show’s absurdly hot-to-trot wife who takes a practically evangelical approach to the recruitment and seduction of swinger wannabes.

It’s the bicentennial summer of ’76, and Davenport and Parker, thanks to some financial good fortune, have moved “only five minutes away” from their conservative Chicago neighborhood and their dowdy friends into a den of iniquity filled with wife-swappers, slutty divorcees, and perhaps even some nascent teen homosexuality. (Only on TV could changing neighborhoods seem like time travel – but then, Swingtown producers Mike Kelley and Alan Poul told the New York Times that they envisioned the show as the bastard child of Boogie Nights and The Wonder Years, and if that’s possible then I guess anything is.) Here’s a humorous sneak peek: (more…)

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If you’ve watched the TV news carefully this week, you may have noticed that somewhere amidst the all-Russert-all-the-time lovefest there were other events taking place – some of which might have benefited from some Russertian analysis.

There are, of course, massive floods up and down the Mississippi River – a “500-year flood” that has taken out levees up and down the Iowa-Illinois border, according to the Army Corps of Engineers. The enormous damage to homes and lives has often taken a backseat to worries about the damage to the Midwest corn crop. (Less ethanol next winter! More food riots in Africa!)

There is the Bush-McCain pas de deux on oil drilling, with both men suddenly insisting that Congress open the waters off our shores to “exploration and exploitation” (as McCain put it) for the first time in 28 years. Failing to do so, one of them said (I can’t remember which – it’s hard to tell them apart), would doom our nation to many more years of gas prices like we’re seeing now ($4.63 at the local Chevron this afternoon).

And then there is the re-emergence of Rudy Giuliani to shore up McCain’s dipping foreign-policy numbers and to rationalize his slipping appreciation for American values. In the wake of last week’s Supreme Court decision restoring some measure of habeas corpus rights to Gitmo detainees – and with his 9/11 blinders enabling him to ignore the resurgent violence in Iraq and Afghanistan – Rudy trotted out an oldie but goodie, accusing Barack Obama of…wait for it…reverting to a “September 10 mindset” when it comes to applying the (god forbid) Constitution to our treatment of “enemy combatants.”

The media has treated these three developments separately, but to me they’re all part of the same story. Simply put, our nation’s disastrous energy policy is breaking us financially – and when it’s not busy doing that it’s getting us killed around the world, or avoiding the middleman and ravaging us at home via the type of extreme weather that just might portend a climate-change apocalypse. Out-of-control oil prices, Middle East instability and global warming are related problems that require a unified solution. It inevitably will be the task of the next president, even if it’s John McCain, to begin the long-delayed process of weaning this nation (and eventually the world) off of oil and other fossil fuels. (more…)

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This was a tough weekend for political junkies – particularly those whose televisions generally find themselves tuned to NBC-related channels. Tim Russert’s death on Friday at the far-too-young age of 58 was nothing less than a cataclysm in this riveting campaign season. He was not just a fixture among the TV commentariat – he was the unquestioned Lord God King of on-air political analysis, the most credible voice on a Tuesday election night as well as the most reliable among all the Sunday-morning quizzers of politicians and pundits.

The weekend was a wall-to-wall weepfest on MSNBC, starting with the raw emotions of Friday evening (when Keith Olbermann’s makeup people couldn’t keep enough pancake on his cheeks to hide the tears, and the pain showed through even on Andrea Mitchell’s surgically improved and/or heavily Botoxed face). By Saturday, an hourlong tribute hosted by Tom Brokaw was running on a loop, and on Sunday Brokaw moved over to the mothership to serve as ringmaster for a televised wake on Meet the Press.

Even after all that catharsis, a huge hole remains evident in the “political culture” that this column aims to explore. Don’t worry, I’m not going to pursue the general hagiography of Russert, what a great guy he was and what a wonderful son; you can find that elsewhere (and besides, I’ve seen enough of “Big Russ” this weekend to last me my whole life). What concerns me is the fact that Russert was such a uniquely talented inquisitor and commentator, that his words and deeds had such an impact on the political scene – and that there is no one currently in the TV-journo profession who stands even a ghost of a chance of filling his shoes.

Russert, quite simply, was the definitive voice of this political age – from his dressing-down of David Duke in 1992 to the whiteboard reading “Florida, Florida, Florida” on election night 2000, and straight on to his dramatic pronouncement after last month’s North Carolina primary that “we now know who the Democratic nominee is going to be, and no one’s going to dispute it.” Hillary Clinton didn’t like that last proclamation, nor did she abide by it, but she was practically the only one who didn’t; though she went through the motions for four more weeks and racked up $20 million of debt, Russert’s was the last word on the campaign for many millions of Americans. (more…)

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