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Today's
Stories
April 12 /
13, 2008
Alexander Cockburn
Olympic
Torch Toasts US Candidates
Patrick Cockburn
Warlord:
the Rise of Muqtada al-Sadr
Mike Whitney
Want to Save the Economy?
Robert Fantina
Bush's Brand of Morality
Conn Hallinan
Another Defining Moment in Iraq
Bill Hatch
In Praise of Hippies and the Counter-Culture
Ramzy Baroud
The Basra Battles
George S. Hishmeh
Back to Square One
Charles Thomson
The British Prime Minister and the Tate's Tin of Shit
Alexander Billet
The Diseney-fication of CBGB
Missy Beattie
Huffing and Puffing to Failure
April 11, 2008
Nikolas Kozloff
The Clintons and Their Sordid
Colombia Advocacy
Wajahat Ali
Revenge of the Ghetto Nerd: an Exclusive Interview with Junot
Diaz
Sharon Smith
Let
Them Eat Ethanol!
Yigal Bronner
/ Neve Gordon
Digging for Trouble: the Politics of Archaeology in East Jerusalem
Alan Farago
Eating South Florida
Dave Lindorff
On Waking Sleeping Giants: Lessons for America from China
George Wuerthner
Money for Nothing? The Problems with the Conservation Reserve
Program
Christopher
Brauchli
Prostitutes Don't Do Funerals
Website of the Day
Animals Explain the Insurance Industry: a Health Care Video
April 10, 2008
Mathieu Vernerey
Tibet
for the Tibetans!
Elizabeth Schulte
Slavery
in the Fields
David Macaray
Labor
Unions Will Never Get a Fair Shake
Ashley Smith
The Rise of Muqtada al-Sadr
Peter Morici
Driving Up Debt and Dragging Down Growth
Jacob Hornberger
The Military's Distintegrating Family Life
Harold Austin
Snitch or Else: Prison Officials Threaten Gang Drop Outs
Website of the Day
Hillary: the Wal-Mart Videos
April 9, 2008
Paul Craig
Roberts
The
Fading American Economy
Winslow T.
Wheeler
Congressional
Theater: the Petraeus / Crocker Hearings
C. Hand
Why Dave Marash Left Al Jazeera
Paul Krassner
Sex and Violins
Paul Wolf
Colombian "Magnicidio" Remains a Mystery After 60 Years
Wajahat Ali
Alien Invasion!
Karyn Strickler
Lost in the Fumes: the Sierra Club Sells Out to Clorox
Dan La Botz
Confronting the Economic Crisis
Eric Walberg
The Shadow of Munich: Another NATO Flop
Robin Millenthal
Enough Already! Growth and the Tar Sands Economy
Website of the Day
Conservative
Nanny State
April 8, 2008
Mike Whitney
Should
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed be Set Free?
Nikolas Kozloff
Bush
Bullies Congress on Colombia Deal
Greg Moses
Migrant Detention in South Texas
Joshua Frank
The Other Military Draft
John Ross
Mexico City's Urban Tribes Go on the Warpath Against EMOS
Michael Donnelly
Hillary's Western Swing
John V. Walsh
Why Obama Lost Massachusetts
Jeff Nygaard
Health, Security and Mandates
Bill Piper
Last Shot for a Bush Legacy?
Sen. Russ Feingold
Legal Representation and the Death Penalty
Website of the Day
Catonsville 9, Forty Years Later
April 7, 2008
Ishmael Reed
The
Irish Black Thing
Harry Browne
Irish
Peace Activist Acquitted; Deported
Uri Avnery
Tibet and Palestine
Lenni Brenner
Obama's Constitution, His Pastor and His Unbelieving Mom in Heaven
Ayesha Ijaz Khan
America Must Respect Pakistan's Democracy
Robert Fisk
Fearful Lives in the Land of the Free
Edwin Krales
Ensuring the Success of Fascism in Spain: the US Corporate Role
Chris Genovali
Vancouver Island's Dwindling Ancient Forests
Website of the Day
LA Artists Against War
April 5 / 6,
2008
Alexander Cockburn
Did
the Elites Want MLK Dead?
Ramzy Baroud
There
are No Checkpoints in Heaven
Ralph Nader
Runaway Bailouts
David Yearsley
How Scott Joplin Had Wall Street Down
Saul Landau
Sex Politics in America
Paul Craig
Roberts
The Petraeus and Crocker Show
Lawrence Korb / Ian Moss
Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a True Patriot
Seth Sandronsky
Meet America's Promise Alliance: Colin Powell's New Gig
John Ross
La Cumbia de la Doctrina Bush: Colombia Kills Four Mexican Students
in Ecuador Bombing
Robert Fantina
McCain, Republicans and Family Values
David Michael Green
Back to Disaster: Hoover at Home, Tet Abroad
Missy Beattie
McCan't
Patrick Bond
Vultures Circle Zimbabwe
Dr. Susan Block
The New American Pot Dealers
Phyllis Pollack
The Stones Meet the Press
Adam Engel
The Boobus in the Lie
Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up
Poets' Basement
Diamand
and St. Clair
Website of the Weekend
Richard Pryor Goes to the Gun Shop
April 4, 2008
Dave Lindorff
The
Night I Heard King Had Been Shot
Greg Moses
Missing
King
Ron Jacobs
Two Murders, 40 Years On: Bobby Hutton and Martin Luther King,
Jr.
Alan Farago
Show Me the Size of Your Bail Out and I'll Show You Mine
Alison Weir
Funding
Our Decline: U.S. Aid to Israel
David Rosen
Rape as an Instrument of Total War
Robert Weissman
The Unrealized Dream
Jacob Hornberger
Was Killing Iraqi Children Worth It?
Jackie Corr
Hillary and Obama Head for Butte
Carl Finamore
Taking On United Airlines
Laray Polk
We Are All Dith Pran
Susie Day
Advice for the War-Torn
Website of
the Day
Winter Soldiers: a Video Portrait
April 3, 2008
Peter Morici
The Deepening Recession
Joe Bageant
The Audacity of Depression
Andy Worthington
Cleared But Still Detained:
The Ordeal of Moroccan Prisoner Said al-Boujaadia
Nikolas Kozloff
Condi's Divide and Rule Strategy in South America
Rannie Amiri
The U.S. Disdain for Mideast Democracy
David Macaray
More Labor Strife in Hollywood
Stephen Lendman
Lynne Stewart's Long Struggle for Justice
Website of
the Day
The
True Face of Da Vinci?
April 2, 2008
Diane Farsetta
Indian
Point on the Potomac
Harry Browne
Bertie
Ahern Laid Low by Secretary
Wajahat Ali
The Folly of Attacking Iran: a Conversation with Steven Kinzer
George Wuerthner
Open Season on Wolves
Col. Dan Smith
The
Militarization of America
Philippe Marlière
The Politics of Bling-Bling in France: Sarkozy's Cultivated Anti-Intellectualism
Steve Early
A Purple Uprising in Oakland
Bernard Chazelle
Saving the American Left
Reza Fiyouzat
Bowling in Hell
April 1, 2008
Jeff Leys
Fracturing
the Peace to End the War
Thomas P. Healy
Restoring the Constitution: a Conversation with Daniel Ellsberg
Winslow T. Wheeler
When Pigs Sprout Wings: Mangled Rationales for a Fatter Defense
Budget
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
New Deal Nostalgia
Patrick Irelan
Cocaine, Colombia and the Cartels
Andy Worthington
The Case of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani
John V. Walsh
The Shunning of Ralph Nader
Michael J.
Smith
Woolly Mamet
Robert Weissman
The New Philip Morris--Even Worse Than the Old?
Dave Lindorff
Bush's Defining Moments
Martha Rosenberg
Brain Mist Disease: Boss Hog's Gift to Humanity
Website of
the Day
Support Briana!
March 31, 2008
Mike Whitney
Dead
on Arrival: Paulson's Fixit Plan for Wall Street
Mats Svensson
Walls,
Tunnels and Daily Humiliations
Paul Rockwell
Hillary's
Lies About Outsourcing
Paul Craig Roberts
A Third American War in the Making?
Patrick Cockburn
Sadr
Calls for Ceasefire
Peter Dale Scott
The Showdown
Alfredo Molano
Cultura Mafiosa in Colombia
Peter Morici
Why Paulson's Reform Plan Falls Short
Uri Avnery
Day of the Land, 32 Years Later
Michael Simmons
The American Bard in New Orleans
Betsy Roberts
/ Karen Orr
The Clorox Coup
Phyllis Pollack
First the Sun and Then the Moon: Scorsese Does the Stones
Website of
the Day
Five Years Too Many
March 29 / 30, 2008
Alexander Cockburn
When
They Pick Up the Phone at 3 AM, What Will They Say?
Patrick Cockburn
Iraqi
Police Refuse to Back Maliki's Attacks on Medhi Army
Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Next Big Bail Out Plan
Christopher Brauchli
The Pastor of Armageddon and the Slave Sale: McCain, Lieberman
and Rev. Hagee
William Blum
China, Tibet and the Propaganda Olympics
Robert Fantina
Iraq
Troika: McCain, Obama and Clinton
John Ross
AMLO, the Comeback Kid? Fighting the Privatization of Mexico's
Oil
Allison Kilkenny
Shady Lending Hits Home
Nelson P. Valdés
Cuba, the Beatles and Historical Context
Suzanne Baroud
The Great Lake of Gaza: a New Crisis in the Making
Richard Rhames
Social Security: Throwing Granny from the Gravy Train
Christopher Fons
Transcending the 60s? Obama and the Baby Boomers
Carl Finamore
Misery at 35,000 Feet: Mergers Stall, Fares Soar, Services Slump
and Consumers Sour
Eamonn McCann
Hillary Misremembers Again!
Missy Beattie
Justice and the Monsters of War
Fred Gardner
Jim Thorpe, All-American
Kim Nicolini
Cock Chuggers and Cheese Curls: Richard Kelly's "Southland
Tales"
David Yearsley
"All the World's a Hospital"
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Booked Up
Poets' Basement
Valentine and Ko Un
Website of
the Weekend
Hidden Iraq
March 28, 2008
Saul Landau
Growing
Dread About Iraq
Alan Farago
Other People's Money: the Chop Shop Economy
Peter Morici
Knocking Down False Economic Gods
Andy Worthington
Plight of the Uyghus: a Chinese Muslim's Desperate Plea from
Guantánamo
Felice Pace
Ashes of Lies: Why No One Trusts the US Forest Service
Peter Montague
Sierra Club Cleans House -- With Clorox!
Dave Lindorff
The Mumia Exception
March 27, 2008
Patrick Cockburn
Basra
Erupts
Binoy Kampmark
Free Market Apostates
Joanne Mariner
"Was George Washington a Terrorist?"
Norman Solomon
NPR News: National Pentagon Radio?
William S. Lind
Mars Only Knocks Once: a Prognosis for Iraq
John V. Walsh
Obama's Speech: a Touch of Bigotry?
Robert Weissman
How Things Work
Ron Jacobs
Meeting Charlie Ehlen
Ralph Nader
Put Impeachment Back on the Table
David Macaray
Court Rules Against Grocery Workers
John Borowski
Clearcutting the History of Forest Destruction
Website of
the Day
Going Out for an English
March 26, 2008
Stan Cox
The
Germs Next Door
Sharon Smith
Greed
Pays: Welfare on Wall Street
Anita Sinha / Jill Tauber
Dreams Turned into Rubble in New Orleans
Matt Vidal
So Much for the Self-Regulating Market
William S. Lind
Operation Cassandra
Joe Mowrey
The Audacity of Hypocrisy: Obama's Pandering to Israel
Dave Lindorff
Duck and Cover (Up): Hillary Under Fire
Ray McGovern
Frontline's War: Too Timid, Too Little, Too Late
Justin Smith
Why Race and Gender are Separate Issues
Sam Husseini
The Winter Soldier Hearings and Indy Media
Martha Rosenberg
Blood on Ice: Gentlemen, Pick Up Your Clubs
Michael Dickinson
Politicians as Dogs
Website of the Day
The Wal-Mart Virus: How the Infection Spread
March 25, 2008
Ishmael Reed
The
Crazy Rev. Wright
Corey D. B.
Walker
The Politics of Jeremiah Wright
Linn Washington Jr.
Racism in America and Other Uncomfortable Facts
Alan Farago
The Money Launderers: a Picnic for Wall St. Insiders
Vijay Prashad
A Glimmer of Hope From the Gulf Coast
Joshua Frank
A Silver Lining to the Bush Years?
Ralph Nader
How Public Servants Can Help End This War
David Rovics
If I Can't Dance: Why is the Left So Boring?
Peter Morici
America's Banks are Broken
Dave Zirin
Olympic Flames: China's Crackdown in Tibet
David Krieger
The Crisis in Tibet
Website of
the Day
Memorializing Iraq
March 24, 2008
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Blonde
Ambition: Hillary's Berserker Campaign for 2012
Peter Morici
Digging Out of the Recession
Uri Avnery
Two Americas
Wajahat Ali
First of the Mohicans: an Interview with Rep. Keith Ellison
Paul Craig Roberts
Inside the Shell Game
George Ciccariello-Maher
The Coming War on Venezuela
Stephen Lendman
Sami Al-Arian's Long Ordeal
Christopher
Brauchli
Possessing Someone Else's Country
Cat Woods
A Letter to Mom on Obama
Stacey Warde
Tax Burden
Dave Lindorff
The American Dead Hits 4,000, But Who's Counting?
Website of
the Day
Live from the Longest Walk
March 22 /
23, 2008
Ralph Nader
Bush
Blisters the Truth on Iraq
Nicole Colson
Can You Afford to Feed Your Family?
James Petras
The Cost of Unilateral Humanitarian Initiatives
Laura Carlsen
From Bombs to Markets: The Andean Crisis and the Geopolitics
of Trade
Greg Moses
Tolerance and the American Pulpit
Andy Worthington
Torture Stories Dog Guantánamo Trials
Michael Dickinson
Art on Trial
John Ross
Bush's Surge Hits Mosul
Missy Comley Beattie
Killer Economics
David Michael
Green
Happy Anniversary, America!
Ramzy Baroud
The Coming Uncertain War on Iran
Martha Rosenberg
Easter Egg Shells from Hell
Paul Watson
Evolution is Going to the Dogs in the Galapagos
Isabella Kenfield
Monsanto's
Raid on Brazil
James Murren
Logging v. Water in Honduras
Jacob Hornberger
Sex and the Immigration Officer
Kathlyn Stone
Ben Heine, Master of the Art of Resistance
Seth Sandronsky
Rethinking New Mexico's History
Kim Nicolini
Class, Gender and Abortion in Communist Romania
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Booked Up: What I'm Reading This Week
Poets' Basement
Wilson, Woods, Gibbons and Orloski
Website of
the Weekend
Merci, McCain!
March 21, 2008
Marleen Martin
Land
Behind Bars: the Hidden Casualties of America's "War on
Crime"
Peter Montague
Run
Your Car on Coal? Maybe Not
Saul Landau
Monroe's
Deadly Doctrine
Anis Hamadeh
Merkel in the Knesset
Jacob Hornberger
McCain's Al Qaeda Scare: Slip or Tactic?
Khalil Nakhleh
Al Nakba of 1948: How Long Will It Persist?
Adam Isacson
Colombia, Paramilitary Threats and Assassinations
Kenneth Couesbouc
Money for Nothing
Madis Senner
Will the Feds Underwrite the Stock Market?
Monica Benderman
The Costs of Freedom: What Are You Willing to Pay?
Website of the Day
Stop Foreclosures and Evictions
March 20, 2008
Damien Millet
/
Eric Toussaint
The
Triple Failing of the Big Private Banks
Mike Whitney
Winding
Up Bear
John Ross
What Do We Owe Iraq?
Dave Lindorff
Paying the Piper: the Bodies and Bills are Piling Up
Wajahat Ali
Pakistan on Fire
Jill Nagle
Memo to Sex Workers: Stop Financing Shock Journalism
Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Obama and the Psychic Auto-Shrink-Wrapping Called Race in America
Dan La Botz
Obama's Race Speech
Robert Weissman
Alternative Power: Shutting Down the API
Stella Dallas
/
Jennifer Matsui
Apostasy Now! Mamet, Enter Stage Right
Website of the Day
The Angry Monk
March 19, 2008
Patrick Cockburn
A
War of Lies
Robert Fisk
The Little Men and the Inferno
Jeff Taylor
Five Years of War in Iraq
Ed Ruggero
From Pinkville to Iraq: the Dark Anniversary of My Lai
Ron Jacobs
Who'll Stop the Rain?
Christopher
Fons
Obama Takes the Race Bait
Sherwood Ross
In Defense of Rev. Wright
Cynthia McKinney
An Urgent Crisis: Confronting America's Racial Disparities
Joshua Frank
The Kool-Aid That Kills
Robert Weissman
Monsanto's Genetic Food Gamble
Walter Brasch
It's a Welfare State--If You're Rich
Yifat Susskind
Iraqi Women Resist the Occupation
Andrew Wimmer
War Demands Its Due
Website of
the Day
Glimpses of Nature
March 18, 2008
David Price
The
Military "Leveraging" of Cultural Knowledge
Paul Craig
Roberts
The
Collapse of American Power
Tim Wise
Of National Lies and Racial America: Jeremiah Wright, Barack
Obama and the Unacceptability of Truth
Patrick Cockburn
One of the Most Disastrous Wars Ever Fought
Conn Hallinan
Afghanistan, a River Running Backward
James T. Phillips
Monsters: Past, Present and Wannabe
Uri Avnery
The Killing in Bethlehem
David Macaray
Could Wal-Mart Revive the Labor Movement?
Marjorie Cohn
Beware an Attack on Iran
Peter Zinn
Obama in New Orleans
Dan La Botz
The Economic Crisis, Labor and the Left
Monica Benderman
Where are We Going?
March 17, 2008
Pam Martens
The
Fed's Wall Street Dilemma
Sasan Fayazmanesh
The US, Iran and the Policy of Dual Containment
Nelson P. Valdés
The Imperial Branding of Simon Bolivar and the Cuban Revolution
Peter Morici
The Corrosive Consequences of the Trade Deficit
Wajahat Ali
Disrobing the Nine: a Conversation with Jeffrey Toobin on the
Supreme Court Since 9/11
Ronnie Cummins
Beyond Progressive Malpractice: Taking Down Big Pharma
Shaun Harkin
Saint Patrick's Day in Fortress America
Ali Khan
No Pardon for Musharraf
Robert Jensen
Beyond Peace
P. Sainath
Oh, What a Lovely Waiver!
Greg Moses
Jeremiah was a Bullhorn
Dr. Susan Block
Advice for Eliot Spitzer
Website of the Day
No Cowboys
March 15 /
16, 2008
Patrick Cockburn
How
to Destroy a Country in Five Years
Mike Whitney
Bearly
Alive: Investment Giant Rushed to ICU by Panicky Fed Chief
Ralph Nader
Of
Laws and Men
Robert Pollin
It's Still the Economy, Stupid
Diane Christian
The Poetics of Perversity: From Boccaccio to Spitzer
Wajahat Ali
Faking the Hood: a Conversation with Ishmael Reed
Tom Wright
/
Therese Saliba
Rachel Corrie's Case for Justice
Alan Farago
Back to Florida: Where Bushtime Began
Greg Moses
Raiding the Family Room in Texas
Michael Hudson
A Grand Global Bargain?
Martha Rosenberg
Why Hillary's Favorite Chicken Company is Eying China
John Goekler
Fourth Generation Warfare in a Fifth Generation Conflict
Uzma Aslam
Khan
A Letter to Barack Obama: Where's the Change, Barack?
Oren Ben-Dor
The Silencing of Gilad Atzmon
David Underhill
Mammon, Morals and the Mobile Tanker Deal
Fred Gardner
The Education of Eliot Spitzer
David Michael
Green
Why Spitzer Should Have Resigned (and Why He Shouldn't Have)
Rev. William E. Alberts
Jesus, Entombed in Heaven
Gail Dines
It's All About the John: Prostitution and Male Power
David Yearsley
Conducting, Anarchy and the Problem of When to Begin
Chris Clarke
Walking with Zeke: the Luckiest of Dogs
Poets' Basement
Anderson, Lodge & Subiet
Website of
the Day
Deviant Art
March 14, 2008
Paul Craig
Roberts
Watching
the Dollar Die
Don Santina
Vichy
Democrats: Pelosi and the Politics of Collaboration
Patrick Cockburn
Iraqi
Mother Vows Revenge on US: How She Lost Her Husband and Her Sons
Tim Rinne
StratCom
Rules! The Next War Will Start in Nebraska
Robert Fantina
In
Torture We Trust
Saul Landau
Letter
to the Presidents-in-Waitings
David Macaray
Common
Myths About Labor Unions
Franklin Lamb
Is
the Bush Administration Switching Horses in Lebanon
Michael Neumann
The
One State Illusion: Reply to My Critics
March 13, 2008
Paul Craig
Roberts
Republicans
and "Free Market" Zealots Bring Disaster to America
Mike Whitney
Meltdown
Looms Larger As Credit Markets Freeze
Assaf Kfoury
"One-State
or Two State?"- Sterile Debate on False Alternatives
Andy Worthington
Afghan
Hero Who Died in Guantánamo: The Background to the Story
Adam Federman
From
Autopia to Autogeddon: Cars Reach the End of the Road
March 12, 2008
Dave Lindorff
Bringing
Down Spitzer: It's the Big Brother Who Should Bother US
R.F. Blader
The
Spitzer Backlash
Yonatan Mendel
How
to be an Israeli Journalist. Never Write "Murder" or
"Palestine"
Jonathan Cook
One
State or Two? Neither. The Issue is Zionism
Bill and Kathy
Christison
Fallon
and Gates -- At Least One Cheer
James J. Brittain
Was
the U.S. Involved in Killing the FARC-EP Leaders
Ron Jacobs
"All
the Money You Make Will Never Buy Back Your Soul"
March 11, 2008
Paul Craig
Roberts
How
to End the Subprime Crisis
Ed O'Loughlin
How
Israeli Troops Invade Homes in Gaza, Brutalize, Smash and Steal
Ramzy Baroud
'Unwavering
Commitment' to Inequality
Kathy Christison
One
State or Two? The Debate Over Israel and Palestine
China Hand
PRC
Plays it Cool, as U.S. Tries to Amp Up Pressure on Iran
John Joslin
Thank
You, Nafta! Welcome to Weirton, Home of the Discount Cigarette
Mike Averko
Serb
Politics, Kosovo and the Moscow-Washington Divide
Ben Rosenfeld
Gavin
Newsom's Kneejerk Plan
Thierry Paquot
High
Rise, Low Spirits:The Curse of the Tower Block
March 10, 2008
Uri Avnery
"Kill
A Hundred Turks and Rest": The Five-Day War in Gaza
Col. Dan Smith
Scoring
the "Surge" and What Lies Beyond
R.F. Blader
Why
"Lock Them Up and Throw Away the Key" is Losing its
Sheen
Michael Neumann
The
One-State Illusion: More is Less
Bob Fitrakis
and Harvey Wasserman
Did
the Republicans Give Hillary Her Victory in Ohio?
James J. Brittain
Anti-Uribe
Protests in Colombia and the World
Missy Comley
Beattie
The
Passion of John McCain
March 8-9,
2008 Weekend Edition
JoAnn Wypijewski
The
Only Way to Fight the Clintons
Mike Whitney
Sorting
Through the Rubble in Post Bubble America
Peter Morici
Fed
and Treasury Fiddle as Economy Plummets
Ralph Nader
The
Silent Violence of Gaza's Suffering that Candidates Ignore
Jonathan Cook
The
Meaning of Gaza's Shoah
Steve Niva
Behind
the Israeli Escalation in Gaza
Bill and Kathy
Christison
Crisis
over Teheran's Alleged Nuclear Plans Nearing Climax
Hervé
Do Alto and Franck Poupeau
Bolivia:
Morales is Checked
Eric Walberg
To
Leave and Stay at the Same Time: Putin to Medvedev to…?
Scott Johnson
City
of A Thousand Foreclosures
Mark Scaramella
James
Brown's Gate
Bill Clinton
President
Clinton's Remarks on Naming William M. Daley as NAFTA Task Force
Chairman
Poet's Basement
St.
Thomasino, Engel, Davies and Willson
Website of
the Weekend
Hillary
Blackens Barack
March 7, 2008
Patrick Cockburn
Why
Iraq Could Blow-Up in John McCain's Face
Robin Blackburn
Question
for Barrack Obama: Why Afghanistan is the'Right War'?
Saul Landau
The
Stupid Economy
Binoy Kampmark
When
Competition is Good: McCain and the Muddled Democrats
Chris Floyd
Crushing
the Ants: Admiral Fallon and His Empire
Andy Worthington
Spanish
Drop "Inhuman" Extradition Request for Guantánamo
Britons
Will Potter
Before
the Smoke Even Clears in Seattle: Bringing Out the T Word
March 6, 2008
March 6, 2008
Vincent Navarro
The
Next Failure of Health Reform
Forrest Hylton
High Stakes in the Andes: Colombia's Cornered President
Peter Morici
Why the Dollar is So Cheap
George Ciccariello-Maher
Counter-Attack of the Bureaucrats
John Ross
Taxi! Taxi! The Dark Side of the Oscars
Jacob Hornberger
No Standing to Lecture on Justice
Paul Watson
Illegal Japanese Whaling by the Numbers
Dan Bacher
Off the Deep End
Website of the Day
A Katrina Reader Online
March 5, 2008
Cockburn /
St. Clair
A
Great Day for John McCain (and Maybe Nader)
Joanne Mariner
After Guantanamo
Fidel Castro
The Raid on Ecuador: Underestimating Rafael Correa
Christopher
Brauchli
The Turkish Invasions
Steven Sherman
Obama and the Prospects for a Renewal of the Left
Dave Lindorff
Busting Bush & Co. in New England
James Murren
Bombing Somalia
Adam Engel
Necropolis Now
Website of Day
Remember Song
March 4, 2008
Wajahat Ali
Mumbo
Jumbo: Naming Names with Ishmael Reed
William Blum
How Could Hillary Have Known?
Bill Quigley
The Cleansing of New Orleans
Ralph Nader
The Prince Harry Solution
Patrick Irelan
Oil and Health in Venezuela
James J. Brittain
/
R. James Sacouman
Uribe's Colombia is Destabilizing a New Latin America
Norman Solomon
The War Election
Jacob Hornberger
Hillary in Waco: the Missing Apology
Andy Worthington
Guantánamo and the European Parliament
Mike Averko
Kosovo and the Press
Website of the Day
Tex-Mex Primary
March 3, 2008
Jennifer Loewenstein
Gazan Holocaust
Alan Farago
American Politics and the Faltering Economy
Richard Gott
Colombian Deaths in Ecuador
Wajahat Ali
Who Speaks for a Billion Muslims? Analyzing the World Gallup
Poll with John Esposito
Paul Craig Roberts
The Mukasey Conspiracy: a Bi-Partisan Attack on the Constitution
Robert Weissman
When Multinationals Say Adieu
Uri Avnery
Good Morning, Hamas
Martha Rosenberg
When Your Meat is a Downer
Eva Liddell
Leave the Next Dance for Bill
Michael Donnelly
Will Ferrell Does Flint
Website of the Day
Muddy Waters: Train Fare Home Blues
|
Weekend
Edition
Apri1 12 / 13, 2008
The Musical Patriot
Film
Scores and Westerns: the Stealth Cavalry of Empire
By DAVID YEARSLEY
Music is as crucial to the Hollywood
Western as horses, Winchester rifles, whisky, and all-male campfires.
These and other symbols unite a wide array of films, from The
Searchers to Brokeback Mountain.
It's the film score that does
most of the work of giving the Western its mythic resonance.
Music makes us believe that the story being told on screen is
our story, that it is, as the cliché would have it, part
of who we are and where we came from: music turns the passive
construction How the West Was Won into the active How I Won the
West, but it does so below the surface of rational thought. Music
is the Western's stealth cavalry.
It is also the score's capacity
to evoke distance and movement across vast spaces that makes
it vital it to the Western. Hollywood filmmakers use music like
they use the iconic Cutler Formation buttes and pinnacles of
Arizona's Monument Valley. In the Western, music is landscape,
providing a sweeping backdrop against which the myths on the
screen are played out.
Last year's major contribution
to the Western, James Mangold's not-quite-nihilistic but nonetheless
grim and glorious 3:10 to Yuma, forsakes the red icons
of Monument Valley -- the shale and the Indians -- for the less
costly, though no less iron-rich geology of New Mexico. Some
clichés are simply too worn out to resuscitate: if one
can afford to film in Monument Valley these days, suburban movie
audiences weaned on car commercials would almost expect to see
an SUV to pull up alongside the stagecoach. The musical backdrop,
by contrast, is invisible, portable, and even more evocative
than those venerable Arizona stones so frequently exploited by
John Ford back in the Western's heyday.
Because the Western is so reliant
on its score, one immediately recognizes the unanchored brilliance
of, say, the neo-Western Hud of 1963 with its sparse music
provided by the great film composer Elmer Bernstein: in the opening
and closing scenes, a guitar picks out mournful melody above
a hypnotic accompanimental figure. Westerns are usually about
a journey, and Bernstein's music projects inexorable motion,
like wheels going round. Because of that strange fact of nature
called persistence of vision the wheels of the ubiquitous stagecoach
or of Paul Newman's Cadillac in Hud always spin backwards
on screen. By now we practically need the wheels to turn in defiance
of the laws of physics; this, too, has become a visual cliché
of the Western. So, too, in Hud, Bernstein's music implies
both motion and stasis. The restive characters are paradoxically
imprisoned by the expanse of West Texas and by the claustrophobia
of the small town plunked down in that vast landscape.
Bernstein's music has no recourse to the heroic potential of
the orchestra; the guitar introduces the film, goes nowhere,
and then disappears, returning only at the end. In both its framing
plaint and its abiding absence, music captures something essential
about Paul Newman's hollow, destructive character. Through its
silence the minimal soundtrack makes clear that there will be
no cavalry, emotional or military, to save the day, to redeem
the characters.
A version of Bernstein's guitar
music returns in minor-key, Tex-Mex garb as the theme of 3:10
to Yuma, where it is shadowed by a percussion pattern whose
gathering force evokes the motion of the train of the title,
one that, in the final scene of the movie, appears to take the
anti-hero, Russell Crowe's charismatic bandit, Ben Wade, to justice.
Of course, the audience knows that this scene has been staged
for its onlookers. So far on in years is the Western, that this
kind self-referential enactment of myth for the Western folk
watching the action from within the movie has shed all claims
to originality. Such set-pieces are enjoyable nonetheless.
Sergio Leone did it masterfully in My Name is Nobody (1973),
where Henry Fonda is seen to be gunned down in a Main Street
duel in a movie that would fittingly be his last Western. The
score for that film was written by Ennio Morricone, who composed
the music for My Name is Nobody as well as for that seminal
quartet of Italian-produced Westerns: Fistful of Dollars
(1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), The Good,
the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), and Once Upon a Time in
the West (1968). Morricone received a lifetime achievement
award at last year's Academy Awards.
Like a wagon train gathering in stragglers, the Western draws
in new references, new markers of its identity, as it treks forward
in time. Morricone's additions to the symbolic musical language
of the Western have since the 60s become the reference points
for subsequent efforts. The eerie, whistled theme of The
Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, performed by Morricone's childhood
friend Alessandro Alessandroni, is as iconic as John Wayne's
white hat in Stagecoach. And in Once Upon a Time in
the West, the distant, hollow sound of Charles Bronson's
harmonica is both a signifier of his identity -- his character
is called Harmonica -- and a witty acknowledgement that the Morricone
of the The Good, the Bad and the Ugly had himself become
a Western hero, as essential and indestructible as Clint or Bronson
or any of the toughest of the tough guys. It was as if we had
caught the composer smiling to himself as he etched his own name
into the musical scenery of the Western, like Ringo Kidd carving
his initials with a buck knife into the base of one of those
shale pillars in Monument Valley.
Given the status and influence of Morricone's music, it is perhaps
not surprising that as the credits rolled at the end of 3:10
to Yuma I sensed an uncanny feeling of retrospective recognition
when "Music: Marco Beltrami" came up on the screen.
The shape of an unambiguously Italian name on a Western, and
especially on one with such an evocative soundtrack, is as immediately
familiar, and, one might even venture, as indispensable as the
sight of those Western geologic outcroppings.
So perfect is the name Marco
Beltrami that one could almost suspect that the Hollywood publicity
machine simply made it up. An Italian credit for the score can
do great things for the brand power not just of a Western, but
of many a major motion picture. Beltrami was nominated for a
2008 Academy Award for the score to 3:10 to Yuma, but
the Oscar went to his Italian contemporary, Dario Marianelli
for Atonement.
Given the centrality of "Americans" in the Western,
whose on-screen characters are normally devoid of European emigrants
with funny names and odd accents, it is easy to forgot how important
Italians have been to the Western's music. Giaccomo Puccini's
La Fanciulla del West (Girl of the Golden West) was premiered
at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1910, two years before the
Arizona of Yuma and Yuma became a state. The widely-spaced
opening sonority of Puccini's overture provided an essential
trick for conjuring immense Western distance; it is a conceit
employed in almost every Western film since.
Gerard Carbonara sounds even more like a fabrication. But Carbonara
was born and trained in New York. By 1910 he was back in the
land of his parents working at La Scala in Milan. Hollywood beckoned
and in the 1930s he created and codified many of the requirements
the Western's music, producing film scores for Geronimo,
Stagecoach, The Texans, and the The Kansan
within a two-year period from 1939-40. The Stagecoach score
still defines the sound of the genre with its optimistic traveling
music heard when the stage is underway, its heart-warming pastoral
gloss on the Monumental Valley vistas, and its triumphant cavalry
charge at the close.
Like Carbonara, the Italian-born
Beltrami grew up in America and returned to Italy in early adulthood.
His musical training boasts an august pedigree. After graduating
from Brown University he went to Venice to study with Luigi Nono,
the avowedly communist composer, who construed his greatest work
as a fundamental critique of fascism, war, and capitalism. Nono
is about as far from Hollywood as one can get musically and ideologically,
but that doesn't mean his students couldn't use the lessons learned
from him and run with them to the waiting arms of Hollywood.
Returning from Italy, Beltrami
studied composition at Yale with Jacob Druckman, one of the
most important teachers of the later part of the 20th century.
Trained in the high modernist, intellectual tradition, Beltrami's
aesthetic convictions are avowedly post-modern and relativist,
and thus ideally suited for the marketplace imperatives of the
movie industry. Beltrami's website informs us that in his ideal
musical world "the music of a Jamaican bandleader [would
be] of equal importance with the work of a Germanic music scholar."
Think Theodor Adorno in a grass skirt banging at a steel drum.
Beltrami broke in to the top tier of Hollywood composers with
Scream (1996) and other horror films, and his scores
demonstrate a stylistic flexibility and consummate craftsmanship
that promises a long, lucrative career on the California Coast.
His work on Yuma subtly updates a wide rang of the Western
musical tropes, but concentrates mainly on those inherited, not
to say appropriated, from Morricone. The scrim of electronic
sounds; the reverberations of the drums like shots fired into
a canyon: the portentous gongs; Morricone's grating dissonances
layered more thickly on one another-all these and other elements
represent artful expansions of the musical language of the Western.
And while we may not recognize or remember each detail of melody,
orchestration, and effect, the epic shape of Beltrami's film
score, again, like those Western rock formations so familiar
from the screen, become so embedded in our memory that we think
they've always been there.
As the Yuma-bound train pulls
away in the last scene of Mangold's film, Beltrami's guitar melody
gains momentum, and then is swept aloft by soaring orchestral
strings and finally crowned, by the desert sun of a crying mariachi
trumpet, before it fades with the receding locomotive against
the wide-screen landscape.
This is classic Morricone,
and the combination of sad guitar and wailing trumpet tell us
that the story, like the Western as a form of fantasy, is not
really over. The music becomes one with the landscape, timeless
and permanent, and turns the West into a place of redemption.
That is the main flaw of this gripping, perhaps even great, movie,
just as it is the curse of the Western's best music: it is stuck
in a past that never was.
David Yearsley teaches at Cornell University, and
is author of Bach
and the Meanings of Counterpoint (Cambridge University Press).
He's also a long-time contributor to the Anderson Valley Advertiser.
He can be reached at dgy2@cornell.edu
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