Ex-Powell aide: Bush ‘too aloof’ – Nov 29, 2005

President was detached during Iraq postwar planning, Wilkerson says

Tuesday, November 29, 2005; Posted: 11:57 a.m. EST (16:57 GMT)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff says President Bush was “too aloof, too distant from the details” of post-war planning, allowing underlings to exploit Bush’s detachment and make bad decisions.

In an Associated Press interview Monday, former Powell chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson also said that wrongheaded ideas for the handling of foreign detainees after Sept. 11 arose from a coterie of White House and Pentagon aides who argued that “the president of the United States is all-powerful,” and that the Geneva Conventions were irrelevant.

Wilkerson blamed Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and like-minded aides. Wilkerson said that Cheney must have sincerely believed that Iraq could be a spawning ground for new terror assaults, because “otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an idiot or a nefarious bastard.”

Wilkerson suggested his former boss may agree with him that Bush was too hands-off about Iraq.

“What he seems to be saying to me now is the president failed to discipline the process the way he should have and that the president is ultimately responsible for this whole mess,” Wilkerson said.

He said Powell now generally believes it was a good idea to remove Saddam Hussein from power, but may not agree with either the timing or execution of the war. Wilkerson said Powell may have had doubts about the extent of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein but was convinced by then-CIA Director George Tenet and others that the intelligence girding the push toward war was sound.

Powell was widely regarded as a dove to Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s hawks, but he made a forceful case for war before the United Nations Security Council in February, 2003, a month before the invasion. At one point, he said Saddam possessed mobile labs to make weapons of mass destruction that were never found.

Wilkerson criticized the CIA and other agencies for allowing mishandled and bogus information to underpin that speech and the whole administration case for war.

He said he has almost, but not quite, concluded that Cheney and others in the administration deliberately ignored evidence of bad intelligence and looked only at what supported their case for war.

A newly declassified Defense Intelligence Agency document from February 2002 said that an al Qaeda military instructor was probably misleading his interrogators about training that the terror group’s members received from Iraq on chemical, biological and radiological weapons. Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi reportedly recanted his statements in January 2004. (Full Story)

A presidential intelligence commission also dissected how spy agencies handled an Iraqi refugee who was a German intelligence source. Codenamed Curveball, this man who was a leading source on Iraq’s purported mobile biological weapons labs was found to be a fabricator and alcoholic.

On the question of detainees picked up in Afghanistan and other fronts on the war on terror, Wilkerson said Bush heard two sides of an impassioned argument within his administration. Abuse of prisoners, and even the deaths of some who had been interrogated in Afghanistan and elsewhere, have bruised the U.S. image abroad and undermined fragile support for the Iraq war that followed.

Cheney’s office, Rumsfeld aides and others argued “that the president of the United States is all-powerful, that as commander in chief the president of the United States can do anything he damn well pleases,” Wilkerson said.

On the other side were Powell, others at the State Department and top military brass, and occasionally then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Wilkerson said.

Powell raised frequent and loud objections, his former aide said, once yelling into a telephone at Rumsfeld: “Donald, don’t you understand what you are doing to our image?”

Miami Police Take New Tack Against Terror

By CURT ANDERSON
Associated Press Writer

Miami police announced Monday they will stage random shows of force at hotels, banks and other public places to keep terrorists guessing and remind people to be vigilant.

Deputy Police Chief Frank Fernandez said officers might, for example, surround a bank building, check the IDs of everyone going in and out and hand out leaflets about terror threats.

“This is an in-your-face type of strategy. It’s letting the terrorists know we are out there,” Fernandez said.

The operations will keep terrorists off guard, Fernandez said. He said al-Qaida and other terrorist groups plot attacks by putting places under surveillance and watching for flaws and patterns in security.

Police Chief John Timoney said there was no specific, credible threat of an imminent terror attack in Miami. But he said the city has repeatedly been mentioned in intelligence reports as a potential target.

Timoney also noted that 14 of the 19 hijackers who took part in the Sept. 11 attacks lived in South Florida at various times and that other alleged terror cells have operated in the area.

Both uniformed and plainclothes police will ride buses and trains, while others will conduct longer-term surveillance operations.

“People are definitely going to notice it,” Fernandez said. “We want that shock. We want that awe. But at the same time, we don’t want people to feel their rights are being threatened. We need them to be our eyes and ears.”

Howard Simon, executive director of ACLU of Florida, said the Miami initiative appears aimed at ensuring that people’s rights are not violated.

“What we’re dealing with is officers on street patrol, which is more effective and more consistent with the Constitution,” Simon said. “We’ll have to see how it is implemented.”

Mary Ann Viverette, president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, said the Miami program is similar to those used for years during the holiday season to deter criminals at busy places such as shopping malls.

“You want to make your presence known and that’s a great way to do it,” said Viverette, police chief in Gaithersburg, Md. “We want people to feel they can go about their normal course of business, but we want them to be aware.”

The way is clear for Village Voice Media and New Times to combine into a 17-paper chain of weeklies.

by Chuck Taylor

The federal government has declined to intervene in the merger of New York-based Village Voice Media, which owns Seattle Weekly and five other publications, with Phoenix-based New Times, which owns 11 weekliesÔø?clearing the way for the two companies to become one as soon as paperwork is complete.

In a routine notice on the Web site of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the merger was listed Wednesday, Nov. 23, as among proposed deals that neither the FTC’s Bureau of Competition nor the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice would challenge, based on paperwork filed by the two companies on Oct. 24, when the merger was announced.

Said Village Voice Media CEO David Schneiderman, in an e-mail to employees Monday, Nov. 28: “We expect to close in about a month or so. The work on integrating the two companies will accelerate, but we will still be functioning as separate entities until the closing.”

Village Voice Media is owned by investors represented by Goldman Sachs, Weiss, Peck & Greer, and Trimaran Capital Partners. CEO Schneiderman is a former Village Voice editor and publisher. Besides Seattle Weekly and the Village Voice, Village Voice Media owns LA Weekly in Los Angeles, OC Weekly in Orange County, Calif., City Pages in Minneapolis, and Nashville Scene. The Voice began publishing 50 years ago and is considered the pioneer of the so-called alternative-weekly format. Seattle Weekly was founded in 1976.

New Times, in business since 1970, is largely owned by CEO James Larkin and Executive Editor Michael Lacey. Fourteen percent of the chain is held by a Boston investment firm called Alta Communications. New Times owns Phoenix New Times, Westword in Denver, SF Weekly in San Francisco, East Bay Express in Oakland, Calif., the Dallas Observer, the Houston Press, Cleveland Scene, Miami New Times, New Times Broward-Palm Beach in Florida, Riverfront Times in St. Louis, and The Pitch in Kansas City.

Larkin will serve as CEO of the new Phoenix-based company and Schneiderman will head the combined chain’s Internet operations, based in Seattle. Lacey will be executive editor of all 17 newspapers.

Brian Eno: Taking the world by storm

Brian Eno rarely plays live, but this Sunday he’ll be on stage at a charity gig, playing punk Arabic music. He explains why

The Independent, 25 November 2005

I will be appearing on stage with Rachid Taha at a benefit concert on Sunday, singing live backing vocals in Arabic (Rachid has helped me with the pronunciation). It is mainly to raise money for the Stop the War Coalition, but it also shows that a bunch of Muslims and so-called Christians can quite easily work together on projects like this. I rather like the flyer we sent out, with a picture of Rachid looking like a dirty Arab giving me a big kiss on the cheek. I also support Rachid’s music for its ability to disrupt. It’s not because it makes a specific political statement, but I think it would probably be the greatest social revolution in America if American kids started liking Muslim music, like they once loved Elvis or reggae.

You can’t imagine how happy it makes me feel when I am up there playing this punk Arabic music, live with Taha’s band. I don’t often perform live these days – the last time I was on stage in Britain was about four years ago, with the Brazilian Caetano Veloso – because being on stage doesn’t interest me generally. But I have played with Rachid, who is an Algerian-born singer-songwriter, three times this year in Paris, Moscow and St Petersburg. I have enjoyed that more than any other stage experiences I’ve ever had.

This is because it is great being in a big band – there are seven in Rachid’s – without much responsibility. There is so much energy to this new music – I call it “punk Arab consciousness” – and I just wish all those guitar bands doing Talking Heads remakes would wake up and listen to what’s going on in the rest of the world.

I don’t expect you will see a concert quite like this for some time. Mick Jones will be coming on for “Rock the Casbah”, because of course, Rachid recorded his own version, “Rock el Casbah”. The line-up for this concert – with Nitin Sawhney and Imogen Heap – is pretty amazing

A friend of mine, the guitar player Leo Abrahams, will also be appearing. His guitar feeds into my processors, and then I can do things that no guitar has ever had done to it before. It sounds like live cut-and-paste with Arabic inflections. I’ve been experimenting a bit with this sound with Herbie Hancock this year, originally for his album Possibilities, but the track wasn’t used in the end. It was probably too weird for them.

My involvement in this concert isn’t really so much about politics as it is humanitarian. There is a tragedy unfolding. It’s quite as bad as some of the other awful tragedies that have happened this last year, the tsunami and the earthquakes, but it is one we created. I really think we should be trying to do something about it.

The reason I really resent this war, apart from the fact it has hurt a lot of people and caused chaos in the Middle East, is that it has so far cost at least $200bn. According to the World Health Organisations estimates, for that amount of money we could have eradicated malaria from the planet, given everybody on the planet clean water, given every Aids victim in the world the best treatment available. We could have done all those things and we still would have had change. Is this how we are going to spend our resources in the future – on these ridiculous vanity projects?

I have never used my own music as a mechanism of protest. I am not interested in using music in that way – but I think all music has a political dimension because it suggests a way of being. Just as reggae suggested a world where you chill out, in a society in which is desperately driving consumers to be obedient workers in order that they earn enough money to buy goods, Rachid’s mix of punk Arabic music says: “Let’s take the world by the scruff of the neck, the whole of it, and shake it up”. People may think that because Rachid is a Muslim, he is therefore knee-jerk anti-American, but actually he is anti-Arab as much as he is anti-American. He is very coherent when he talks about the failings of the Arab states. His music makes people think: “Do I live in the little world of white rock’n’roll, or do I live in this big world where everything gets absorbed and thrown back out?

What a lot of Arabic music is about is a different way of moving your body – there is a spinning and whirling motion, rather than stomping and getting down. If you listen to some of the melodies in Rachid’s tracks, they are very complex. To try to remember them as a Western musician is very hard. They are very elaborate. It is a whole different way of thinking about music. So instead of polarising the West against the Islamic world, Rachid’s music merges the two. This is accepting and surrendering to each other’s sensibilities – and if we can do this through music, surely we can try to do that in the world.

The Stop the War Coalition benefit concert is at the Astoria, London, on Sunday (www.stopwar.org.uk; 020-7278 6694)

Cunningham was born in Los Angeles, but grew up in Shelbina, Missouri. After receiving his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Missouri in 1964 and 1965, Cunningham spent a year as a swimming coach in Hinsdale, Illinois before joining the United States Navy in 1966. He eventually became a pilot. During his service, Cunningham became the first Navy ace in the Vietnam War, flying an F-4 Phantom from aboard aircraft carriers, and recording five confirmed kills, making him one two U.S. pilots to “Ace”. He allegedly also downed a Vietnamese fighter ace who flew a MiG-17 against him, although whether it was Cunningham’s shot which downed the plane and whether a Vietnamese ace was truly aboard the MiG are disputed by some. Returning from Vietnam in 1972, he became an instructor at the Navy’s TOPGUN school for fighter pilots at Miramar Naval Air Station in San Diego. Many of his real-life experiences in combat and as an instructor were depicted in the popular 1986 movie Top Gun, although the movie’s producer says it was not based on any specific aviator. In 1985 Cunningham earned a MBA from National University, a San Diego night school. He retired from the Navy in 1987, but success eluded him in business or teaching. In 1990 he got his break during the Persian Gulf War. He became nationally known as a CNN commentator on naval aircraft during the war against Iraq.

Cunningham’s noteriety as a CNN commentator led several Republican leaders to approach him about running in California’s 44th Congressional District. The district had been held for eight years by Democrat Jim Bates, and was considered the most Democratic district in the San Diego area. However, Bates was bogged down in a scandal involving charges of sexual harassment. Cunningham won the Republican nomination and hammered Bates about the scandal. He won by just a point, meaning that the San Diego area was represented entirely by Republicans for only the second time since the city was split into two districts after the 1960 census.

…

Cunningham once referred to a political opponent as a “homo,” and attacked a Democrat member of the House as a “socialist,” an epithet in the United States. Cunningham is often compared by liberal interest groups to former congressman Bob Dornan, with some justification; both are ardent conservatives, both are former military pilots, and both have become infamous for outbursts against perceived enemies.

In September 1996 Cunningham attacked President Bill Clinton for appointing “soft on crime” judges. “We must get tough on drug dealers,” he said. “Those who peddle destruction on our children must pay dearly.” He favored stiff drug penalties and voted for the death penalty for major drug dealers. Four months later, his son Todd was arrested for helping to transport 400 pounds (181 kg) of marijuana from Massachusetts to California.

At his son’s sentencing hearing, Cunningham fought back tears as he begged the judge for leniency (Todd was sentenced to two and a half years in prison, in part because he tested positive for cocaine three times while on bail).

Cunningham’s press secretary responded to accusations of double standards with: “The sentence Todd got had nothing to do with who Duke is. Duke has always been tough on drugs and remains tough on drugs.”

In the Washingtonian feature “Best & Worst of Congress” of 2004, Mr. Cunningham was rated (with four other House members) as “No Rocket Scientist” by a bipartisan survey of Congressional staff.

Cunningham defends deal with defense firm’s owner
By Marcus Stern
COPLEY NEWS SERVICE
June 12, 2005

….In an interview Wednesday, Cunningham conceded that the circumstances surrounding the transaction could raise “fair” questions, but he insisted that the real estate deal was legitimate and independent of his efforts to help Wade win contracts.
“My whole life I’ve lived aboveboard,” Cunningham said. “I’ve never even smoked a marijuana cigarette. I don’t cheat. If a contractor buys me lunch and we meet a second time, I buy the lunch. My whole life has been aboveboard and so this doesn’t worry me.”

Later, he added, “The last thing I would do is get involved in something that, you know, is wrong. And I feel very confident that I haven’t done anything wrong.”

California Congressman Resigns After Admitting He Took Bribes

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 28, 2005
Filed at 2:30 p.m. ET

SAN DIEGO (AP) — Rep. Randy ”Duke” Cunningham pleaded guilty Monday to conspiracy and tax charges, admitting taking $2.4 million in bribes in a case that grew from an investigation into the sale of his home to a wide-ranging conspiracy involving payments in cash, vacations and antiques.

Randy Cunningham “enriched himself through his position and violated the trust of those who put him there,” U.S. Attorney Carol Lam said.
Cunningham, 63, entered pleas in U.S. District Court to charges of conspiracy to commit bribery, mail fraud and wire fraud, and tax evasion for underreporting his income in 2004. Cunningham answered ”yes, Your Honor” when asked by U.S. District Judge Larry Burns if he had accepted bribes from someone in exchange for his performance of official duties.

Cunningham, an eight-term Republican congressman, resigned after his guilty plea. He had announced in July that he wouldn’t seek re-election next year.

House Ethics rules say that any lawmaker convicted of a felony no longer should vote or participate in committee work. Under Republican caucus rules, Cunningham also would lose his chairmanship of the House Intelligence subcommittee on terrorism and human intelligence.

The former Vietnam War flying ace is known on Capitol Hill for his interest in defense issues and his occasional temperamental outbursts.

After the hearing, Cunningham was taken away for fingerprinting. He will be released on his own recognizance until a Feb. 27 sentencing hearing. He could receive a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

He also agreed to forfeit to the government his Rancho Santa Fe home, more than $1.8 million in cash and antiques and rugs.

In a statement, prosecutors said Cunningham admitted to receiving at least $2.4 million in bribes paid to him by several conspirators through a variety of methods, including checks totaling over $1 million, cash, rugs, antiques, furniture, yacht club fees and vacations.

”He did the worst thing an elected official can do — he enriched himself through his position and violated the trust of those who put him there,” U.S. Attorney Carol Lam said. The statement did not identify the conspirators.

The case began when authorities started investigating whether Cunningham and his wife, Nancy, used the proceeds from the $1,675,000 sale to defense contractor Mitchell Wade to buy a $2.55 million mansion in ritzy Rancho Santa Fe. Wade put the Del Mar house back on the market and sold it after nearly a year for $975,000 — a loss of $700,000.

He drew little notice outside his San Diego-area district before the San Diego Union-Tribune reported last June that he’d sold the home to Wade.

Cunningham’s pleas came amid a series of GOP scandals. Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas had to step down as majority leader after he was indicted in a campaign finance case; a stock sale by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is being looked at by regulators; and Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff was indicted in the CIA leak case.

from the LATimes:

…Cunningham got the inflated price from defense contractor Mitchell Wade “in return for being influenced in the performance of his official acts as a public official” in violation of federal law, prosecutors stated in the court papers, filed in August.

Cunningham was on two House committees that reviewed the Pentagon budget and influenced the flow of defense contracts.

Wade’s former company, MZM Inc., which Cunningham has said he championed, has received $163 million in federal contracts ‚Äî mostly for classified defense projects involving the gathering and analysis of intelligence.

The allegations against Cunningham involved the sale of the Del Mar Heights house in November 2003. Wade paid Cunningham $1.67 million for the house, then sold it eight months later for a $700,000 loss.

A month after selling the Del Mar Heights home, the Cunninghams bought a five-bedroom, eight-bathroom house in exclusive Rancho Santa Fe for $2.55 million. Prosecutors alleged that the couple made a $1.4-million profit on the Del Mar Heights sale, which they used to “buy up” to Rancho Santa Fe.

In one of his few previous public statements, Cunningham has called Wade a close friend. Part of the federal probe involved the fact that Cunningham has lived aboard Wade’s 42-foot boat, renamed the Duke Stir, while in Washington.

Bloguemahone: Dispatches from The Pogues Tour Bus in the lower Circles of Hell by James Fearnley

Shane came into rehearsal Ôø?professionally lateÔø?, as he wittily put it, with that gnashing laugh he has, the first day of rehearsal. I think heÔø?d had to be woken up, in his flat. He wasnÔø?t as sartorial as IÔø?ve seen him of late, though he still has his brothel-creepers that I became familiar with coming across on the dressing room floor when we were on tour at Christmas, as he felt the need to air his rather curious-looking feet (and to air, with Joey, the top half of his body, at least one evening, where were we? Newcastle I think). He staggered in at four in the afternoon wearing a tophat that looked as though someone had attempted to contain a firework inside it.

Rehearsals went reasonably well. After so many years playing these songs, recording them, putting them together, rehearsing them, theyÔø?re Ôø? well, internalized, now, part of our fabric somehow, in our bones. I donÔø?t think we actually needed the two days we set aside for rehearsal Ôø? other to remind ourselves whether or not there were three or four verses before the break in Old Main Drag (on the record, and I remember when Shane wrote the song and we put it together in rehearsal, it was supposed to be symmetrical with three before and three after the break), and for Andrew to get used to the rather springy skin on the bass drum of the rented (with a finish that was almost gold lamÔø?) drum kit, and to remind ourselves of the chords to Thousands Are Sailing, which have always been a problem for a lot of us. As it turned out, when it came to the festival at Stoke Park in Guildford, when Jem put on the gunmetal-blue suit he last wore seven months ago for the Christmas tour and went through the pockets, he found the chord crib-sheet heÔø?d used then, so, at least he knew what to do.

The second day of rehearsals was as enfeeblingly hot as the first day. We ran through the set a couple of times, and, though we didnÔø?t actually have time for it at whatÔø?s known as Ôø?GuilfestÔø?, I was amazed that we hadnÔø?t any trouble with Bottle of Smoke, because that one caused the most problems last Christmas: none of us could say at that time, with any certainty, how the break, which Jem wrote, went. We realized, from the live recording, that Terry was playing one thing, me another, and Jem something else. Last Christmas we spent a bit of time trying to discover some concensus as to how the tune actually went. This time, however, for some reason, donÔø?t know why, it was all there Ôø? maybe a bit of contemporizing from Terry, because the dear boy just canÔø?t help it, but, in the heel of the hunt, well, we just didnÔø?t play it at Guilfest. Perhaps in Japan.

I met the band bus coming down whatÔø?s normally the cycle track across Stoke Park at Guilfest and motioned it in through the artistesÔø? gate, to make my way, donÔø?t ask me why, to the guest entrance. I had to come back to where IÔø?d guided the tour bus in and wait outside for ten minutes in a face-off with a rather red-faced, scottish (why are they always Scottish?) security manager who wouldnÔø?t believe me, until the tour manager came (whoÔø?s Scottish too, hmm) to break the deadlock. The band had a straighforward journey down from London. ThatÔø?s tour managers for you. The Pogues have an exceedlingly good one, whoÔø?s as executively functional as you can get and intimately knows that there are more ways than one to skin a cat. WasnÔø?t always the case with tour managers. It is now.

So, we change into our suits Ôø? Jem into the aforementioned, with the chord sheet in; Philip into something suavely black; Darryl into a suit IÔø?m sure dates from my wedding; Terry into a charcoal number, with his blue shirt tucked out, which IÔø?ve told him about, but will he listen?; Spider, with a new, rather fetching, quasi-Steve Marriot hair-cut (an opening came up, with Sarah, nobody but whom he trusts to go near his hair), in a light grey suit, and his shirt tucked out, but I can handle that, for some reason; myself in the suit I bought at a vintage clothing stall in Santa Monica Civic Center and which has seen me through every gig IÔø?ve done, with the Low and Sweet Orchestra, Cranky George, Pogues, since 1995. Shane obviously hadnÔø?t read the band-meeting minutes and went on-stage in the t-shirt and black trousers IÔø?d seen him in last Ôø? the front of the trousers peppered with cigarette burns (reminded me of the pub game I played once, where you peel the tissue paper from the silver foil of twenty Embassy, stick it over the top of a pint glass, put a coin in the middle of it, and then burn holes in it with cigarettes with the person who makes the coin fall into the bottom of the glass buying the next round).

Shane changed the set round at the last minute, which might have put another band into a panic (although the sound and lighting technicians donÔø?t like it one bit, for all the cues going to shit and everything). I saw him scribbling over the set list in the porta-dressing room, arms on his knees, stabbing at the paper with a marker, wiping his nose with a fore-arm, impatiently cuffing the paper. I left him to it. We all left him to it. DoesnÔø?t do to come between the bowman and his target. As it turned out, the first three songs were just the right sort of songs to open the set with (although the front-of-house sound-man might have wanted something slow to get all the levels sorted out, but, hell, you canÔø?t come out in front of Ôø? how many? DonÔø?t know. Fifteen thousand maybe. Between ten and fifteen. Difficult to tell, although the heads stretched right back to the customary, almost medieval-looking ring of tents at the very back – potato places, shops, that sort of thing, though I didnÔø?t concentrate that much on whatÔø?s out at the very back. Streams of Whiskey, then If I Should Fall From Grace With God, then Sally MacLennane. Those are hard work for an accordion-player that wants to jump around at the dramatic bits. My legs (and the knees of my trousers) are ruined.

Shane brought with him onto the stage a large pitcher of iced water and a wet towel, which he wore for some of the time. He had a familiar old thing going on in his head, for this gig: a recital, a disjointed recital of half-remembered phrases that have passed his way in his life, coming out in a sort of bebop of verbalizing, starting out with some improbable connection heÔø?s made, and then just going off on that. Ôø?ItÔø?s nice to play in Denmark again!Ôø? he said, whereupon, heÔø?s off into Hamlet, but runs dry because he canÔø?t remember the whole graveside soliloquy. Spider, however, came to his rescue with something, IÔø?m not sure, from Henry the 4th (not sure which part), which he does remember in its entirety, because Spider has a photographic memory, but one of those panoramic cameras, if you know what I mean. ItÔø?s great to hear Shane go off into some verbal jazz territory, like the character Ron Perlman plays in Ôø?The Name Of The RoseÔø?, and itÔø?s great to hear Spider spitting out Shakespeare. DoesnÔø?t happen a lot nowadays. In that way, it was like a gig-of-old, the two of them playing off one another.

And, like a gig of old, was the way we played the rest of the show Ôø? by the seat of our pants, with almost bemused looks up from our instruments Ôø? or even not bothering to look up at all Ôø? when Shane neglects a cue, or rides off digging his stirrups into the flank of one of the verses after an instrumental break in Fiesta and would, at one time, have left us a mess of limbs, scrabbling in the dust. Nowadays, however, weÔø?re cheek-by-jowl with his frothing steed and heading it round toward the paddock, or crashing into the barn, one of the two, with Spider banging his head on Ôø? well, not the proper beer tray it should have been, because a runner came back from the shops, having been sent out for beer-trays, with a catering pack of those silver-foil tv-dinner trays which Spider left crumpled on the floor. At the end of Fiesta, Jem went off into some penetrating Coltrane territory.

IÔø?m sure someone will have the set list. I donÔø?t have a copy, and IÔø?m buggered if I can remember how it went. We played Rainy Night In Soho in a way I donÔø?t remember ever playing it Ôø? slow, much slower, and, I think, with a refinement the song hasnÔø?t had for a while. I questioned Terry over the top of the piano if he thought it was too slow, but managed to stop him going over to try to get Andrew to speed it up a bit, because that wouldnÔø?t have done, and besides, I was getting to like it slow like that. Shane forgot how the verse after the break went, but let the crowd remind him how it was, and with a fine sense of etiquette almost, took their cue and started the verse again, once he had it.

ThatÔø?s all I have to say about Guilfest. Afterwards I walked fucking miles through Guildford to get a drink in a hotel bar with holes in both knees of my suit.

Except Ôø? since the BBC Radio 2 vans were out the back, IÔø?m wondering if some of it, or maybe all, might be available on the Radio 2 website. I listened to Fiesta on the radio last night (Saturday) and had a laugh at how we did it.

Courtesy J. Coulthart!

Nov 25, 2005 New York Times

Art Review | ‘Day Is Done’

Adults Playing Children’s Scary Games

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
The Los Angeles veteran Mike Kelley’s latest show is a sprawling, scabrous spectacle of noisome installations and hilarious videos, occupying the whole of the cavernous Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea. Ingratiating Mr. Kelley’s work never has been, nor is it now. But serious it is, in its brainy, abrasive, black-humored way, and this is by far his most ambitious and perversely entertaining effort, an attempted Gesamtkunst-werk of satanic rituals and advertising jingles mingled with allusions to Godard, German Expressionist cinema and Stockhausen.

That there is a heart at the core of this crazy-sounding, toxic-comic carnival may be hard to detect at first because, as always with Mr. Kelley, the affect is severe. But it’s there. Like all dark social satirists, Mr. Kelley is simultaneously transfixed and outraged by the treacly, sentimental garbage and pointless violence that pass for contemporary culture, and so turns it to his mischievous use. Tapping into the perverse, libidinous, irrational undertow of ordinary American life, he produces something not quite redeeming and rather abstract.

This show is called “Day Is Done” and it extends a conceit of Mr. Kelley’s recent work. He devises oddball dramas and forlorn installations, imitations of amateur stage sets, based on photographs from high school yearbooks. School plays, musicals, square dances and other endearing or pathetic all-American dress-up rituals provide fodder. Mr. Kelley recreates the cheesy backdrops and get-ups worn by teenagers in the original black-and-white pictures, hires more-or-less look-alike actors – adults playing pubescents – then restages the photographs in color.

Occasionally the original photographs are tough to decipher. Mr. Kelley translated the graphics on one girl’s T-shirt as a baby duck on a stilt, a one-eyed kelp, and a tree branch or a pair of mechanical limbs, take your pick. He had a T-shirt made. A friend saw the original picture. It was the Looney Tunes Road Runner. Amused, Mr. Kelley produced an edition of T-shirts in sickly pink and baby-blue emblazoned with his surreal Looney Tune (the shirts are for sale at the show), as a kind of gag metaphor for his whole translating enterprise.

The photographs are the start. They also inspire far-flung riffs on their unknown characters: scripted, bizarro playlets with accompanying musical numbers in helter-skelter genres – image, text and music often clashing intentionally.

There are 28 installations-cum-musical-theater works in the show, a bazaar or a medley, depending on how you look at it. On a video alongside a high-backed chair rotating on a carpeted platform before a red curtain, a vampire belts out in the style of an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical: “Blood is all I crave, sweat is what I get, I hunger for … love.” The lonely vampire vainly waits for someone to sit in the chair, too shy to venture from behind the curtain.

Nearby a boy in a Nativity play slowly gesticulates to a soundtrack of electronic beeps. In the style of the Italian horror-film director Dario Argento, a chase is filmed through a house. Gospel singers wail before a 15-foot-long rocket ship. Heavily made-up barbers menace a kind of wild child who, while waiting for his haircut, thumbs through a porn magazine, then detects a curious similarity between one of the pictures and one of the customers.

A teenage girl dressed like a hillbilly recounts a nonsense parable in the manner of H. P. Lovecraft crossed with William Faulkner as part of a faux-reality show in which each character paints on black velvet a beloved tabloid-troubled celebrity. A catfight ensues with a Kiss-lover who rhapsodizes like a medieval troubadour about Gene Simmons’s tongue.

Did I mention the church confirmation in which a plump female communicant morphs into a devil worshiper, and teenage boys dressed in Nazi outfits suddenly rap about sex with fat women? Or the mesmerizing exotic dancer whose undulating silhouette casts a shadow that splits, mirror-fashion, on a mechanized, rotating curtain? Outtakes from her wiggly show, spliced together, create a separate short video, flat-screened, in the manner of experimental film.

Whatever else it is, Mr. Kelley’s button-pushing shebang is an amazing feat of industry and poetics. (Scott Benzel composed the music with Mr. Kelley.) It can grow on you, as it comes together, visually. Purple backdrops echo across the sea of abject bric-a-brac. A candy-cane throne, copied and turned on its side, makes a kind of Bauhaus-derived shelter, a sculptural echo. Figures crop up from one scenario to another. The boy in the barbershop is in the Nativity scene, and one of his barbers plays a devil. Themes of sexual desires go everywhere unfulfilled. Adults menace children.

That most of the characters are adult actors playing teenagers playing roles from high school dramas layers the irony and locates the emotional center not in juvenile angst but in some adult realm of sublimation and fantasy.

Rhetorical whiplash is Mr. Kelley’s style, and it can seem obfuscating. Coy allusions let an art audience flatter itself. But Mr. Kelley’s deep roots are in the performance tradition going back to the Vienna Actionists. Such raw theater is for some traditionalists art’s nemesis, but it is not meant to be easy.

The sheer ambition of this project suggests a conscious rebuke to the thinness and cookie-cutter-competence of much contemporary art with its go-along, get-along relationship to the market. Mr. Kelley’s art doesn’t get along and it doesn’t preach. He is an unlikely romantic, for whom art, when practiced at a stretch, should stick in your head and your craw.