Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September
19, 2003
Ilan Pappe
The
Hole in the Road Map
Bill Glahn
RIAA is Full of Bunk, So is the New York Times
Dave Lindorff
General Hysteria: the Clark Bandwagon
Robert Fisk
New Guard is Saddam's Old
Jeff Halper
Preparing
for a Struggle Against Israeli Apartheid
Brian J. Foley
Power to the Purse
Clare
Brandabur
Hitchens
Smears Edward Said
Website of the Day
Live from Palestine
September
18, 2003
Mona Baker
and Lawrence Davidson
In
Defense of the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Wayne
Madsen
Wesley
Clark for President? Another Neo-Con Con Job
Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Wesley Clark and Waco
Muqtedar Khan
The Pakistan Squeeze
Dominique
de Villepin
The
Reconstruction of Iraq: This Approach is Leading Nowhere
Angus Wright
Brazilian Land Reform Offers Hope
Elaine
Cassel
Payback is Hell
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Website
of the Day
ALA Responds to Ashcroft's Smear
Recent
Stories
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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September
20, 2003
Masked and Anonymous
Bob
Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
By DAVID VEST
Bob Dylan's new film, "Masked and Anonymous,"
has met with almost universal condemnation (or worse, condescension)
from critics in the corporate media. According to most reviewers,
in lieu of a plot the film offers "rambling incoherence"
and "incomprehensible dialogue." It is "an exercise
in self-indulgence." Several reviewers have actually worried
in print that Dylan made the movie in order to have some kind
of joke at their expense. Dylan's character, Jack Fate, has little
or nothing to say, we are repeatedly told, and more or less just
"sits there like a toad," in the words of Roger Ebert,
who should be the last person to accuse anyone of that.
Could the movie really be this bad? It
wouldn't matter if it were equal to "The Tempest" or
"Julius Caesar," it has already been pronounced D.O.A.
Anytime the nation's media are this unanimous
about anything, one would do well to be suspicious. After all,
President Bush's decision to invade Iraq in search of "weapons
of mass destruction" was met not with skepticism but with
near-unanimous cheerleading and boosterizing in the  corporate media.
Reviewers had already effectively killed
Dylan's film by the time it arrived in Portland, Oregon for a
perfunctory one-week run. Although attendance grew steadily during
the week, it started sparse and grew toward respectable.
Not ten minutes after the opening credits
I could see why the film had been marked for assassination by
big newspaper media critics. They are the villains of the piece!
"Masked and Anonymous" portrays the reporters who wrote
the bad reviews as people who have to wear ankle monitors. Editors
hold the keys that control them. Who owns the editors is pretty
clear, too. The sight of superstar critic and Sixties specialist
"Tom Friend" (Jeff Bridges) being beaten to death with
Blind Lemon Jefferson's guitar must have been too much for them.
"Friend," obsessed with his
own memories of the Sixties but oblivious to what is going on
outside the window, never seems to notice that Fate, his quarry,
answers none of his questions.
Officials of the "network"
televising the "benefit" on which Fate is to appear
see him as self-indulgent, too. They want him to sing "Jailhouse
Rock," "Jumping Jack Flash" and "Revolution
-- the slow version."
He gives them "Dixie."
The infamous "rambling and incomprehensible"
plot is in fact rather well-constructed and makes abundant sense.
Although the project could have used some tighter editing and
more attention to minor issues of continuity, anyone who couldn't
follow this movie probably couldn't be trusted with a comic book.
The storyline is no more "obscure" or "disjointed"
than "A Hard Day's Night."
But it hits a great deal harder. When
the camera pans slowly down a desolate L.A. avenue, and Dylan
is heard singing "Seen the arrow on the doorpost, saying
This Land is Condemned, all the way from New Orleans to Jerusalem,"
try to keep tears from welling. (Or sit there like a toad eating
popcorn and stuff the feeling, it's your call.)
Whereas the concert finale of "A
Hard Day's Night" is witnessed by screaming teenagers and
an adoring TV audience, the concert performed by Fate in "Masked
and Anonymous" is seen by no one except stage hands and
extras because it is pre-empted by a presidential speech and
interrupted by guns and bayonets.
In spite of what you may have read, the
film is not "set in some imaginary third-world country at
some point in the future," anymore than King Lear is about
prehistoric England. Failure to recognize the true setting should
immediately disqualify any reviewer. "Masked and Anonymous"
is a spot-on accurate portrayal of what is going on RIGHT NOW,
seen through the eyes of someone with vision and not just eyesight,
someone who has looked through the eyes not only of Charley Patton
and Elizabeth Cotton but also of Emmett Miller and even Daniel
Decatur Emmett.
All America's chicken-hawk foreign wars
have come home to roost. The horrors once visited upon El Salvador,
Nicaragua, Vietnam, Somalia and Iraq are now rolling through
the streets of California. All the electoral disgrace of recent
campaigns has been compressed into one presidential speech. As
for the major media as portrayed in this film, it is impossible
not to think of Christiane Amanpour's recent admission that CNN
"was intimidated" by the Bush administration and operated
in a "climate of fear and self-censorship" during the
invasion of Iraq.
When the new president (Mickey Roarke)
concludes his "war-is-peace" oration at the end of
the film with the sarcastic words "May God help you all,"
it is merely what anyone with a perceptive imagination can hear
Bush or Cheney saying when they conclude their speeches with
the formulaic "God Bless America." Certainly the administration
portrayed in "Masked and Anonymous" is no more thuggish
than the one currently rooting at the trough in Washington.
Or, as Uncle Sweetheart (John Goodman)
puts it, "It's the dark princes, the democratic republicans,
working for a barbarian who can scarcely spell his own name."
When a soldier (Giovanni Ribisi) tells
Fate of fighting first with the rebels, then with the counter-insurgents,
then with the Government, then with the rebels again, only to
discover that some of the rebels are in fact funded by the very
Government they're supposed to be opposing, how strange does
that seem to anyone familiar with the betrayals and capitulations
of contemporary politics, especially movement politics? It's
like finding out who sponsors "Earth Day."
My favorite exchange: "I'm trying
to be on your side, Jack," says Uncle Sweetheart, the promoter
who is, naturally, "only trying to help."
"You have to be born on my side,
Sweetheart," says Fate.
To be on the side of workers, of animals,
of oppressed people, of love, of the truth is to court destruction.
Before singing his final song and meeting his own fate, Jack
Fate experiences a visitation by his ghostly forerunner, Oscar
Vogel (Ed Harris), a banjo-playing entertainer who worked in
blackface and who disappeared after raising his voice against
the times. When Fate looks back to catch a last glimpse of Vogel,
the vaudevillian has been replaced by a young Black man who could
be a janitor, a Reggae artist or a rising Hip-Hop truth teller,
next in the line of destiny, or line of fire.
This film isn't perfect. I have read
the original screenplay and far too much has been cut out of
it to try to make it acceptable to people who would have had
none of it under any circumstances. But it is the only motion
picture I have seen so far in this millennium that seems to have
a clue about what is going on in America. Moviegoers will get
it or they won't. Great pains have been taken to ensure that
they won't even see it.
It is a tale of almost unbearable sadness
and loss. When Dylan sings "I'll Remember You," as
electrifying a performance as has ever been caught on camera
(all the songs are performed live, there's no lip-synching in
this movie) you feel that he may well be singing not merely about
a person but also about that "lost America of love"
that Ginsberg mourned in "A Supermarket in California,"
a work that in its visionary aspect and intensity "Masked
and Anonymous" resembles. (Its ultimate antecedents are
of course Shakespeare's history plays.)
When Dylan's character, Fate, is reunited
with his lost/doomed love (Angela Bassett, magnificent in the
role), she endeavors with great tenderness to console him for
his losses, and without a word Dylan manages to convey that Fate's
grief is inconsolable. It is a scene of considerable beauty and
delicacy.
Dylan's performance has been called "inscrutable."
But who else could have played this role? There are people who
find his songs inscrutable as well, and I suppose arguing with
them would be as pointless as trying to answer "Tom Friend's"
interview questions. (These days, anything an idiot can't or
won't bother to understand is "incomprehensible" and
"inscrutable.")
The most daring (and intriguing) line
in the film slips by almost unnoticed: moments after Jack Fate
is arrested for a sudden act of violence committed by his sidekick
Bobby Cupid (Luke Wilson), he thinks to himself, "Sometimes
it's not enough to know the meaning of things. Sometimes we have
to know what things don't mean as well. Like, what does it mean
to not know what the person you love is capable of?"
Unlike D. A. Pennebaker's "Don't
Look Back," which showed a young Dylan eating dumb but presumptuous
critics alive, "Masked and Anonymous" depicts an aging
Jack Fate with nothing whatever to say to them. "I was always
a singer and maybe no more than that," he says.
So much for "self-indulgence."
David Vest
writes the Rebel Angel column for CounterPunch. He and his band,
The Willing Victims, just released a scorching new CD, Way
Down Here.
He can be reached at: davidvest@springmail.com
Visit his website at http://www.rebelangel.com
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
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