Gorbachev!

GORBACHOV: THE MUSIC VIDEO - BIGGER AND RUSSIANER from Tom Stern on Vimeo.

Israel Sucks at Ads, Part II

Just another case of missing the point here. I get that it's fun to revel in your enemy's death, but wouldn't the recent Mossad hit on a mid-level Hamas member be something you want to keep to yourself? Man, I could have killed Mahmoud al-Mabhoub better than the Mossad killed him, because I know what a video camera is and I would have dressed like a real person instead of a yuppie grotesque from a Ralph Steadman drawing. Watching the video camera footage from the hotel is like watching a cartoon.

An actress in the ad said she found the hit "inspiring." Is any bloodletting at all, no matter how poorly executed, enough to get Israelis hard at this point? The Gaza massacre, the Dubai hit- what's next, feeding coins to seals at the zoo? Even Americans only like their bloodshed when it's well done; they liked the initial invasion of Iraq and the hanging of Saddam that went off without a hitch, but they don't like the counter-insurgency bits in Iraq and Afghanistan. Are the Israelis starting to enjoy things they're bad at, which is starting to even include Mossad operations? This speaks to great tension- the feeling of the walls closing in- and the desperation to relieve that tension by whatever option is available.

Gorillaz's "Plastic Beach": Another Green World, And This One Has Mark E. Smith On It

Mark E. Smith welcomes you to a beautiful electronic planet.

Gorillaz albums have always been a place where your quiet and alienated weird side can come out of hiding and hang out. That why, even though there's better music out there, I seem to keep coming back to Gorillaz songs more than seems due. It's makes sense that the band is composed of animated characters- this is music for your alter ego.

The new Gorillaz album, "Plastic Beach", is maybe the band's most welcoming and heartening yet. This is despite the fact that, unlike Gorillaz' more varied past albums, it's purely electronic music, which tends to be cold and alienating. Unlike a lot of electronic music, Plastic Beach doesn't make harsh demands that you dance or oppress you with stale electronic beats. And it doesn't create insubstantial electronic atmospheres that you need ecstasy to be immersed in.

Instead, the electronics cooly unfold to create colorful landscapes upon which vignettes are played out by the Damon Albran and the albums amazing set of guest artists. There's the lost highway of "Stylo" (see the music video) with Bobby Womack and Mos Def as the voices in your head as you drive, De la Soul sit back and talk shit at a pregame party or a lazy Sunday on "Superfast Jellyfish," and Snoop Dogg sounds like an otherworldly flight attendant on "Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach." (Is Soul Plane 90 minutes of that? Hmm, maybe I will see it after all.)

Unlike some electronic albums where there's excess attention shown to how the sounds are chopped and sliced together, Plastic Dreams doesn't show indifference to how the individual noises actually sound by themselves. This is particularly true of the guest vocalists; you get the sense that Albran isn't as interested in what they're saying as how they sound when they're saying it. The album warmly welcomed my old soul personally with a Mark E Smith guest appearance on "Glitter Freeze," and just like on his Fall records, the attitude in his delivery is so transcendent that it almost doesn't matter that you can't hear what he's actually saying.

This is an album where you'll definitely have personal favorite tracks that are endearing in some particular way. Maybe's it's the Middle Eastern time-warp on "White Flag," or the futuristic tourist ad featuring half of The Clash on "Plastic Beach." My personal favoriteis "Some Kind of Nature," where Lou Reed plays the old, deadpan drug-mystic that William Burroughs used to play on his old spoken word tracks, talking about needing to "protect the girls from the spiritual poison you expel at night." A lot of albums just have guest artists show up basically as cameos- and a few of the artists on "Plastic Beach" are literally "phoning it in," meaning that they're being recorded talking on the telephone- but its sounds like Albran has carefully chosen each artist for each track. Mark E Smith, who is the God of England, lords over an electronic cataclysm on his track and proclaims that it is a "Glitter Freeze." It's really works. It certainly isn't a case of bringing Kanye West on a track because you can.

People might say that there are better electronic albums out there from samplers like Ratatat, but I don't know- there's something oppressive and mechanical about their albums. Listening to them is like being trapped in a drawer with some guy's record collection: there's interesting stuff here and there, but only sheer darkness lies in between and beyond the individual sampled sounds. Electronic music has become our anti-life minimalism, like modernist architecture. In our time, they seem to say, there is the refuse of the past to sift through like some post-apocalyptic junkyard, and there is nothing else.

On the other hand, in terms of welcoming electronic atmospheres that feel fluid and expansive, Plastic Beach is like Brian Eno's Another Green World with a blockbuster budget. There might be better albums coming out this year, but very few that you'll play as much.

The English Beat

I saw the English Beat the other night, possibly the most purely enjoyable group to come out of England since The Yardbirds and likely the most joyous post-punk/ new wave Brit group ever. They're a ska revival band; like The Pogues or The Mekons, they took the no-future genre of punk and plugged it into a preexisting genre of music, maintaining the Britishness of the former but showing total respect for the latter. The English Beat's MO is to play punk-infused ska that's as danceable as most ska from Jamaica but has English cheek at its core.

There was only one member from the original band present, a geezer and a former alcoholic named David Wakeling. But like other hard living Brits who lost their original bands or their musical careers, like Mark E. Smith of The Fall, John Lydon of The Sex Pistols, or John Cooper Clarke, Wakeling had a good natured personality that is clearly hard won and allows him to maintain perfect contentedness as he goes from venue to venue. So he just stood up there, took the piss a little, and played playful and sometimes gorgeous ska music (you don't get to say that a lot) with a brilliant back up band. Totally solid.

I actually danced a lot- there were a lot of Brits in the audience (apparently every English person from Aspen came, as if to pay respect), and they all danced about as badly as I did. I'm inclined to like the Brits a bit for that, in spite of everything else. Anyway, check out Twist and Crawl and Mirror in the Bathroom to get started.

Israel and Hasbara Suck at Ads

Advertisers have exactly one job to do: make an association between their product and something awesome that it has almost nothing do with. Wear this deodorant and get the girl, eat at this restaurant and have a stable and even enjoyable relationship with your family, drink this beer and be cool and not the loud shithead you always, always are when you're drunk, etc. This is neither new nor rocket science.

So what does the Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy do in their ad? They associate their country with small penises.

Remember in Unforgiven when the bad guy mutilates the prostitute's face because she giggled at how tiny his "pecker" was? That's how awesome people think a small penis is. The CCIJA wins the "How Badly You Can Possibly Fuck Something Up" contest for today.

I don't know if there's any geopolitical significance to the total failure of this ad, since there are terrible ads for minivans, fast food, and other things that aren't apartheid states. Maybe the CCIJA is selling the old image of Israel, with its 400 nukes and 13 billion dollar military budget, as being the scrappy, can-do country surrounded by hostile Arab desert that people thought it was before the Gaza Massacre and the two intifadas. Maybe not. But this "Size Doesn't Matter" ad reminded me of two other Israel-related ads that are about as self-aware as Gary Busey in a sensory deprivation chamber:

First, there's the infamous Cellcom ad, where faceless and soundless Palestinians play soccer with Israeli soldiers. The irony of this ad, as a friend pointed out, is that Israeli soldiers have shot kids who play soccer too close to the wall, and the IDF has set up a number of safely dehumanized "auto-kill zones" near the Gazan border, so Palestinians can play soccer under remote-controlled gun-turrets that can sense their movement. At least this ad, which depicts the other side of the wall as an unknown wilderness, as if the Israelis were Puritan settlers and the Palestinians were Iroquois, gives lie to the claim that Israel is constantly beleagured by it's Arab occupants- rather, the Palestinians are now almost wholly invisible and ignorable to Israelis beside the occasional rocket.

Then there this creeper of an ad. You know those science fiction films that show what the modern advertisement would look like in a dystopian or totalitarian state, like in Children of Men or Blade Runner? This feels like a PSA in 1984. "Report on friends who marry goys." (To Israel's credit, enough Israelis protested so that the ad was taken off the air).

The one unifying thread for all these ads is that anyone with a modicum of awareness can immediately see how terrible they are, and why. The first two requires some moral awareness; the third is just aesthetic- but all are consistent with Norman Finkelstein's description of Israel as a lunatic state. They just don't know what's going on any more on a number of fronts: they had no idea what Hezbollah was up to in 2006, they're amazed that people don't like them after they massacred 1400 Gazans; their recent hit of a mid-level Hamas member in Dubai made G. Gordon Liddy's Watergate meatheads look like actual spies. They're declining on the military front, on the intelligence front, and particularly on the propaganda front.

Advertising is one arm of that latter front. If Israel is doing as poorly as its ads suggest, then it's in bigger trouble than I thought. Just more good news from the front is all.

PS. The response of protestors in Bil'in, the West Bank to the Cellcom ad.

Faith in Winter

On this winter night, forever is an end

Rather than a beginning.

The stars trace like signposts along its border;

Street lights pin it to the earth.

And the cold is settled firmly in between.

Pressed against the border of all there is,

The one thing we share with the stars:

The sharp edge of the night's black glass.

Under the row of street lamps,

My thoughts are cast into the night

As if stones skipped upon bottomless water.

Faith has become a guessing game about

What is on the other side of a wall.

The grey wisps of my breath

Break against the cold,

Disappearing as if swallowed.