Ikea Is The Disney World Of China

People go there just to hang out.
Hat tip to Gawker

What Happened To The Prisoner?

HMM.

Album Review: Pink Floyd's 'Meddle'

When it comes to recordings, I have long had a peculiar habit of often finding the album a band made before its breakthrough hit to be my favorite. Three examples: Steely Dan's Royal Scam, which preceded Aja; the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed, which preceded Sticky Fingers, and Miles Davis's Filles de Kilimanjaro, which preceded In a Silent Way.

And so it is with Pink Floyd.

While Dark Side of the Moon, which remained on the charts for an extraordinary 741 weeks (14 years) after its 1973 release is probably the best concept album this side of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band, it is Meddle, the band's previously released album, that I have reached for most often over the years. That may have something to do with the fact that the first time I heard Pink Floyd live they played Meddle in its entirety. Or I think they did.

Depending on how you count, Meddle was Pink Floyd's fifth or sixth album (and while Obscured by Clouds was released in between Meddle and Dark Side, I'm not counting it for the purposes of this essay because it was composed as the soundtrack for the French movie La Vallée and not purpose built from scratch. (It's my blog, okay? Which also is why I can get away with reviewing a 38-year-old album, okay?)

Meddle, released in 1971, is made up of five then new songs on the A-Side and one long song on the B-Side that Pink Floyd had been performing in concert under the title of "The Return of the Son of Nothing."

Meddle is special because it was a departure from Space Rock for a band that had come to loath that label, finally had some real cohesion after the slow-motion exit of lead singer, lead composer and lead maniac Syd Barrett, was not yet engaged in the full-blown warfare that would characterize band members' relations with each other, and was ready for new horizons beyond relentless noodling for its own sake.

Those conquered horizons would mark Pink Floyd as progressive rock avatars who would go on to sell an extraordinary 200 million albums worldwide.

* * * * *

Although I came to love each and every one of Meddle's A-Side compositions, they vary wildly in quality and mood.

First off is the largely instrumental "One of these Days," which is followed by "A Pillow of Winds," one of the very few acoustic love songs in the band's catalog. The two are connected by windy sound effects that anticipate "Wish You Were Here" on the 1975 album of the same name.

Next up is "Fearless," which is overdubbed and ends with a field recording of the Liverpool Football Club choir singing that soccer team's theme song, "You'll Never Walk Alone," then "San Tropez," a jazz-inflected piece of pop with a shuffle beat that recalls a band vacation at the French resort on the Mediterranean. The side ends with "Seamus," a whimsical ditty that includes the yowls of the collie of0 Humble Pie frontman Steve Marriott, whom Pink Floyd guitarist and lead singer David Gilmour was looking after while that band was on tour.

"Seamus" is forgettable and indeed was quickly forgotten when a listener would get up in the old days, trundle over to their stereo and turn over a vinyl recording of Meddle, an inconvenience negated with the advent of audio cassettes and later compact discs.

Quickly forgotten indeed with the pinging, wind-like sound and then the insistent opening bass and organ lines of "Echoes," a 23 minute-plus aural masterpiece alternately described as scary and uplifting by people with whom I have listened to it over the years. I come down somewhere in between, but the song is riveting to the very end -- an unforgettable sine-wave glissando.

Listening to "Echoes" today, I am struck by how structured it is compared to Pink Floyd's previous extended compositions. Where "Astronomy Domine" and "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun," to name two jam pieces on the Ummagumma album, remain eminently listenable, they are less the sum of their parts. "Echoes" is much more than the sum of its parts and the whale song-like screams and other bits are purposeful, not helter skelter.

"Echoes" is credited to the entire band: bass player Rogers Waters, Gilmour, drummer Nick Mason and keyboardist Richard Wright. Gilmour was the chief composer of the music, but the haunting lyrics are Waters', who told Pink Floyd biographer Mark Blake that they came from a sense of disconnection he experienced following Barrett's turbulent departure from the band:

Writes Blake:

"Waters and his future wife Judy Trim had moved to a flat in Shepherds Bush, West London. One window of the apartment afforded a clear view of the busy Goldhawk Road, down which the couple would observe an ant-like procession of commuters heading off for a day's toil in the morning and returning in the evening. The lyrics referring to strangers passing in the street were, he explained, 'all about making connections with other people. About the potential that human beings have for recognizing each other's humanity.' Perversely, despite the icy distance that would develop between some of those writing and performing the music, the theme of communication, of reaching out, would be one the band would return to obsessively."

The only thing not to like about Meddle is its abstract cover, a close-up of a human ear under water, and easily the least attractive of Pink Floyd's album sleeves. Otherwise, it is an aural delight. If your Pink Floyd repertoire tends toward chart busters like Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall, then you owe it to yourself to dive into what came before and made what came after possible. That would be Meddle.

* * * * *

If you wanted to read about Pink Floyd in addition to listening to them, there are two biographies of note: Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (2008) by the aforementioned Mark Blake, and Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey (1991) by Nicholas Schafner.

PHOTOS (from top): Gilmour, Mason, Waters, Wright, Barrett.

'By Chance Two Separate Glances Meet'

ECHOES
By Pink Floyd

Overhead the albatross
Hangs motionless upon the air
And deep beneath the rolling waves
In labyrinths of coral caves
An echo of a distant time
Comes willowing across the sand
And everything is green and submarine.

And no one called us to the land
And no one knows the where's or why's.
Something stirs and something tries
Starts to climb toward the light.

Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me.
And do I take you by the hand
And lead you through the land
And help me understand
The best I can.

And no one called us to the land
And no one crosses there alive.
No one speaks and no one tries
No one flies around the sun . . .

Almost everyday you fall
Upon my waking eyes,
Inviting and inciting me
To rise.
And through the window in the wall
Come streaming in on sunlight wings
A million bright ambassadors of morning.

And no one sings me lullabyes
And no one makes me close my eyes
So I throw the windows wide
And call to you across the sky . . .

Paul Still Dead, But Was Brian Murdered?

When Brian Jones was found face down in the swimming pool of his East Sussex home and very dead shortly after being booted from the Rolling Stones some 40 years ago, there was speculation that he had been murdered and hadn't died because of a long night of drinking and drugging. Or perhaps was a suicide

Based on new information, British police have reopened the investigation into the death of Jones, 27, whose bad-boy antics got to be too much even for the Stones.

The prime suspect is Frank Thorogood, Jones' minder, who according to the now-deceased house guest who found the body, seemed shaken even before Jones was discovered.

Beautiful Photographs du Jour

A PINK FLOYD LIGHT SHOW

It's Time To Put CIA Out Of Its Misery

CIA learned of Berlin Wall fall and Soviet Union collapse on CNN

It is appropriate amidst all of the bloviating, whinging, hankie wringing and wrist slashing concerning the CIA's role in the Bush Torture Regime to put the so-called intelligence agency in an historical perspective.

A sports metaphor will do: If the CIA was a major-league baseball team, its record in its 100 biggest games would be something like 5 and 95. That's right, a mere five wins in a 62-year history, which is as compelling an argument as any for telling Dick Cheney and other crybabies to shut the frick up. And while we're at it, let's pass the hat to pay for digging a big hole down in Langley, Virginia, and bury this sad sack and obsolete agency once and forever.

Now that I've gotten that off my chest, let's debunk the claims of CIA sycophants that many of its successes are secret. That's horse hockey, which pretty much leaves us with these:

* It anticipated and warned about 1967 Six-Day War in the Middle East.

* It waged a successful cyber warfare campaign against a Soviet espionage team in the mid-1980s and precipitated the exit of the Soviets from Afghanistan (which it then botched by failing to anticipate the rise of the Taliban).

Moving right along, these are but a few examples of the CIA's overarching incompetence:

* Failing to anticipate and warn about the 1950 Chinese invasion of Korea.

* Failing to anticipate and warn about the 1959 takeover of Cuba by Fidel Castro.

* Failing to anticipate and warn about the 1963 Cuban missile crisis.

* Failing to anticipate and warn about the strength of and support for the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong in the 1960s.

* Failing to anticipate and warn about the 1979 ouster of the Shah, Iranian revolution and rise of the ayatollahs.

* Failing to anticipate and warn about the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

* Failing to anticipate and warn about the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.

* Failing to anticipate and warn about the coming of Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda and the global Islamic jihad in the mid-1990s.

* Failing to anticipate and warn about the 1998 explosion of a nuclear bomb by India, which remade the balance of power in South Asia.

* Failing to anticipate and warn about the 9/11 attacks.

* Failing ascertain that that the pre-2003 invasion claims of Saddam Hussein that he had WMD were false. (The State Department's tiny intelligence unit got it right. And was ignored.)

Let's be clear: An agency with a mandate like the CIA sometimes has to engage in illegal behavior for the greater good. But while the CIA did plenty of rotten things, the blame must be shared by presidents and congressional overseers who have been bootlicked while being fed a diet of lies and misinformation.

Fact of the matter is, a decade into the new millennium the National Security Agency and other intelligence groups have pretty much marginalized the CIA's usefulness and where the agency could make a difference -- humint (as in human intelligence) it has been and continues to be a scandalous failure.

As Tim Weiner wrote in Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA:

"For sixty years tens of thousands of clandestine service officers have gathered only the barest threads of truly important intelligence -- and that is the CIA's deepest secret. Their mission is extraordinarily hard. But we Americans still do not understand the people and the political forces we seek to contain and control. The CIA has yet to become what its creators hoped it would be."

Cartoon du Jour

Michael Ramirez/Investors Business Daily

'So Are You Gonna Let Me Adopt Him?'

Not that we need a fuller picture of Sarah Palin -- and acknowledging the the source is a not-to-be son-in-law who was used, abused and discarded after the Alaska governor's run for the roses with John McCain crashed and burned -- but Levi Johnson's revelations in a forthcoming Vanity Fair article further reveal Palin to be a deeply screwed up woman.

After the 2008 election:

Sarah was sad for a while. She walked around the house pouting. I had assumed she was going to go back to her job as governor, but a week or two after she got back she started talking about how nice it would be to quit and write a book or do a show and make "triple the money." It was, to her, "not as hard." She would blatantly say, "I want to just take this money and quit being governor." She started to say it frequently, but she didn't know how to do it. When she came home from work, it seemed like she was more and more stressed out.

She was not exactly the super mom that she has portrayed herself as:

The Palin house was much different from what many people expect of a normal family, even before she was nominated for vice president. There wasn't much parenting in that house. Sarah doesn't cook, Todd doesn't cook -- the kids would do it all themselves: cook, clean, do the laundry, and get ready for school. Most of the time Bristol would help her youngest sister with her homework, and I'd barbecue chicken or steak on the grill.

And tried to hide Bristol's pregnancy after Levi knocked her up:

Sarah told me she had a great idea: we would keep it a secret -- nobody would know that Bristol was pregnant. She told me that once Bristol had the baby she and Todd would adopt him. That way, she said, Bristol and I didn't have to worry about anything. Sarah kept mentioning this plan. She was nagging -- she wouldn't give up. She would say, "So, are you gonna let me adopt him?" We both kept telling her we were definitely not going to let her adopt the baby. I think Sarah wanted to make Bristol look good, and she didn't want people to know that her 17-year-old daughter was going to have a kid.

The adoption shtick has a somewhat familiar ring because of persistent rumors during and after the campaign that Baby T was not the issue of Mother S. And is it any wonder that Bristol became pregnant with a control-freak mother who measured her every breath?

Top photographs by Nigel Parry/CPi Syndication & Mark Seliger

Diane Sawyer: The New Dinosaur Rider

Mind you, I have nothing against Diane Sawyer, but I can't remember the last time I watched the "ABC Evening News," or for that matter any of the other network evening newscasts.

So I was kind of taken aback by the lavish coverage this rearranging of the deck chairs is receiving. After all, a woman anchor is no longer a novelty. Besides which, network news is going the way of the dinosaur. And who's gonna miss Charles Gibson?

Attack Of The Powerful Little Sugar Pill

There is a passage in Comfortably Numb, a book chronicling the history of Pink Floyd, where promoters of one of the band's earlier gigs at an underground club in London handed out sugar cubes assumed to be laced with LSD to everyone coming through the door. Although the cubes were placebos, many of the concertgoers nevertheless danced the night away in hallucinatory-like trances.

This incident came to mind as a read a terrific piece titled "Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why" by Steve Silberman in Wired.

The bottom line is that pharmaceutical companies must prove that new drugs are more effective than placebos and for reasons that are unclear, that is getting harder to do even thought the Placebo Effect has long been acknowledged -- and thought to be understood.

Meanwhile, Big Pharma marches on: Pfizer has agreed to pay a record $2.3 billion fine -- the largest healthcare fraud settlement in the history of the Department of Justice -- after pleading guilty to illegally promoting four drugs and submitting false claims for uses that were not medically accepted.

Hat tip to Donkelphant

Da Mets: Flat Out Bad In Flushing

It is a sign of how truly crappy the New York Mets are on the field and in the front office that I actually . . . uh, actually . . . okay, I'll blurt it out: I actually feel sorry for them. Kind of.

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

TRAILWAYS BUSH STATION
(Bainbridge, Georgia, 1978)
By Paul Kwilecki

Hat tip to Woods' Lot

Iraq Disintegrates & America Yawns

The downward spiral of events in Iraq give me an outsized feeling of omnipotence, but then I'm brought up short.

Who other than a Bush Era apologist, which I am most certainly not, would be surprised that the military gains of the Surge strategy have been squandered by a feckless Baghdad government that has, by its actions and inactions, engineered the return of the insurgency, a level of sectarian violence not seen in a couple of years, and the reality that Prime Minister Al-Maliki's political career is in the shitter. And that all of these things are occurring right on schedule: That is, as the drawdown of American troops accelerates.

These things also are happening because of the bomb and not the ballot box, and as far as most Americans are concerned, are happening on another planet because of a paucity of news media coverage and that Yankee inscrutability: If we don't care about it then it doesn't exist.

Al-Maliki's fall has been precipitous and nothing is more symbolic of that than massive truck bombings that destroyed the Foreign and Finance ministries on August 19, killing 95 people. The consensus view is that the attacks were telegraphed and came off because of the collusion of insurgents and Iraqi security forces.

Not exactly what the guarantor of a safe, stable and American troop-free Iraq had been preaching.

In fact, violent deaths in Iraq hit a 13-month high in August. Some 456 people -- 393 civilians, 48 police and 15 Iraqi soldiers -- were killed in what was the highest toll since July 2008.

The body count, however, is merely a distraction. It is what is going on beyond the violence that has spelled likely defeat for Al-Maliki in national elections scheduled for January.

Although Al-Maliki is a Shiite, the majority sect's elders never trusted him and he owes his job to merely having been the least bad choice when he took office in 2006. Nobody is buying his post-"Bloody Wednesday" bombing pronouncement that a coalition with the minority Sunnis and marginalized Kurds will cure what ails Iraq. These three groups have been able to agree about nothing, whether it is power sharing, divvying up oil revenues or when or whether the Americans should leave.

One sign of the prime minister's shaky standing was the discovery this week of caches of weapons stockpiled by his Shiite political rivals.

Meanwhile, the American withdrawal, scheduled to be completed by the end of august 2010, is well under way. Seven U.S. soldiers died in Iraq in August, the lowest number since the 2003 invasion, in large part because they're trying to stay out of harm's way. Some 4,336 Americans in all have perished, but then who's counting?

Top photograph by The Associated Press

AfPak Chances Better Than A Coin Toss?

Did Barack Obama show great foresight by changing course in South Asia or great weakness by failing to stay the course? Answer here.

Photograph by John Moore

Cartoon du Jour

Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate

Investigating The Torture Docs

Physicians for Human Rights is calling for an independent investigation of the doctors, psychologists and and other health care professionals complicit in the Bush Torture Regime, the first time that a professional group has done so. It's about time.

From Acorns Mighty Oaks Grow

Today is the 40th anniversary of the Internet.

Gotta Love Those Pious South Carolinians

First it was Mark Sanford. Now there's this. And this.

Obligatory Catholic Bashing Post

This guy was too right wing for even the Vatican.

Is Michigan About To Feel The Burn?

Major college football is big business and about the only thing that stands between it being a totally out-of-control big business and merely the hottest ticket on any given Saturday in the fall is the NCAA and the rare college athletic director with a conscience.

The NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) is a bunch of self-righteous scolds with a rulebook as thick as the Manhattan telephone directory, but these rules do serve a purpose: They are a check on programs that emphasize football to the detriment of academics and help ensure fair competition.

The rules are anything but ambiguous, but this has not prevented many big-time programs from ignoring them and, in some cases, getting sanctioned by the NCAA in the form of loss of scholarships, games won and the Holy Grail of post-season competition.

Now comes an explosive story in the Detroit Free Press that the University of Michigan under semi-new coach Rich Rodriguez, has repeatedly violated NCAA rules. The source of the allegations are players themselves.

Michigan's program has been sanctions free, but that may be about to change, and while one can feel some sympathy for the players, Rodriguez was a known quantity to the people in Ann Arbor who hired him:

A guy who comes up short in the scruples department and played hardball with and then dumped the University of West Virginia, where he had previously coached, cries on cue and begs for understanding when he comes under fire. But then this is about winning games and championships. All other considerations are secondary.

Photo by Julian H. Gonzalez/Detroit Free Press

Chris Connor (1927-2009)

MORE HERE.

Cartoon du Jour

Tony Auth/The Philadelphia Inquirer

This Is Not About Cheney's Latest Lies

At age 34, two years before his first election and two decades before he would run for governor of Virginia, Robert F. McDonnell submitted a master's thesis to the evangelical school he was attending in which he described working women and feminists as "detrimental" to the family.

The 93-page paper ends with a 15-point action plan that McDonnell said the Republican Party should follow to protect American families -- a vision that he started to put into action soon after he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates.

More here.

This Is Not About Palin's Latest Lies

It was only a matter of time before it would turn out that those reusable designer metal water bottles contain unmentionables that hip people are avoiding not using unhip plastic water bottles.

The folks at Sigg now confirm that some of their bottles --yeah, the ones that show up at Fashion Week and have designs featuring Hannah Montana and celebrating Earth Day -- contain the very Bisphenol-A, or BPA that turn up in plastic bottles.

But not to worry, they don't anymore. Maybe.

More here.

Yo Ford: Why Mess With Success?

The Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor is as ubiquitous as McDonald's restaurants on America's highways and byways.

Mind you that the Crown Vic won the hearts of smokies from coast to coast because it was the last suitably big car made by the Big Two and a Half, but cops also love 'em because they're roomy, safe, the column shift enables them to easily stash a shotgun . . . oh, and they're fast.

So why is Ford thinking of killing them off?