Show Tomorrow (Tues, Aug 9) @ UB&G
I’ll still be holding court this Tuesday nite (& next) at the UB&G.
Tues, Aug 09
Universal Bar & Grill – 8:30PM (my set)
4093 Lankershim Blvd (at Cahuenga)
N. Hollywood, CA. 91602
818-766-2114
FREE
+ + + + + + + + +
LISTENING TO:
*Brendan Benson: The Alternative To Love
Title track reminds me of Nick Lowe in his power-pop heyday. Brendan put on a good, straight-forward show at the Troubadour here in LA a few months back.
*Ennio Morricone: With Love - Classic Italian Soundtracks
Enchanting melodies from the master.
*Emitt Rhodes: Emitt Rhodes
Recorded almost simultaneously as McCartney’s first solo record. Track for track, Emitt’s is a stronger solo-debut. You might have heard Emitt’s song “Lullaby” in the movie The Royal Tenenbaums (2001).
*Annie Lennox, Rolling Stones, Rush: Annie's Stoned Rush
(aka Annie Lennox vs. The Rolling Stones & Rush)
Cool & strange remix (mash up?) of Annie Lennox vocal over the Stones “Satisfaction” and then some Rush song (Fly By Night?). Heard it on Indie 103.1 while channel surfing.
+ + + + + + + + +
NEXT SHOW:
Tues, Aug 16
Universal Bar & Grill – 8:30PM (my set)
4093 Lankershim Blvd (at Cahuenga)
N. Hollywood, CA. 91602
818-766-2114
FREE
+ + + + + + + + +
QUOTE:
“The closest I’m getting to Tokyo is Benihana’s.”
-Edgerrin James, Indianapolis Colts
The star NFL running back (known for his disdain of both flying & pre-season games) on the chances he’d be at this year’s first pre-season game (The American Bowl), which is held in Tokyo. Ultimately, his hand was forced & he made the flight & the game, saying: “My options were limited.”
+ + + + + + + + +
READING:
*Name Calling
by George Packer, The New Yorker
“… America is no longer fighting the global war on terrorism. The Administration has replaced, or revised, or expanded the G.W.O.T. with a new phrase: “a global struggle against violent extremism.” The war is now a struggle.”
www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/050808ta_talk_packer
*I Predict: Bush Will Pardon Rove
by Paul Begala
Funny stuff. Check out the speech Begala (former presidential speechwriter himself) writes for W.
www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/featuredposts.html#a005266
+ + + + + + + + +
WELCOMING BACK:
*Monday Night Football
Yes, I’m ready for some football. Even if it’s just pre-season. Good to see some jerseys on the field & Al & John at the mic.
+ + + + + + + + +
WILL BE MISSING:
*Peter Jennings
Rest in peace. One of the last of the few class acts left in that business. Not bad for a high school dropout. As a friend of mine once pondered, was there anyone in the public eye closer to a real-life James Bond?
+ + + + + + + + +
TUNES ONLINE:
Don’t forget, my whole catalog (practically) is available at digital download sites everywhere. Thanks again for the sales!
+ + + + + + + + +
GOOD TO KNOW VIDEO
You can stream the video for Good To Know anytime at: www.gregbrooksfilms.com/
+ + + + + + + + +
Hope to see ya Tuesday.
Cheers & stay cool,
Brady
www.bradyharris.com
Tues, Aug 09
Universal Bar & Grill – 8:30PM (my set)
4093 Lankershim Blvd (at Cahuenga)
N. Hollywood, CA. 91602
818-766-2114
FREE
+ + + + + + + + +
LISTENING TO:
*Brendan Benson: The Alternative To Love
Title track reminds me of Nick Lowe in his power-pop heyday. Brendan put on a good, straight-forward show at the Troubadour here in LA a few months back.
*Ennio Morricone: With Love - Classic Italian Soundtracks
Enchanting melodies from the master.
*Emitt Rhodes: Emitt Rhodes
Recorded almost simultaneously as McCartney’s first solo record. Track for track, Emitt’s is a stronger solo-debut. You might have heard Emitt’s song “Lullaby” in the movie The Royal Tenenbaums (2001).
*Annie Lennox, Rolling Stones, Rush: Annie's Stoned Rush
(aka Annie Lennox vs. The Rolling Stones & Rush)
Cool & strange remix (mash up?) of Annie Lennox vocal over the Stones “Satisfaction” and then some Rush song (Fly By Night?). Heard it on Indie 103.1 while channel surfing.
+ + + + + + + + +
NEXT SHOW:
Tues, Aug 16
Universal Bar & Grill – 8:30PM (my set)
4093 Lankershim Blvd (at Cahuenga)
N. Hollywood, CA. 91602
818-766-2114
FREE
+ + + + + + + + +
QUOTE:
“The closest I’m getting to Tokyo is Benihana’s.”
-Edgerrin James, Indianapolis Colts
The star NFL running back (known for his disdain of both flying & pre-season games) on the chances he’d be at this year’s first pre-season game (The American Bowl), which is held in Tokyo. Ultimately, his hand was forced & he made the flight & the game, saying: “My options were limited.”
+ + + + + + + + +
READING:
*Name Calling
by George Packer, The New Yorker
“… America is no longer fighting the global war on terrorism. The Administration has replaced, or revised, or expanded the G.W.O.T. with a new phrase: “a global struggle against violent extremism.” The war is now a struggle.”
www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/050808ta_talk_packer
*I Predict: Bush Will Pardon Rove
by Paul Begala
Funny stuff. Check out the speech Begala (former presidential speechwriter himself) writes for W.
www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/featuredposts.html#a005266
+ + + + + + + + +
WELCOMING BACK:
*Monday Night Football
Yes, I’m ready for some football. Even if it’s just pre-season. Good to see some jerseys on the field & Al & John at the mic.
+ + + + + + + + +
WILL BE MISSING:
*Peter Jennings
Rest in peace. One of the last of the few class acts left in that business. Not bad for a high school dropout. As a friend of mine once pondered, was there anyone in the public eye closer to a real-life James Bond?
+ + + + + + + + +
TUNES ONLINE:
Don’t forget, my whole catalog (practically) is available at digital download sites everywhere. Thanks again for the sales!
+ + + + + + + + +
GOOD TO KNOW VIDEO
You can stream the video for Good To Know anytime at: www.gregbrooksfilms.com/
+ + + + + + + + +
Hope to see ya Tuesday.
Cheers & stay cool,
Brady
www.bradyharris.com
posted by blackpug at 11:19 AM
4 Comments:
The New Yorker Magazine (2005-08-08)
NAME CALLING
by George Packer
You had to be a careful reader of the inside pages of the Times last week to notice that America is no longer fighting the global war on terrorism. The Administration has replaced, or revised, or expanded the G.W.O.T. with a new phrase: “a global struggle against violent extremism.” The war is now a struggle. The terrorist enemy is now the violent extremist enemy. The focus has shifted from a tactic to an ideology. In a major new strategy document quoted in U.S. News & World Report, the Pentagon is even more specific (and more accurate), venturing onto delicate ground by calling the threat “Islamist extremism” and “extremist Sunni and Shia movements that exploit Islam for political ends.” In June, a Marine lieutenant general, Wallace Gregson, floated the new thinking in a speech: “This is no more a war on terrorism than the Second World War was a war on submarines,” he said. “The decisive terrain in this war is the vast majority of people who are not directly involved but whose support, willing or coerced, is necessary to insurgent operations around the world.” On July 12th, Donald Rumsfeld used the new language in a press conference, repeating the word “extremist” or variations of it eleven times. On July 23rd, two top White House officials followed up with an Op-Ed in the Times: “At its root, the struggle is an ideological contest, a war of ideas that engages all of us, public servant and private citizen, regardless of nationality.” The President’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, once said of war planning for Iraq, “You don’t introduce new products in August,” but the rebranding of the war formerly known as G.W.O.T. has all the earmarks of a full-blown summer marketing campaign. What’s going on here?
Something serious, in fact—almost unprecedented. The Administration is admitting that its strategy since September 11th has failed, without really admitting it. The single-minded emphasis on hunting down terrorists has failed (“Hearts and minds are more important than capturing and killing people,” Gregson said). The use of military force as the country’s primary and, at times, only response has failed, and has stretched the Army and the Marines to the breaking point. Unilateralism has failed. “It’s not a military project alone, and the United States cannot do it by itself alone,” Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy and a leading advocate of going it alone with military force, said on his way out the Pentagon door and into private life (good luck, fellas!). The overwhelmingly American character of the war has failed, isolating moderate Muslims—who, in the end, are the only hope for political change—or driving them closer to the radicals. Loading the entire burden of the war onto the backs of American soldiers, while telling the rest of the citizenry to go about its business, has failed, even as public relations: in a recent Gallup poll, only thirty-four per cent of Americans said that we are winning the war on terrorism. The phrase has outlived its enormous political usefulness.
These recognitions are late in coming. Arguments for a broader, deeper, more nuanced strategy appeared in the report of the 9/11 Commission, a year ago. They were the basis for a sixteen-billion-dollar national-security bill that was introduced by Senate Democrats in January, and is currently going nowhere. At the Pentagon, they date back to October of 2003, to a memorandum in which Rumsfeld candidly asked, “Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?” Almost two years later, in the summer of Sharm al-Sheikh, Netanya, London, and Baghdad (where 7/7 is an average day), the answer is no. Jihadis are crossing the borders into Iraq, for example, far faster than they can be killed or kill themselves. A recent study by an Israeli researcher shows that they are predominantly young Saudis, inflamed by footage of the fighting in Iraq and by incendiary sermons from their imams. Do they hate us for who we are, or for what we do? That turns out to be the wrong question. Most of the new jihadis had no connection to terrorism before the Iraq war; the American occupation has filled them with fantasies of violent death. But they come largely from a region in Saudi Arabia where the most extreme Islamist ideology was already flourishing, directed against Shiite Muslims as well as against “crusaders and Jews.” They have the sympathy of millions of fellow-travellers. The war in Iraq is the trigger, not the reason, for their self-annihilation.
A better question is the one suggested by Lieutenant General Gregson: what can be done to persuade the millions of Muslims on whose support the jihadis depend to abandon their ideology? In the wake of the London bombings and the daily massacres of Iraqis, gaps are opening in the ranks of radical Islam. Even certain jihadi Web sites have posted heated arguments over the morality of killing innocents; none other than the spiritual mentor of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has attacked his own disciple for giving jihad a bad name in Iraq. But radical Islam is not a problem that Muslims can sort out alone. The grand gamble of the architects of the Iraq war was that a democratic state in the heart of the Middle East would change the political dynamic throughout the region. Right now, the best we can salvage is an Iraq that doesn’t descend into communal violence on a large scale. It seems likely that the Administration will begin to withdraw American forces from Iraq early next year, well ahead of the midterm elections in November—regardless of the realities. Only yesterday, Iraq was the central front in the war on terrorism; perhaps the Pentagon’s new terminology is the linguistic version of an exit strategy. But no one should imagine that an American departure will end suicide bombings in Iraq, or anywhere else. Just as the jihadis in Afghanistan did not retire after expelling the Soviets fifteen years ago, the withdrawal of another superpower will not be enough for this generation of insurgents, either.
In Iraq, America has run up against the limits of war in an ideological contest. The Administration is right to reconsider its strategy, starting with the language. Will anything else follow? The global struggle against violent extremism would inspire more confidence if, for example, the Administration hadn’t failed to include funding for democracy programs in Iraq beyond the next round of elections there; or if Karen Hughes, the President’s choice as Under-Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, hadn’t left the job empty for five months while waiting for her son to graduate from high school; or if the White House weren’t resisting attempts by Congress to regulate the treatment of prisoners; or if Karl Rove would stop using 9/11 to raise money and smear Democrats. No one really knows how American influence can be used to disinfect Islamist politics of violent ideas. This is the first problem. The second is that the Bush team has shown such bad faith, arrogance, and incompetence since September 11th that it seems unlikely to figure it out.
— George Packer
Huffingtonpost.com (2005-08-06)
I Predict: Bush Will Pardon Rove
by Paul Begala
Arianna Huffington, Lawrence O'Donnell and others on this post have done a terrific job of staying on top of every new fact in the Plame-CIA leak case. I, however, want to go beyond the facts and engage in a little conjecture:
George W. Bush will pardon Karl Rove.
I know I'm getting WAY ahead of the facts, but this thing has the smell of a serious legal problem for the Bush Administration. From the outside, Mr. Fitzgerald does not look like a prosecutor who sees wrongdoing but believes it falls short of criminal conduct, like, say, Joe DiGenova did when he investigated allegations that the Bush 41 Administration rummaged Bill Clinton's passport file.
The Bush team excels at political strategy. They pride themselves on seeing three moves ahead on the chess board. So let us look a few moves ahead as well:
Mr. Fitzgerald indicts Mr. Rove. Maybe for violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, maybe the Espionage Act (which outlaws mishandling classified information). Perhaps the charge is a criminal cover-up –- obstruction of justice, perjury, conspiracy or lying to a federal investigator.
What does the President do? What does he say?
As a former White House speechwriter, I've taken the liberty of drafting the speech for Mr. Bush:
My fellow Americans. We meet once again in dark and dangerous times. I remember well the terrible tragedy of September the 11th, 2001. Today, we have the terrorists on the run, and yet they attack our soldiers nearly every day in Iraq. They bomb tourists in Egypt, kill innocents in London and Madrid and Indonesia and Kenya. This truly is a global struggle against violent extremism.
This is not a conventional war, and it will not be fought nor won by conventional means. At the heart of our success will be tactics and techniques that I am not free to divulge to you -- strategies and secrets you will never know. At a time like this, in a post-September the 11th, 2001 world, preserving, protecting and defending our national security secrets is literally a matter of life and death.
That is why I was so angry when the name of one of our CIA agents was revealed two years ago. I vowed then to cooperate in every way to bring the wrongdoers to justice, and I have done so. But what started as an investigation into national security has gone off track. Those who seek to undermine me politically are now pursuing a course that will harm America's security and could invite another September the 11th, 2001.
Let me put this as plainly as I can: the charges against Karl Rove are false. He is an innocent man. He was a strong and steady presence at my side on September the 11th, 2001. And he has a right to defend himself, his good name, his lifetime of service to our country and his wonderful family. The charges that have been filed against him are the result of a secretive grand jury proceeding in which Karl has not been shown the evidence against him, has not been able to confront his accusers, has not even had a lawyer present when he was questioned -- a right every murderer in every police station has.
But now that the secret grand jury proceedings are over, more than anything else, Karl wants to stand up in the cold, clear light of day and defend his good name.
But here's the problem. If Karl were to explain how and why he is innocent; if he were to offer his strong and compelling defense in public, it would reveal even more of our nation's secrets. The terrorists have CNN, you know, and Karl's trial would give them a daily tutorial in just how we fight the war on terror. They would learn lessons from the trial that might allow them to attack us here at home, just as they did on September the 11th, 2001.
I cannot allow this to happen. I cannot jeopardize the lives of our fighting men and women -- no matter how much I love Karl and no matter how badly he wants to clear his name. I have not forgotten the lessons of September the 11th, 2001. And I will not allow anything to happen that makes another September the 11th, 2001 possible. And so, in an act of selfless patriotism, Karl has agreed not to offer any public defense. He has agreed to keep secret all the evidence that clears him. And he has agreed -- at my insistence -- to accept a full, free and absolute pardon.
Although innocent, Karl will pay dearly. Those who oppose our efforts to combat terrorism will vilify him. I would remind them that in front of the Department of Justice stands a statue of Nathan Hale. A noose around his neck, Hale stands defiant, about to be executed by the British for keeping secrets that led to America's independence. Nathan Hale said he regretted that he had but one life to give to his country. Karl himself has told me he regrets he has but one reputation, but he is willing to sacrifice it for his country, especially if it helps to prevent another September the 11th, 2001.
Karl's selfless act will end the matter immediately and allow us all to get back to the life and death struggle against those who hate us for our freedoms, and who attacked us on September the 11th, 2001.
God bless you all, and may God bless the United States of America.
Rough, Rattled & Tattered
UB&G
Tues, 08/09/05
This show besieged by technical problems early on.
Set list:
Drunk With You
Half the World Away (Oasis cover/incomplete/tech difficulties)
-break for tech difficulties adjustments-
Talk Tonite (Oasis cover)
Feeling Strangely Fine (request)
Born in the USA (Bruce Springsteen cover)
Girl (Beatles cover)
Can’t Hardly Wait (request/Replacements cover/incomplete)
Lost Highway (Hank Williams cover)
The Outdoor Type (Lemonheads cover)
Sunday Shining
*Ukulele mini-set (w/Danny Bernal on bass):
Things Have Changed (Bob Dylan cover)
Oh Babe, What Would You Say? (Hurricane Smith cover)
All You Need Is Love (Beatles cover/Marc Bernal add’l vocals/audience singalong)
UB&G
Tues, 08/16/05
Set list:
Drunk With You
Anthrax Blues
Good To Know
Ace Of Spades
Underneath The Sky (request/Oasis cover)
Come Along & Thrill Us
Ordinary Song (request)
I Want You To Want Me/Surrender/Do You Really Want To Hurt Me (Cheap Trick/Culture Club cover/medley)
Sunday Shining
Ukulele mini-set:
Things Have Changed (Bob Dylan cover/incomplete)
All You Need Is Love (Beatles cover/audience singalong)
Oh Babe, What Would You Say? (Hurricane Smith cover)
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