Blogging on Meds

In one of the best magazine stories of the year, David Samuels embeds with a Cali pot dealer and his different “scenes” for the New Yorker. I love that this was cool with the editors:

Water pipes were passed around, and everyone got high. After four hits on Nick’s bong, the slogans on the refrigerator started to vibrate with uncommon significance.

The whole story is worth reading. And Samuels deserves a National Mag Award nomination. Guy spent six months reporting this one…

The New Yorker is taking an increasingly liberal approach to covering pot and potheads. Remember the blunt-in-hand Weezy pic (see below) that ran as a full page last year? It was the first time the magazine had ever run a picture of someone smoking weed. Now Samuels writes 8000-plus words and is admittedly stoned during much of the second half of the story.

First time New Yorker ever ran a pot smoking pic, Lil Wayne from last year…

Everyone knows about Southie, the Boston white ghetto made famous by Good Will Hunting and The Departed. But did you there was a place called East Boston, another white ghetto, that’s filled with Italians not Irish? Pretty neat huh? And Eastie rules. They had an Italian Fest this weekend and these two women, Gabby Rizzuto and Christin Skane, were captured by the Boston Globe.

Best news of the day! NYT says Blackwater to end “security contracting” “business.” Steroid sales in Iraq and North Carolina to plummet 40%…

Blackwater is giving up on the business that put them in the crosshairs of an astonishing array of parties, from the insurgents it expected to face in Iraq to the Iraqi government itself, along with the American public, Democratic members of Congress and investigators from several agencies in Washington.

Gary Jackson, Blackwater’s president, described plans for a withdrawal from security contracting in an interview published last night by The Associated Press:

In 2005 and 2006, security jobs represented more than 50 percent of the company’s business. The security business is down to about 30 percent of Blackwater revenue now and Jackson said it will go much lower.

“If I could get it down to 2 percent or 1 percent, I would go there,” he said, adding that the media have falsely portrayed much about that aspect of the company. “If you could get it right, we might stay in the business.”

This comes a day after SecDef Gates wondered, “Why have we come to rely on private contractors to provide combat or combat-related security training for our forces? Further, are we comfortable with this practice, and do we fully understand the implications in terms of quality, responsiveness and sustainability?”

Batman Goes Bateman 2
LAT.com does not have anything up top about Batman’s arrest. In a town where the movie business is the only show in town, when the star of the biggest movie ever gets arrested two days after its record opening, which was propelled by the death of another of the film’s stars, wouldn’t this be a lead story? Still, despite not getting top of site billing, Bale’s arrest is the third most emailed story on LAT.com.

A lot of turmoil has stricken the LAT of late, but they’re entertainment coverage is second to none. Here’s a great story on Da Dark Knight’s gross potential:

“I think that’s not going to be a difficult task,” Warner Bros. domestic distribution chief Dan Fellman said of “The Dark Knight’s” prospects to eclipse both “Iron Man” ($314.4 million to date) and “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” ($312.6 million to date). “I think we’re going to be way up there.”

But how high? Some rival studios said Monday that they are confident “The Dark Knight” could gross more than $400 million by the time all tickets are counted. The highest-grossing film of all time is 1997’s “Titanic,” with ticket sales of $600.8 million. But only six other films ever have grossed more than $400 million in domestically, a list that includes the original “Spider-Man” and “E.T.”

“The Dark Knight’s” Sunday sales — a record of $43.6 million for the day — suggests that family, adult and ethnic interest in the film is unusually high, as the end of the weekend tends to be an especially good moviegoing day for those demographics.

I wonder if the Bale arrest is going to help or hurt ticket sales? I say help…You know he’s gonna release the best statement ever, like, “The immense pressure of making this film and Heath’s death has contributed to my mental instability at this time.”

Batman Goes Bateman: Real Life Insanity Clouds the Dark Knight

I hate you mom!!!

I was trying with all my energy not to write about the new Batman move, The Dark Knight, which just had the biggest opening weekend in history ($158 million). Last spring, one its stars, Heath Ledger, who plays the Joker, overdosed on a pill combo that included OxyContin. Now Batman himself, Christian Bale, gets arrested in London for beating up his mother and sister. In effect, a movie that cost $180 million plus another $100 million for marketing, and then grossed more than any film ever, has been hijacked by its stars’ insanity. That’s a lot of precedents.

British police sources tell TMZ Christian Bale has been arrested and is still being grilled on allegations of assaulting his mom and sister Sunday, the night before the London premiere of “The Dark Knight.” 

Bale went to a London police station this morning by appointment and was arrested there.

A recent stat showed the number of drug deaths in the US jumping from 800 to 2500 between 1999 and 2005. This jump is largely due to a legal painkiller, OxyContin. Ledger’s death, for all its media coverage, hasn’t spurred any talk about the fact that one opiate, which was falsely marketed by Purdue Pharma as non-addictive, is killing so many people. (Last year Purdue lost a $2 billion lawsuit for false advertising.) So many people my age know of folks who have had their lives ruined or ended by OCs. If Hollywood had any balls, they’d use Ledger’s death not just as a vehicle for Dark Knight dollars but also as a way to confront the FDA for tighter regulations on opiates.

Bale, well, he’s played a lot of “dark” dudes, most notably Patrick Bateman, maybe the best psycho in American literature. Anyone else beats his ma and sis, I’d say it would hurt him, but the Batman numbers and Bale’s “Psycho”-background make him an unprecedented franchise. Even this shouldn’t hurt him.

Now if they’d only turn Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns into a film and let Bale kill that poon Superman.

I can read your vibes…

I somehow missed my friend and Guru, Paul Manza, brother of Jamie (aka Senor Awesome, Mons Ziti, Big Queso etc), in New York Magazine a few weeks ago. But Paul showed me this feature at his 31st b-day on Saturday (where Skye Manza cooked the best wood pizza ever!!!). Sarah Bernard writes:

Picking a yoga practice in New York, where the options are limitless, is not such an easy task. You can crisscross the boroughs, bankrupting yourself while figuring out whether you like Vinyasa or Ashtanga or Hatha or some hybrid form. Pure Yoga, a massive studio opening June 25 on the Upper East Side (203 E. 86th St., nr. Third Ave.; 212-360-1888), offers a logistical solution: nineteen different types of yoga under one very spalike roof and a flat $140-a-month fee that allows unlimited classes. There are straight-from-the-ashram practices for purists (Iyengar fans: There’s a rope wall!) as well as options like Bollywood Fusion (the title speaks for itself) or Acroyoga, a partner yoga, and something they’re calling Zenyasa, which mixes yoga, push-ups, strength training with Thera-Bands, and guided meditation. Master teachers like Yogi Vishvketu and Twee Merrigan will be flying in to teach alongside well-known locals from studios like Jivamukti and Om Yoga. Below, a few instructors assume their positions.

While reporting the story, Bernard spoke to Paul for about 30 minutes. NY Mag wound up placing him dead center on the page, looking Zen as a motherf*cker, in pink shortz, while all the other featured Yogies are pretzel-bent and way less Guru-y. Paul’s quote:

“Half-lotus lets you sit completely straight without any effort. The hard work is doing all the other poses so that can happen.”

The Barry Files

Pic by US Army

Anyone else wake up most mornings, look at the news, then think with a smile: Is this guy really going to our next President?

Senator Obama is in Iraq right now. Here he is cruising in a Blackhawk with General Pertaeus. Last week, Iraqi PM Maliki endorsed Obama’s Iraq plan. After Obama hits Israel later this week, we can start to review his Mid East-Afghanistan trip in full, but so far he’s gotten a great response and head of state treatment.

Shawn Young in Port au Prince. 

Going to Haiti doesn’t cost much—just airfare to the DR or Part au Prince, which runs about $500 with taxes—but the experience of visiting the Americas’ poorest nation and most failed state is akin to setting foot on another planet. You have the oldest (and maybe the best) culture of the Americas stuffed onto a resource starved half-island with no functioning government; a population of 8 million-plus, with 80% living on less than $2 a day. Tropical heat. Voodoo. UN blue helmets. Shawn Young was just there, and here’s what he saw:

The total journey to Port-au-Prince took about 2.5 hours. But along the way I had to get off and find new rides in Croix de Bouquets and at another point just outside of central Port-au-Prince. I walked most of the distance through Croix de Bouquets—about two miles—to get to the next stop where I could catch a ride further along.

As I reached the other side of town, it was a very strange feeling to be standing on a street in shorts and a t-shirt and see a convoy of armed UN troops in flak jackets roll by in white trucks. The deeper in I went, the scarier it felt, and the more removed from help I imagined myself being if anything went down. I just wanted to keep moving. I jumped on the next “tap-tap” (the characteristic multicolored buses and converted mini pick-up trucks in Haiti) and got going.

Thirty minutes later I was in Port-au-Prince. I caught another ride further in to the center, about a mile along. And the further along I went, the more shocking the scene became. Burned out buildings, unfinished construction never to be finished, people everywhere selling junk and nobody buying, piles of garbage and filth…squalor, ruin, desperation—my uneasiness from fear started to shift into something new: an increasing sobriety about the world and human reality, informed by what was starting to become (and would soon be) an absolutely unbelievable environment of social ruin. The truck stopped. I hopped out and gave the guy 50 gourdes. I walked further down the street, towards where it got more crowded.

It was incredibly crowded. There was a large truck trying to push its way up an extremely crowded street. People were selling anything they had to sell: used clothing from the United States, brightly-colored plastic household items, soap, rice, fish, crabs, meat…everything was motion, congestion, noise, heat, humidity, stench. Chaos. It was like a Hieronymous Bosch painting…things happening everywhere in every small and large place, with no overall theme or idea but that of a thousand horrible individual stories being played out simultaneously. At the macro level, it was all just static on the TV screen. I saw an old woman selling underwear out of a large basket and sitting quietly on the ground in the middle of all the turmoil; I saw another person selling rotting food; I saw people unfolding huge bundles of clothes to lay out on the ground and sell; I saw piles of rice, polluted water, flies, and garbage everywhere. A man was struggling to pull an old engine on a wagon that looked older and heavier than the engine itself did. Nothing made sense. The buildings seemed disproportionate and empty, yet filled with people. Everything was in disrepair. I noticed paint peeling off of balustrades maybe 20 or 30 feet above. I thought that I should be taking photographs of all these things—but then taking pictures just seemed intensely trivial and irrelevant in the middle of such an incredible, horrible, and very immediate situation of other people’s lives. And I didn’t want to actively draw attention to myself. I was the only light-skinned person that I had seen in hours in an unfamiliar and dangerous place, and had moved like a specter thus far on my journey. I had to get out of there.

I walked up a hill and glanced behind me. With some distance between me and the place, I saw it there, in the pit of it all, at the center in all of its decaying glory: the old slave market. It looked like something out of a nightmare. A hot, crowded, smelly, midday-sunlit nightmare. God damn…this place truly was a disaster…a giant social disaster extended out of a disastrous history. It was like I had descended into hell, and it was very much like Sartre said: Hell is other people…

UPDATE 10:44AM Tuesday, July 22: Brian Ristau accurately pointed out that Rama Mayo also released the first Ten Yard Fight 7″.

Rama Mayo released my then-college roommate Steve Pica’s LP back in 98. A decade on, the design holds up. 

As some people have noticed, the Medicine Agency homepage has been updated and redesigned. The site is now two separate entitities: a marketing, art, and design agency, and an editorially independent blog. The agency-side, from what I understand, is to be headed by Rama Mayo, a childhood chum (and business associate) of nearly all Med A’s writers.  John Lacriox will continue to oversee Med’s overall development.

The content on this blog has nothing to do with the agency. Our goal remains the same: to cover relevant international news, politics, and culture with a youth-y voice. We are editorially independent. You will not see posts hyping anyone or anything that is not newsworthy. We will, of course, cover our own contributors’ work if it is news (case in point: Anthony Pappalardo’s book, Radio Silence (Powerhouse/MTV 2008), which went live on Amazon last week). 

While a formal mission statement and press release is forthcoming, Mayo and the agency’s work will be transparent and support the content side. Mayo grew up in Boston, and has been in LA since the early 2000s. He spent time in the late 90s helping launch Jimmy Eat World, At the Drive In, Piebald, The Explosion, Fastbreak, and others. He’s since worked in fashion, marketing, and production.  

Barack Obama is in Afghanistan! NYT…WaPost…

These photos of the Haitian food crisis are from May, but I never caught them. By Eric Thayer.

Indeed, my forecast was correct. LiRon were on NY’s Lower East Side last night. It was the couple’s first public appearance since Lindsay’s (semi) official de-closeting earlier in the week via Mark Ronson’s girlfriend and Life and Style Magazine. Here are some are pics from the event (Sephora 10 Year Anniversary Party—an orgy of really bad outfits saved by lesbian beauty). People can hate Lohan all they want, but having one of the most visible young actresses on earth acting unashamedly gay is a net positive for America. Homophobia is the lamest concept, especially considering how many of the very same straight men who hate the gays are into anal sex with their wives, and I hope LiRon take this chance in the spotlight to showcase lesbianism as a healthy, normal lifestyle—one that even saves druggy starlets from career suicide.  

172 Norfolk, the haunted house of Richard Price’s Lush Life, hosted LiRon last night…

The Obamafication of LiLo

Sam Ronson is DJing an event at 172 Norfolk tonight. With Mark Ronson’s girlfriend admitting Lohan’s lesbianism the same week the tabloids are calling a spade a spade, could tonight be the first public outing for lesbian couple LiRon?

Nice. Here’s a young actress—gorgeous, almost dead last summer, busted with coke—somehow achieving one the greatest PR coups in history. From the beginning of her party days, everyone predicted the Decline and Fall of Lohan—but the fall was avoided. After the coke bust she laid low. But a few months ago she posed nude for New York Magazine. It shut down the magazine’s website. In the aftermath, she took one indie role and began an amorphous relationship with DJ Sam Ronson. A boy-ish looking rap and rock specialist, Ronson (the sister of Mark, Amy Winehouse’s producer) is like a lesbian Joel Madden. After the NY Mag shoot, some said Lohnan had gone too far. That looks to be untrue, as she is now semi-bullet proof, hater wise.

What can you say? Bad girl, you cleaned up, took up with a woman publicly even though Hollywood has a stigma against gays, refused to appear on your mom’s show “Mom-ager,” and didn’t buy into dad’s weird church? Impressive for a 22-year-old…it’s hard to say anything too negative. Much like Obama, who “did a little blow,” Lohan’s post-blow decisions seem sound. 

So, Inshallah, Lohan will be at this Ronson gig tonight on the Lower East Side. 

Retired Manhattan beauty publicists MacKenzie Lewis and Laura Something recently moved to Seattle. The two are now crusading against grave tipping at local cemeteries. When reached for further comment, Ms Lewis, who has BA in communications from NYU, said, “No comment.”

Here’s the video: (sorry it’s not embeddable)
http://www.king5.com/video/index.html?nvid=264251

UPDATE 1:23PM: Through her publicist, Ms Lewis has released this statement, “You know, when you find that one thing in life you really care about — cemetery vandalization, in my case — everything else just kind of falls into place.”

The Barry Files

Pic by Karen Bleir, Obama halo…

Obama raised $52 million in June, mostly from big donors, for the second highest total of his campaign. The total is unexpectedly high, given that May was his slowest month yet, with only $21 million raised. Quite simply, John McCain cannot keep up. He raised a mere $22 million in June. But don’t let the $ fool you. Hillary was out raised 2-1 but still wound up getting 500,000 more votes than Obama from March onward.

A story in the Times today about Iraqi opinion of Obama and his withdrawal plan has the week’s money quote:

“In no way do I favor the occupation of my country,” said Abu Ibrahim, a Western-educated businessman in Baghdad, “but there is a moral obligation on the Americans at this point.”

We’ve ignored the moral questions of withdrawal and the Iraqis who’d be affected for too long. Obama must inject a just war rationale, as defined by your Michael Walzer-types, which states a minimal ethical benchmark for foreign armies conducting regime change and occupation  as providing a functioning state that can secure itself.

Ryan Lizza’s long “Obama in Chicago” story in the terror-jab issue of the New Yorker lacks the depth and first person accounts of David Mendell’s book “Obama: Promis to Power.” Still, Lizza’s offers new insight on how Obama’s 2002 Iraq speech came to be. Mendell stated that Obama, with an eye on a Senate run, used the speech to win over Axelrod and the Chicago liberal establishment. Lizza says that claim is “dubious.” The piece ends strongly, however:

Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them. When he was a community organizer, he channelled his work through Chicago’s churches, because they were the main bases of power on the South Side. He was an agnostic when he started, and the work led him to become a practicing Christian. At Harvard, he won the presidency of the Law Review by appealing to the conservatives on the selection panel. In Springfield, rather than challenge the Old Guard Democratic leaders, Obama built a mutually beneficial relationship with them.Like many politicians, Obama is paradoxical. He is by nature an incrementalist, yet he has laid out an ambitious first-term agenda (energy independence, universal health care, withdrawal from Iraq). He campaigns on reforming a broken political process, yet he has always played politics by the rules as they exist, not as he would like them to exist. He runs as an outsider, but he has succeeded by mastering the inside game. He is ideologically a man of the left, but at times he has been genuinely deferential to core philosophical insights of the right.

Finally, Obama hit the gym three times yesterday, for a total of 188-minutes of activity, showing up W’s hour per diem of mountain biking and Conde’s bench press/treadmill-ing.

While Obama spent 91 minutes at a campaign event yesterday, the Illinois Senator spent a total of 188 minutes in the gym yesterday –making three separate stops to Chicago gyms over the course of one day.

Papelbon takes it easy. JD Drew, ASG MVP, hits 7th inning homer.

Best All Star Week Ever? ASG in Review

On Monday night I sat in Yankee Stadium’s right field lower deck, two rows back from the foul pole, just barely in fair territory. Great seats for a Home Run Derby. And a perfect vantage for watching Josh Hamilton’s dingers fly during his record breaking first round. By home run number 12, all 55,000 Bronx fans chanted “Hamilton, Hamilton!” Corny as it sounds, the chills were a-goose-bumpin. When he railed like 13 straight with 7 outs, most to the upper deck or deep into the bleachers, my awe-factor reached boner status. Ending with a dead center shot, Hamilton’s 28 homers broke Bobby Abreu’s record of 24 and earned him a long standing ovation and place in Yankee lore (barf).

It was my fourth or fifth time at the Toilet this year. On previous visits, as much as I tried to get nostalgic for The House That a Bad Trade Built, it never hit me—until Hamilton. Seeing an entire stadium—the biggest in the majors—packed with baseball nuts on their feet cheering for some guy who spent his early 20s smoking crack was beautiful. I’m hardly a mystical, metaphoric baseball fan (it’s just a game), but I love communal energy focused on pure athletic power and talent.

This was my second Derby. Back in 99, I was at the Home Run Derby in Boston. Then, Mark McGuire hit 13 homers in the first round, a record, some of which flew above the old Green Monster Coke bottles to heights still unmatched in Fenway history. Like Hamilton, McGuire lost the Derby (to Ken Griffey Jr). Like Hamilton, McGuire’s performance legitimized the Derby, making it more than just a dunk contest or some dumb spectacle. When a guy like an Ortiz or Abreu goes on a Derby tear, it becomes a once-in-a-lifetime oppurtunity to see the hardest feat in sports at the highest level.

Yesterday I went up the All Star parade on 6th Ave in Midtown. Arriving late, and finding it sparsely attended, I missed A Rod and Jeter, but caught JD Drew and Captain Tek sitting together in the back of a Chevy truck (official MLB sponsor). The fifty people on the corner of 57th barely booed, but boo they did. Mo Rivera drove by wearing the worst brown-on-brown biz casual/Latin yuppie outfit.

Then Josh Hamilton came by and was given the best non-Yankee response. Doing his best Tom Brady, Hamilton, in a white shirt tucked into chinos, was all humble smiles. The “Josh” chants, overwhelming cheers, and so many happy onlookers (”That’s him!” screamed a girl in a sundress to another, who responded, “The cokehead who hit all those home runs last night! He’s hot!”) made me realize this guy’s about to score some big time endorsement deals. You don’t come to New York and steal the spotlight without Madison Ave noticing. Look for a Hamilton NIKE deal by week’s end.

When the most hated man in NYC, Jon Papelbon, rolled by in a grey suit and tie, he flicked off the crowd with a World Series ring. (Love it.) Boos and “faggot” chants came in response. Pap’s comments the day prior to reporters, saying him not Mo Rivera should close the ASG, were plastered with a “Papelbum” headline on the back of the day’s Daily News. He later blamed the News for blowing up a non-story, “My wife was really upset. We got threats, everything. I wish I hadn’t taken her.”

I don’t know why, but before every All Star Game people always say, “I only care about the first two innings. These game’s usually suck.” Except they don’t. And last night was maybe the greatest ASG ever. 15 innings. 7 Red Sox. 4 Yankees. 34 strikeouts. 3-3 tie for seven innings. An amazing 11th inning . JD Drew hit a 7th inning game tieing two-run shot and the whole Stadium cheered—for a Red Sox! Obviously, The Rivalry was the true star (Jeter-A Rod/Pedroia-Youk starting infield, the Papelbon-Mo closer beef, Terry managing at the Stadium) even if ESPN and the Steinbrenners want you to believe the Stadium was.

On ESPN Derek Jeter said New York has the “Most intelligent fans in all of sports. They pay attention to detail here.” Incorrect. Boston has more knowledgeable fans. I’ve been to The Stadium enough to know that Yankee fans don’t pay attention to nearly as much Sox fans do. In Boston, the Red Sox are all people have. New Yorkers actually have lives outside baseball.

I’m not too familiar with New York Mag’s new sportswriter, Will Leitch, but he totally misses the beauty of last night’s game by focusing on the scene at the Stadium:

It is a unique quality of baseball that an event can hold such magnitude that the best tickets are running nearly $10,000 … and then, just four hours later, those same people are leaving before they know who wins. Yankee Stadium looked pretty last night, but it wasn’t an epic sendoff of the old bird. In fact, people couldn’t wait to leave. Considering the sorry lot of the Yankees this year, it’s more than likely this will be the stadium’s last night in the national spotlight. Fox’s last shot? The box seats, nearly empty. “This time it counts.” Obviously, no, it doesn’t.

First off, the assholes paying $10k for tickets are just that—assholes. All Star Games aren’t filled with average baseball fans. They draw show-offs and rich guys trying to impress chicks, especially in the expensive seats.

But really, all the baseball fans I know (mostly AL East maniacs) were texting about this game right up until 2am. No one said, “Please end this.” Rather, I read “Best game,” “Holy shit,” “Am I rooting for or against Mo here,” etc. Some fans I know even went out to celebrate post-game. That’s right folks, an impromptu party for an All Star Game AL win was held at a downtown sleaze den.

To the players and real fans, last night’s game counted. If you think Terry Francona, whose team is in first place, doesn’t want home field advantage for the World Series, you’re high. The game features all the best players in the league, and no one wants to get showed up, especially the young guys from small market teams making a national appearances for the first time—in New York of all places! There were thirty f–king four strikeouts against the best hitters in baseball! These guys weren’t playing an exhibition game (certainly had no meatball tossing like to Cal Ripken back in 01). These guys were playing to win, playing like it counted, because it did.

And finally, what of A Rod, the most amazing human ever? The guy didn’t do much at the game, but he did throw a funny, weird sounding party at 40/40: 

Instead, his mommy, Lourdes, and his new best friends, Guy Oseary and Ingrid Casares, were by his side in a corner booth as he threw back shots. And Casares was then spotted leaving A-Rod’s Park Avenue pad yesterday afternoon.

Reps from Berk Communications, who’d slapped Madonna’s name on their tip sheet for the event, kept insisting she was on her way, but she never showed. Instead, A-Rod was entertained by big-busted hotties who shimmied to Material Girl tunes and desperately tried to make eye contact with him.

Overall, the ASG NYC energized the city and made me happy to live in a baseball-mad town even if I hate both teams that play here. The Derby was record breaking. The gossip and shit talking unprecedented. And the game was the best ever. Now, bring on the second half!

Breaking the law at Beatrice

Did you know you can only legally dance at 181 places in New York City? Yup, the lamest and most violated law ever (besides pot’s illegal status) may finally end. Mayor Bloomberg’s office is moving to reverse the 1926 Cabaret Law that requires any venue with “more than three people dancing” to have a permit, called a cabaret license, of which there are less than 200.

In a city with 10,000 bars and 8 million insane horn-dogs, dancing’s illegality always made zero sense. Let’s all get drunk at 3am and…stand around staring at each other or talking about nothing. Drunken convos are so overrated. Of course, it was only after Rudy G’s “Quality of Life” campaign that the Cabaret Law started being enforced.

Cheers to Bloomberg! The end of the Cabaret Law would offer many more DJ gigs and cut down your pointless drunk conversations by at least 60%. Soon, I may never have to hear about the company or magazine or “eco-friendly sustainable co-op” you’re (not) starting—I’ll be able to just dance away.

Via NYDN:

“We either want to eliminate the license or establish a different license so that it would be less onerous for people to engage in dancing,” said a source close to the mayor.

The 82-year-old license “as it exists doesn’t offer a reasonable opportunity for New Yorkers to dance at clubs,” the City Hall source said.

As the 1926 law stands, three or more people can’t dance unless a bar or restaurant has a cabaret license - even if music and liquor are allowed.

There are 181 licensed cabarets in New York, according to Consumer Affairs, and most are limited to techno-thumping clubs in Manhattan.

But dancers have long complained the license process squeezes out small venues that might offer swing and salsa and even sued the city last year to reverse its Prohibition-era ban on social dancing.

The Taliban Summer

Today: Jamaat-i-Islami protest US “War on Muslims” in Lahore, Pakistan—note the “Stop Bombardment on Muslims” posters

Breaking: Western Ignorance and Idiocy in Pasthuland

Hot off the wires:

DVCM) 09:58 DJ Pakistan Tribesmen Say NATO Forces Massing On Afghan Border

MIRANSHAH, Pakistan (AFP)–Tribal elders on Tuesday raised the alarm over a buildup of hundreds of NATO-led troops on the Afghanistan side of the border, but Pakistan’s military downplayed fears of any intrusion.

“We have heard there is a buildup of foreign troops,” said Malik Mohammad Afzal Khan Darpakhel, a local tribal leader in North Waziristan who isn’t affiliated with the Taliban.

“We want to warn them that 3 million tribesmen will rise against them if they try to move in,” Darpakhel told a news conference held by five elders in Miranshah, the main town in the region. Intelligence sources said some 300 NATO soldiers equipped with tanks, armored vehicles and heavy weaponry have been moved very close to Lwara Mundi, a border village in North Waziristan.

Meanwhile, the Times gets the story on what happened at the American base where nine troops were killed Sunday, when 200 Taliban launched a surprise attack. In short, the insurgents were likely retaliating for civilian deaths caused by an airstrike on July 4, which killed 47 mostly women and children. The base was less than a kilometer from the bomb site. (I noted here that the entire UK press was covering that story as the US media ignored it.) “Insurgents have been present in the area for months, including Pakistani militant groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, a group that was originally formed to fight in Kashmir,” the Times reports.

I’ve long been calling for a regional, US-brokered Kashmir summit. The respective Jihads in Afghanistan and Kashmir against the US and India are one in the same, ie ISI and MMA supported.

Hassna Chop writes…

[Sunday's attack on the US base] may or may not be true that it was a response to the air strikes. Militants have been hitting these small NATO outposts more regularly in the last few months. These outposts are small and usually only house a couple of dozen soldiers, and they’re in brutal terrain that gives the militants an edge, since they know the area better and have plenty of cover.

I wasn’t surprised to read that they were able to get inside the walls of the NATO outpost, especially since there were about 200 of them.

My guess is that this story about NATO building up troops along the border has more to do with having a larger force around to help protect these outposts and respond more quickly to attacks than invading Waziristan…because that would be suicidal.

Sketchy dead Taliban

Unprecedented Violence Makes Afghanistan Deadliest Front Yet in War on Terror

Damn, nine soldiers were killed in a Taliban assault Sunday. Besides the downing of a chopper in 2005, this is the single deadliest attack on American troops of the war. It comes a week after the war’s Kabul biggest Kabul bombing, on the Indian Embassy, which killed 40 and injured 200. A few weeks earlier, the Taliban staged a crazy-bold prison break which freed 400 fighters. Last month 46 US soldiers died in Afghanistan, by far the highest tally of the war. Exhale…

How bad is it? Well, applied to Iraq, where there’s more than four times as many troops, last month’s Afghanistan death total would have topped 170. By comparison, the worst month in Iraq, November 2004, saw 141 killed. Therefore, Afghanistan right now the most violent front per capita of the War on Terror.

To think, seven years in, things are worse than ever—maybe worse than ever imagined. That quagmire Johnny Apple q-headed back in 2002 is fully upon us, even though he was ridiculed for writing it at the time.

Today, the NYT shows why it’s the most important news organization in the world (by a factor of like five), featuring both an intrepid cover story from Pakistan’s tribal areas and an oped by Barack Obama on the War on Terror. The two Times’ stringers were detained for three days in the Tribal Areas after reporting on a Taliban-held marble quarry. And Barry O says he would send two combat brigades, about 10,000 more troops, to Afghanistan.

Here’s some copy about yesterday’s battle the AP report:

Militants with machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars attacked the remote base in the village of Wanat in the mountainous northeastern province of Kunar at about 4:30 a.m. Sunday, with insurgents firing from homes and a mosque.

An unknown number of militants got inside the outpost, the reason the fighters were able to inflict such high casualties…

Ok, so the US Army, the most sophisticated and heavily armed fighting force in world history, somehow had a base breached by a bunch of illiterate AK-47-toting kids? I’m shocked. I’m angry and depressed.

There’s no question that this Taliban 2.0 is more powerful, organized, and well-funded than the one that took Afghanistan in the late 90s. That’s right folks, we invaded Afghanistan to remove the Taliban only for a stronger Taliban to emerge. “Regime change” actually helped the Taliban mobilize popular support. And years of battling the US have forced the Talib to become smarter, better fighters.

Is there a solution? The Taliban are hardly moderates, but as rulers they were isolationists. Unfortunately, the Taliban are Pushtu and follow a super-duper strict code of hospitality—one so deep that they’d never consider turning on their Al Qaeda guests. The world could live with the Taliban were Al Qaeda not living on their land. No negotiated settlement would erase Al Qaeda’s dedication to global jihad. Sadly, there is no near-term solution. Still, the occupation is failing…

Here’s Juan Cole on Obama’s Afghan plan:

I don’t know whether Senator Obama really wants to try to militarily occupy Afghanistan even more than is now being attempted. I wish he would talk to some old Russian officers who were there in the 1980s first…

If the Afghanistan gambit is sincere, I don’t think it is good geostrategy. Afghanistan is far more unwinnable even than Iraq. If playing it up is politics, then it is dangerous politics…

Search and destroy in Afghanistan is an even worse example of going overboard. My advice to his campaign team is to give more thought to how he can take a strong enough position on an issue to win on it, without giving away the whole store.

We who admire him don’t want Afghanistan to become an albatross around the neck of a President Obama.

Afghan tribes are fractious. They feud. Their territory is vast and rugged, and they know it like the back of their hands. Afghans are Jeffersonians in the sense that they want a light touch from the central government, and heavy handedness drives them into rebellion. Stand up Karzai’s army and air force and give him some billions to bribe the tribal chiefs, and let him apply carrot and stick himself. We need to get out of there. “Al-Qaeda” was always Bin Laden’s hype. He wanted to get us on the ground there so that the Mujahideen could bleed us the way they did the Soviets. It is a trap.

Beware.

The text on this 5O record could easily be changed to “Go-Go Boy Gay Party.” Whereas this picture of Mr West at Fashion Week in Paris shows a well dressed guy about to go drink champagne and suck pussy.

There’s a rap war brewing between the “tight clothes”-ers and the baggy set. In short, the baggy crew is saying tight clothes trend is too gay and must be stopped. Here’s some XXL blogger:

Hip-Hop had already been on a creative downswing for more than 10 years now. Certainly, the fact that mofos are walking around wearing purses and tight-ass pants showing off their nuts was a sign that hip-hop had crossed some sort of threshold into complete and utter teh gheyness.

While I love the colorful language above, he’s wrong. Sure, rap’s not in its 94-97 glory days, but “creative downswing” is incorrect. In fact, more rap is being recorded now than ever. The music industry’s shrinking profits have led to more output not less. Producers, hungrier than ever, are taking the sound to new and exciting places—the rise of the South has added so many new soul, funk, and r and b infusions.

Secondly, saying guys who are comfortable enough in their sexuality to where tight clothes are gay forgets just how homo-erotic rappers like, say, 50 Cent are. With their shirts off and glistening muscles, their album covers look like gay club flyers.

Verdict? Clothes don’t make music, people do, and worrying about fashion is a waste of time.