Blogging on Meds

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. 

All this shock and awe at Obama’s centrist drift ignores history. Barack Obama was never an uber-liberal, despite his (thin) Senate voting record saying he was the chamber’s resident lefty.

No one better chronicles Obama’s rise to national power than the Chicago Tribune’s David Mendell in his book Obama: From Promise to Power. For the book, Mendell followed Obama from 2003 until he announced his presidential run in early 2007. The politician Mendell describes is a pragmatist with a liberal’s heart; an egotistical, insanely ambitious, and mercurial man who wants to be loved—even if that means appealing to the center for votes; a man whose career has been guided by Washington-insider David Axelrod, with an above-all focus on personal narrative; a natural wonk who has traded policy for vague rhetoric to achieve political goals; and someone whose political fortunes were dependant on Penny Priztker and Chicago’s Gold Coast monied elite. After reading the book, there’s no question Obama has what it takes to be president. But he’s a politician not a progressive activist.

Those ever-( dare I say over-) influential “Netroots” folks on the left did not study the facts before crowning Obama liberalism’s savior. Obama ran a primary campaign that was to the right of Hillary Clinton on domestic issues. (Remember, triangulated centrism was a mid-90s Clinton specialty.) Still, the net-left gave Barry unending support.

Now Obama’s disregarded the constitution in favor of telecoms—you know, phone companies, the little guy. He supported a Supreme Court ruling overturning a handgun ban in a city with an unprecedented history of handgun murder. He told black people not to try and be “the next Lil Wayne” (even though Wayne’s studied political science at U Houston and his latest record ends with a six-minute spoken-word political essay), prompting longtime Obama supporter Jesse Jackson to say he wants to “cut his nuts out.” He wants to “refine” his unrealistic 16-month Iraq withdrawal promise. And so on.

None of this should come as a surprise, however. Nor does it make Obama a weaker candidate. It just makes him less of the hope/change martyr the net-left worshipped. Of course, it’s hard not to be offended by Obama’s recent moves. But politically I respect his, well, Clintonian dedication to electoral victory at any cost.

After eight years of GOP illegal wars and criminal rule, we need a winner not a savior. And on foreign policy Obama remains a committed multilateralist. I’m looking forward to seeing how Europe and the Middle East greet him on his upcoming tour. Although this TNR piece is pessimistic about the latter stop, saying recent statements at AIPAC on Israel have soured Arab opinion, I’m not sure I buy the authors’ argument. Arabs are foremost a hospitable people. When Obama arrives as a guest, I hope and assume they’ll respond with the same open mindedness that I received upon visiting the region. If Obama needs to drift to the center to win an election so he can carry out a liberal foreign policy, that works for me.

One of Med’s contributors, Anthony Pappalardo, has been working for years on the definitive monograph concerning American hardcore’s aesthetics. Radio Silence: A Selected Visual History of American Hardcore Music (MTV Books) saw its  Amazon listing go live last night. Awesome! So everyone, pass this around and get the pre-orders buzzing. From Amazon:

Book Description
“Each scene was a reflection of its time and place. It was organic to each city.” (Dave Smalley, DYS, Dag Nasty, All, Down By Law) Hardcore music emerged just after the first wave of punk rock in the late 1970s. American punk kids who loved the speed and attitude of punk took hold of its spirit, got rid of the “live fast, die young” mindset, and made a brilliant revision: hardcore. The dividing line between punk and hardcore music was in the delivery: less pretense, less melody, and more aggression. This urgency seeped its way from the music into the look of hardcore. There wasn’t time to mold your liberty spikes or shine your Docs; it was jeans and T-shirts, Chuck Taylors and Vans. The skull and safety-pin punk costume was replaced by high-tops and hooded sweatshirts. The Jamie Reid ransom note record cover aesthetic gave way to black and white photographs of packed shows accompanied by bold and simple typography, declaring The Kids Will Have Their Say or You’re Only Young Once. This new come-as-you-are attitude attracted skateboarders, surfers, BMX’rs, metalheads, and graffiti writers, with each group adding their diverse influences to the scene. This cross-pollination helped to create an eclectic cross section of bands like Bad Brains, Negative Approach, SSD, Big Boys, and 7 Seconds. Radio Silence documents the ignored space between the Ramones and Nirvana through the words and images of the pre-internet era when this community built on do-it-yourself ethics thrived. Without funding, distribution, or exposure, the scene had to be self-sufficient in order to grow. Everyone involved from bands to fans took it upon themselves to book shows, photograph bands, broadcast pirate radio shows, start record labels, design album covers, publish fanzines, or just offer a place for a band to crash. Authors Nathan Nedorostek and Anthony Pappalardo have cataloged private collections of photographs, personal letters, artwork, and various ephemera from the hardcore scene circa 1978-1993. Unseen images accompany to handmade T-shirts and original artwork brought to life by the words of their creators and fans. Radio Silence includes over 500 images of rare records, T-shirts, fanzines, photographs, and illustrations presented in a manner that abandons the aesthetic clichés normally used to depict the genre and lets the subject matter speak for itself.

About the Author
Anthony Pappalardo wrote for Slap Magazine from 1997 to 2002 and has been published in Alternative Press, Mass Appeal, and Magnet. He’s toured and recorded albums for the hardcore bands Ten Yard Fight, In My Eyes, and Get Down, and has produced for other bands including The Explosion.

Many of the monograph’s photos were taken by Erik Lee Snyder, whose work led the Getty Pavilion at the 2008 New York Photography Fair and has appeared in ESPN the Magazine and Surface among others. Below, a Dischord Records collage and portrait of Minor Threat’s Jeff Nelson…

Right now, the publishing world is bidding on Emily Gould’s blog book, “And the Heart says Wahtevs.” Last month, Gould wrote a controversial essay for the Times Magazine detailing her battle between public life and privacy as a Gawker blogger. The last woman I can recall writing a first-person cover essay for the Times Mag was Joan Didion.

So, how much will the book fetch? I’m saying $250-300k with a $200k back-end if movie rights are optioned. I hope a mega-literary house grabs it too.

NYMag got the proposal and excerpts a paragraph in which one of the sentences is, “He has five more minutes and then he has to leave for wrestling, and besides, sex never seems to relax him.” That’s almost as good as, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”

The NYT Sunday Style’s checks in with Parisian hebrew Olivier Zahm, founder of Purple Magazine and Purpler Jounal.Zahm is about as cool as Frogs get, though he buys into the commercial downtown NYC street thing a little too much. But he’s excused because of his French origins. Rizzoli just published the Purple Anthology: Art Prose Fashion Sex Music Architecture Sex (ah, le good life). The book is maybe the best single volume of 2000s style.

OLIVIER ZAHM, a founder and the editor of Purple magazine.
WHAT I’M WEARING NOW An Yves Saint Laurent leather jacket and ostrich boots, American Apparel jeans and a vintage Christian Dior shirt. I buy a lot of these T-shirts from Eleven on Elizabeth Street. They feel sweet against the skin. My watch is a Seiko from the ’80s. It looks like a gold Rolex, which I can’t afford yet. The glasses are Ray-Ban. I have five pairs, all in different shades of amber. I love amber. It’s a beautiful color for men. The only perfume I wear is because of its amber color — Azzaro, which is an old cheap cologne for workers.

STYLE CREDO To me, the best time for men was in the ’70s. I would love to look like Polanski or Jack Nicholson back then, the way they wore their jeans with just a shirt, a good watch, glasses and a nice white jacket. It was simple, but really sexy. At the beginning of this decade all the men got very glamorous. They started buying a lot of clothes. Me, I don’t like it. When you notice clothing on a man, I find it suspicious.

I’ve long said that a man should never distract from the woman he’s with. A man’s job is to make a woman’s style shine. Timeless not trends define good male style. Zahm, you rule!

From the blood, sweat and tears of midwest artist and designer and typographer, Michael Perry comes the second issue of an art/fashion magazine titled, Untitled.

This issue comes in a limited run of 1000 copies and features the work of ANTHONY WALLACE, LUKE RAMSEY, BRIGITTE SIRE, ROBIN CAMERON, NOAH SHELDON, DAMIEN CORELL, BEN FREDRICKSON, MILAN ZRNIC, JEREMY WILLIAMS, JOSH CLANCY, THEO MORRISON, WYETH HANSEN, ANNA WOLF collaborated and composited with Mr. Perry’s signature stylistic illustrations.

This would make a nice father’s day gift for any dad who likes his art in a collectible yet accessible form. Get it from the website for a mere 18 bucks.

Former NYT Baghdad reporter Dexter Filkins, whose million dollar advance book The Forever War (Knopf) comes out in Sept (and has been optioned by Tom Cruise), weighs in on Patrick Cockburn’s new bio of war criminal Moqtada al Sadr for TNR today.

The Wild Card
Dexter Filkins, The New Republic Published: Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq

By Patrick Cockburn

(Scribner, 227 pp., $24)

To feel the power of Muqtada al-Sadr, the young Shiite cleric and tormentor of the Americans in Iraq, all you needed to do, in the years after the invasion, was go to the Mohsin Mosque in eastern Baghdad. There, spread in the street for a half a mile, as many as fifteen thousand young men would stand assembled, prayer mats in hand, waiting for the service to begin. The scene was safe: Mahdi Army gunmen searched the cars and the supplicants for bombs. There were no American soldiers in sight. And then, as the thousands fell to their knees, an imam would exit the mosque, climb onto a raised wooden platform, and signal the beginning of prayer. As he began, the crowd started to chant.

May God speed his appearance!
May God curse his enemies!
May God make his son triumphant!
Muqtada!
Muqtada!
Muqtada!

The “his” in the first three chants referred to the Mahdi–the messiah of Shia Islam–and the last three lines established a momentous equivalence between this redeemer and Muqtada al-Sadr. But Muqtada never showed his face; he almost never does.

(more…)

Sanchez says Bush was “confused” after the Blackwater ambush in Fallujah, March 04…

General Ricardo Sanchez was in charge of military operations in Iraq during 2004, when America lost control of the occupation and found itself fighting a two-front war. It was also when Abu Grhaib surfaced. Sanchez had a terrible reputation as a bull-headed ass with no regard for human rights. But his new memoir attempts to clear his name, per WaPost:

Getting lost in the media furor over McClellan’s memoir is the new autobiography of retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the onetime commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, who is scathing in his assessment that the Bush administration “led America into a strategic blunder of historic proportions.”

Among the anecdotes in “Wiser in Battle: A Soldier’s Story” is an arresting portrait of Bush after four contractors were killed in Fallujah in 2004, triggering a fierce U.S. response that was reportedly egged on by the president. During a videoconference with his national security team and generals, Sanchez writes, Bush launched into what he described as a “confused” pep talk:

“Kick ass!” he quotes the president as saying. “If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can’t send that message. It’s an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal. There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!”

So, after the four contractors were killed, Bush approved the US’ storming Fallujah only to turn around 5 weeks later and retreat. This strategic blunder cost 600 Iraqi lives and further damaged Arab public opinion about America. Worse, it led to the pan-Anbari uprising that’s only recently been squashed—by the arming and paying of our former enemies.

When asked what Ameirca owes Iraq, Sanchez gave a decent answer, similar to the one laid out in perfect clarity by moral philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain in the latest issue of World Affairs.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez: The US has a moral and legal responsibility to ensure that Iraq is capable of providing its own internal/external security before we can withdraw completely. According to international law we incurred that burden when we occupied the country. Furthermore the country must be a functioning member of the region and the international community.

International law didn’t bother Sanchez in regards to human rights and torture, but on this one he’s right.

Ahmed Rashid is a pretty much Pakistan’s most widely read journalist. His latest essay, in the New York Review of Books, is fantastic. And now Viking’s released “Descent Into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia,” the first major account of America’s post-9/11 war in Asia from a Pakistani perspective. The book’s huge (544 pages) and wonky, but it’s a must own volume for any political junky. Rashid lives in Lahore, Pakistan’s cultural capital.

Viking’s PR copy reads:

While Iraq continues to attract most of American media and military might, Rashid argues that Pakistan and Afghanistan are where the conflict will finally be played out and that these failing states pose a graver threat to global security than the Middle East.

I don’t know that Pakistan-Afghanistan, where there’s no oil or major strategic interest, “pose a graver threat” than the Mid East, but certainly America has certainly failed to combat terrorism in Central Asia.

Rashid will be at the Asia Society in NYC on June 3rd, 6:30pm. 725 Park Ave, NY, NY.

The US and Cannuck covers of The Outlander.

Last night I caught a reading by Canadian Gil Adamson. Her first novel, The Outlander, has just been published by Ecco. Adamson, in her 40s, is a Toronto-based writer and poet. Set in western Canada 1903, The Outlander’s protagonist is a 19-yr old girl on the run for murdering her husband. “It’s more a why-done-it than a who-done-it,” Adamson said before giving a short reading at McNally Robinson in Soho. The book was a hit in Canada and many compared it to Cormac McCarthy (though Adamson uses traditional punctuation). Check it out…

Here’s some of Adamson’s writing from a work in progress on her website:

Nicole had learned on previous bus trips that ignoring the no smoking signs, or refusing to stop smoking when asked, or fighting with the driver and with other passengers, even sneaking to the toilet cubicle to smoke–all of that was a losing battle. She couldn’t win by fighting and she couldn’t hide. So she didn’t smoke. The safest way, Justine said, was to throw the pack away before they got on the bus.

“I won’t smoke.” Nicole put her fingers up, good little boy scout.

“Yes you will.”

“No, really, I won’t. I prom—“ she glared at her sister. “Oh fuck, fine!” and she hurled the package in a garbage pail.

Three days in a bus seat. That’s what they had to look forward to. And she was only four hours in. Nicole nearly cried with boredom. But Justine slept like a baby, shifting and dreaming and lying across Nicole. Nicole fumbled automatically in her bag for cigarettes or anything that might help, but there was nothing.

“What did I fucking do to deserve . . .”

The woman across the way caught Nicole’s eye with a pitiless smile.

“Your girlfriend there sure can sleep.”

(more…)

What’s worse? These pictures of Jenna Bush’s wedding (she did drop some lbs) or James Frey’s new novel being hailed as a tour de force by not only his publisher but also Janet Maslin in the NYT?

Actually, this sounds much worse than the Bush-Hagger wedding: A book tour featuring James Frey, Terry Richardson, and the Hell’s Angels:

To promote the book, Mr. Frey will eschew typical bookstore readings for events at rock venues. He will appear at the Blender Theater in New York, Whisky A Go Go in L.A., and Slim’s in San Francisco. At each venue, he will have music and a light show, with images from “Wives, Wheels, Weapons” projected on a screen while he reads. At the San Francisco and L.A. readings, local heavy metal bands will perform.

Members of the Hell’s Angels will handle security at the events, in what Mr. McWhinnie described as an allusion to the infamous 1969 concert at the Altamont Speedway, in which fighting between members of the crowd and the Angels led to one fan’s being stabbed to death. Presumably Mr. Frey will not attempt to carry the historical echo that far, but who knows? Perhaps he can stage an altercation and use it as grist for his next book.

Cool, the Yanks-Sox rivalry makes it into a fiction serial from the Sunday Times Magazine.

By Colin Harrison

We live on the West Side, with our daughter, Rachel, lucky to have a nice four-bedroom. We bought in ’90, back when the real-estate agents were living on rice and beans. Sometime in the mid-’90s they starting getting fat. Then they exploded. The city goes through these cycles, and if you live here long enough you can sense them coming and going. See how the money heats up the city, makes people crazy.

I arrived home, threw my coat on the table. “Yanks and Boston tonight,” I called.

“Not good enough,” Susan said. “I want to see Joba myself.”

The Yankees were indeed in Boston that night, with Chien-Ming Wang on the mound. The game would be on television. But that wouldn’t cut it for Susan. She wanted to see Joba Chamberlain, the young Yankee fireballer who came on so strong at the end of last season, in person, and preferably from field-level seats.

I promised I’d get tickets to the first home game against Boston the coming week.

Which I hadn’t yet done, perhaps because I was still mourning the loss of Joe Torre as manager, and no amount of happy talk was going to make me feel better anytime soon. You follow a team, you develop these intense relationships. The Yankees brought back Mariano, Pettitte, Posada and A-Rod, fine. But I missed Torre.

Of Harrison’s most recent novel, The Finder, the NYT said: “Colin Harrison’s New York is an-eye-for-an-eye, dog-eat-dog Darwinian world with similar map coordinates to Tom Wolfe’s Manhattan and the Los Angeles of Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy…”

Whatever, since I did those Bobby pics below I figured I’d put up some of Cornell Capa’s 1960 shots of JFK. Cornell is the brother of Robert Capa, maybe the most famous photojournalist of all time and founder of Magnum photo agency. Cornell covered JFK for LIFE. Later, he helped found the International Center for Photography in New York. The ICP held Cornell’s JFK For President show last year.

Today we have guest poster, Mark Baumer of Everydayyeah.com:

It looks like the son of one of the literary greats is going to actually betray the dying wishes of his father. Now, I could understand Dmitri Nabokov, son of Vladimir Nabokov, refusing his father’s last wishes if it had been something like making his father’s most famous work a reality by having sex with a sixteen year old girl, but all the old man asked of his son was not to cash in on his legacy and burn the manuscript for his last novel, The Original of Laura.

Dmitri claims he’s been tormented by the decision for years and only recently when his father appeared before him and said, “You’re stuck in a right old mess—just go ahead and publish,” did he decide to move forward. It all sounds a little too fantastic to me, but maybe the boy is shooting for a movie deal too. I could almost see Albert Finney and Billy Crudup signing on to the roles of father and son and Tim Burton directing and instead of calling it something like The Last Novel they can just call it Big Fish 2.

Huh?

I don’t know. I tried too hard right there.

You know what though, good for Dmitri. Screw the old man for trying to further his legacy.

As for the rest of the list, I say let them all free. I want to see Kerouac’s and Burroughs’s Hippos, and Thompson’s Jellyfish, and even though I’m sure it isn’t that great the name sounds cool so we might as well get another Brautigan tale especially if it has to do with aliens.

Kate Christensen won 2008’s PEN/Faulkner Award for her novel The Great Man. She lives in Greenpoint, BK, and much of The Great Man is set there. I interviewed Kate via email for a story about the neighborhood. The resulting Q and A proved an impressive stand alone document, and I’ve printed it below. PS: Read The Great Man ASAP…

1. What affect does your neighborhood have on your writing?

In addition to the low, unassuming buildings, big sky, proximity to water, and rough-and-tumble history, I’m constantly soothed and inspired by the melange of people in Greenpoint, the combination of big-city open-mindedness — an implicit but very real-feeling tolerance of eccentricities and differences — with a small-town feeling of familiarity and being known. I have something of a dog’seye view of the place; I know all the lampposts and fire hydrants –I walk my dog every day, twice a day, for miles, over to the Newtown Creek, up to my tiny work-studio on Morgan Avenue, through McCarren Park. We traverse the whole neighborhood.

2. When and why did you move to Greenpoint? Approximately where in GP do you live?

I first moved to north Brooklyn in 1990, when I rented a one bedroom above a laundromat on Graham Avenue for $450 a month.Then I lived with my husband in a loft in Williamsburg for the first seven years of our marriage, until we realized (in 2003) that we were suddenly old enough to be everyone’s parents, and that we’d saved enough for a down payment on a house. We found our houseon Calyer Street by what felt like a stroke of amazing luck; we could (barely) afford it, it was exactly where we wanted to live and exactly the house we wanted, a little row house with nineteenth-century details under drop ceilings and shag carpets and paneling. We renovated it ourselves; anyone else who has done this knows what this entails. We tell each other that we’ll never move again because it was so much work to get ourselves here, and in fact we might very well stay here till we die, unless the neighborhood changes radically and becomes too crowded and corporate, which I fear it might, like everywhere else…

3. Your latest novel won the Pen/Faulkner, placing you alongside Henry Miller, Paul Auster, Norman Mailer etc as a major award winning Brooklyn writer. (A google search of “great brooklyn writers” finds a link to you SIXTH! WTF?) How did it feel to get thePEN phone call? Were you really doing laundry in the Greenpoint?

WTF!?!?!!? It must be because of the word “Great” in my title. The washing machine was indeed in use when I got the call — does that count as “doing laundry”? When I learned that I had won, I almost fainted. The shock was so great I came down my first cold in about eight years and still have it, a month later. The PEN/Faulkner wasnever even anything I had daydreamed about winning. It’s still hard for me to believe it.

4. Writing is an intensely personal and difficult act, which you say “causes an enforced manic-depression.” Can you describe what Greenpoint does to lift your spirits? Is there a certain time of day when the sun hits a certain flower pot or something?

Ha! I love that image. But — not to harp on this — what unfailingly lifts my spirits, twice a day, is walking my dog, Dingo. He’s what some of us locals call a Brooklyn Brown — a mid-sized yellow-brown mutt with huge ears. I got him from BARC; he was evidently a wild street dog for at last three years before someone “rescued” him, and although I could see right away how smart, scrappy, and adaptable he was, he wasn’t housebroken or trained. But the instant he arrived in our house he was obviously determined to do the right thing so he’d be allowed to stay. He is now a loyal and stellar companion, but because of his difficult past, he (like me) is prone to occasional fits of melancholy and worry. So even in the worst weather, we go out together morning and evening, and because of this, we both stay (relatively) sane.

5. Food is a major character in The Great Man. Where do you eat/shop in GP?

I go to the Associated up the street, on Manhattan Avenue. And Freshdirect delivers…

6. Hollywood. The place is insane. Can you describe the feeling of returning to GP after a meeting in LA? (And is the Great Man being developed? If so by whom?)

The Great Man is not, to my knowledge, in any sort of development, because no one seems to realize how many brilliant actresses of a certain age there are, being wasted, while 22-year-old lookalike starlets rule the world. Hollywood is insane mostly, to me, becauseno one will say anything negative there. I went out for two series of meetings after I wrote the script for “The Epicure’s Lament,” and after all that fairy dust blowing out of everyone’s mouth, I found it deeply refreshing to come back to Greenpoint, where everyone seems willing to tell it as they see it.

7. Anything you’d like to add about being a writer in Greenpoint…

I feel lucky to live here. I hope the rough edges don’t all get smoothed over; this place feels like an endangered enclave of present and historical authenticity in a spreading unstoppable sea of corporate homogeneity.

8. Hillary or Obama?

Ugh. Do I really have to choose? They both seem like crass, calculating game-players to me. I don’t like either one of them, or any politician, or the political system. I’m a crank who wants revolution. Where are the philosopher kings?

As far as other Greenpoint writers go — I honestly don’t know of any. Am I the only one? Do you know? I would love to know of others…poets or playwrights, novelists…

Left, video of fight at Club Mansion Miami. Right, da club…

Yesterday I posted about The Box—how the downtown club was struggling to find a lawyer and that if it shuts down we’ll all be stuck going to Mansion New York. Located in West Chelsea, Mansion, with a capacity of 1800, is NYC’s newest megaclub. It’s actually kind of fun, but there’s a sleazy trance vibe in the main room that makes it decidedly uncool. Mansion’s owners, Opium Group, are a Miami-based syndicate…

Today, The Miami Herald’s lead story is about the South Beach branch of Mansion. Supposedly, 3 college dudes on Spring Break (wooohhh!) were trying to skimp on a bottle charge, so eight bouncers decided to beat them up. Now Miami Police Dept have released a video of the incident. (The video and story are here) :

Club Mansion employees threw punches at, physically restrained and dragged three University of Delaware students during a fracas inside the South Beach club early Friday morning. Eight bouncers were arrested shortly after the brawl on battery charges.

The video begins about 3:45 a.m. Friday, when the three students were escorted into a back room to discuss a disputed tab for a bottle of vodka. When they enter the room, a man is sitting behind a desk.

`It reminds me of a Joe Pesci movie. They take you out back and break your legs if you ask a question about the bill…”

Lesson? As much as people want to hate on The Box, you’d certainly never get mob-style assualted there—unless Diddy is involved.

That whole Guido-”I’ll fuck you up, ugh”-bouncer-vibe is so depressing. I understand that drunk people suck and clubs need to employ security. But really, what does a bunch of steroided jujistu retards bring to a situation? Is it that hard to find responsible, calm doormen? The book below—by a king fu bouncer—makes it sound like such a hard job. In reality, one can diffuse 80% of all potentially violent situations with the following words: “I didn’t serve four years in the US Marine Corps to get shit talked by someone like you.” No one—and I mean not one human—wants to fuck with a crazy ex-Marine. You can also substitute “Marines” with “two tours of Iraq”…

STEROIDS+BOUNCER+JUJITSU=WORST HUMAN

After Crocker made up a new word yesterday—Lebanize—to describe Iran’s actions in Iraq, these books jumped up on Amazon…

Walid Raad and Kate Brooks

Anthony Shadid on Lebanon…

Ex-Gawker editor Emily Gould has moved over to GalleyCat, my favorite book blog. It’s great that a talented, young, and funny writer like Gould is on the publishing beat. In an indutsry that takes itself way too seriously, Gould should add a needed dose of Jewish mensch-ismo.

Steve Coll’s last book, Ghost Wars, was possibly—ok, probably—the best foreign policy tract of the decade. Ghost Wars won the 2005 Pulitzer. Coll’s name grew in font size on the cover of his new book, The Bin Ladens. NYT.com gave the book’s review a front page feature yesterday, where Michiko Kakutani said:

Steve Coll’s riveting new book not only gives us the most psychologically detailed portrait of the brutal 9/11 mastermind yet, but in telling the epic story of Osama bin Laden’s extended family, it also reveals the crucial role that his relatives and their relationship with the royal house of Saud played in shaping his thinking, his ambitions, his technological expertise and his tactics. It is a book that possesses the novelistic energy of a rags-to-riches family epic, following its sprawling cast of characters as they travel from Mecca and Medina to Las Vegas and Disney World, and yet, at the same time, it is a book that, in tracing the connections between the public and the private, the political and the personal, stands as a substantive bookend to Mr. Coll’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning 2004 book, “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the C.I.A., Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to Sept. 10, 2001.”

Tonight at 7:30 Coll reads at Barnes & Noble 1972 Broadway at 66th St, Upper West Side, Manhattan (Free)

(Pascal Maitre, National Geographic)

Last year journalist Paul Salopek was arrested in Darfur. He was held for five weeks. By then Governor Bill Richardson (D-NM) was in Khartoum negotiating Salopek’s release. The resulting story—about the land beneath the Sahara called the Sahel—is in this month’s National Geographic. Abstract, episodic, uber-novelistic—Salopek’s written one of the weirdest magazine stories in history—a beautiful tragedy that loops nation to nation, shifting like trauma fractured memory, while still managing to explain the geographic issues at the root of the Darfur conflict.

There were three of us.

Idriss Anu drove the Toyota truck that would be stolen by militants. Daoud Hari was the translator, and for this he would eventually pay with severe beatings. We were en route to the village of Furawiya when the pro-government guerrillas rose silently from the grass.

“Stay in the car,” Daoud said.

But it was already too late. Even as the gunmen sauntered up, their hair matted in dreadlocks and their chests slung with small blackened things that looked like dried ears but which were Koranic amulets, we still hadn’t grasped that we had crossed a threshold where it no longer mattered what passport you carried, that you were young and loved, that your skin was supposedly not of a torturable color, or that you were a noncombatant. Words had lost all currency as words, and by the time the grinning teenager with the Kalashnikov reached for my door handle, we were condemned to live and die according to choices made by others. We had become truly Sahelian.

Dauod Hari, mentioned above, has just published a Darfurious memoir called The Translator (Random House) about his work as a “fixer.” The prose is nimbler than A Long Way Gone and Hari offers a vision far more devastating than Ishmael Beah. Although Hari does offer some fun scenes with Nicholas Kristoff “acting like he always sleeps on a mat outside in the middle of warzone.”