Hughes, Bermondsey, Tatchell's orientation an issue, shame on Hughes, shame on Hughes

by far the sharpest cookie yet on Munich is Zadie Smith,
thus
"If the reviewer is 'pro-Israeli', the review and the film can be dismissed by the reader who feels differently. If the reviewer is 'pro-Palestinian', the same can be done. As it happens, the film itself is neither, and as such, in the opinion of many American reviewers, is inherently aggressive towards Israel....
the nature of the argument - how it dehumanises and destroys those involved in it - and not the argument itself that Munich is interested in....
This film is about confusion and it comes at the right time. How many of us know what to do with these two competing, equally true facts we hear exchanged between Ephraim and Avner: 'Israelis will die if these men live. You know this is true!' says Ephraim. Avner replies, 'There is no peace at the end of this. You know this is true!'"

Michael Wharton, dead aged 92, had his satire praised to the highest in that morning’s Telegraph.
the columnist, it was pointed out, did not suffer anyone directly biting his style, although with Bron Waugh and arguably Chris Morris there are echoes.
Howse wrote that “he learned useless languages such as Irish”, and in a similarly distasteful vein it’s true that Wharton both supported the white Rhodesians and Franco, then applauded Slobodan Milosevic’s refusal, at trial, to recognise the Hague.
in the final analysis he was called a genius.
i may demur.

you can say one thing for Mark Oaten which is that, when he was Home Affairs brief - this in contrast to his Tory and Labour peers, plus a significant section of the UK press - he always discussed asylum seekers and economic migrants as if they were actually people

now there's a novelty

that said, it must be owned that this is the best Private Eye cover since the Hutton report

k-punk gets to the point

get well soon isaac
-down on yr luck, walking thru a dingy bus station, scrubby free papers and crap French/Polish restaurant adverts, mind on caffeine and Mexican food

fierce PA salvation in the form of a glorious blast of Steve Miller's 'The Joker'
yes that's right

this is quality

thanks to OC, we can now see -> Joan Didion = THIS

also just wanted to share this, it's rather tardy but a correspondent of the Sheffield label Discus had said
The first time I saw Derek Bailey was at Company Week at The Roundhouse in Camden maybe back in 1977; I remember an all-star big band of improvisers leaving the stage one by one until there remained only Bailey & the unsung (but equally significant) Terry Day, to whom Bailey called in his sonorous South Yorkshire brogue: 'There's only thee an' me!'
[their Martin Archer also reckons Chora are "a This Heat for the new century"]

my mother sang a basically perfect In The Midnight Hour this morning

---

later-
things with the Thames whale might be going distinctly unquality.
ah.

this is not the genocidal campaign of a government at the height of its ideological hubris, as the 1992 jihad against the Nuba was, or coldly determined to secure natural resources, as when it sought to clear the oilfields of southern Sudan of their troublesome inhabitants. This is the routine cruelty of a security cabal, its humanity withered by years in power: it is genocide by force of habit.

Alex de Waal, August 2004

And so it came to pass that Russia assumed presidency of the G8

[drawing all power - soon...]