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I went to an unbelievable dinner party at Charlotte and George Shultz's penthouse Monday night for retired Army Gen. Eric Shinseki, the new secretary of veterans affairs.
The party was a Stanlee Gatti tour de force, complete with fatigue-wearing servers, camouflage table cloths, extras dressed up as snipers and a full Marine color guard and band.
It was like being in Afghanistan.
All this for about a dozen guests. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was there with his wife, Maria Shriver. Gavin Newsom was there with Jennifer, and boy is she showing.
I was seated next to Arnold, and he seemed to be holding up pretty well, considering the nightmare going on up in Sacramento.
The dessert: a chocolate replica of the Joint Chiefs of Staff seal, surrounded with vanilla ice cream and the Golden Gate Bridge in chocolate on each side.
from Willie Brown's (former mayor of SF, California Assembly Speaker) weekly column:
http://www.sfgate.com/columns/williesworld/
The Susan Boyle Experience
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
What was Susan Boyle?
Not who: that we know. She’s a stout, plain, 48-year-old Scotswoman whose bravura performance of the “Les Misérables” anthem of entitlement, “I Dreamed a Dream,” on a British talent show in April became a hugely popular YouTube clip.
Then in May, a tabloid reaction — or something — eroded Boyle’s popular support. After she sang beautifully again in the finals of “Britain’s Got Talent,” voters nonetheless awarded the competition’s top prize to Diversity, a multiracial, 11-member dance troupe. Four weeks ago, days after abjectly conceding the loss on stage (“The best people won,” she said), Boyle checked into a London clinic and was treated for exhaustion.
The fans need some rest now, too. We need to build up our strength for when the next star-making video surfaces and requires that we be amazed. But this downtime also presents an opportunity to ask: What was the Susan Boyle spectacle, that chunk of culture that held us, for days at least, so firmly rapt?
The answers still lie in the video, a small, insidious masterpiece that really should be watched several times for its accidental commentary on popular misery, the concept of “expectation” and how cultures congratulate themselves. First off, the Susan Boyle phenomenon truly belongs to the world of online video, whose prime directive is to be amazing. The great subjects of online video are stunts, pranks, violence, gotchas, virtuosity, upsets and transformations. Where television is supposed to satisfy expectations with its genres and formulas, online video confounds them.
In the Boyle video, we first see her sitting alone, wearing a Sunday-best dress and eating a sandwich. Boyle tells the camera that she has never been kissed. “Aw, shame,” she adds, with the sweetly pathetic theatricality of David Brent, Ricky Gervais’s character on the BBC version of “The Office.”
Once she’s onstage, it’s not her frumpiness but her hammy efforts at sex appeal that seem to disquiet Simon Cowell, the world’s ranking judge of stage talent. Cowell is, after all, a connoisseur of British frumps, having championed Paul Potts, the schmo tenor who won the first season of “Britain’s Got Talent.” (The 2009 Boyle clip is patterned almost beat for beat on Potts’s 2007 blow-the-judges-away video clip.) Seconds into the song, though, Cowell’s eyebrows rise, and by the time Boyle sings “I dreamed that God would be forgiving,” she’s saved. The audience is on its feet, and Cowell beams.
At one point, a jumpy M.C. gloats from the wings, demanding of the camera: “You didn’t expect that, did you? Did you?”
Well, no, we didn’t. Or, rather, in the passive voice: Expectations have been overthrown. But expectations about what, exactly? Surely it’s no surprise that a fat woman can carry a tune. Perhaps the upsetting of generalized expectations comes instead from the deft video editing and the judges’ campy expressions of awe. But the effect must also derive from the music itself, from the wonderfully coercive “I Dreamed a Dream.” To quote an “American Idol” truism, this was a great song choice.
You may know it by heart or from an adolescent diary. I dreamed a dream in time gone by, when hope was high and life worth living. In march the tigers — with their voices soft as thunder — to ravage those dreams.
Finally, I had a dream my life would be so different from this hell I’m living. That word “hell” breaks up the anodyne tautologies of dreaming dreams, and Boyle, like others who have interpreted “I Dreamed a Dream,” gets hoarse and hellish on the word. And that’s it: had dreams, lost dreams, dreams dead. A suicide song. Call it “I Will Not Survive.”
Every culture likes to re-enact the moments it designates its finest. Just as American self-love is dramatized in Tom Sawyer’s enthusiasm for restaging emancipation — by having Huck “free” Jim, who is already free — British self-love often surfaces in the drama of romantic populism. Humble villagers speak their minds; fancy hypocrites are put to shame. Cowell knows well the cultural unconscious, and he lustily plays his role as high priest. And it’s no wonder that Boyle, the Scottish daughter of Irish parents, is told by a judge that she “did it for Great Britain” — for Falstaff, for the rustics, for the lowliest characters in Dickens. It’s probably also no wonder — given the deep unease of the British people with triumphalism, as well as the song’s prophecy of misery — that Boyle ultimately lost.
But don’t worry, Susan: there is a land of dreams where people love to win and where tigers live to profit off the dreams of dreamers. Cowell called it on that last night when he hinted that, win or lose, she would find “stuff coming your way in America.” The groundwork stateside had, as Cowell well knew, already been laid on YouTube — where the luminous performance we Americans didn’t expect was, happily, exactly what we expected.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/ma...l?ref=magazine
Questions for Reza Pahlavi
The Exile
By DEBORAH SOLOMON
You are said to be a leader of the Iranian exile groups working to overthrow the regime whose clerics and mullahs overthrew your father exactly 30 years ago in the Islamic Revolution and forced your family out of the country. What do you do on a day-by-day basis, exactly?
I am in contact with all sorts of groups that are committed to a secular, democratic alternative to the current regime. We believe in a democratic parliamentary system, where there’s a clear separation between church and state, or in this case, mosque and state.
Has the American government aided you?
No, no. I don’t rely on any sources other than my own compatriots.
But presumably you’re working with American agents in the C.I.A. or elsewhere who have been trying to destabilize the Iranian regime for years.
Your presumption is absolutely and unequivocally false.
How did you end up settling in Bethesda, Md., with your wife and children?
It happens to be circumstantial. To me, it’s a temporary place to live.
Why would you call your decades of living near Washington “temporary”?
Because my desire has always been to permanently return to my homeland.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed victory over Mir Hussein Moussavi in an election that was widely condemned as fraudulent.
What do you make of him?
The cry for freedom you hear in the streets of Iran right now is well beyond the fact of whether it’s one candidate versus the other. It’s about the fact that for 30 years they have been denied their most basic rights.
Many people believe that Moussavi would be more a more moderate president than Ahmadinejad.
The same argument was made during the Soviet era, where one would argue that one person would be supposedly more moderate than the other. But at the end, they all represented a Communist, totalitarian system. I think that anyone the Iranian regime prescreens would not be a true representative of the nation.
What do you make of Ahmadinejad’s rants against Israel?
Of course it’s troubling, and it’s connected again to the viral, violent message embedded in the ideology that was brought about by Khomeini himself at the time of the revolution.
Did you see the speculation from Iran that Ahmadinejad has Jewish roots? Do you think the claim is true?
Look, we hear a lot of things, but the big picture here should not be forgotten. If we say Jewish roots, aren’t we all the children of Abraham if you come to think of it?
What religion are you?
That’s a private matter; but if you must know, I am, of course, by education and by conviction, a Shiite Muslim. I am very much a man of faith.
What do you say to those who associate your father’s rule with the violation of civil rights? He ran a brutal secret police.
I leave this judgment to history. My focus is the future.
Some say the media clampdown in Iran and censorship of the foreign press are tactics Ahmadinejad learned from your father. You don’t feel obligated to acknowledge your dad’s misdeeds?
The current regime is, by any measure, the standard-bearer and global poster child for militancy, brute autocracy and corruption. If they are in fact students of my father, his ultimate act of refusing suppressive bloodshed in favor of exile should be their test.
When your father fled Tehran and went into exile, he reportedly took a lot of money with him. Would you describe yourself today as a billionaire?
Those are the recycling of 30-year-old propaganda by the clerical militants of the time. If you were to learn of my net worth, you would be more than surprised.
Do you feel bitter about not getting to be shah?
This is not a personal matter. This is not about me.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/ma...l?ref=magazine
The party was a Stanlee Gatti tour de force, complete with fatigue-wearing servers, camouflage table cloths, extras dressed up as snipers and a full Marine color guard and band.
It was like being in Afghanistan.
All this for about a dozen guests. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was there with his wife, Maria Shriver. Gavin Newsom was there with Jennifer, and boy is she showing.
I was seated next to Arnold, and he seemed to be holding up pretty well, considering the nightmare going on up in Sacramento.
The dessert: a chocolate replica of the Joint Chiefs of Staff seal, surrounded with vanilla ice cream and the Golden Gate Bridge in chocolate on each side.
from Willie Brown's (former mayor of SF, California Assembly Speaker) weekly column:
http://www.sfgate.com/columns/williesworld/
Not who: that we know. She’s a stout, plain, 48-year-old Scotswoman whose bravura performance of the “Les Misérables” anthem of entitlement, “I Dreamed a Dream,” on a British talent show in April became a hugely popular YouTube clip.
Then in May, a tabloid reaction — or something — eroded Boyle’s popular support. After she sang beautifully again in the finals of “Britain’s Got Talent,” voters nonetheless awarded the competition’s top prize to Diversity, a multiracial, 11-member dance troupe. Four weeks ago, days after abjectly conceding the loss on stage (“The best people won,” she said), Boyle checked into a London clinic and was treated for exhaustion.
The fans need some rest now, too. We need to build up our strength for when the next star-making video surfaces and requires that we be amazed. But this downtime also presents an opportunity to ask: What was the Susan Boyle spectacle, that chunk of culture that held us, for days at least, so firmly rapt?
The answers still lie in the video, a small, insidious masterpiece that really should be watched several times for its accidental commentary on popular misery, the concept of “expectation” and how cultures congratulate themselves. First off, the Susan Boyle phenomenon truly belongs to the world of online video, whose prime directive is to be amazing. The great subjects of online video are stunts, pranks, violence, gotchas, virtuosity, upsets and transformations. Where television is supposed to satisfy expectations with its genres and formulas, online video confounds them.
In the Boyle video, we first see her sitting alone, wearing a Sunday-best dress and eating a sandwich. Boyle tells the camera that she has never been kissed. “Aw, shame,” she adds, with the sweetly pathetic theatricality of David Brent, Ricky Gervais’s character on the BBC version of “The Office.”
Once she’s onstage, it’s not her frumpiness but her hammy efforts at sex appeal that seem to disquiet Simon Cowell, the world’s ranking judge of stage talent. Cowell is, after all, a connoisseur of British frumps, having championed Paul Potts, the schmo tenor who won the first season of “Britain’s Got Talent.” (The 2009 Boyle clip is patterned almost beat for beat on Potts’s 2007 blow-the-judges-away video clip.) Seconds into the song, though, Cowell’s eyebrows rise, and by the time Boyle sings “I dreamed that God would be forgiving,” she’s saved. The audience is on its feet, and Cowell beams.
At one point, a jumpy M.C. gloats from the wings, demanding of the camera: “You didn’t expect that, did you? Did you?”
Well, no, we didn’t. Or, rather, in the passive voice: Expectations have been overthrown. But expectations about what, exactly? Surely it’s no surprise that a fat woman can carry a tune. Perhaps the upsetting of generalized expectations comes instead from the deft video editing and the judges’ campy expressions of awe. But the effect must also derive from the music itself, from the wonderfully coercive “I Dreamed a Dream.” To quote an “American Idol” truism, this was a great song choice.
You may know it by heart or from an adolescent diary. I dreamed a dream in time gone by, when hope was high and life worth living. In march the tigers — with their voices soft as thunder — to ravage those dreams.
Finally, I had a dream my life would be so different from this hell I’m living. That word “hell” breaks up the anodyne tautologies of dreaming dreams, and Boyle, like others who have interpreted “I Dreamed a Dream,” gets hoarse and hellish on the word. And that’s it: had dreams, lost dreams, dreams dead. A suicide song. Call it “I Will Not Survive.”
Every culture likes to re-enact the moments it designates its finest. Just as American self-love is dramatized in Tom Sawyer’s enthusiasm for restaging emancipation — by having Huck “free” Jim, who is already free — British self-love often surfaces in the drama of romantic populism. Humble villagers speak their minds; fancy hypocrites are put to shame. Cowell knows well the cultural unconscious, and he lustily plays his role as high priest. And it’s no wonder that Boyle, the Scottish daughter of Irish parents, is told by a judge that she “did it for Great Britain” — for Falstaff, for the rustics, for the lowliest characters in Dickens. It’s probably also no wonder — given the deep unease of the British people with triumphalism, as well as the song’s prophecy of misery — that Boyle ultimately lost.
But don’t worry, Susan: there is a land of dreams where people love to win and where tigers live to profit off the dreams of dreamers. Cowell called it on that last night when he hinted that, win or lose, she would find “stuff coming your way in America.” The groundwork stateside had, as Cowell well knew, already been laid on YouTube — where the luminous performance we Americans didn’t expect was, happily, exactly what we expected.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/ma...l?ref=magazine
Questions for Reza Pahlavi
I am in contact with all sorts of groups that are committed to a secular, democratic alternative to the current regime. We believe in a democratic parliamentary system, where there’s a clear separation between church and state, or in this case, mosque and state.
Has the American government aided you?
No, no. I don’t rely on any sources other than my own compatriots.
But presumably you’re working with American agents in the C.I.A. or elsewhere who have been trying to destabilize the Iranian regime for years.
Your presumption is absolutely and unequivocally false.
How did you end up settling in Bethesda, Md., with your wife and children?
It happens to be circumstantial. To me, it’s a temporary place to live.
Why would you call your decades of living near Washington “temporary”?
Because my desire has always been to permanently return to my homeland.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed victory over Mir Hussein Moussavi in an election that was widely condemned as fraudulent.
What do you make of him?
The cry for freedom you hear in the streets of Iran right now is well beyond the fact of whether it’s one candidate versus the other. It’s about the fact that for 30 years they have been denied their most basic rights.
Many people believe that Moussavi would be more a more moderate president than Ahmadinejad.
The same argument was made during the Soviet era, where one would argue that one person would be supposedly more moderate than the other. But at the end, they all represented a Communist, totalitarian system. I think that anyone the Iranian regime prescreens would not be a true representative of the nation.
What do you make of Ahmadinejad’s rants against Israel?
Of course it’s troubling, and it’s connected again to the viral, violent message embedded in the ideology that was brought about by Khomeini himself at the time of the revolution.
Did you see the speculation from Iran that Ahmadinejad has Jewish roots? Do you think the claim is true?
Look, we hear a lot of things, but the big picture here should not be forgotten. If we say Jewish roots, aren’t we all the children of Abraham if you come to think of it?
What religion are you?
That’s a private matter; but if you must know, I am, of course, by education and by conviction, a Shiite Muslim. I am very much a man of faith.
What do you say to those who associate your father’s rule with the violation of civil rights? He ran a brutal secret police.
I leave this judgment to history. My focus is the future.
Some say the media clampdown in Iran and censorship of the foreign press are tactics Ahmadinejad learned from your father. You don’t feel obligated to acknowledge your dad’s misdeeds?
The current regime is, by any measure, the standard-bearer and global poster child for militancy, brute autocracy and corruption. If they are in fact students of my father, his ultimate act of refusing suppressive bloodshed in favor of exile should be their test.
When your father fled Tehran and went into exile, he reportedly took a lot of money with him. Would you describe yourself today as a billionaire?
Those are the recycling of 30-year-old propaganda by the clerical militants of the time. If you were to learn of my net worth, you would be more than surprised.
Do you feel bitter about not getting to be shah?
This is not a personal matter. This is not about me.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/ma...l?ref=magazine