Tuesday's new CD day, so i walked up to Kim's Uptown on 114th and Broadway and picked up the new Cure album, which was released today. I agree with Pitchfork's assertion that the self-titled new record is probably the Cure's best since Wish - Wild Mood Swings didn't come close and Bloodflowers was formulaic and somewhat boring. The Cure seems more in the vein of the variant and schizophrenic textures and moods of Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me or Head On The Door than the more staid poppiness of Wish. It's also proably the first Cure album i know of to feature gigantic anti-piracy labels obscuring most of the cover art, and thus marks the consolidations and transformations in the recording industry since the band first appeared 25 years ago. Robert Smith has repeatedly hinted that he'll stop performing soon. Bloodflowers was supposed to be the band's final album, before every band from A Perfect Circle to 311 started riding the band's coatails to fame and someone in the Cure camp realized another album might be a good idea. The Cure is at the very least a much better goodbye than its predecessor was.



That said, the "End of The World," the first single, ahs lost its appeal for me - too emo, i guess.

A day after a Christian Aid report alleges that US oil companies have sifted away 20 billion dollars of oil revenues from the restructured puppet state, the "handover of sovereignty," however meaningless, begins two days early. This won't prevent insurgent attacks, so what's the real reason for this accelerated timetable?

Woohoo

Happy birthday to my mother!

The supreme court scratches Cheney' (and the energy lobby's) back, the FEC rules that it gets to regulate advertising for political documentaries, and over 70 are dead in Iraq.



It's morning in America, indeed.

Today's times' expose on the institutionalization of torture tactics by occupation forces is devastating, and, although much of this information was already available - the ghost detainees, the dogs, the forced masturbation, shocking and disgusting. There's a deeply homophobic logic behind this colonial subjection of bodies to state terror. The imperial occupation of Iraq thus threatens a wide spectrum of movements for global social justice. We need to hold the American military state apparatus accountable for what they have been doing, and we need to end the occupation now.

The New York Times gets something right:

Aside from a brief reference to "my poor judgment," the governor's resignation speech was peculiarly self-serving. An outsider who had no idea the state had been struggling through a seemingly endless series of scandals might have assumed Mr. Rowland was giving up his job to accept an ambassadorship. In truth, the questionable dealings under Mr. Rowland's leadership ranged from who paid for the vacation house hot tub to a $220 million deal with Enron that left the state taxpayers holding the bag.



The inquiries into Mr. Rowland's affairs uncovered a raft of associates who were happy to give the governor gifts, forgive debts or let him in on favorable deals. These same people wound up with state loans or contracts. The best conceivable defense for the governor was that he regarded this as normal.