Man With White Mustache Speak With Forked Tongue

Here's another painfully amusing moment in da Bush Era. The Times story has particularly good fun with this. First of all, this photo. Could the guy possibly look more undiplomatic? I mean this is like the Dean of Discipline from 1957. Then, someone as monstrous as Reagan's UN ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick says, "He may do diplomatic jobs for the U.S. government, but John is not a diplomat."

But here's the punchline, something that was actually softened in subsequent versions of this story. Turns out in 2003, Bolton was on a negotiating team that was dealing with North Korea, and in the middle of these discussions, he said life there was a "living nightmare." Here, in amazingly deadpan fashion, the story quotes the North Korean government as saying Bolton was "such human scum and bloodsucker" that he was "not entitled to take part in the talks." And the State Department threw him off the team.

The sad thing about this is that the guy might actually get waved through.

At the Sprint Store


Everyone there wears these red shirts and you feel like maybe something okay is going on in there. Then they call you and you approach these podiums or other similar workstations with almost always people of color manning them, and these people are trained with a battery of responses for all conceivable questions. I find most of them have a kind of sympathy with me, probably because they’re dealing with angry corporate types all day. So they follow this protocol, and you gotta talk to them like you know they’re trained to say something and you know it’s not their fault, and thank god you’re not working there but if you did, you’d go out to lunch with them or drinks afterward and complain about shit. When they tell you something like “We’re going to have to re-order a replacement phone,” you say softly, but with conviction. “But I need the phone for work,” as if you’re completely at their mercy and hope they will be down with you. This tactic seemed to work for me. After being told I’d have to wait 2-3 weeks, Maylin at the 170 Broadway store promptly went over to the secret back-room stash and came back with a phone like she’d planned on giving it to me all along.

The Miracle of Candeal



Carlinhos Brown is so cool. So is Bebo Valdes, now the star of Fernando Trueba's unrelenting quest to bring "Latin" musicians of different stripes together for his films. First it started with the reuniting of Bebo with his son Chucho, then the pairing of flamenco singer Diego El Cigala with Bebo, and now Bebo goes to Bahia. Carlinhos is his first contact, and he takes him around with this amazing style and grace. Bebo is proud of saying an old woman told him he needed to go to Bahia someday, and now, 20 or 30 years later, here he is.
Yeah there are the obligatory visits to Caetano and Gilberto Gil's respective cribs (Caetano's has quite a view of the ocean) and a really nice scene where Carlinhos and Marisa Monte join Bebo in song. But there's a scene when Carlinhos and Bebo go to some candomble women's house and the elder is possessed, with the two sudden friends in awe. She shudders and bolts around the house until she returns to bless them after they'd prostrated themselves on the floor. It was a moment whose power I haven't often seen, and maybe most importantly came across as a stirring statement for pan-Africanism, spiritual religion, and love.