Georgia to Russia: We don't wanna PUT IN

But we do want fake facial hair and disco dancing!



Get it? Pretend there's no space between the last two words of the song's title.

"The title of the song, sung in accented English, is “We Don’t Wanna Put In,” a barely successful play on words involving the Russian prime minister’s name," says the nytimes.

The song, by a Georgian group called Stephane and 3G, was chosen by popular vote on Wednesday as Georgia’s entry for Eurovision, the megapopular and kitschy European song contest that will be hosted by Moscow in May.

Georgia was planning to boycott this year’s event to protest Russia’s de facto annexation of two Georgian separatist regions after the August war, but it apparently settled on taking a musical swipe at Mr. Putin right in the Russian capital.

This song is unbelievably bad, perhaps because the group's front man said the song is supposed to be a "marketing trick."

“The most important thing for us was to create the project that would attract as much attention as possible,” said Mr. Mgebrishvili, a slight man of 29 who in a YouTube video performs the tune in a large black wig with sideburns as his three bandmates dance in spandex and hot pants to a disco beat that evokes “Saturday Night Fever.”

“We don’t wanna put in / the negative mood / is killin’ the groove,” goes the chorus.

Mr. Mgebrishvili, who participated in street protests against Russia in Tbilisi during the August war, said his group received “moral support” from some government ministers.

If only all derivative disco enjoyed government support! Although we'd probably have quite a few more diplomatic incidents. Certainly, Russia won't take this lying down.

The news has already begun to excite patriotic passions in Russia, where anti-Georgian sentiment remains high after the war, which many in Russia believe Georgia started.

“In my opinion, this is amoral,” Yana Rudkovskaya, the Russian producer for Dima Bilan, last year’s Eurovision winner, told the Echo Moskvy radio station. “I think that the Eurovision board and the heads of Channel One should forbid this song because it insults our country.”

Not immoral, but amoral. Because it insults the country. (Which of course requires the equation Russia=Putin).

Is that really an insult? I don't particularly want a Put In either, but I'm still not really sure what it means (beyond being vaguely dirty).

The state-controlled Channel One will broadcast the competition live. If Georgia makes it to the final round, it is unclear how the station will handle such an affront to Mr. Putin, who receives little but fawning coverage by Russian federal television.

Dmitri Peskov, a spokesman for Mr. Putin, called the song “hooliganism” and told the Ria Novosti news agency that he thought it unfortunate that Georgia would use the song competition to “promote pseudopolitical ambitions.”

Those pesky little countries with their pseudopolitical ambitions!


UPDATE: If only because I can't resist close reading the lyrics.

The bridge (1:54-2:04 in the above video), goes like this apparently:

I like all Europe countries and I love Europa

Say - give me sexy ah

Give me sexy ah

Say - give me sexy ah

Give me sexy ah

Through their accents and mumbling, it almost sounds like South Ossetia! (i.e., the region suffering from conflicting claims by both Russia and Georgia.)

Coincidence? I think not. They end the bridge by screaming "Put In" a few times, dispensing with the rest of the witty chorus.

Barry and Benjamin

The nytimes is again focusing on Benjamin Netanyahu, recently tapped to perhaps form the next Israeli government:

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likud Party leader chosen Friday to form Israel's next government, likes to tell a story about his meeting last summer in Jerusalem with President Obama, who was then still the Democratic candidate.

As it was ending Mr. Obama pulled Mr. Netanyahu aside from their aides to a corner of the room in the King David Hotel.

“You and I have a lot in common,” Mr. Obama said, according to Mr. Netanyahu’s account. “I started on the left and moved to the center. You started on the right and moved to the center. We are both pragmatists who like to get things done.”

Whether that turns out to be an accurate assessment will determine much of what happens in the American-Israeli relationship in the next couple of years and in efforts to make progress on Middle East peace.

But what is almost as noteworthy is that Mr. Netanyahu tells the story with pride and a kind of endorsement. Although he is a hawkish man of the right and runs the largest conservative party in Israel, he considers himself a pragmatist.

Though the nytimes article doesn't draw it out, this is a pretty brilliant strategy. One of the most potent criticisms of a Netanyahu-led government is that he would not have the nearly unconditional support (at least publicly) that Israel enjoyed under Bush. So the argument goes: a narrow, right-wing government, lacking American support, would undoubtedly fail.

In one story, Netanyahu associates himself with hope and change (campaign/president-elect Obama), while capitalizing on Obama's own transformation into a pragmatist (once sworn in), and simultaneously attempts to assert his powerful connections--both political and personal--to the American goverment.

So, in his own telling, perhaps the powerful (left-wing) American patron would support a right-wing goverment?

Footnote: And this is not the first time Netanyahu has stressed the Obama connection:

Click on the Russian-language version of the campaign Web site of Benjamin Netanyahu, the conservative Likud leader running for prime minister of Israel, and up pops a picture of him with Barack Obama. On the Hebrew version, Mr. Obama is not pictured. But he is, in fact, everywhere.

The colors, the fonts, the icons for donating and volunteering, the use of videos, and the social networking Facebook-type options — including Twitter, which hardly exists in Israel — all reflect a conscious effort by the Netanyahu campaign to learn from the Obama success.

la résistance

In the final days of his presidency, GWB gave more interviews than any other outgoing American president in history (dubbed the "Bush legacy tour" by the press).

These interviews were derided as further evidence of Bush's lack of self-awareness, demonstrating his ignorance of the consequences of his actions as a president.

And yet... we can't seem to help agreeing with him, as some disasters slip into history and some successes remain.

One signal: W., Oliver Stone's suprisingly sympathetic portrait of our once proud leader.

The nytimes this week wrote about the split between Cheney and Bush over the lack of a Libby pardon. (The nytimes has speculated on such a rift between the two since at least 2005.)

Cheney spent their last days together, furiously lobbying, bringing it up in "countless one-on-one conversations," but did not succeed in the end.

The dispute underscored the raw feelings of Mr. Cheney and other supporters of Mr. Libby, who believed that he was mistreated by prosecutors and ill served by a president who, in their view, failed to return Mr. Libby’s loyalty and sacrifice.

And it points up the distance said to have grown between the two men as their worldviews, once largely in sync, seemed increasingly to diverge in their second term as Mr. Bush took a less hawkish stance.

For Mr. Cheney, the failure to win a pardon was a stinging loss that led him to offer a rare public rebuke of Mr. Bush’s judgment, saying of Mr. Libby in an interview with The Weekly Standard last month that “I strongly believe that he deserved a presidential pardon,” and that “I disagree with President Bush’s decision.”

So what does this mean?

The article quotes unnamed officials early in the article, who said "Mr. Bush was unyielding to the end, already frustrated by a deluge of last-minute pardon requests from other quarters."

Bush was annoyed, eh? "Two former White House officials familiar with the thinking of both men said that Mr. Bush had been generally overwhelmed and surprised by the last-minute lobbying for pardons, but that he had believed he owed it to Mr. Cheney to listen to him as he made one last case for Mr. Libby over the course of several long discussions."

Apparently, he felt uncomfortable with going beyond his initial commuting of Libby's prison sentence, leaving him to serve no jail time. That decision drew a lot of criticism; but later, Bush decided he didn't want to issue disputed pardon in his final hours, like Clinton.

There's something admirable about not caring for criticism, when he knows what he is doing that's right. But the problem comes in the decision-making process, or the lack thereof, in Bush's case.

The article closes with an enigmatic quotation:

A former administration official involved in some of the deliberations said the outcome of the lobbying effort was evidence of something else: “The biggest myth of the presidency is that Vice President Cheney always got his way.”

Read quickly, this suggests that Bush is valiant for standing up to Cheney, the bully.

Read again, and the implications are not so nice. One of the typical Bush apologias is to attribute Bush's mistakes to having the wrong friends, surrounding himself with the wrong people (a la Warren G. Harding, not the Truman Bush wants to be).

Rather than rehabilate Bush, as this anonymous official seems to want, he's stuck with this conclusion: Bush made his own mistakes.

But maybe that's what Bush always wanted us to know. Strength of his own convictions, rather than Teapot Dome. If only he used his head, rather than his gut.

Shepherd Fairey v. the AP

What began as a dispute over the source of Fairey's unofficial Obama campaign poster has turned into a showdown over "fair-use," the wikipedia-inflamed ability to engage in rifacimento--remixing, rebranding, but above all, reposting and sharing it again. But not for commercial gain, no never!

Ripped straight from the copyright law of 1976:

The fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

This balancing test actually involves some pretty complex case law behind (and dancing around) each of the factors. Nothing is as at seems! But let me be the judge.

1. Intended for non-profit use, not commercial (adv. Fairey)
2. Copyrighted hardcore (adv. AP)
3. I think this is where the answer lies. How much of the original photo remains? To my mind, it was completely transformed, from the mundane to a work of art (adv. Fairey)
4. If anything, this made people comb the AP archives to try to find the original photo. I can't see how this would reduce the value of the original; if anything, it would increase it (adv. Fairey)

O dear readers, what say you?

Uh-oh.

Apparently, I should watch out, after criticizing Stanley Crouch.

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in the Village Voice:

Stanley Crouch is a gangsta rapper. Throughout his career, Crouch has moved through black nationalism, bohemia, and places we haven't yet developed the vocab to name. But if there's one thing we've gleaned from Crouch's recent assault on novelist and critic Dale Peck, it is this—we have found Crouch's muse, and his name is Suge Knight.

The backstory is simple, and for Crouch routine. On July 12, out for lunch at Tartine in the West Village, Crouch spotted Peck, who'd trashed his book Don't the Moon Look Lonesome a few years back. After greeting Peck with one hand, Crouch smacked him with the other. "What I would actually have preferred to happen," says Crouch, "was that I had the presence of mind to hawk up a huge oyster and spit it in his face."

Of course! Who doesn't have regrets that they did not spit phlegm upon someone who had criticized them?

Crouch's literary mean-streak is well-known, going so far as to pen vitriolic, ad-hominem attacks against his critics. Who knew that streak extended to fisticuffs? Well, apparently the entire Village Voice staff:

"Stanley deserves better than his own temper" says jazz writer Peter Watrous, who also worked here with Crouch. "There are two things that happen at the same time—one of them is that Stanley is a utopian. He strongly believes people should behave in certain way. That combines with an inability to control his own temper, and it makes for a bullying streak."

There was the time Crouch was arguing with jazz writer Russ Musto and told him that if he were a foot taller he'd knock his block off. Musto kept arguing, since he knew he wasn't growing any. Crouch went back on his word, and swung at him anyway. After the two men were separated, Crouch calmed down and offered to buy Musto a drink. Musto says they're friends to this day. Then there's what happened to Guy Trebay, whom Crouch stalked through the Voice's old offices threatening to kill him, relenting only after writer Hilton Als intervened. Another time, writer Harry Allen approached Crouch, hoping to exchange some notes on hip-hop. Instead Crouch, evidently in a bad mood, caught Allen's neck in the cobra clutch, prompting the Voice to give Crouch his walking papers.

By then the Hanging Judge had secured his rep as king of the literal literary brawlers—an accolade that ranks right up there with prettiest journalist. Really now, administering beat-downs to pencil-necked critics is about as macho as spousal abuse, croquet—or gangsta rap.

Much like the acts he derides, Crouch has a taste for swinging that is nothing short of a variation on the "I ain't no punk" theme seemingly encoded on the DNA of all black males. "I have a kind of Mailer-esque reaction to the way some people view writers," Crouch once told The New Yorker. "I want them to know that just because I write doesn't mean I can't also fight." Put another way, Crouch wants you know he keeps it gangsta.

Um... I don't even know what to say.

It's a shame that this man's views represent(ed) the idea of jazz to the American public. Or rather, his own demented conception of jazz.

The widening Gulf

The nytimes published a recent article on the bleak prospects of foreigners in Dubai:

With Dubai’s economy in free fall, newspapers have reported that more than 3,000 cars sit abandoned in the parking lot at the Dubai Airport, left by fleeing, debt-ridden foreigners (who could in fact be imprisoned if they failed to pay their bills). Some are said to have maxed-out credit cards inside and notes of apology taped to the windshield.

The government says the real number is much lower. But the stories contain at least a grain of truth: jobless people here lose their work visas and then must leave the country within a month. That in turn reduces spending, creates housing vacancies and lowers real estate prices, in a downward spiral that has left parts of Dubai — once hailed as the economic superpower of the Middle East — looking like a ghost town.

In Qatar, I heard horror stories of foreigners who got sick or were involved in an accident, leaving them with huge debts and no way to pay them off. And in Qatar, you cannot leave if you have any outstanding debts. That really doesn't leave you with any option than debtors' prison.

No one knows how bad things have become, though it is clear that tens of thousands have left, real estate prices have crashed and scores of Dubai’s major construction projects have been suspended or canceled. But with the government unwilling to provide data, rumors are bound to flourish, damaging confidence and further undermining the economy.

Instead of moving toward greater transparency, the emirates seem to be moving in the other direction. A new draft media law would make it a crime to damage the country’s reputation or economy, punishable by fines of up to 1 million dirhams (about $272,000). Some say it is already having a chilling effect on reporting about the crisis.

Yikes. Good luck to the new locations of "CNN, the book publishers HarperCollins and Random House, the British Broadcasting Corporation, The Financial Times and the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charity arm of the financial news giant Thomson Reuters," in the Abu Dhabi Media Zone. Why does the "zone" part of the name suddenly sound sinister?

NIGHTMARES!

While the Obama administration is stressing the need to diversify America’s fuel supplies and wean the nation from its dependence on foreign oil, Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter, is warning about a “nightmare scenario” if consumers seek to speed up the development of alternative fuels.

Ali al-Naimi, the Saudi oil minister, said Tuesday evening at an oil industry conference in Houston that a push to develop more renewable fuels might jeopardize investments in conventional fuels.

“While the push for alternatives is important, we must also be mindful that efforts to rapidly promote alternatives could have a chilling effect on investment in the oil sector,” he said. “A nightmare scenario would be created if alternative energy supplies fail to meet overly optimistic expectations, while traditional energy suppliers scale back investment due to expectations of declining demand for their products.”

Is that a threat?

Saudi Arabia, along with other oil exporters, has long complained about what they view as the uncertainty of energy policies in Western nations. This uncertainty, oil producers argue, hampers their ability to make long-term plans to develop their resources.

:(

If only energy policy and prices were more certain... I have an idea! Monopolistic cartel, anyone? I see a few hands...

At the moment, the slowing economy and collapsing demand for oil is freezing investments around the world. The secretary-general of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries said recently that cartel members had canceled 35 drilling projects because of lower prices.

AHHHHHHHH! If only America would stop talking about alternative energy!