GOD ONLY KNOWS

Twas only this week that I got around to seeing a whole episode of HBO's Mormon polygamy drama Big Love with Bill Paxton. Really enjoyed it. Harry Dean Stanton and Bruce Dern are particularly unsavoury in the Fathers and Sons flavoured episode. Was pleasantly surprised with the simple and subtle choreography for the title sequence which uses the Beach Boys' God Only Knows from that holiest of pop texts, Pet Sounds, as each of Bill's three wives hold his hand in turn and then form a closed circle. Like the girls in The Crucible (Arthur Miller) as much as good country folk. Only a day late I spot this 1967 Rehearsal album of 8 tracks on An Aquarium Drunkard, with some amazing lo-fi less ornamented interpretations of the Beach Boys' finest. God Only Knows and Surfer Girl are breathtakingly drop dead gorgeous. Absolutely sublime. Download from here before they disappear. Just beautiful. I could bathe in these songs forever, even drown.

IT'S JUST NOT KIRKIT

'I did not try to eat the ball, Mister Daryl'

'But I can see the teethmarks, fellah'

LIQUIDS ON A PLANE

KEYBOARDING

Academic writing is terribly fun. You move swiftly through a few paragraphs like an Israeli tank division in Southern Lebanon, with your air force intellect scattering cluster bombs of snappy phrases across a couple of pages. But then you become stuck in a river of referential anxiety and can't go any further. Where's my voice gone? Instead of name that tune, it's name that scholar? Is there any of me here at all? But don't I need these guys to make me sound learned. And you've got to give props to those who came before... And before you know it you are bogged down in the syntax of a sentence. What are you doing here? Sit there looking at it for a few minutes, adjust the posture at the keyboard. Go to the bathroom. Nada. So you backtrack through the sludge to finesse earlier adequate passages in the hopes that will unstick you. Ah these read well, but this one needs to be changed. Click click click type type type. And suddenly you lose your footing as you go over what you thought was familiar and safe ground. You shouldn't have tinkered with that clause. You're in quicksand and you're drowning in the word count and can't see the outline of the argument you'd mapped on so many bits of paper with your favourite rollerball pens. Hasn't it all been said before, you wonder. Am I just rewriting something I did years ago? Have I moved on so little in my thinking? Are my obsessions, guffaw scholarship, so narrow? Shouldn't I be doing something useful like working at the UN instead? Suspend the mission and withdraw for a little while to take stock. Shall I surf the web for related content, check email, fine tune the iTunes? Maybe that way, the path I am seeking will suddenly come into my peripheral vision and I can adjust my direction. Have another coffee or sugary drink to avoid that tempting nap. New resolve. Then you remember the worst part--the soldiers of the academic citation regime (MLA this time) are waiting with their orders to dot and cross and number correctly. But they're still in the distance, like snipers on rooftops ready for an ambush.

iRaq

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DOG TRIBE

LONDON KITCHEN

SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY

Journalist: How will the deaths of Israeli soldiers today affect your plans?

Israeli Army Spokesman: You saw that massacre of 12 Israelis .. it will ...

Journalist: Massacre you said? But those were soldiers and this is war.

Spokesman: No, it was a massacre because the people who fired the missiles weren't targeting soldiers. They were targeting Israeli civilians but killed the soldiers by accident.

Journalist: But you also committed massacres in Qana and elsewhere.

Spokesman: No, there was no massacre in Qana. Hizbullah fighters were the targets of the bombardment but civilians were hit by accident.

It is symptomatic of Western racism that Israel and its sympathisers are blind to what it is ordinary Arabs find admirable in Hizbullah, writes Azmi Bishara