Letters From a Young Contrarian
-- Christopher Hitchens
"It struck me that if you were reading a book, people would assume that therefore you were doing nothing, and that they were entitled to talk to you. I still battle against that notion."
-- Ian McEwan
"Anything you do, let it come from you. Then it will be new. Give us more to see."
-- Stephen Sondheim
"Ten miles behind me, and ten thousand more to go."
-- James Taylor
Subscribe in a readerby Mark Seal, Vanity Fair, June 2012
She’d never been one to take serious care of her voice, unlike Celine Dion, who “wouldn’t speak for 24 hours before we were going to record,” says Foster, who produced many of both singers’ hits. “Whitney, even when she’d been filming all day, would come into the studio and—bang,” he says, “she’d rip her jacket off, and she’d be starting to sing. She was focused, and she was at the top of her vocal game.”
By the late 90s, however, her voice would begin to betray her, and she would have to lower the keys in live performances. The reason wasn’t just cigarettes and her age. Whitney’s drug use escalated after the 1993 birth of her only child, Bobbi Kristina Houston Brown. She started lacing her joints with cocaine, as she later told Oprah Winfrey. She confessed that she would spend her days and nights getting high with Bobby, watching TV, not getting out of her pajamas for seven months, while Brown lost control—“he would smash things, break things … cutting my head off a picture.” In short, she began the degrading process of what Oprah would call “making herself smaller … so the man could be bigger.”
The pop diva was reverting to the New Jersey street kid. “People think I’m Miss Prissy Pooh-Pooh,” she told Time magazine. “But I’m not I can get down, really freakin’ dirty, with you.” She told Rolling Stone, “I can get raunchy I’ve learned to be freer from Bobby.” She said in a later interview, “I started in the hood.” And she admitted, “Yeah, man, I’m what you call a functioning junkie.”
…In 1994, Whitney showed up two hours late to a White House state dinner, where she was to perform for Nelson Mandela. By the 1996 release of The Preacher’s Wife with Denzel Washington, she was doing drugs every day, she later admitted to Oprah. “I was losing myself,” she said. In 1999 she canceled five concerts, and in 2000 she was caught with half an ounce of marijuana in the Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, airport. In March 2000 she was supposed to sing “Somewhere over the Rainbow” at the Oscars, but at rehearsals she appeared disoriented and couldn’t remember the words. A reporter told Dateline, “Bobby Brown … was sitting in the front row, drunk, with a coat over his head.” Houston was replaced on the program.
The Bahai Gardens in Haifa — an oasis in an otherwise non-distinct cityscape
(May 28, 2012)
Loreen, the winner of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest for Sweden, singing the only decent song of the entire evening, “Euphoria”.
MA’ALE ADUMIM, Palestinian Territories – After the bus from Jerusalem exits the tunnel which runs underneath the university at Mount Scopus, any connection to the city is shredded and disposed of, as the landscape shifts from urban jungle to arid hilltops speckled with deep green pine trees and puddles of concrete. Yet while the physical environment dramatically alters, it feels as though no political boundary has been crossed, in spite of the fact that the bus has, technically speaking, driven straight across the Green Line.
The other thing to note when visiting Ma’ale Adumim on a weekday morning is its stillness, its ghostly aura. Settlements on the West Bank are often spoken of in the abstract, as if the towns have no residents or perhaps more accurately as if ‘the settlers’ are one homogenous block with no distinct characteristics or fault lines.
In Ma’ale Adumim at least, while the residents have taken an active decision to reside in this most controversial of settings, a good proportion of the city’s inhabitants are merely commuters who work in Jerusalem by day and travel back to their homes and families on the E1 highway as the sun sets. They live, as it were, a normal existence in a most extraordinary setting.
Ma’ale Adumim has the dishonour of competing with Ariel – “the heart of Israel”, according to Benjamin Netanyahu – to be the most controversial Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank. Established by a few families in 1975, it has grown with tremendous encouragement from the central government into a city of nearly 40,000 people, complete with shopping mall, library, schools, sports facilities, parks, and playgrounds. The quality of life and subsided cost of housing and living attracts olim from the United States and the former Soviet Union in particular.
by Abraham Rabinovich, The Forward, May 23, 2012
A few days before the war, Dayan had surveyed the Jordanian lines with the front commander, the Israeli general Uzi Narkiss, and said that the upcoming war would be focused entirely on Egypt. “You must avoid any action that would entangle us with Jordan,” Dayan told him.
With the bulk of Israel’s army poised on Egypt’s border, the last thing Israel wanted was the opening of another front. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol sent a message to King Hussein via the United Nations as the Israeli planes were returning from destroying the Egyptian air force in the first hours of the war: We will not attack you if you don’t attack us. Narkiss’s troops had orders to respond to Jordanian fire with restraint and to avoid escalation.
In signing a defense pact with Egypt, however, Hussein had handed over command of his army to an Egyptian general, Abdel Moneim Riad, whose intention was to escalate as much as possible. To draw off Israeli forces from the Sinai, he ordered a Jordanian tank brigade to threaten Beersheba from the West Bank. To protect the tank route, Jordanian troops occupied U.N. headquarters in Jerusalem, which abutted the road, and moved several hundred yards into Israeli territory. Despite this incursion, which was driven back, and the fact that Jordanian artillery was pounding the heart of Israeli Jerusalem, Israel agreed to a renewed U.N. request for a cease-fire. Jordan refused.
What finally ended Israeli restraint was an announcement on Cairo Radio that Jordanian troops had captured Mount Scopus, an Israeli enclave behind Jordanian lines. Since 1948, Israel had maintained a garrison of 120 troops on the mount, rotated in U.N.-protected convoys. No attack had in fact been launched on Scopus, but Israel saw the broadcast as a clear statement of intent. A paratroop brigade commanded by Mordechai Gur, a colonel, was dispatched to Jerusalem with orders to break through to Scopus.
