Bookers: DM me if you need a guest to talk Egypt. I’ve been following this stuff pretty closely for almost a weekTue Feb 01 21:28:41 via web

D.C. Reporter
DCjourno

For insider liberal coastal media elite private jokes I usually prefer Real Kaplan (who is not the “real” Peter Kaplan, who is the editorial director of Fairchild’s “fashion group” of magazines, but is “real” compared to the two other fake Peter Kaplan Twitter accounts, which are now “involved” with the two new fake Twitter accounts for new New York Observer editor Elizabeth Spiers — kidding, that second one is real!). [UPDATE: IT’S VERY IMPORTANT THAT YOU ALL MUST KNOW THAT THE FAKE SPIERS ACCOUNT IS PUT ON BY AN UNKNOWN INDEPENDENT PERSON, ONE WHO DOESN’T DO THE FAKE KAPLAN ACCOUNTS. DON’T LET THAT INFORMATION KEEP YOU UP ALL NIGHT.] But there’s also an art to deception in impersonation, which is why DCJourno is so thrilling. It’s hard to spot that it’s not real a bit, because it so frequently resembles the real Twitter discourse emerging from some of the many wonderful people who labor in the shadow of our nation’s leadership.

If anyone out there sees a tweet that i can re-tweet with “Interesting … “ in front of it, DM me!Tue Feb 01 17:52:02 via web

D.C. Reporter
DCjourno

Trying to come up with a joke that includes both Egypt and the White Stripes, but it’s really hard.Wed Feb 02 22:07:40 via web

D.C. Reporter
DCjourno

Really smart stuff about Mubarak from Dylan Ratigan right now on MSNBCTue Feb 01 21:18:48 via web

D.C. Reporter
DCjourno

That one was so good that I suspect is passed without notice.

Know how u feel RT @mattyglesias Fascinated by quantity of assholes who are absolutely obsessed w/ my blog while dismissing it as irrelevantSun Feb 06 15:20:44 via web

D.C. Reporter
DCjourno

(Recommended by Shani Hilton, who is a person in DC you can follow where none of this insider business will occur!)

Previously:

Kate Riley
Roger Clark

Emma Gilbey Keller

The versatile and virtuosic Irish guitarist Gary Moore died in his sleep Saturday night while on vacation in Spain. Moore did several stints playing lead guitar for the forever awesome, never-enough-appreciated Thin Lizzy in the ’70s and ‘80s — most notably on the 1979 album, Black Rose — and enjoyed a long and successful career as solo artist, too. He’s in the silver blazer in the video above.

Here, watch him absolutely destroy the world with co-guitarist Scott Gorham at the end of a television performance of “Don’t Believe A Word.”

Here’s Moore’s biggest solo hit, “Parisienne Walkways,” which was actually written and sung by Thin Lizzy frontman Phil Lynot.

And here’s a rather incredible video for another song the two did together, “Out in the Fields.”

by Nathan Deuel

The other day, 19-year-old Dylan Sodaro was in line to register for classes at American University in Cairo. The Egyptian woman processing forms asked Dylan if he was Jewish. All week, people had been taking to the streets to criticize Hosni Mubarak, widely considered a friend to America and Israel. “Won’t this hurt your people?” the Egyptian woman said. Dylan shrugged — at this point, he wasn’t sure what the protests meant.

On Thursday night, the eve of the largest gatherings calling for Mubarak’s resignation yet, a friend of Dylan’s named Will was having a party. Dylan retreated to a bedroom with his best mates, Matthew Scarvie, also 19 and from New Mexico, and Gunnar Dancer, a 20-year old from Minnesota. It was very early on Friday morning when they made it back to a shared apartment they rented — a block from Tahrir Square, ground zero for the protests. The friends called the apartment “The Aviary,” because of the birds they kept on the balcony. “They’re probably dead now,” Gunnar said.

They woke up late and bleary in the morning, the day protesters were calling the Friday of Anger. It was after 11 a.m., and they walked to a breakfast place called Kazaz, where for less than two dollars you could order an omelet, ful, falafel, tea and bread. During the meal, uniformed police entered the restaurant; they glowered at customers and searched the bathrooms. Just before 1 p.m., the boys saw green rugs unrolled and people kneeling in prayer. Dylan said there was a sense of anticipation in the air.

They stopped to get ice cream, and were picking out flavors when workers begin to pull the shutters. “Hurry, hurry,” said the ice cream shop owner. Outside, the boys sat on a curb licking their cones when an older man began to speak. They were on the edge of the vast square, where crowds were growing, and they strained to hear over sirens. Then police vans began screeching through the crowd. At one point, an officer in a riot helmet emerged from a van, and — thud, thud, thud — tear gas exploded. From the roofs of nearby buildings, people began dropping bottles of water, oranges, torn-up cloth for gas masks and onions to staunch the tears.

The crowd was like a school of fish, dodging a shark, they said, rushing in waves from danger. Gunnar took shelter in a kiosk. A percussion grenade boomed, knocking over an older lady. The alleys, where the air did not move, were choked with tear gas. “That’s the worst gas I’ve ever seen,” Gunnar said, like a grizzled veteran. “If you opened your eyes, they would burn.”

Through the dense fog, Gunnar saw a lone old man stand in the middle of a deserted street, berating a fearsome wall of police. Then the helmeted officers began charging, firing a hail of bullets. Gunnar dove behind a car. His pants split. He couldn’t tell if the police were firing high or if the old man had been hit. He was a block from his apartment, but he couldn’t get home.

He ducked into a shop, where eight people were hiding among the safety of bolts of cloth. “Take those off,” said the shop owner, a tailor, pointing to Gunnar’s pants. “I’ll sew them for you.”

At last, all the boys made it back to the apartment, where they turned on the TV. Across the street, they could see an old man dropping stones on the heads of police. The police thought the volleys were coming from a nearby parking lot. From their balcony, they watched a stream of injured people, out of breath, red-faced, in tears.

It got dark. The headquarters of the ruling party was on fire. You could hear gunfire and explosions. The college students were learning to distinguish between rubber bullets, live ammunition, the thud of tear gas canisters, percussion grenades and Molotov cocktails.

To explain the situation, Dylan gestured at my kitchen table. My arm was the museum. The square was my notebook, and the teapot was the government building. He seemed shocked to be describing a neighborhood he’d grown to love, a place that had become a war zone. “I’ve seen tanks at museums,” Dylan said. “But these tanks were standing in the city I live in.”

Saturday morning, destruction was everywhere. Windows had been knocked out. Businesses were shut and damaged; cars were burning on the street. The police were gone. At 10 a.m., the phones came back on, and everyone called their parents. They didn’t have much credit on their phones, so the conversations were brief.

I asked what they told their parents. “You don’t exactly tell everything you did to your mom,” he said. “We’re college kids; it’s understood.”

* * *

Sunday was the day classes were supposed to start. “It sort of felt like a snow day,” Dylan said. “Except we were barricaded by the Egyptian Army.” They looked out the window and saw crowds of guys with metal pipes. There was some sort of altercation. A guy swung a machete wildly, and the crowd convulsed in anger.

Overhead, helicopters circled. Dylan said Syracuse called, ordering him to join the U.S. government evacuation, but he didn’t want to get on a plane bound for some random European capital. Matthew was in a similar situation. His school — Arizona State University — had decided to cancel the Cairo program. His funding would be cut, and dependent on student aid, he couldn’t afford to stay on his own dime. Gunnar, meanwhile, was left behind — his university seemed to have forgotten about him. Talking to his mom, a sonic boom exploded. “What was that?” his mother said. “Oh, it’s just the fighter jets,” he told her. They ate a lot of pasta.

On Tuesday morning, at last they decided as a group they would leave Cairo. The cab ride to campus took them through a city under siege. When they arrived, two buses were waiting to take students to the airport. At this point, the departures were voluntary — classes had technically been rescheduled for February 13. At the VIP terminal, they were met by U.S. officials wearing Homeland Security IDs on lanyards. After sitting on the tarmac for two hours, a fellow student several rows back got a call from a friend whose apartment was being overrun; he was restrained from returning.

On the plane were also tourists and State Department personnel, including a young embassy family with a three-month old baby. Waiting to take off, they said you could see planes from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Korea, alongside sleek private jets. Even Iraq was evacuating its citizens.

The guys arrived in Istanbul to an empty hallway. On the other side of immigration sat a lone card table draped with an American flag. Several women with clipboards milled around, looking confused. They had four-page forms — agreements to repay the U.S. government within 90 days for the cost of the flight. How much was the flight? None of the women knew the answer, and so the boys refused to sign. On the table were packets of crackers. At duty free, they bought Lucky Strike cigarettes.

* * *

“It didn’t feel abnormal,” Matthew said, talking about the cab ride from the airport to the center of Istanbul. “It felt like a quick vacation,” Gunnar said. It was amazing, Dylan said, to be somewhere clean, where people drove normally. “They have pizza here,” Gunnar said, and grinned.

Gunnar told me he’d be heading to Minnesota. Matthew said he would return to New Mexico. Dylan said he hoped to resume studies, perhaps in Beirut. He told me about trying to talk to his mom, but getting interrupted when his sister came home from school. “I’m trying to talk about my life, this revolution, and my sister is trying to tell my mom she got 100 on an English exam,” he said. “That’s important, but I’m in a war zone.”

So far, the U.S. government has evacuated several thousand American citizens from Egypt. Home was, of course, where most of the Americans were always headed after their time abroad. For them — as much as for any outsider — a place like Egypt is a blip on an otherwise overwhelmingly American radar.

Given that, how much, if at all, will the events unfolding at Tahrir Square remain a part of our lives? For what it was worth, Dylan, Gunnar, and Matthew seemed to offer a difficult answer.

Imagining talking to his friends for the first time, Dylan said he’d tell them about freedom, that he’d seen what real revolution looked like. “Like the American revolution?” Much better, Dylan assured me: “This was more real.” But I wondered if his friends would understand.

“It’s all still so fresh,” Gunnar said. “But I’m really nervous about two weeks from now.”

And what about the Egyptians? We sat in silence.

Matthew shook his head, perhaps sensing the difficulty of what was to come. “Maybe we never should have gone out,” he said, as if they could still reconsider their decision to leave the apartment. “I think we may have been too casual about all this,” he said.

Nathan Deuel is a writer who lives in Turkey and in Iraq, where his wife is the NPR correspondent based in Baghdad. When he quit his last real media job — at Rolling Stone — he packed a bag and walked from New York to New Orleans. This is his first piece for The Awl but his other writing can be found here.

Remember that time you went to J.D. Salinger’s house for a drink in 1952 and it went really really poorly?

For those of you who don’t, somehow, do your private banking with Goldman Sachs, you won’t see their just-issued report on the AOL purchase of the Huffington Post. For starters, they expect “retention compensation” to offset the Huffington Post’s earnings — that the introduction of the Huffington Post will have no impact whatsoever on AOL’s projected 2011 earnings. Although: “We view this acquisition as further solidifying AOL’s stance as an owner of valuable focused content channels, similar to cable networks….” Here comes the bonus: trashing Yahoo! “We consider this acquisition strategically valuable from the perspective of (1) brand building; (2) mobile distribution; and (3) differentiated content as it distinguishes AOL’s focused approach from Yahoo!’s ‘everything to all people’ strategy.” Yow! GS remains neutral on AOL. (Also the company “expects to receive or intends to seek compensation for investment banking services in the next 3 months” from AOL.)

Um! Enthusiasts of the work of Jay Kang (this and this) will be interested in this: “Crown’s Lindsay Sagnette made a six-figure pre-empt for North American rights to a debut novel by Columbia M.F.A. Jay Kang. Sterling Lord’s Jim Rutman sold The Dead Do Not Improve, which the publisher is comparing to works by Junot Díaz and Gary Shteyngart. The novel follows a frustrated young writer with an M.F.A. who becomes the focus of a “violent scheme,” per the publisher, after his neighbor is murdered. Crown said the book follows the protagonist as he wanders through ‘a suddenly menacing, unknowable San Francisco, fending off militant surfers, overpopulated quinoa cafes, and aggressive advanced creative writing students.’”

Don’t ever tell me it could be worse. There is no single piece of ostensibly helpful advice that I detest as much as “It could be worse.” I can’t say I’ve never offered it myself to some poor friend or family member in the midst of a crisis and I had nothing more useful to say. I get why people fall back on it. Sometimes it seems like the only thing you can say is something like that, something intentionally devoid of deeper meaning. Better that than to enflame or further deepen some afflicted’s funk. But that doesn’t mean it’s good advice, or really advice at all. Of course things could be worse. They could be anything. They could be better, too. They could be breakfast meat. They could be God’s divine will. Could be.

And it’s exactly the kind of thing some non-sports fan friend of yours — or worse, your spouse — will tell you when you’re disconsolate after your favorite team’s loss. What it confirms most is that the person (a) doesn’t actually care about the game you’ve just suffered through even though (s)he claimed to and (b) feels you are being ridiculous for caring as much as you do. I don’t like being condescended to about my irrational love for my team. No one is more aware of the irrationality than I am. I’m the one who has to deal with myself when I feel this way. Folks around me get some of it, but I get all of it.

“It could be worse.” Of course it could be worse. You could be stuck in an elevator with someone who says: “It could be worse.” You could be Bobby Knight’s least favorite son. You could be one of the guys turned down by the fraternity that is full of the hapless geeks the other fraternities won’t have. You could be a Louisville fan. That would be much, much worse.

Or you could be one of the people who get stuck living in the shadow of the Northeast Corridor Amtrak route. You’ve seen these places before and probably thought the same thing. You’re dreaming lazily and staring out the window at a passing vista of what have to be some of the bleakest tracts of real estate anywhere in America and you think, “Man, there’s no way that can’t suck.” Whether it’s dilapidated row houses near Baltimore or the apparently entire abandoned neighborhoods on the outskirts of Philly or the industrial wreckage of north-central Jersey, that right there is a panoply of “It could be worse.” You find yourself thinking “Who lives there?,” or, more likely, “Who gets stuck having to live there?” It’s condescending, but it’s true. Does anyone say to those folks it could be worse? Probably not. I hope not, at least.

Then again, sometimes people in the worst spots seem to be much better at keeping things in perspective than idiot over-thinkers like me. There are clearly good things to focus on, better things. Lots of them. In fact, most times it definitely could be a lot worse. And for people for whom things really do suck, and who are stuck in the suck, focusing on the good is probably much easier than for those who only think things suck. Jerks like me.

I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about things. I most often seem to get hung up on what is it, exactly, that I am supposed to be doing all the time? Got to be productive. But at what? In the back of my mind is always that Hollywood-standard Zen advice that goes something like: “Find what you love and do that.” That may be great if what you love actually provides something of an income. For those of us without marketable skills or the ability to apply ourselves, we have to either suck it up and pick something less loved or marry up. Lacking anything more realistic, I chose to write a lot about college basketball. And marry up. In my case, there’s zero doubt that it could be worse. Much worse.

Luckily, nobody told me on Saturday, as Kentucky lost another crushingly close SEC road game, that it could be worse. Obviously, this is true. The Cats are still considered tournament material, and they’ve been competitive in each of these games. But we in the Big Blue Nation do not do well with losing. Ever losing. We were spoiled last season with all those NBA players we rented. The talent of John Wall and Demarcus Cousins and Eric Bledsoe was the reason UK went 35–3 last year and not 30–8 or 28–10 or what have you. This season, we are learning the lessons of relying on freshmen all the time, even massively talented ones like Brandon Knight and Terrence Jones and Doron Lamb.

Try to tell North Carolina fans it could be worse. After apparently finally ridding themselves of the Larry Drew recruiting mistake, things are looking up — to the tune of 16 assists from his replacement, Kendall Marshall. Sure, the ACC is down, but for all that grief folks gave Roy Williams and his supremely talented underachievers early in the season, the fact is that the Tar Heels are sitting pretty at 17 wins, seven in the conference. Whether UNC will be a dominant force in the NCAA tournament is certainly up for debate, but at least being in the field is not, and after last season, that is reason enough for UNC fans to to keep “It could be worse” in the back of their minds.

Right, Michigan State faithful? Anyone feeling it could be much more terrible in East Lansing these days? Hard to believe what’s happened to the Spartans this season. Doesn’t seem like Tom Izzo can believe it. But after being humiliated on Sunday at Wisconsin, Sparty is on the other side of worse. Five losses in six games means at this point, there is nothing save a Big Ten tournament run that will save the preseason Final Four lock’s NCAA hide. For a guy like Izzo, or his senior point guard Kalin Lucas, who had to sit out last season’s surprise Final Four run due to injury, it can’t feel much worse than it does right now.

But these are all temporal states of being. Next year will bring new blood and new games and new chances to right some wrongs for these perennial challengers. Other programs have to be wondering, how can it actually get much worse? To paraphrase Rod Stewart, if some Division 1 basketball programs have all the luck, others have all the pain. A pain that just keeps returning over and over again. It’s not always a matter of just bad coaching hires or a lack of tradition, though those do play real factors. Winning programs have been built in unlikely places on next to nothing, while a slew of would-be big-time BCS schools still flounder year-in, year-out, or just can’t seem to turn the corner. As illustration, we look at the situations at N.C. State, Oregon, Seton Hall or Auburn.

The ingredients all exist or have existed at these places to create a consistent winner, but whether through poor leadership, bad player evaluation a run of rotten luck or some combination of each, it just hasn’t happened in recent years.

I’ve covered the N.C. State situation previously, so I won’t go on too terribly long. But one wonders how much mediocrity can there be? And who is out there that can change things without taking a Tom Crean-esque amount of time to do so. There are no scholarship limitations here, save those currently going to inferior players, or sanctions to overcome, just a culture of unimpressive performance. It will take a winner winning in attractive fashion to do it. And no gimmicky hires.

Oregon hired Dana Altman, formerly of Creighton (and very, very briefly, Arkansas) in the hopes of turning around its needlessly sinking ship. Altman fits the bill as a program-builder, even if he wasn’t the first choice. He can build a good program, though the PAC-10 is in theory a much tougher conference to win consistently in than the Missouri Valley. But the funds will be there, and the fans, too. Just have to bring up the talent level and stop losing all of Oregon’s A+ recruits to outsiders.

Seton Hall has been losing to outsiders plenty in recent years. The Pirates suffer from Gonzo creep this season. First-year coach Kevin Willard has to play with the guys he’s been left. He could probably do without the near-death experiences his team has had to endure on top of a generally bad vibe affixed the program by former coach Bobby Gonzalez. Like Altman, key to getting Seton Hall back to the heights it once knew likely means owning the north Jersey recruiting territory that has been mined in recent years by interlopers like Mike Krzyzewski and Rick Pitino. That won’t be easy.

Turning the Auburn disaster around definitely won’t, either. New coach Tony Barbee is finding that out. The Tigers opened their brand new multi-million dollar Auburn Arena with home losses to UNC-Asheville, Samford and Campbell, and have limped to an 8-win season to date. Along the way, they’ve been described in a number of less-than-flattering ways, including as the worst high-major team in the country. Auburn hasn’t played in an NCAA game since 2003. Here is a genuine case of “it couldn’t be much worse.”

But I guess all this is still just basketball, right? Guys like me take it way too seriously, at least in the eyes of most people. It’s just a game. It could be worse. But I guess that’s sort of what bothers me most about being told it could be worse by someone who just doesn’t understand. It implies that the thing I find most enjoyable and exhausting and invigorating and depressing in the world is somehow just a nothing. It’s not really that important. Not for those folks out there getting paid to pay attention to the real problems of the world, the ones they obsess on and take home to their families at night, to live them and to breathe them.

You know, I guess after all that I have to admit it could be worse. I could have a real job.

Originally from Kentucky, JL Weill now writes from Washington, DC. His take on politics, culture and sports can be found at The New Deterrence and on Twitter.

Photo by FlyinAce2000, from Flickr.

“The extraordinary rendition program landed some people in CIA black sites — and others were turned over for torture-by-proxy to other regimes. Egypt figured large as a torture destination of choice, as did Suleiman as Egypt’s torturer-in-chief. At least one person extraordinarily rendered by the CIA to Egypt — Egyptian-born Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib — was reportedly tortured by Suleiman himself … In October 2001, Habib was seized from a bus by Pakistani security forces. While detained in Pakistan, at the behest of American agents, he was suspended from a hook and electrocuted repeatedly. He was then turned over to the CIA, and in the process of transporting him to Egypt he endured the usual treatment: his clothes were cut off, a suppository was stuffed in his anus, he was put into a diaper — and ‘wrapped up like a spring roll’. In Egypt, as Habib recounts in his memoir, My Story: The Tale of a Terrorist Who Wasn’t, he was repeatedly subjected to electric shocks, immersed in water up to his nostrils and beaten. His fingers were broken and he was hung from metal hooks. At one point, his interrogator slapped him so hard that his blindfold was dislodged, revealing the identity of his tormentor: Suleiman.”
 — Oh, no. At Al-Jazeera, UC Santa Barbara professor Lisa Hajjar writes an extremely damning of portrait of the spy man overseeing Egypt’s “transition” to democracy. I’d like to be more optimistic about this. But it’s awfully difficult.

As much as I love LCD Soundsystem, as sure I am that their final live performance, just announced to take place on April 2nd, will be totally awesome, I’m not sure I can get myself to attend a concert with a dress code. (I know I’m being curmudgeonly here — and a Madison Garden full of everyone wearing only black and white will make for great video and photographs. But still. I’m old!) Nevertheless, the event is even more exciting in that the recently reformed art-disco-rock band Liquid Liquid will be opening the show. It’s perfect.

An earlier incarnation of the sort of distinctly New York sound that comes through LCD Soundsystem records, Liquid Liquid is best known for the fact that their 1981 song “Cavern” was sampled, two years later, to make Melle Mel’s classic “White Lines.” (So, you know, bring some cocaine to the all-white-and-or-black party April 2nd.)

Mobb Deep used the great bass line to very ominous effect on their 1999 hit “Quiet Storm.”

Which inspired a strong verse from Lil’ Kim on the remix.

And was subsequently re-sampled, by the R&B; group 112, in 2001.

And, of course, Duran Duran covered “White Lines” in 1995.

“It’s a slow-motion train wreck and will end in disaster.”
 — Gosh, how do you really feel about the AOL HuffPo buy?