Live From The Apollo By The Raconteurs (Manchester, 15 Oct 2006)

http://www.concertlive.co.uk/Raconteurs/index.html

I’ve heard the Raconteurs were better live, and I’d say that’s an understatement. A lot of songs their first album, Broken Boy Soldiers, lacked energy. I had to listen a few times to get into the songs, but once i did it was well worth it. With their live performances, they’ve managed to cement a reputation as a great live act, and more importantly they’ve managed to put some real thrust in their catalog.

The cover of Bang Bang by Nancy Sinatra is well brooding and well played by Jack White. I’ve always been a White Stripes fan, but I think I’m beginning to come around to the psychedelic full band sound of the Raconteurs. After hearing the band really come together on these songs, I’m hoping for an amazing second album, which is usually an oxymoron, but not always (Disraeli Gears or Room on Fire anyone?).

On the studio album they sounded like a chimera, on the live cut they sound like a band from Detroit–-which is a good thing.

—Mark Elliot Cullen

Poetry: “Dream Farm”

Since everyone loves poetry here is a poem about the affects of solar power on the human spirit.

Dream Farm

But each night since, a second moon stares upside-down into the bedroom. The sight never quite gets natural.

But each such night, I get the feeling upside down: I’m being watched; the sight so natural.

And upside-down I feel the seconds tickling up the stairs of stars and gazing into my mind, breaking the door

grazing on tubes of light ideas under the sun belt of transparency.

In bed, I wear a suit of ashes and plow the fields to build a better hat, in bed.

—Mark Elliot Cullen

American Soft Power Working In Iran?

According to a recent New York Times article, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad experienced major setbacks in the partial election results that have thus come forth. Likely having no bearing whatsoever on the aforementioned piece of information, but of particular interest, is that just days before this setback, Ahmadinejad wrote a letter to the American people in an attempt to reach out to them and make a clear distinction between his qualms with the American government and its people, who, in the recent 2006 mid-term elections, turned against President George W. Bush’s policy of being indefinitaly comitted to an American military presence in Iraq.

The major beneficiary of the votes lost by Ahmadinejad’s hard-line government was Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a somewhat confusing figure in Iranian politics. Rafsanjani, the leader of the Kargozaran party, has, over the past several decades, been walking somewhat of a political tight rope between the conservative fundamentalist politics that have dominated the Middle East since the fall of the Shah and pragmatist philosophies advocating free market reform.

These policies of reform have, in the last several years, overtaken his party’s conservative stance as a result of Ahmadinejad’s boisterous anti-Zionism, which was trumpeted earlier this week when he and several other “free speech advocates,” such as David Duke and a group of ultra-Orthodox Jews, congregated to denounce the state of Israel and the historical legitimacy of the Holocaust. But to suggest that anti-Zionism is a contraversial stance in the Middle East would be a bit ridiculous. When it comes down to it, it’s about money. With Iran facing possible U.N. and U.S. economic sanctions, the people of Iran seem to be turning against Middle Eastern insularity and fundamentalism, desiring modernization and free market reform to prevent their country from suffering any further economic hardship.

So, the question is, is American foreign policy responsible for this change in the Iranian body politik? I think that the answer is, to a degree, yes. But, I think to a larger degree, the prospects of a free market are tantalizing to a country that has suffered economic hardship for decades. We as Americans tend to see countries, particularly Iraq, from a “foreign policy” perspective, focusing on what leaders do rather than how individuals act. And this isn’t just an issue with American, you could say that it’s an issue with how every country perceives the other. What I am trying to get is that we shouldn’t over-emphasize the strength of American soft-power, especially in such a volatile, anti-American region as the Middle East. But, I am all for economic reform, and while it’s likely that Ahmadinejad will be reelected, it seems like a positive step forward towards a less impoverished Iran, whatever the political consequences for that may be.

—Bryan Klausmeyer