By Siavash Habibi

President Barack Obama's recent speech in Cairo attracted a lot of attention. But an earlier, much shorter message he delivered to Iranians also deserves serious consideration. On March 20, 2009, Mr. Obama congratulated the Iranian people on the Persian New Year with a video address, less than four minutes in length, that rapidly spread on the internet. The gesture represented a new policy spirit toward Iran — a spirit of diplomacy that has been widely expected of him since his campaign days. The Nowruz speech represented the unclenching of the American fist and a congratulation of the New Year, but it also indicated a less obvious policy strategy.

During his campaign, Mr. Obama emphasized the “worthwhile” benefits of diplomacy. Thus, he contrasted himself against President Bush's more aggressive approach to foreign policy. Mr. Obama's Nowruz speech demonstrated follow-through on his campaign promise and showed consistency in his approach of using diplomacy first.

This was important, because Mr. Obama not only established some credibility at home and abroad, but he also completed some of the hard preparation for potentially more aggressive actions against Iran in the future. For if Iran rejects the President's diplomatic gestures, then the United States will have cleared the way for more violent measures, perhaps with the backing of international allies. Military actions will appear more legitimate when President Obama already explored his diplomatic options and proceeded only after they failed.

But this begs the question: Why would the Iranian leaders reject President Obama's gestures?

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Krzysztof Kotarski

First, a note about me.

I am an outsider in the country of my birth.

I am too happy, too trusting, too Canadian. I walk into a shop and expect the shopkeeper to smile. I expect bureaucrats to help me when I seek official documents, and when presented with an idea, I think “why not?” instead of “why?”

For a long time, I chalked this up to personality. I tend to be excessively optimistic at times, and although I always laugh that “I am educated enough to be cynical,” I am cynical when confronting the realm of ideas, but naïve to a fault when confronting the realm of man.

My Polish family and acquaintances have always told me that my behaviour and worldview were deeply rooted in Canada, that although I could speak the language and read the books, I was too foreign in my temperament to fit in in my native Warsaw. After a while, I came to believe this. After all, in some matters, Canada and Poland sit on the opposite ends of the same axis, with Canada’s broad open spaces, easy smiles and obsessive deference to the law contrasting starkly with Poland’s confining apartments, sulking functionaries and a citizenry that dislikes and distrusts the state.

Yet, sometime over the past five years, I came to discover that things are not always so black and white. I began to notice a dark and cynical current that runs through Canada’s continuing struggles with collective identity, and I began to rethink my view of Poland as a place where cynicism triumphs en masse.

The 1980s, the decade of Solidarność, was my first in this world.

I was born in 1981, a few months before martial law was declared, so for as long as I can remember, everything around me was always on an upward trajectory.

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by Olivia Scheck

When Hedwig and the Angry Inch creator John Cameron Mitchell began casting his follow up film, Shortbus, members of the gay dramarati flocked. Hoping to set himself apart from the crowd, Jonathan Caouette supplemented his headshot and resume with a gritty montage of dramatic clips, including a drag impersonation of his mother (performed when he was only fifteen, inspired by Lindsay Wagner in The Bionic Woman) and naked footage of himself with boyfriend, David. While this unorthodox film reel did not land Caouette a role in Mitchell’s film, it did earn him several meetings with the director. “We both knew I wasn’t right for the part, but he kept calling me back to meet with him,” Caouette explained in a Q and A at Yale University in 2006. What caught Mitchell’s eye was Caouette’s unique style of editing – a whirlwind of picture and sound, oscillating between the serenity of suburban life and the cacophony of fucked up circumstances that underlie it. Moreover, Mitchell was amazed by the electronic archive that Caouette had compiled throughout his life – everything from B-horror films he made with friends at age 11 to super-8 footage of his delusional grandmother and old voicemail recordings. Unsure of what else to do with it, Mitchell began screening the reel obsessively to friends and colleagues.

Simultaneously, at his Brooklyn apartment, Caouette was busily collaging together recordings of his life to songs by Nick Drake. He was doing this at the prompting of friends who had seen the original montage and with the goal of submitting it to the MIX Film Festival for experimental films by gay directors. The hitch was that the deadline was only two weeks away, and his editing software was a copy of imovie that came with his computer. So, Caouette took leave from his night job as a doorman and embarked on a caffeine binge to compress his life and more than twenty years of footage into a feature film. It would end up taking only three and a half weeks.

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Odder Still
Jim Culleny
……………………..

As odd as it is that a moon comes up
behind the inelegant tree behind our house
over the dark mountain, grey-white
and silver-dollar like –a night eye
crying silver– it’s odder still to think
of a moon that never was
……………………

As odd as spring seems, fresh and green
as the crisp salad before the salmon fillet,
as odd as the salmon fillet itself seems,
pink upon my plate, it’s odder still
to think, no salmon, and spring
never was
……………………
As odd as I live and breathe this night air
cool as a cucumber into my lungs
with a vague taste of pine and
something else, maybe a wood fire
ablaze in a stove down the valley; as odd
as pine and burning wood seems, it’s
odder still to think otherwise, now,
standing upon two feet and good legs
and all the electricity I need to be
sparking, snapping, seeing
—that seems odder still to me

by Evert Cilliers

There is a specter haunting the planet. It is the specter of the failure of Western capitalism.

All that is solid — jobs, homes, retirement savings — melts into air. Our cock-a-hoop capitalism is staring into a pesky abyss which is either Lacan's mirror or the funky Weltschmerz of its own rectum.

Yet far away in communist China, capitalism is alive and well — maybe because China is not a democracy.

In Western democracies, capitalism is in crisis — maybe because capitalism is not democratic.

The fact is that capitalism is a feudal system, which therefore works well in a feudal society like China.

But in modern, highly evolved democracies, capitalism is a handicap.

Why? Democracy has evolved, but capitalism hasn't. It's essentially unchanged from its 18th century origins. Capitalism is so feudal, it's almost medieval. It requires a subservience from its minions that hints at slavery, serfdom, or peonage. It grants its captains of industry the freedom to lord it over everyone else like banana-republic dictators or command-economy Kremlin bosses. It booms and busts with the fervor of a yo-yo being yanked by a spastic on steroids. Every so often it poops itself like a toddler sans toilet training, and sits there bawling in its own excreta until the state steps in to clean its unruly bottom.

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One day back when I was living in Minneapolis, an ice-cream truck came trolling down our tree-lined street. Despite the dearth of children in the neighborhood, the squat beige van came not infrequently, usually tooting something innocuous like “Pop Goes the Weasel” to rally a small crowd. One blistering afternoon it started whistling a different song, no less bouncy but with a tad darker history. Without my wanting it to, the whose first verse played in my memory.

My roommates went bounding down the steps when they heard the tune. They saw the look on my face. “Didn’t you hear the ice cream truck?” they asked.

“Yeah. Didn’t you?”

“What did you mean?”

“Didn’t you recognize the song they were playing?” I hummed. Nothing.

The incident sort of fell out of my mind until a few weeks ago, when two consecutive buses came roaring down the street in front of my DC apartment. After months of construction the street looks a little like some of the harder-hit patches of Dresden after World War II, and there are plenty of metal plates and potholes to crash into. With the buses’ squeaky brakes and clattering mufflers they raised quite a racket. A whole string of car alarms went off in the buses’ wake, like windows exploding. It was a too familiar happening around here, and I was seething over the five-movement symphony-alarm from the grey minivan with the Maryland plates (again!)—when suddenly, beneath it, came rising up the same tinny ice-cream truck song from a decade earlier. No words, just electric synth sound.

“Dixie.”

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by David Schneider

If you're asked, “So, what are you reading these days?” do not under any circumstances reply The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Unless, of course, you intend to frighten off acquaintances, old friends, petrified Republicans, pie-eyed Democrats, overstaying guests, job interviewers, potential lovers– heck, just about anyone. Trust me. In this age of Life, Inc., in that mumbled admission you instantly brand yourself: prolix, patrician, and pessimistic. (Yeah, names don't hurt me, but ouch.)

Look, blame Battlestar Galactica for my parade of pedantry. You might remember–– a while back I was thinking about that sci-fi epic as “Romans: Remixed,” so – as part of my new venture, Reading Books So You Don't Have To, Unlimited – I decided to check out the original track recorded by Gibbon. (Decline and Fall must have sounded pretty interesting when it premiered, in London, in 1776.)

I regret to report that, as a literary work of art, it has a few significant defects.

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