Author: Josh Philip Ross

If M.I.A. is the Jimi Hendrix of grime — some kind of mysterious genius who seems to come from another planet entirely (and whose album is, sadly, delayed indefinitely) — then Lady Sovereign is the Janis Joplin of the scene, tough and brilliant but approachable. She’s like someone you want to stand next to at a party and who you hope will think you’re cool and funny, and who seems generous enough that she just might. She oozes charisma and her flow is kickin’ (as the kids probably no longer say).

I don’t want to carry these metaphors too far, but I do want to draw your attention to Lady S.O.V.’s revamped website with new material, including a couple of new videos and a live recording that just kicks ass. (You have to sign up to get the full-length videos and all.) Go watch and listen. Now matter how cool you are, listening to S.O.V. will make you cooler.

Okay, this one is just nuts. South Korea and Japan are in a territorial dispute over a couple of uninhabited islands in either the Sea of Japan or the East Sea (that name, too, is disputed). The BBC reports that to protest Japanese claims, a couple of Koreans chopped off a finger each, one with garden shears and the other with a meat cleaver. Let us hope, for the protesters’ sake, that there are not nine more territorial disputes.

And how do you get the chickens to eat it?

These are the questions raised by an intriguing BBC story on claims that kimchi, fed to chickens, may be a cure for the bird flu that is currently wiping out chicken populations across Asia and creating serious worries of a global pandemic.

The results so far are inconclusive, and researchers have no idea why kimchi would be able to stop the deadly virus. It does make intuitive sense, though, that Korea’s flaming-hot, reeking, fermented national dish may be toxic to some organisms. I just assumed the organisms were people.

I hadn’t been to the UN complex in a while, so I decided today to swing by for lunch. I was hoping to pick up a copy of A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals from the UN bookshop, but they didn’t have it in yet. Mildly disappointed, I headed for the cafeteria, but then caught sight of a large crowd gathered in the lobby in front. I almost turned back, but then decided that as the crowd was outside, the cafeteria itself might not be completely swamped.

As I drew nearer, I noticed flashbulbs and lights and cameras, and then I caught sight of what was in the middle of it all: Kofi Annan, making some kind of presentation for International Women’s Day, speaking in his quiet voice so that it was hard to hear him even with the amplification. I only stayed for a few moments, but it was interesting just to stand nearby and see in person someone who I’ve seen so often on TV. He looked pretty much like he does on TV, but then I was never closer than about twenty feet. It is, to date, the closest I have ever been to a world leader, although I’m hoping this will change next fall, when President Roh Moo-hyun will be visiting. We’ll see whether I manage to get within twenty feet of him.

So Bush has nominated John Bolton to be the American ambassador to the United Nations. This is, unfortunately, a man who has declared that the UN doesn’t exist, who has been openly hostile to both the UN and multilateral diplomacy generally. He has declared that “It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law.” As undersecretary of state for arms control, he has spent the last four years vigorously thwarting all attempts at multilateral arms control. (here.)

It’s a shame that just when the UN is becoming more relevant and reforming itself, the United State should choose to ignore and denigrate it.

On Sunday night, Jenny and I had dinner at the Second Avenue Deli. My great-aunt Sylvia lived for decades across the street in an apartment that faced St. Mark’s Church — it was her apartment we stayed in when we first got back to New York in 2003 — so Abe Lebewohl’s palace of cholesterol has been something of a family institution since its origins in 1954, and it was to the Second Avenue Deli that we adjourned after Sylvia’s funeral last summer.

The Second Avenue Deli is, of course, a classic, and also a holdover from an earlier era. But unlike the Carnegie Deli, which is now mostly for tourists, Katz’s and Junior’s, which has been taken over by Lower East Side hipsters, or Junior’s in Brooklyn, which now serves a largely African-American clientelle, The Second Avenue Deli is still an ethnically Jewish institution, from its thousand-year-old waitstaff (even the two old Chinese guys feel authentically Jewish, like potstickers after Yom Kippur) to its decidedly nose-heavy patrons.

Our Sunday night visit, however, was an accident: we’d intended to eat at Veselka, but were stymied by a gigantic tour group that was trying to squeeze into the overcrowded restaurant, so instead we decided to get our Ukrainian fix two blocks up, where there was still a wait, but a shorter one. When we were finally seated, packed in between two other tables, the fun really began.

After waiting for some time, we finally got some attention from our waitress, an elderly woman whose hair obviously lives in curlers at night. She announced her presence by flinging a plate of coleslaw onto the table in such a way that I felt it necessary to wipe away the scattered cabbage bits. A few minutes later, she came back with the pickles, again tossing them with enough force to spread them around the table a bit. Then she disappeared for a while, but at last returned to take our orders — or so we thought. She stood behind me, her pen poised over her opened bill case, and said, “Oh?” I reached for my menu to open it and begin my order, but I must have been too leisurely, because she then said, “Oh!” again, snapped her bill case shut and wandered off to do something by the cash register. She returned a minute later, this time allowing us to order — cholent and a kasha knish for me, Hungarian goulash for Jenny, Dr. Brown’s cherry sodas for us both. (If you think of the Second Avenue Deli as exclusively a sandwich joint, you’re missing out. I have eaten a fair bit of cholent in my day, and the Second Avenue Deli’s is exquisite.)

Our meal arrived soon after. “Move that, honey,” the waitress croaked at Jenny, gesturing with a hot plate of goulash toward Jenny’s coleslaw plate. “I need a space to put this.” Jenny complied, and the goulash was duly slapped down, with my cholent following soon after, then the knish, and at last the two glasses of ice and two cans of soda. The last items were the straws, which the waitress withdrew from her apron pocket and then dribbled onto the table, flicking them free of her fingers as if they were someone else’s snot. I don’t think I’ve ever seen straws treated so contemptuously. A while later, totally unsolicited, she wandered past and slapped a pile of napkins down on the top of our water carafe. The service put me in mind of my parents’ descriptions of Ratner’s, where they used to go after concerts at the Filmore East, and where, they claimed, you could count on your waiter to deliver your glass with his thumb in it.

Getting the check was another complicated challenge, but when we did, I made sure to tip big. After all, you can’t get service like that just anywhere!

Topic: Middle East

As I was walking back from the gym today, I crossed paths with a substantial protest march consisting of maybe 150 Lebanese, draped in their red-and-white flags emblazoned with Lebanon’s famous cedar trees and chanting, “What do we want? Syria out!”

It was a curious sight in a number of ways. It was a further reminder that events in the Middle East have immediate ramifications here in America. As the protesters shouted beneath the windows of the Syrian Mission to the United Nations, I had the thought that this is something they probably couldn’t do in Lebanon itself, at least not without fear.

The protest also made me reflect on just how much has changed in the Middle East since 9/11. We are now facing at least the possibility that Iraq will become a stable democracy, Syria will withdraw from Lebanon, Lebanon will democratize, Egypt will at least make a show of holding multiparty elections, Iran will strike a deal with Europe to halt its nuclear program, Afghanistan will hold viable elections, and the Israelis and Palestinians will at last make peace. Not one of these things has actually happened yet, mind you, but they are all at least possibilities rather than just pipe dreams. And let’s not forget that we’re all buddies with Libya now, too.

For better or worse, the United States invaded Iraq, lying about its motivations and stumbling badly in its management of the aftermath. I disagreed with the invasion at the time, and I continue to believe that it was a mistake. So what if all goes well in the Middle East, and all these distant possibilities turn into solid realities? Will I have been wrong?

No. This is a little like the argument some people make that colonial powers like Britain in India or Japan in Korea weren’t all bad because they developed infrastructure and industry. This is true, of course, but to assess the value or harm of colonialism, you can’t just measure the state of industrial development at the beginning and the end of the colonial periods, because that assumes that without colonialism, progress would have been zero. Yes, Koreans would say, Japan did promote and develop industry, but Koreans were already heading in that direction and would have done it faster and with far less harm to the Korean people. (The most egregious examples of this kind of thinking involve Stalin, who did raise literacy rates and industrialized a nation, but at the cost of destroying that nation and its people for generations and into the present.)

So yes, our invasion of Iraq has certainly had an effect on the region. Without it, Saddam Hussein would likely have remained in power for a long time. Afghanistan, however, would have been invaded by pretty much any American who was president on 9/11, and someone else might have done a more thorough job, perhaps making some meaningful progress in pushing Pakistan and India to compromise instead of cozying up to the Uzbeks. Iran’s reform movement has done best when the U.S. has ignored it, robbing the Iranian reactionaries of their favorite foil. Libya’s negotiated settlement with the U.K. was a longstanding effort, not a result of our invasion of Iraq. And Arafat’s death would almost certainly have shaken the demoralized Palestinians even without our invasion of Iraq.

So the big differences, had we not invaded Iraq, would be that Saddam would still be playing cat-and-mouse under a largely effective sanctions regime, and Syria would be much less frightened. On the other hand, we’d have much greater political capital in the region, and we might well have been able to push Egypt and Saudi Arabia to ease up on the political repression. And we would’ve had a lot more energy to expend on dealing with the real regional threats, Iran and Pakistan, and on North Korea.

That said, we can’t roll back time, and the Bush administration, having stirred things up considerably, now faces a number of historic opportunities to help things settle again in a way that genuinely improves the lot of millions in the region while making America and the world more secure. Should they make the right choices and succeed, it will be to their credit.

So have you been itching for a vacation, but uncertain where to go? Why not try North Korea! This fascinating post on Boing Boing provides links to a must-watch Flash movie put out by the [North] Korean Friendship Association, along with some bizarre exchanges they had with the North Korean organization regarding bandwidth.