Today – Two Quick Reviews

Books:

I finished Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. The author, a Washington Post reporter, was in Baghdad before and during the early years of the Iraq War. His book is an attempt to show the follies of the War from inside of the Green Zone, appropriately named by soldiers, The Emerald City for it fantasy and illusion, like Oz.

The best parts of this book are the vignettes. Mr. Chandrasekaran uses one to two page anecdotes to break up the chapters. These short sections are stories about people inside the Green Zone and they show us more about what life was like there than the other two hundred or so pages of the book. He tells us about clubbing, drinking, the undercover whorehouse, the cafeteria, hooking up, and where you could get the best pizza in Baghdad. Good stuff.

The worst parts of the book can be lumped into the rest of it. The critical praise it has gotten is largely undeserved, especially when there are better accounts (see Fiasco) that manage to put the entire war in perspective, not just present us with pitfall after pitfall. In Imperial Nights, you get the point twenty pages in and the rest of the book becomes just a bitch session about how young, naïve, and incompetent the civilians running the CPA were. There seemed to be displeasing element of score-settling as well. This is a problem of tone. The tone of the book is very “know it all” reporter trying to dish on what he witnessed, after the fact.

For example, Mr. Changrasekaren spends at least a third of the book on the Iraqi economy. Here’s the summary: the US screwed up the already screwed up Iraqi economy. In trying to set up a new western style stock market we alienated the Iraqis and made them distrust our intentions. Privatization of factories led to thousands of lay-offs and reprisal killings. The book is supposed to be about the Green Zone, not about the economics of occupation, though a fascinating subject for some; it is not exactly page-turning material. He focuses all of his attention on the little stuff and misses, completely, the big.

Nobody wants to go on a journey with someone who is dissatisfied with everything he sees. Mr. Changrasekaran is that person and glimpsing Baghdad through his eyes fulfills every stereotype that the right-wingers say about the media. He witnesses an awful lot of cringe-worthy things in his time there, but you don’t get the impression he wants you to learn anything from the book, but instead, just get mad about it, which doesn’t accomplish anything. He is constantly critical and perpetually dissatisfied – two very displeasing traits in a narrator.

Music:
My father sent me Bruce Springsteen and the Sessions Band’s Live From Dublin CD. In this CD, the Boss is playing a live show in Dublin with the band from the Seeger Sessions. Though there are some admirable musical performances, the album itself falls short. Not every concert deserves to be made into a CD. Not everything the Boss does is gold.

Perhaps I am a little Boss-weary these days. I don’t attribute this to over-listening, but perhaps because I am malcontented with the role of Springsteen now, as opposed to his role, ten years ago. When he was first doing the comeback thing, there was a lot of energy and freshness to his music. It was like he was becoming big all over again, like in the early 80’s. In the past decade, we have followed the Boss as an iconic figure, the aging rock star who can do no wrong.

When dealing with icons, you run the risk of celebrating them too much and missing the human being there. With the aging Boss, I appreciated getting the CD, listened to the same old stuff on it, and then threw it up on the shelf. Why? The CD is completely unremarkable and something of a bore. Like most live recordings, it is just a crappier version of the studio songs. They are slightly different because of the band, but they are also cheesier too, because the Seeger Sessions band’s appeal is slowly wearing off. On this album when the Boss does try to vary some old standards like Highway Patrolman and Atlantic City, they simply don’t work.

Let us not forget why we love the Boss – before he was an icon he was a struggling kid trying to make it big. We love him because of the struggle, because America watched him transform, rooting the whole way for him to succeed. We want a little of that early rebellion. In Live From Dublin, we don’t see it at all. We see a guy resting on his laurels and seemingly ready to retire. He runs the risk here of becoming a parody; the Bruce Sprinsteen trying to live up to the image of the Boss is a parody - and nobody wants that.