Friday, July 15, 2005

Son Volt Encores with Cortez the Killer

The ears are still ringing from seeing Son Volt's free outdoor set last night at the South Street Seaport. Being an outdoor show, I had no idea it was going to be so fucking loud. But it was. On the upshot, I can now say I've seen Son Volt, I can say that the new material off Okemah and the Melody of Riot is fantastic (including the psychedelic jammy jam "medication"), and I saw a blistering rendition of "Drown" that made the hair on my arms stand up. They came out for a single-song encore, Neil Young's "Cortez the Killer." They had barely gotten back onstage before Jay Farrar was tearing out the amazing, continuous guitar solo that makes up that song, only occasionally punctuated by haunting lyrics. (He came dancing cross the water...). The new album is a dualdisc, new music on one side, documentary film on the other.
I love seeing truly great musicianship. You couldn't get much tighter than these guys if you were the cooper son of Ra.

Thursday, July 14, 2005


Found by way of this blog, who found it elsewhere.

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Friday, July 08, 2005

Giving Birth to Monsters/The Indomitable Nature of Touch


There is a Beulah song, entitled "Calm Go the Wild Seas," that contains the lyric "My prints are unique/you've been touched time and time again."
I like to think that we all function this way, that the events that we are a part of, the actions we take to enable certain things to happen, these stick with us and change us, they shuttle us from then to now. Without them, we wouldn't be anywhen.
These thoughts come back to me in the midst of this prosaic shit and my playing out the part of the downtrodden, when no news is good news. The mail has delivered to me an envelope from Malta containing a postcard advertising the MA Art Exhibition at University of Brighton, the school where my friend Heidi was completing her MA in Fine Arts. The exhibition was entitled "Giving Birth to Monsters." It wasn't a piece of bad news. It wasn't a demand for money. It was a tendril of myself returning home to remind me of who I am and to how many people from out there in the faceless world.

Tender tendrils return to me
touching me
marking trails of toeholds
and fingertips
out in the cold
where in the world
I laid my hands
and left traces indelible
left dents and fingerprints
in my fellow man
that remain
and refuse to be lifted

Thanks for the postcard.

Tuesday, July 05, 2005

This way to the Hall of Douchebags

Via Musicthing... link to "An alarming archive of awful band photos."

"Why is it that words like these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?"-Joyce, The Dead

Things that work

Here's an interesting article about a fuel cell run car.

Of $100 Laptops and the Decline of Emor.

Nicholas Negroponte of MIT's Media Lab is in negotiations with Brazil to provide the country with $100 Linux-based laptops, offering the largely staggeringly poor nation the opportunity to distribute know-how and information to people regardless of social caste, while modern caste-based theocracies like Emor are busy consolidating the power of the state and industry over it and thwarting plans for public-works wi-fi networks (see recent pyrrhic victory of heading off a PBS funding cut only to have a former RNC honcho installed at its head, see freepress for details on the ongoing consolidation of media under fewer and fewer corporate banners). In Emor it isn't enough that you are a human being. It's really quite a handicap. You have to be at the top of the heap and willing to devour as much human flesh as it takes to get there and stay there, either by actively doing or by simply acknowledging that you get ahead while others starve, or you ride the greased ladder to penury and charity before anyone has anything to do with you, before you get that country's hollow hags to look at you. In Brasilia they're giving information, access, know-how to the people, taking them off the gold standard once and for all, closing those cash flow gaps so long convenient to the caste system by ignoring them and moving on to a new currency, one that, even though its adoption was spurred by the need to scrape by and get ahead, is more human. Each person can learn to use the machine, each person's ideas can take form and reshuffle the deck. Access! A country that does not offer its people simply frightened and narrow careerism, cash analogs to human relationships, cash analogs to poetry, cash instead of romance! Cash and the means to get it or nothing at all! A country that does not simply offer protectionist, group-enforced mediocrity! An enormous country.
Would that Emor would recognize the potential of its people with such openness, instead of with restraining, exclusionary fear and in-group schadenfreude. Would that Emor would see its people for people and do a little thing now and then to let the playing field level just a bit.

Fireworks

I wish I had gotten batteries for my digital camera. Fireworks were awesome.
This is really funny. Thanks, Manny.

Saturday, July 02, 2005

Doing the cool at MOMA. Ps1. Send beer if you have any decency..

The Weather from David Lynch

I saw this on BoingBoing.

Friday, July 01, 2005

An incredibly hot photographic document of an anti-cruelty demonstration outside a Bennetton Store in Moscow.




Zaftig (Russian?) girls with causes with paint on their birthday suits.

Senate Approves Repeal of PUHCA

Articles regarding this here and also here. From what the Truthout article leads us to believe, rampant deregulation of the power industry and it's mismanagement by speculators, pyramid schemers, and other types of intestinal paramecia was one of the factors involved in the construction of the Foshay Tower in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Also influenced were great chroniclers of American life/broken dreams Frank L. Baum, Nelson Algren, and John Steinbeck.

Dead literary hunk, Nelson Algren.

Tall building, the Foshay Tower.

BBC Article On British Author's Book Makes Racist Allusions Connecting Rap Music and Neanderthals ::or:: "I Can See Them Rapping in My Mind"


I especially like the caption under the picture of the rapping guy that says "Have we come very far in the last 50,000 years?".
Booyakasha.
Article is here.

Highlights include:
"Neanderthals would have sounded rather "nasal" in their singing because of their larger noses, Prof Mithen said."

"The Neanderthals would have enjoyed it. They weren't particularly creative people but they would have passed on little songs down the generations."

"It is thought that language, separate from music, developed with modern man's immediate African forebears.

But, according to Prof Mithen, words are not necessary, as long as the tune is good."

"I think they would have particularly liked rap music. It has the sort of effect Neanderthals would have enjoyed."

"I can see them rapping in my mind."

Giving the kids something to do

Bip-Hop, an electronic label out of France, has a nice webzine you can read, among other things.