broker/therapist

Normally I don't just comment on press pieces, but this one hit pretty close to home. Since Camille & I are right smack in the middle of buying our first place, the headline "My Broker, My Therapist" naturally attracted my attention.

The article's definitely accurate in its contention that buying a home brings out the absolute worst in everyone involved. Anything that can be dredged up, will be. But, that said, a few quick things:

1) What kind of person (and especially what kind of spouse) complains, when her husband is buying a $3 million summer home for the family, "I wish you had a good job so we didn't have to live like this"? What would a "good job" be, exactly? And when you say "like this," what horrible circumstances, the result of your husband's sucky job, are you struggling to conceal? This doesn't seem like an instance of real estate offering a quick glimpse into someone's dark side -- this woman is suffering from compulsive greed and I doubt real estate has anything to do with it. Unless, of course, she was being sarcastic, which would be pretty funny.

2) What kind of person chooses an open house to reveal that she's pregnant? And who would do it in such an oblique way? It's one thing to keep it a secret for good reasons, but why decide, on the spur of the moment, to insist that you need a bigger apartment and then rub your belly in a significant way while saying nothing, like Charades? That's bizarre.

3) Somewhere in this article, it should have been mentioned that these people need actual therapy.


In other news, the Georgia Supreme Court is fine with you being a bigot, but you need to parse your bigoted arguments with a little more subtlety. What they really need to pass in Georgia is a statute that allows voters to hold utterly hypocritical views, thereby avoiding this "single-rule" nuisance.

lynx

I cleaned up and updated the links bar, so there's more & better stuff available.

alternate title: once upon a mattress

Following up on this rant, more news from the world of luxury bedding. UNITE HERE published a report last month on hotel housekeepers, their workload, and the amenities arms race currently being conducted by luxury hotel chains. It gathers data from recent surveys and publications, and also presents information from a multi-city survey conducted by the union itself.

Here’s the link to the report, and an accompanying summary of facts and figures which documents all the findings, and provides extra details on the industry as a whole.

I think this report does an excellent job of clearly and accurately presenting what’s at stake for hotel workers’ health and safety, without exaggeration or (too much) melodrama. The anecdotal testimony from housekeepers makes abundantly clear the need for workload reduction, but even more persuasive is the list of tasks per room that a hotel housekeeper is expected to perform:

Bedroom Tasks

✔ Remove all room-service items from room
✔ Strip bed(s) of all sheets, blankets and duvets
✔ Place bottom sheet on each bed and tuck 4-8 times
✔ Place top sheets and blanket on each bed and tuck 4-8 times
✔ Spread duvet on bed
✔ Remove 4-8 pillowcases per bed and stuff pillows into fresh cases
✔ Dust all nightstands and desk
✔ Carefully restock and arrange pens, papers and other written materials (i.e. room service menus) on desk
✔ Dust armoire or dresser, including behind the TV
✔ Clean TV screen
✔ Retrieve TV remote and rearrange TV channel guides
✔ Pick up trash and empty bedroom’s wastebasket
✔ Wash and dry ice bucket and rearrange on counter
✔ Collect, wash and dry dirty glasses
✔ Dust vents
✔ Put away all ironing boards and other equipment
✔ Vacuum all floors

Bathroom Tasks

✔ Pick up soiled towels and place on cart
✔ Replace soiled towels
✔ Clean and disinfect toilet bowl
✔ Wipe down top and side of toilet
✔ Restock toilet paper
✔ Wipe down counter tops
✔ Clean sink(s) and polish faucets
✔ Replace and arrange toiletries (i.e. shampoo, soaps)
✔ Clean bathroom mirror
✔ Wash and dry coffeepot and cups and rearrange on counter
✔ Scrub inside of bathtub
✔ Clean/replace shower curtain or scrub shower door
✔ Clean bath and shower walls
✔ Pick up trash and empty bathroom wastebasket
✔ Mop floor
✔ Dust vents

A few things to keep in mind. Many rooms have more than one bed, doubling some of the bedroom tasks. Some housekeepers are expected to clean 20 of these rooms a day, giving them about half an hour to complete a room. Inspectors visit their rooms regularly, and any incomplete task from the list above is grounds for discipline. Obviously these conditions improve markedly in union shops, but the workload issues still persist. In particular, all tasks that require maneuvering bedding become much more difficult – and dangerous – when the hotels upgrade amenities.

This issue has gotten a lot of press recently, and for good reason. The industry is posting record profits due to the amenities arms race, and in the process, literally breaking apart the bodies of the women who do the actual work.

Tom Hanks knows how to fake-piss

I just saw The Green Mile last night, and without doubt Tom Hanks' finest moment in the film is the tight shot of blissful relief spreading over his face during his first piss after John Coffey heals the urinary infection.

It reminded me of his endless pissing scene in A League of Their Own, which, until I saw The Green Mile, I considered his finest on-screen performance.

So, is this, like, his hidden specialty? I didn't see Philadelphia -- does he piss in that?

favela rising

Just a quick plug for Favela Rising, which Camille & I saw at the SF International Film Festival last week.

It's playing a lot around the country -- worth going to see, without question. Great material for people interested in music, community organizing, urban policing, etc. etc.

One disclaimer, though: It's not a particularly balanced or intellectually rigorous documentary, nor was it intended to be, I'd imagine. Just a good thing to keep in mind, especially if you don't know much about the subject matter.

U-M can finally eat food

Yesterday, UNICCO workers at the University of Miami won the freedom to choose a union through a variant of card-check neutrality. This will, I hope, continue to inspire other student groups to pursue campaigns like this on their campuses. It’s especially critical that these type of student-labor alliances flourish on Southern campuses, where neither the unions nor progressive students can rely on a union infrastructure. This just rocks so hard.

On a related note: I’ve heard educational institutions described as a “soft target,” for any of the following reasons:

• Their “product’s” value relies largely on the kind of prestige susceptible to public pressure.
• If public, they are funded directly by taxpayer dollars, if private, indirectly through grants.
• They are not perceived as profit-seeking enterprises, nor as vital engines for economic growth, so the imperative to reduce labor costs, especially at the expense of service to students, appears unseemly.
• They are expected to operate in an ethical manner and set that same example for students.

One theory goes that it’s not always good to focus on soft targets, since changing them has little effect on the “regular” targets that drive down standards and control industry. This argument holds water in some situations – like efforts to organize public employers while ignoring the vast private sector labor market. But in the case of universities, the “soft target” label doesn’t fit very well. For one thing, they often sub-contract with the largest operators in the service industry (like Sodexho and Aramark in food service), and universities may offer an opening foothold in unionizing these companies wholesale as opposed to contract by contract. For another – and this argument is as older than the hills round these parts – universities are grounded capital, growing in urban areas, and expanding services and jobs. So, in many cases, they can set local or regional standards in places where no other employer (or industry) could do so. They're increasingly emerging as the economic backbone of cities abandoned by other, more mobile industries. Finally, there’s all the ancillary benefits of having a unionized campus: training new activists, affecting the course of knowledge-production and research, etc. etc. etc. Those arguments take a lot of rhetorical energy to put together, and since I’m not organizing students I don’t have to make them anymore, thank fancy Moses. Go here for more.

Anyway, congratulations to the U-M workers, SEIU, and the students who fought so hard throughout for this precedent-setting win.

The Go! Team

Great American Music Hall
4/28/06

I saw The Go! Team last week, the night after Sekou Sundiata. But I decided, instead of reviewing the show, to just develop a list of all the relevant terms, ideas, comparisons that have accumulated over the last 2 years of unrelenting hype for this band. Originally I was gonna list them at the beginning of a longer review, to get them out of the way, but once done with the list I realized that I didn’t have much else to say. Feel free to explore these at your own leisure – Pitchfork, RS, VH1, et al have all covered the group.

Cheerleading
70s cop show soundtracks
Mixing issues (album & live)
Crowd participation
Original vs. US release
Record vs. live lineup
Why do they use sampled horns?
Ninja works the crowd
Two drummers
Buzz Band
Fatboy Slim/Public Enemy/Motown/etc./etc.
Experience/Exuberance

The show was a total rave-up, and the crowd was more into the band than any I’ve seen since the 2001 Okayplayer tour. So that was great. But intentional or not, mixing was pretty horrible. Based on the arrangements, I'd assume the density is intentional, but that's all the more reason for a good mix. It did help cover Ninja’s lame lyrics, but I thought the lame lyrics were sort of the point.

Swedish psychedelic rockers Dungen co-headlined. They look like they just left the Shire and grew 14 feet, and they play a weird, Scandinavian breed of hairy, stompfoot Viking rock. I think Jethro Tull would be the closest analogue, but that might just be the flute solo talking. The bassist, who we could barely see through the hobbit-fro, had the line of the night:

“Excuse me. We sing in Swedish, so if you do not understand…

...then that is the reason.”

Sekou Sundiata

Sekou Sundiata is basically a poet, of the spoken word variety as opposed to the Edna St. Vincent Millay variety, though in the last few years he’s transformed into more of a performance artist. I went down to Stanford last week to see the world premier of his new performance piece, The 51^st (Dream) State, which he’s been developing during a residence. As the title suggests, it’s sort of a dreamy rumination on American identity. The performance set-up for this new piece fairly resembles that of his critically-lauded blessing the boats: a full band on stages, vocalists, and Sundiata moving about speaking poetry and prose with musical backing. They had also erected a series of screens at the rear of the stage, which projected dancing, photo collage, and interview footage.

I can’t speak for the music in the last one, but The 51^st (Dream) State ran the gamut from jazz to gospel to raga and back again. I find this kind of hodge-podge wonderful to enjoy in the moment, and less memorable as time goes on. Programmatic music needs a pervading musical sensibility -- not necessary a strict genre, just a style and tone -- in order to communicate and sustain whatever themes it's intended to accompany. The Hindustani improvisation over Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” was jarring and beautiful at the time, but its disturbing effect fades in memory and the cavalcade of other musical styles that preceded and followed it effectively prevent listeners from gaining an understanding of its function within the whole. That's a major problem, and an easy way to make your audience into a bunch of glassy-eyed trout.

The same problem extended to the poetic content, unfortunately. When poetry is presented well (not that I’m much of a judge, but I have some experience due to my parents’ occupation and my own early aspirations), an audience over the course of an evening gains a sense of how the poet interacts with the world, and what he/she would like to reveal to you about it. Sundiata’s poetry, at times transcendent, at times aimless, did not accomplish this, at least not for me. He prefers to inundate you with words, imagery, and rhetoric, which may entertain you but will only communicate something substantive if he's exercised discipline in putting them together. I loved his trenchant re-vamping of the tired cliché “Everyone’s a nigga if you look at it right," and so did the rest of the crowd. Meanwhile, his first-person narrative of the confusion and horror immediately following a terrorist attack left the audience (included me) shocked and clammy – his character describes recognizing brain tissue, amongst the carnage, because it’s “ticking like a watch.” You don’t hear that everyday. Even the juxtaposition of taped interviews with a Japanese internment survivor and a post-9/11 Arab-American, heavy-handed as it was, did a good job bringing our struggle with American identity into relief.

Sundiata's weaker material simply rambled through a variety of clichés about facing up to our own injustice, greed, etc. I hate to say this of a respected poetry professor, but he sometimes kind of sounded like a sophomore AmStud major doing a book report on Notes of a Native Son. Which isn’t to say that the sentiments aren’t appropriate for the times, given the current, volatile conflict over what is and isn’t American. This was just a classic situation of trying to address much more than anyone could cover in two hours -- especially through the medium of song and poetry. Camille described it well when she said, leaving the theater, "I just wanted them to follow up something."

One last thing I’ll say: one thing I admired about The 51^st (Dream) State was that, of all the art I’ve seen in the last six years, I think it was the most comfortably situated in the 21^st century. It made no effort to be timeless, or to explore history separately from its relation to the present. It avoided various dated paradigms of race, gender, colonialism, etc., while confronting head-on violent acceleration of culture, commerce, and empire that has characterized the last decade. With more focus, any of these topics could have made for a challenging (and memorable) theme.

As it was, all I can say is that I saw Sekou Sundiata perform last week. I’m not too sure what he did.

Rainer Maria review

Catastrophe Keeps Us Together
Grunion Records
4/4/06

I was so far behind on this band, that when I became a fan of Rainer Maria, it was during not their first, not their second, but their third wave of popularity. It was about a year ago, when I saw them at Café Du Nord, which was both my first time hearing their music, and my first time eating Du Nord’s super-crispy Kennebec fries with chili ketchup and garlic aioli. Awesome night.

In the intervening year, I’ve developed a medium-sized obsession – somewhere between my consuming devotion to the Magnetic Fields and my vague infatuation with MF Doom. They’re from Wisconsin…which is nice. Not because they have a particularly Midwestern flavor, but because they don’t have the permeating (and infuriating) aura of being from New York, or the Bay Area scene, or – worst – fucking Montreal.

I love three-pieces, especially G-B-D types. Rainer Maria works on basically the same formula as The Who, although the content, performance, etc. are plenty different. Really virtuosic performers, who just tear into their instruments like they just bought them yesterday, filling up as much space as possible. I also have to admit that I like female bassists. Don't know why.

The new album is called Catastrophe Keeps Us Together, and it’s...sorta different, sorta not. The band smoothed out the sudden changes, abrasive vocals, and dissonance from the previous albums, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I love their last LP, Long Knives Drawn, because it sounds so much like their live show, full of careening energy and furious attacks. The new one is more controlled, more carefully arranged, less muddy. For the songs with depth, of which there are a handful, the added care improves the material. For the more banal songs (this poetically-themed band occasionally writes some pretty lame lyrics), the cleaner mix and simplified lines pushes the music dangerously close to modern-rock territory. On previous albums, slightly juvenile melodrama was well complimented with punk abandon. And you can’t fault bands that make this kind of music for writing simple lyrics – as with Sleater-Kinney, or The Walkmen, complex verbal exploration wouldn’t fit the tone or the style. That said, modern-rock + simple lyrics = Hootie, so you’ve got to be careful.

As with the last two albums, the first cut serves as the anthem, (see Long Knives Drawn’s “Mystery and Misery” or “Artificial Light” from A Better Version of Me). Cashing in on the post-millennial, pre-apocalypse tension, “Catastrophe” opens the album with a vaguely political alarm call/love song. It’s the best cut on the album, and even got me a little misty at the end, when Caithlin De Marrais repeats over and over: “I’ve got a plan/I’m gonna find you/at the end of the world.” What can I say, she’s hot and I’m a sucker for screamy professions of love against the odds.

Other album highlights: “So Terrified,” which would be cheesy if it weren’t so earnest and resolutely anti-cliché. “Bottle” is a great love song that employs the charmingly Garth Brooks-ish metaphor of love like a bottle to the head. “Already Lost” has a mounting anguish that purges itself through lots of thrashy chords and desperate wail, along with trademark "I'm sad/I'm ok/wait, am I?" lyrics:

I waited up all night
And my thoughts were all of desolation
But the best part of waiting up all night
Was in the morning when I didn’t feel a thing.

There’s some familiar stuff here, too. “Life of Leisure” is basically “Ears Ring,” a little watered-down and Interpol-ed (Peter Katis, the Interpol’s producer, did the first two cuts). “Clear and True” has a generic catchiness that I know Camille will love, and I’ll endure and probably sing along with mindlessly. Unfortunately, William Kuehn’s wild drumming can’t save “Make You Mine” from lines like “I’ll make you mine/Cause I love you so, tonight,” and Kyle Fischer’s endlessly inventive guitar work can’t save “Burn” from similar problems.

But the album as a whole is great, and I’m sure it’ll grow on me, because De Marrais’s voice is so affecting, and they play so well. If you don’t own a Rainer Maria album, and you’re interested, I’d recommend Long Knives Drawn or A Better Version of Me, to get a sense of what their best songwriting sounds like un-handicapped by “sophisticated” production. Also download “Catastrophe” from iTunes and try not to sing it under your breath.

Oh – also, Rainer Maria are going on tour to support the new album, and I can’t recommend their live show strongly enough. I’ve been seeing live music long enough not to trust the frequent impulse to buy an album as soon as the show’s over. But I did after the show last year, because they were having such a blast on stage, dancing around and tearing into the songs. Kyle Fischer, especially, is not to be missed. It probably depends on the mood, but on the live DVD, and at the show I saw, he was just shredding and doing some killer Pete Townsend moves.

Tour dates

Band website

Ask New Plastic Alek

I stole this idea from Alex Ross, though of course I've seen it elsewhere. I wouldn't have done it myself, but after finding "new plastic alek" among the search terms that returned my website last month, I figured that if I've got a nickname, I should answer some questions.

Yes, immigrant housekeepers are underpaid: find out more.

I'm no expert, but I think if the chorus of a song is "I'm Black and I'm proud," it probably does exemplify black power.

Janel Maloney is not ugly -- consult a physician for your problem.

Hey man, once you found Angelo Badalamenti's theme for Twin Peaks, weren't you wishing that someone had remixed it?

Wouldn't we all love to read the Nice & Smooth blog? Greg Nice's posts would probably be pretty similar to his lyrics. "Today I bought some Timberlands. Does that make you jealous, per se wishing you had some? Don't get p-noid like Sigmund Freud. By the way, I love women. Do the seats recline in your car?"

To whoever was looking for the main idea of Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic as a counterculture of modernity, let me know if you find it. Same goes for Sahlins' history of conjecture.

At least those folks are reading my college essays, instead of just downloading them from swipe pages.

For the millionth time, I'm a heterosexual white Jew: I know next to nothing about black male sexuality.

If you're an aspiring drum major searching for tricks, you've come to the wrong place -- unless you consider being tall and sick of band class a "trick."

And if you want to know what caused the holocaust, you've really come to the wrong place: try my mom.

Finally, this is all I know about your topic, sir. But they're newborns and they can't fly, so you can probably catch one and study it.

times is changin'/young niggas is agin'

Bloggin's gonna be spotty for a week or so more. Camille and I are looking at properties (or, in the proper parlance, "units") to actually buy with money and live in.

I can't describe how far that is from my youthful ideas about what I'd be doing at age 25. Not that this is worse. I thought I was going to be trying to make it as a professional clarinettist. Which meant, presumably, that when people asked me what I do for I living, I would have had to say "I'm a clarinettist." Glad I dodged that bullet.

I'm married. I have a cat, two fish, and a monthly car payment. I'm about to have a mortgage, and in a year and a half I'll be starting law school.

Things just ain't the same for gangstas.

*bends over, hands on knees, breathing deeply in and out*

aqui estamos y no nos vamos

A few reasons why Monday’s immigration rally in San Francisco was good.

1) It was short.

2) It had a mix of broad and narrow scope, i.e. Broad: Everyone deserves justice and citizenship in our country, regardless of where they came from or how they got here. No human being is “illegal.” Narrow: Boo HR 4437.

3) Our union was keeping things live with chants adapted (on the spot) for the occasion. "El pueblo-Arriba! La migra-a bajo!" etc. Local 2, baby.

There’s been tons of coverage on this issue already, obviously, and I’d expect that pretty much everyone reading this will be familiar with the relevant stuff here anyway. What interests me is the relation between the massive pro-immigration demonstrations (for lack of a better term), and the anti-war/anti-Bush mobilizations last month.

Leading up to, and following, the March 18 protests, I spent a lot of time talking with other folks in the movement about the effectiveness and utility of "mass mobilization." I’ve been complaining for a while now that, instead of being a focused demonstration of support for a particular change or set of changes, these anti-war mobilizations end up turning into Lefty-Con 2006. Hardly a rare complaint on the left, or anywhere else of the political spectrum for that matter, but no less valid for it. These are basically just large gatherings of people with similar, or related, or at least non-conflicting interests (like vegans and First Amendment advocates). That's why the proper term is "mass mobilization," as opposed to "protest." Well, really, I'm just splitting semantic hairs to prove the point -- I don't actually care what you call them. Anyway, Ben Adler wrote an article in Campus Progress last year about the September mobilizations, which I think sums it up very well:

Here we have the opportunity to bring together tens of thousands of Americans to implore someone (the president) with the power to grant a specific, achievable request (withdrawal from Iraq), and it may well be wasted. Where activists could demand a policy change that has significant and growing public support, too many choose to protest every U.S. policy under the sun.

…this view, in its attempt to be all encompassing, is in fact quite myopic; it trades actual gains for people suffering under occupation for the immediate satisfaction of unloading invective on every aspect of U.S. foreign policy for a day.

Should we resent people for believing in Lefty-con, or even just enjoying it? Well, obviously not -- and I admit that the part of myself I'm not crazy about frequently prompts me towards derision, either because I've decided to be holier-than-thou for the moment, or because I'm guilty about doing little to challenge US military aggression, or because I have a jerky knee despite my best efforts. But regardless of how mature I feel like being on a given day, I still don’t go to “mass mobilizations” as a rule. I don’t get much out of them, they’re rarely effective in my view, and I believe my time could be better spent working on focused campaigns, or taking a break from work on focused campaigns. And I won’t be arrogant enough to say I’ve heard every counter-argument to my position, but I’ve heard plenty. Think globally, act locally. Show the rest of the world visible resistance to the Washington consensus. Give activists a chance to communicate, recharge their “batteries,” get pumped. Etc. etc. etc.

Here’s the thing: it seems like whenever I ask organizers and attendees a few direct, strategic questions, things get way too murky for my taste. Who’s in charge of making the change you want to see happen? What do you think is most likely to influence their decision? Assuming they’re not inclined to make the change of their own volition, what do we believe will persuade them, threaten them, or leave them no option but to make that change? Those are the critical strategic questions to me. If you want to win change, as opposed to just demanding it, then strategic questions should be at the center of every action you perform and every dollar you spend.

If, for instance, I thought that mass mobilizations of leftists had any significant impact on the people who set U.S. military policy, then I would attend them. Unfortunately, even if they did have an effect, the mass mobilizations would still require a focused aim. The goal of gathering a whole lot of people in one place, or multiple places at once, ought to be to demonstrate that an enormous number of people were capable and willing to join together to push/oppose a particular course of action. And either the numbers, the demographics, the location, or the activity (ideally all) should demonstrate to people in power that they need to heed the will of the gatherers. Meanwhile, all that Lefty-Cons demonstrate is that thousands of leftists understand how to operate a listserve, and are willing to indulge each other for a short period of time. I know that sounds harsh, but it's hard for me to imagine how this kind of event would inspire someone (in an accountable way) to further action. I’m all for it if it does. And if there’s literally no other way to transform that person into a progressive, critically thinking, active member of society, then all the more reason for mass mobilizations to take place. I'm trying to work the scorn out of my system, and replace it with bland support, or at least indifference. But without clear, persuasive answers to the strategic questions I posed above, you will not find me there.

All that said, the immigration protests were the exact opposite of Lefty-con. There's pending legislation in Congress that will profoundly affect millions of immigrant families, communities, and the U.S. economy. Moreover, it will set the course for future federal decisions in this area, and public opinion is in flux.

Should we have a march for immigrant rights, human rights, no more sweatshops, organizing rights, and fair trade? No. We should have a march opposing the crappy legislation, and supporting a humane, just immigration policy to be implemented now, or at least begun now, while there’s a window. We’ve got legislation that’s up in the air, a critical wedge issue in the 2006 midterms, and a group of people that haven’t had any voice on the national stage since 2003. Politicians who are in charge of drafting and approving this legislation are watching their constituents because they know what's at stake. They're seeing business and labor unite on lobbying day, and they're seeing huge numbers of "legal," voting immigrants (and the naturalized-by-birth children of "illegals") turn out across the country. They're seeing the politicization of immigrant communities that are less than a generation old, and growing at enormous rates in hundreds of major cities. That covers who's in charge and who/what might be likely to influence their decision. It's clear that the organizing is there to make this one of the crucial political issues of the next ten years, and that leaves people and powerful institutions with no choice but to address it. Also, sad to say -- it's here in town, not across the world. Unlike US foreign policy, we have immediate and effective ways to confronting the injustice in our own communities, which means that voters, workers, taxpayers, and consumers can be mobilized to exert pressure directly on the folks that make these decisions.

RIP William Sloane Coffin Jr.

I tried a few times to summarize Sloane Coffin's life, or express the lasting impact his work had, and will continue to have, on everyone that struggles for social justice.

But it's the end of the day and I'm wiped out. And tonight is Pesach.

So instead of waiting a long time to gather my thoughts, I'll just echo his most famous quote, in the hopes that it causes you to pause for a moment and mark his passing.

"The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love."

(In fairness, his most famous quote is probably the one about winning the rat race and still being a rat, but this one seemed more appropriate)

pesach

Passover begins tonight at sundown.

Josh, as usual, has put a lot more thought into this than I would have (or at least he linked to previous moments when he'd put thought into this).

I'll just add that the janitors at the University of Miami are entering their second week of a hunger strike for organizing rights, and that when we feast tonight we should remember not only those who hunger in a world of plenty, but also those whose hunger for justice has brought us -- and continues to bring us today -- ever closer to the promised land.

In case that was a little preachy, I'll also point out the the UM students straight GAFFLED an idea from the Better Way Village at Yale. Look at this picture, taken at UM last week:



Now look at this one, taken at Yale in April 2003:




I know, the mock negotiating table idea has been used before. This was too blatant to pass up, plus the 3-year anniversary of the BWV is coming up on Friday.

kid koala/mike relm

Kid Koala/Mike Relm/J-Boogie
Independent
4/1/06

Have you ever been to a “turntablist” concert?

That’s right: “No.”

You should go to one. If you like dancing to music, and aren’t ashamed to be a geek, it’s likely to be more fun than whatever live music’s available that night, and way better than CSI: Milwaukee (or whatever).

Turntablism: the record player/mixer as musical instrument. A lot of people have trouble accepting the pretense, but I think you’d be hard-pressed to find someone holding onto that opinion about after seeing a show like the one I went to last week.

I’ll skip J-Boogie, because I always get bogged down in the openers. But Mike Relm is more fun than a barrel of Fun-Dip. Seriously, DO NOT MISS HIM IF HE COMES TO YOUR TOWN. He’s a dorky guy in glasses and a black suit, with a sense of humor, a lot of ridiculous things on vinyl, a fairly pointed (but not always apparent) political sensibility, and the innate DJ ability to make any record kill. And in his newer shows, he’s introduced the Pioneer DVJ-X1, which is a scratch-able DVD “turntable." A while back Pioneer developed some kind of algorithm to simulate vinyl manipulation and match it to a physical "scratching" interface, the size of a 45 record. That was a revolution, and now they've applied the same process to DVD audio, and built a parallel system for visual data. Imagine what it might look like on screen if someone was moving the spindles of one of those old reel-to-reel projectors back and forth, and you'll get the idea.

Relm already had made visuals a big part of his show, but with the scratch-able DVD, and a DVD burner, they can become totally integral. Video/audio clips include: Bjork’s “Human Behavior” video (where she sings at her Cheerios and gets chased by a stuffed bear), the “O face” and other scenes from Office Space, a mix experiment using the “Twist” scene from Pulp fiction (you can find video of that here), “99 Problems,” Peanuts/Peewee’s Playhouse, Fight Club, School of Rock…you name it. Plus blends of Led Zeppelin, the Cure, Public Enemy, John Lennon, Rage Against the Machine (two cuts!!), RJD2, etc. etc. etc. etc. I was in heaven. You can get a taste of it on his website , and check out some fan-recorded visuals at YouTube (they’ve even got clips from the SF show).

Kid Koala was also awesome. Folks will know him from Handsome Boy Modeling School, Deltron, and of course Gorillaz. Also Bullfrog. Koala’s set includes elaborate mood pieces, frenetic B-Boy workouts, artsy stuff, and lots of humor. He’s in the vein of other hiphop renaissance men, like Prince Paul, DJ Spooky, etc. He’s a cartoonist and composer, with clear designs on a niche market that has slowly become acceptable in the mainstream: geeks. Which isn’t to say he didn’t rock hard or get everyone dancing. But what stays with me was his Plunderphonics-style reworking of “Moon River,” his performance of “Drunk Trumpet” (in which he uses the turntable speed and vinyl surface to create his own jazz trumpet solo over a rhythm section), and his “spooky” set, which mixes Slayer, RATM – it was a good night for them – and various scary sound effects. It’s impossible not to have fun when this guy is playing. I can’t say enough about his creativity and the freshness of his approach to the instrument. Go get his first LP, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, and listen to it with open ears.

And see him when he’s in your town.

I know I say that about everybody. I guess what I’m recommending is more live music. It’s the best possible way to spend your entertainment money. Do you remember any movies you went to in 2005? You’ve got maybe a dim memory of buying Milk Duds, right? Live music is interactive, and it stays with you much longer. Though, by the same token, it takes much longer to wash a bad show out of your brain than a bad movie. So do what I do – once every 1-2 months, spend an hour combing through Citysearch, or the events listings of your local paper. Alternately, you might make a list of the venues that you enjoy in your town and comb through their calendars. Then buy a set of will-call tickets in advance, and write it into your calendar. That way, you’ve already spent the money and blocked out the time, so you’re committed and you’ll make it out the door (which is the hardest part).

Plork

Introducting Plork.

Should I change careers?

I don't know, I feel like Della Fitzgerald (that's my laptop) would be intimidated by the Powerbooks. Signal processing is not her thing. She's better equipped for simple things, like searching for screencaps of Janel Maloney in her underwear from last week's West Wing (don't bother, I already looked).

Some information & relevant questions, from the site:

The Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) is a newly established ensemble of computer-based musical meta-instruments. Each instrument consists of a laptop, a multi-channel hemispherical speaker, and a variety of control devices (keyboards, graphics tablets, sensors, etc...). The students who make up the ensemble act as performers, researchers, composers, and software developers. The challenges are many: what kinds of sounds can we create? how can we physically control these sounds? how do we compose with these sounds? There are also social questions with musical and technical ramifications: how do we organize a dozen players in this context? with a conductor? via a wireless network?

It's too early (obviously) to tell whether this will turn out to be a novelty or the start of a widespread phenomenon. Computers have been a critical component of new music for decades now, and of live performance for nearly as long. Their capacity for use in an interactive context is based on the quality of the hardware design and the software programming. Plork is currently composed of people who participate in all aspects of the process, from research to design to composition. The success of this model beyond Princeton will rely on the quality of the ideas at all these levels. Will non-CS majors be able to learn & perform this music? If so, will the software for instrument design be flexible and friendly enough for them to design and play their own instruments? Will composers without a background in computer music be able to do the same?

This isn't to suggest that making the Plork idea available beyond the Princeton CS department is a necessary or even a good idea. But the unbounded nature of computer technology (not to mention wireless networking) prompts these kinds of questions. Friendliness and flexibility are two of the main advantages "meta-instruments" ought to have over the conventional variety, and the same should go for sound design and composition. To my mind, the prospect of those open, unexplored vistas (and not the novelty of 15 people sitting on pillows with Powerbooks) is the most exciting thing about Plork.


PS: I found while browsing around that, in Dutch, the word "PLORK" can also be used to describe a girl with a "Prachtige Lichaam, Onwijs Rot Kop" (sp?), which translates into English as "wonderful body, unbelievably ugly face."

In my freshman dorm room, I regret to inform you, the preferred term was "butter face." As in, "She has a nice body, but her face..." I don't think I need to explain that I never used this term. It's just one of the many gifts I received from Eric Eskenazi.

Mad for Sadness

Arab Strap
Cafe Du Nord, San Francisco
3/25/06

Wow, what a difference. Camille & I last saw this band at the Guinguette Pirate in Paris, which is actually an old Chinese junk docked on the banks of the Seine. It's a horrible venue for live music. Woozy, cramped, navy toilets. They have the right idea, in that it resembles an awful dive bar, but at least in an awful dive bar you don't have to walk down the gangway for fresh air, or wonder if there's sewage in your drink.

This was the summer of 2003. Arab Strap had released Monday at the Hug & Pint the previous April, and was touring on it. They were not happy. Which, to anyone who's heard their music, will seem like a redundant statement. But they even seemed unhappy beyond the general level of gloom and disgust for which they're adored and/or detested, depending on your view.

The concert in 2003 was pretty awful, what with the sound problems and onstage bickering, but I've come to love this band deeply since then. Somehow they made it onto the list of artists whose releases I will always buy new, not used, as soon as they come out. I don't know what it was about their sound that got to me, but it was something. Slow, echoing fingerpicked guitar, plodding drum machine, and half-sung, half-growled, half-whispered lyrics about alcolhol and one-night stands in an impenetrable Scottish brogue. Occasional strings, plinky pianos, effects.

I know, I know, it sounds irresistable. But Arab Strap will seduce you (like fruits and vegetables, or a woman – (c) Oliver Babish). Lead singer Aidan Moffat has a Serge Gainsbourg-like delivery, and a rather distinctive way with a couplet. From “Packs of Three,” off Philophobia:

It was the biggest cock you’d ever seen
But you’ve no idea where that cock has been
You said you were careful, you never were with me
I heard you did it four times and johnnies come in packs of three

Meanwhile, guitarist Malcolm Middleton seems to have an endless supply of reflective, slowly-winding guitar backdrops. Rather than developing chord structures, bridges, etc., he strings these long lines together, so the overall effect is something between a guitar and a music-box drone with flange. It's distinctive, and immediately unsettling.

Over the course of the last ten years, the band has cautiously added new elements to their palette. Strings, bagpipes, music boxes, percussion. Each album gets a little more conventionally “listenable.” I actually like that they seem to work slowly and deliberately on their sound, rather than making a constant effort to fling themselves into new areas. They’re the perfect example of how doing the same thing over and over can work. Like the Morgan Freeman of Scottish indie rock.

Alright, the show. The first opener was A Whisper in the Noise. They courageously started with a 10-minute long slow tune. I leaned over to Camille and said “Side one of The Wall called, and they want their shouty, echo-y vocals back,” which she thought was funny. Then I told her I needed to remember that for the blog, and she retracted her statement, saying it wasn’t quote, “funny enough for the internet.” To which, of course, I had to respond: “If yeh don’t eat your meat, how can yeh have any pudding? How can ye have any pudding if yeh don’t eat your meat!?” I guess I don’t remember much more about the opener. They didn’t particularly pique my interest. Kind of detached and plodding for my taste. I feel bad saying that, since they suffered some misfortune later on in the tour, but being weird is not the same as being good. And even though I like weird music, I don’t like it because it’s weird. To be fair, I was hungry and waiting at the bar with my wife, who was also hungry (and a little cranky), so who knows.

His Name is Alive had the middle spot. I can’t get into their music too much. Some of it is terrific, some is just boring, wandering nonsense. “I Thought I Saw,” from their new album Detrola, is a super singable Motown-type shuffle, with horns and scratchy guitar goodness. It got the patented Camille head-bounce, which is hard to earn. But that song proved an exception during the show, and is probably an exception in their overall catalogue. The majority of their music left me cold, bored, and annoyed that I didn’t spend my money on something else. It’s worth noting, though, that their recorded output, from what I’ve sampled on ITunes, seems more varied than what they presented, and might offer more to eclectic ears. Unfortunately neither the songs nor the performance had the immediacy to translate well in a live context. Worse, their setlist was sequenced funny. It didn’t have much variety, and it didn’t build. ¾ of the way through, when you should be warming up to a band, getting comfortable with their sound and style, I was wishing HNIA would get off. That’s never a good sign.

Oh, right, the headliner. Well, they fucking killed. They’re in rock band mode now – no strings, two guitars, bass, and live drums instead of a machine. The concert opened with “Stink,” the snarling first track on their new LP, The Last Romance. The buzz on this album is that it’s more “upbeat” than the previous ones (true), but it’s comforting to know that even with sprightlier tempos, they haven’t strayed too far from the template. The first line of Stink is “Burn these sheets that we’ve just fucked in,” and it goes pretty much downhill from there. They are not Kool & The Gang. They tore through some new songs, including the new LP’s first single, “Dream Sequence,” as well as “(If There’s) No Hope For Us” and “Don’t Ask Me To Dance.” Like the older material, these songs explore the claustrophobic, disorienting nature of love and the need to escape, or at least get your bearings. But the upswing in pace and rock-ier instrumentation makes the music’s hopeful side a little more credible. Listening to the earlier albums, I had trouble believing that Aidan Moffat actually wanted his drunken, destructive lovelife to change. If he wasn’t addicted to wallowing, he was at least sincerely committed to it. The Last Romance, on the other hand, has a struggling, driven aspect to it that fundamentally alters the perspective – to me, at least. It’s just more hopeful, there’s no other way to say it.

As the show progressed they dug back into their ten-year catalogue for “Pyjamas,” “Who Named the Days,” “New Birds,” and “Packs of Three.” Though “Who Named the Days” is a gorgeous, whispered ballad, the overall crowd response & rapt sing-along leads me to believe that it’s become a minor anthem despite their best intentions. They closed the set with “There is No Ending,” an absurdly catchy uptempo dance number with a big trumpet hook and reluctantly optimistic lyrics. Yeah, it talks about pedophiles and nuclear holocaust, but it still falls squarely into the “love song of resistance” mold – sort of like “No Surrender” being covered by the patrons of a sports pub in the Northern UK. You know – “Love will keep us together…again.” My favorite part:

If you can love my growing gut, my rotten teeth, and graying hair
Then I can guarantee I’ll do the same as long as you can bear.
If you love my little poofy hands, my skinny arms and reeking feet
The way I dance the way I eat…

Plates may smash and doors may slam, my comments may be less than kind
But that won’t mean I’ve changed my mind
I’m a huffy prick the best of times, I love to sulk and shout and squeal
But please don’t doubt the way I feel.

For the encore, Aidan and Malcolm came back with an acoustic guitar and took requests. It offered a great window into the heart of the band, and a picture into how they must of looked, felt, and sounded back in the mid-nineties. I’m one of the fans that’s always glad (so far) to see them change their approach to music, and how it reflects their outlook on life, but it was nice to get a glimpse during the encore of the bare elements that called critical attention to Arab Strap a decade years ago: brutal honesty, dark humor, and passionate longing of the very modern, urban variety.

So Arab Strap was great. As for the other openers? Well, I’ll put it this way. They were not Scottish.

plus i'm scrambling...

...to review shows I've seen recently. This last week was the NoisePop festival here in San Francisco, so it'll be a while before I get them together, but keep checking back.

Arab Strap should be up today or tomorrow.

Kid Koala/Mike Relm should be up later this week.

Smoosh should be up next week.

Planet Asia/Rasco will never be up, because the show was two weeks ago and I can't remember enough. It was slightly above average for a hip-hop show, but the sound was still weak and the crowd wasn't too familiar with Asia's new, worse material.

Superman is a dick.

RIP Norm Leonard...

In the vein of people whose death I missed because reading the Obit section depresses me almost as much as the Fashion section, I wanted to mark the passing of Norm Leonard. Over the last few months I've been having this conversation:

Some guy: So, you're going to law school?
Me: Yeah, I think so.
Some guy: What kind of law do you want to practice?
Me: I'm not sure I actually want to practice law, but...
Some guy: Then why are you going?
Me: Well, there's a lot of other things you can do with a law degree, but I don't know...I might practice law. If I did, it'd be, like, labor law or law directed towards social justice.
Some guy: You mean, like A Civil Action?
Me: No.

Well, if I did practice law, Norm Leonard would be the blueprint to follow. I'll link to the LA Times and SF Chronicle obits.

Here's the short summary of his work, from the Chronicle:

Mr. Leonard's cases included his 1954 defense of Harry Bridges before the U.S. Supreme Court, in which he successfully got the labor leader's perjury conviction overturned. Other cases included the defense of activists who picketed in spring 1964 at the Sheraton-Palace Hotel to protest a whites-only hiring practice; the defense of UC Berkeley students during the fall 1964 Free Speech Movement; conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War; and the representation of people subpoenaed before the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings for alleged Communist Party activity.

I had the good fortune to work for three months at Leonard Carder LLP, Bay Area firm started by Norm Leonard and his partner Bill Carder. I even attended a holiday lunch with Mr. Leonard in 2004, where he spoke forcefully about the importance of carrying on the work. His colleagues at the firm were an inspiration to me, and helped show me what could be done with a legal education. So, if I do end up practicing law (and again, I don't know if it's likely or not), it'll be due to that as much as anything.

Glad I got the opportunity to see him in person.

MJ in his prime...

So, because of all the wedding hoopla, and work, and my successful attempt to disconnect myself from Okayplayer, I didn't find out about the tragic passing of James Yancey (aka Jay Dee/J Dilla) until last week. For folks who don't know Dilla's music -- it might turn out that you do. He barely promoted himself at all, even in his solo career, but he made some of the best and most distinctive hiphop in the last 20 years. Amongst heavy-duty hiphop fans he was totally revered, to the point of fetishization.

I've been wanting to write something about him for the last week. But his history, and his struggle to make music through the illness, are well documented in articles by the Detroit Free Press and MTV.com. And you can hear a lot of his live music at TheRootsLive.com, which recently produced a tribute (this link also gives you the uncharacteristically personal and emotional statement from Roots MC Black Thought, which is a must-read).

I guess I don't have a whole lot to add. Dilla's work demonstrates, even on first listen, that he had one of those minds just built for music. There aren't too many composers out there whose music you hear, then right away understand their personal connection to sound and rhythm. And that quality obviously extended to his collaborations with other musicians. He had a talent where whoever he was working with -- Tribe, D'Angelo, Common, Talib Kweli, Madlib, Badu, Busta, etc. -- it seemed like the perfect match, and at the same time his music brought so much new out of those artists that they seem deeper and stronger with him behind the boards.

Anyway, I've also been thinking about the signature Dilla "sound," if there is one. Dilla was versatile almost to a fault. He went from producing R&B (Janet Jackson's "Got Till It's Gone", D'Angelo) to jazzy boom-bap (Common's "The Light," "Dynamite," for the Roots, etc.), to sparse, percussive bangers ("So Hardcore," the best track on Busta Rhymes' When Disaster Strikes). And that doesn't even count the entirely new style of beatmaking he introduced for his own group, Slum Village -- which I don't even want to try to describe. Whatever he made, it was usually characterized by the absence of instruments rather than their presence. That's one of the ways you can tell a Dilla beat in the first few seconds. The archetypical Jay Dee beat is uneven drums, with a sloppy hi-hat and a too-loud snare, an expressive bassline so weird that no one would play it in real life, and a loop filtered beyond recognition. Overall, his beats tend toward purposeful sloppiness, but the good kind. The kind practiced deliberately by jazz and funk bands in an effort to get further into your guts. Hearing (and feeling) a good Dilla beat makes you worry that your heart rhythm will go out of synch with your lungs. Or, if that doesn't make any sense, it's like the experience of patting your head, rubbing your stomach, and chewing gum while you're walking down the street. Discombobulating and exhilarating at the same time.

What I really wanted was to write a sort of blow-by-blow review of Dilla's work, and make a list of his incredible innovations and moments of genius. But ?uestlove already did it here, and much better than I would have. So if you like hiphop, soul, jazz, or funk, go get Fantastic Vol. II. Get Like Water for Chocolate. Get Donuts, get Jaylib, and Mama's Gun, and Voodoo, and Labcabincalifornia. You'll have Dilla fever soon enough.

One last thing:
I've noticed that it really seems to get to me when people with remarkable, unique approaches to creating music die. Elliott Smith's is another that comes to mind right away. I think my sense of good in the world, more than I'd care to admit, is inextricably tied up with my sense of good in the world of music. The existence of people like James Yancey and Elliott Smith is sometimes what gets me up in the morning. The gratitude I feel for their music, and the hope I hold for the things they haven't written yet. I'm discovering that the indescribable feeling you get, tearing off the shrink wrap, is hard to live without.

James Yancey's music gave me that feeling, no question. But obviously I can't describe it very well. If you want to pay your respects to Mr. Yancey, find the music and listen to it. I'm sure that wherever he is, or isn't, that would make him happy.

"it's unbelievable..."

Man.

This is a huge settlement, both in financial terms and in terms of its impact on future litigation. Not only did Bridgeport win a high-profile, lucrative sampling case in a what has become murky territory for the law, but they actually got the album pulled from shelves and the radio.

A number of things entertain me about this. Where the RIAA is insanely vigilant against piracy, they regularly appear on record and in amicus briefs in opposition to restrictive sampling law. And now we see why. I don't know Ready to Die's current sales volume, but imagine if this happened to the Blueprint or College Dropout. Pulled off the shelves and ITunes for sampling violation? Damn. Of course, it wouldn't happen to those artists because the modern-day sample climate in mainstream hiphop is incredibly paranoid, especially since the 2004 ruling I linked to above, but breakout hits from lesser-known (and less cautious) labels often emerge from the underground, and those're the people who don't have the budget to clear the samples, but could be seriously exposed in a situation like this.

I really want to know how they made this case, considering that the samples would be pretty hard to recognize and identify for your average jury. Maybe Bridgeport music hired Questlove as a jury consultant.

Anyway, this quote piqued my interest (from the Tennessean) .

"We're glad the jury listened very closely to the evidence and found appropriately for Westbound and Bridgeport."

I'm trying to imagine prosecution: "So, here, you can clearly hear a half-second of the guitar lick, right before Biggie says 'I put the 12 gauge to your brain/Make your shit splatter.' Listen very closely to this evidence."

But of course, there was probably never any contention over whether the sample was used, but rather whether the sample falls under fair use guidelines. I think it does, but obviously the jury was following the 2004 ruling that even one second of recorded material, regardless of use, should be actionable. For what it's worth, there's no question in my mind that the fair use doctrine applies here. After all, we're not talking about "Ice, Ice Baby."

P.S. I'd be remiss if I didn't link to Jesse Kriss's History of Sampling 1.2, a graphic representation of sampling's history. It requires some serious Javascript but it is awesome.

Anna Eshoo chronicles...

Josh makes reference to Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, (D. CA) as an aside to his recent piece on Mark Warner's press coverage.

That prompted me to recall my various encounters with Congresswoman Eshoo. By the way, keep in mind that whenever I use phrases like "which prompted me to..." in this blog, what I mean is: "I was bored and someone or something provided me with the thinnest of pretenses to stop working and write a NewPlastic post."

The first time I saw Anna Eshoo, I was, no joke, a drum major in my junior-high marching band. I wasn't one of those fancy drum majors who do twirls and tricks and stuff. A week before the May Day parade, my band teacher said that we needed a drum major. By the way, for people not in the know, the only reason a drum major exists is because marching bands walk on flat ground, with no conductor, so you need a big long stick to show the folks in back where the beat is. I have a suspicion that the band teachers approached me to do it because I was an inch away from quitting the band, and somehow they knew that, in my little world, even the role of drum major was superior to plodding along in a line. We were not one of those tricksy marching bands. We walked and played, simultaneously, and we didn't even do that very well.

Anyway, after the march was over, Anna Eshoo came down the parade route after us. I was with my mom, who, when the Congresswoman appeared, shouted:

"YAAAAY!! Womens' Suffrage!! Whoohoooo!"

That's a verbatim quote. Believe me. I was with my then-girlfriend, Caitlin Levin, who thought I was weird enough as it was (I think that was why we were dating), and she heard the whole thing. I hid behind a tree.

Come to think of it, that encounter wasn't particularly impressive or edifying. And that's the best of the bunch.

Speaking of female members of Congress, and my mom embarassing me, it reminds of the time my parents held a living-room fundraiser for Barbara Boxer. Caitlin wasn't there to document the mortification of that particular occassion -- but she didn't need to be.

Why?

Because I still have my pair of "Barbara Boxer" boxers.

They say "Barbara Boxer" on them.

...

Back off, ladies. I've got a ring on my finger now.

also re: fortune cookies...

I was looking for other things people add to the end of fortune cookie fortunes, and I came across this site.

I was, to put it mildly, STOKED.

Why? Because I have, for the last few years, held on to a hilarious, weird, horribly bleak fortune cookie that simply read: "Everything is not yet lost."

Things didn't stay tubular for too long, though.

Scroll down.

Dammit!!

fortune cookie suggestion...

So, you know how people play that stupid game where you add "...in bed" or "...between the sheets" to the end of every fortune cookie fortune? The claim is that this addition always seems to both work grammatically and transform the fortune into something more risque. But of course, what usually ends up happening is you get something like this:

You: "Wait, wait, lemme read mine! I'll go, I'll go!...Ahem: 'You will be traveling to distant lands for business purposes'...IN BED!!"

(silence)

You: "...huh."

Anyway, a few days ago in the car, inspired by recent conversations/blog entries, I came up with a better fortune cookie addition. I hereby present it to you, free:

Upon completing the recitation of your fortune cookie, append the phrase: "...at the RENFAIR!"

Wait for hilarity to ensue.

Taos Music...

Taos, NM has a remarkable music scene, for a town of around 5,000 people.

I don't know how to describe it. It's not "Americana," though that'd definitely be the record-store genre classification.

Maybe AmeriCaneToad.

Taos is known for having the highest per-capita number of art galleries of any city in the world. But its quotient of mandolins and bouzoukis is probably pretty damn high, too, if the CDs and the live music are any evidence.

I was very happy.

Camille & I went out and saw a bunch of live music while we were there, and I bought three CDs of local artists, though there were plenty more to choose from. Taos Music is a good introductory website for the scene, and you can also buy music through it (getting more money into the hands of the local artists).

I brought back Am I Born To Die, a collaboration between Chipper Thompson and Mason Brown, which has been in non-stop rotation in the car since then. Their version of "Pretty Peggy-o," I'm sorry to say, puts Bob Dylan's a little bit to shame. It's got a sweetness and delicacy that Dylan missed, and the whole fun of the song (to me at least) is in the mix of gentleness and surprising brutality. Their takes on "Banks of the Ohio" and "Oh Death" are also terrific. I think these kinds of albums are important for people whose sense of traditional American music has been deadened by the post-O Brother, Where Art Thou flood of "roots" releases.

I also brought back a collaboration between Thompson and Roger Landes, a Southwestern bouzouki master and founder of Zoukfest (no relation to this). Fans of Uncle Tupelo have heard a lot of bouzouki, because it was all over their third album, March 16-20th, 1992, which is incredible and a must-have. Go get it. Bouzouki has a lute-ish sound. When Camille heard the album, she said "One word: Renfair." Then we argued about whether it really sounded like a Renfair, even though neither of us has been to the Renfair. The whole Renfair thing came up because I described the band Big Country as "U2 meets up with Talking Heads at the Renfair." That's actually a good description, by the way. Moving on.

Bouzouki's been a mainstay in Irish music for a while now, though it's actually Greek in origin. When you think about it, "bouzouki" does sound like the kind of thing you'd marinate in garlic and lemon juice and bake wrapped in filo. It also sounds like a slang word made up by Missy Elliott to describe some bodily area she wants to inform us she's shaved. Anyway, the album I brought back is called The Janissary Stomp, and it's good if you've got a high bouzouki tolerance.

Finally, I bought an album by "Dulcimer Dan" Arterburn, who is, believe it or not, one of multiple "Dulcimer Dan's" out there. The album's called Just Pickin'. I assume the "...Ma" is implied. This album is only for folks that are seriously addicted to the twangahol. I doubt I'll be playing it too often in the car. Because even though I loved it at first listen, it's pretty infrequent that I feel like pretending I'm in the Blue Ridge Mountains ca. 1904. Even more rare that Camille wants to take that little trip. But I'll have the album just in case.

One last aside: I have no idea how these guys keep their instruments in tune when there's literally no moisture in the air at all. It'd be like playing bluegrass in an airlock.

advice

I'm back from my honeymoon.

In case anyone's interested in honeymoon advice -- make sure you ask whoever takes your room reservation about the bathroom situation.

I'll give you some tips.

Wrong way to conduct this conversation:

You: So, you have a room for those dates?
Other guy: You betcha.
You: Does it have its own bathroom?
Other guy: (pause) ...yes.
You: Sounds great! See you then!

Right way:

You: So, you have a room for those dates?
Other guy: You betcha.
You: Does it have its own bathroom?
Other guy: Sure.
You: Is the bathroom significantly separate from the rest of the room?
Other guy: Yes.
You: Not to belabor the point, but by "separate," do you mean "Right on the other side of a waist high adobe wall?"
Other guy: Nope, it's completely separate from your bedroom.
You: Okay. And, just to cover the obvious loophole here, it's not located in someone else's bedroom, right?
Other guy: Don't worry.
You: Ha ha. One last thing. Will people sitting in the hammock outside be unable to avoid looking directly through a window at the toilet, or, failing that, the shower, resulting inevitably in awkward eye contact?
Other guy: (pause) ...no.
You: Forget it. We're going to Cancun.

And...SCENE!

long time coming...

David Irving's been sentenced to three years in Austrian prison, for holocaust denial.

In some ways, this is terrific, because one of the first things that comes to mind when you hear about his brand of disgusting, irresponsible scholarship is: "there oughta be a law against that."

In Austria (and eight other European countries), there is.

So in my heart, I hope he serves every day and I hope it's awful.

But in my head, I wonder about whether this is a fair or appropriate use of the criminal justice system.

Bad scholarship shouldn't be illegal, nor should being an unrepentant bigot.

Scholarship that meets the legal standards of inciteful hate speech or libel should be illegal, and it is.

I haven't read too much of Irving's material, but I've read excerpts, and while there's no doubt he's a holocaust denier (which in my book puts him just below oil-company lawyers and Fred Phelps in the seventh ring of hell), I don't know whether his writings ought to classify him as a criminal. Obviously, in Austria and Germany the legislatures feel that the damage caused by Holocaust denial is significant enough to represent a threat to freedom, health, or safety. Or, at least, they perceived that threat when the laws were passed.

I have no trouble seeing the damage caused by holocaust denial, just as I have no trouble seeing the damage caused by expressions of racial or ethnic prejudice. These actions present a threat to the psychological health of individuals and their communities, as well as a threat to the integrity of current ideas and the historical record. But that's a risk inherent to the preservation of free speech. Without demonstrating a clear and present danger to freedom, health, security, etc. (not manufacturing one, as the Bush administration did with the Patriot Act), the anti-Holocaust denial laws do not seem justified.

Irving's nemesis, Deborah Lipstadt, agrees that the free speech concern should take precedent. But she manages a nice dig at the end of the article, which I think is warranted considering what he put her through.

Nothing is served by having David Irving in a jail cell, except that he has become an international news issue. Let him go home and let him continue talking to six people in a basement. Let him fade into obscurity where he belongs.

Ice cold!!

fixed link

The House of Labor blog link was broken.

Now it's fixed.

Don't say I never did anything for you.

Because I did -- I just fixed the link.

Try it.

It's fixed.

...and the response.

Who I work for, apparently.

The guy on the right is Bruce Raynor, the General President of Unite Here.

It ought to be patently obvious to anyone that his quote was taken out of context (the presence of Kim Jong Il pretty much destroys the pretense of credibility). But for the record, the quote came from a 2003 article in the NYT about UNITE's efforts to organize Cintas (archived at CommonDreams).

Here's what he said:

"There's no reason to subject the workers to an election," he said, adding that employees were often vulnerable to threats, intimidation and firing during election drives. (my emphasis)

The context is kinda important, don't you think? In fact, I wouldn't even call the threat of intimidation and harassment "context" in this case. I'd call it "a secondary clause in the same damn sentence which apparently, for stylistic reasons, the author decided to present without quotation marks."

Incidentally, violating labor law has been a matter of course for Cintas, so you can see why an NLRB-sponsored election might prompt serious concerns. This guy has a lot more in common with Kim Jong Il and Castro than Bruce Raynor.

Anyway, the ad I linked to above was created by the Center for Union Facts, a newly-formed non-profit that has gone on the attack against union organizing with front-page ads in the NYT, the WSJ, & the Post. The site itself is poorly researched at best, and libelous at worst -- if not actually in violation of labor law. As an example, check out Nathan Newman's dissection of their statistics regarding "labor racketeering." And it goes without saying that when you stock "impartial" government agencies with rabid anti-union advocates, and you instruct them to go after unions, you'll get more government cases against unions. So simple volume of cases isn't much to base an argument on -- though, as I'll get to below, the substance of those cases is indeed crucial.

The CUF is a front group. It's run by Rick Berman, who some of you may remember from his industry-funded attacks on smoking laws, drunk-driving laws, health laws, and environmental laws. If that doesn't float your boat, how about his industry-funded attacks on the minimum wage laws, living wage laws, and healthcare laws? Yup, that's him too. Quick CV: he's worked as a labor lawyer for steel & auto producers. He's worked as a lobbyist for food, alcohol, & tobacco industries.

And -- wait for it -- he was the labor law director of the US Chamber of Commerce under Nixon.

So, no big surprises there.

What's funny about the site, to me, is that no matter how corrupt and greedy they try to make unions look, the numbers that are supposed to shock us are actually pretty paltry. The president of an international union makes $200,000 a year? Good lord! And the political contributions, which are supposed to enrage the common man, are comically small compared with industry counterparts. In fact, they're small compared with the $5 million/year Berman plans to spend on this campaign.

HOWEVER: It should definitely be noted that the CUF site, though its contents are hopelessly biased in their presentation, does offer a wealth of details in the areas of corruption & criminal behavior. Labor movement proponents (including myself) have often been heard to argue that crime and corruption are just as prevalent, or more prevalent, in corporate America or government as they are in organized labor. While this may be true, there's a reason we hold ourselves to a higher standard, and we can't choose when that standard is enforced. The actions of union leaders in practicing, condoning, or ignoring corrupt/criminal behavior within their organizations is despicable, and should be decried at all levels of the movement, and outside it.

The thing is, of course, that exposure isn't what they're after. Berman admitted as much when he was working for the restaurant industry, in an interview the Chain Leader trade publication (link unavailable):

“Our offensive strategy is to shoot the messenger. Given the activists’ plans to alarm beyond all reason, we’ve got to attack their credibility as spokespersons.”

It would be great if a site called "Union facts" actually contained a balanced presentation of, well, union facts. Like the union/non-union wage differential, unionization rates in public/private sector, by industry, skill level, etc. Benefits across union/non-union professions, union stance/involvement in various social/political issues, history, relevant law & how it's generally applied, etc. That would put the corruption, crime, and political contributions in context, and -- I'd argue -- would do a lot more to erode call attention to the existing problems.

the starting gun...

This is why I haven't been blogging much for the last little period of time.

There were over 1,400 Local 2 members signed in and over 700 labor and community allies. Needless to say, we didn't all fit in the 900-person ballroom at the Renaissance Parc 55. I can't tell you anything about the program itself. I know lots about the translation equipment, the truck, the t-shirts, the signs, the music (picked by ME, MOTHERFUCKERS!!), the photo display...

We would've been able to hold it in a bigger room, except all the big convention hotels in the city are either under boycott or full from the business we moved there as part of the boycott.

My bad.

thank god someone is marrying me...

...because I am not to be trusted with my own facial hair (recently unearthed, from a Culture Clash performance in 2003). Before people get all up in arms about me breaking my ironclad guarantee to NewPlastic readers, let me state for the record that you were promised no pictures of people you don't know, drunk. Y'all know me, and anyway, I might have been drunk when I decided to grow that ri-cock-ulous goatee, but I was sober for this picture. I can't speak for Sarah Stillman, who's sitting next to me, but even so -- everyone knows Sarah.

While we're on the subject of unearthed photos, check this out (forwarded to me by alert reader and former colleague Jocelyn Lippert). I would like to meet the person who took this photo and explain some things.

Also, the hotel I'm standing in front of has since been sold. Coincidence? I think not. Vague, tangential, Busta-Rhymes-to-Kevin-Bacon-type connection?

You be the judge.

found a new one.

Everyone knows, I'm a sucker for generators.

So here's another one, which has entertained me to no end.

LFO is prominent.

But terrible lyrics are easy to come up with. Harder to find are lyrics that are simultaneously the worst and the best.

A few examples from hiphop (there are tons more in the rock/pop world):

"Anything can happen, you can't stop the shining
You lookin at my watch, but my mind's really the diamond
- Wyclef

"during sex lay there i'ma have to ask if it's good
this rap stuff stressful let's go see if we can relax in the woods"
- Silkk the Shocker

"I don't have no problem with you fuckin' me
But I have a little problem with you not fuckin' me"
-ODB (the undisputed king of best/worst hiphop lines)

And finally, this entire verse from Nice & Smooth's "Sometimes I Rhyme Slow" is either your favorite or the worst thing you've ever heard.

"Sometimes I rhyme slow sometimes I rhyme quick
I'm sweeter and thicker than a chico stick
Here's an ice cream cone honey take a lick
I go to Bay Plaza and catch a flick
Wore my Timberland boots so I can stomp ticks
Scandalous get a wiff of this mist
Just like the Yar Boys now I'm blissed
I feel good per se good state of mind
Drive a red Sterling and the seats recline
I love it when a lady treats me kind
Go to Tavern on the Green have a glass of wine
He say, she say I heard it through the grapevine
No static, got an automatic
Too much of anything makes you an addict
Teasin, skeezin, all so pleasin
Don't ask why I got my own reasons
Smooth B Greg Nice Slick Nick clique
Sometimes I rhyme slow sometimes I rhyme quick..."

Greg Nice stomps ticks.
Don't ask why. He has his own reasons.

new webcomics

I added a few more webcomics to the link list down there. Folks who read webcomics probably know about most/all of these already, but for the rest, they're worth a look if you're looking for a reason to come to work in the morning.

A Softer World - Vaguely surrealist photo collage w/dark & hilarious text.

Dinosaur Comics - The exact opposite of A Softer World. The same six panels of dinosaur clip-art every day, with different dialogue. Fairly addictive.

Dr. McNinja - Son of an Irish ninja family grows up to become a doctor, disappointing his parents. Fairly self-explanatory.

Overcompensating - This is constantly described as Jeffrey Rowland's autobiographical comic, but as far as I can tell it bears only passing resemblance to real events. It's extremely funny and charming.

Perry Bible Fellowship - The best new find. Totally bizarre, crude, and hilarious short gag strips with a revolving variety of art styles and characters.

Wigu - Jeffrey Rowland's previous strip, an epic, which you just have to read. Like Achewood, it's an entire world with characters informed by the same permeated personality. Lots of fun.