pure bishop (link)

"Bishop! Bishop! Not true -- false!"

(reference help for non-Wyclef fans)

Anyway, this is completely expected, but I love the comment from Roy Blunt's spokeswoman:

"While we firmly believe the contributions were legal at
the time of receipt, the plea indicates that such contributions
may not have been given in the spirit in which they were received."

So -- that's a tidy phrase, but in what spirit were they received, exactly? Presumably she's just saying, he was legally trying to be corrupt, and we weren't. Whatever, it's just spin, and self-conscious spin at that, but it got me thinking about the spirit in which most contributions to Republican candidates are received.

"Your note here says you care about supporting our troops. Great. I hereby receive your donation, in the spirit of destroying social security."

You know? Or, "We receive these donations in the spirit of a tacit understanding that we will clear the way for casino development, not an explicit understanding. Okay?"

And speaking of spirit, I like how this statement pretends that campaign finance even exists on the same continent as the spirit of the law.

Also, though it's unclear from the article whether Gingrich is aware of his black pot status, he offers these words on the subject of the kettle:

"You can't have a corrupt lobbyist unless you have a corrupt member
(of Congress) or a corrupt staff," former GOP House Speaker Newt
Gingrich said in a lunchtime speech. "This was a team effort."

Blech.

says the sturgeon general...

This broke my heart.

Now how am I gonna pay back my blood debts to the Romanian mafia?

Actually, this is one of those stories that, on the face of it, seems totally normal until you realize that the presence of human beings has caused the world to go totally batshit insane.

I'm not a militant vegetarian. Sometimes I remind Camille that various things on her plate have "a mommy who misses them," but that's just to irritate her. I do subscribe to an eating philosophy that I believe is both ethical and environmentally sustainable, but realistically our bodies are designed to eat meat and I usually don't feel compelled to get in peoples' business.

However, I think the casual consumer needs to be reminded of something:

Commercial caviar production normally involves
stunning the fish (usually with a club to the head)
and extracting the ovaries. (from Wikipedia)

That is flat-out disgusting. This industry, and now this looming environmental hazard, only exist because people like to scoop revolting, briny ovaries out of living fish, put them on toast points, and eat them.

Despite the cultural cache, objectively speaking I have trouble imagining anything less sophisticated.

Maybe you could throw rocks at a squirrel until you knocked it out of a tree, then eat whatever you find in its cheeks.

Anyway, this post is intended as a public service message to caviar eaters:

Attention: THERE IS PLENTY OF FOOD ON LAND.

double true

Rather than recap and catalogue the endless riches of "Lazy Sunday," I just wanted to note that, inspired by Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell, my sister and I invented a slang term for the five dollar bill.

From now on, the five is called a "slider."

As in, "We can't do the paid parking - I dropped that last slider on shallots at Whole Foods," or "I have a slider, I'll cover the tip."

Got that?

Slider.

P.S. You can get "Lazy Sunday" on the iTunes Music Store, or at www.youtube.com. If they had an annual red-carpet sketch comedy award, this thing would win for 2005. And the award would be a gold-plated statuette of a cowbell.

How Do You Sleep?

Three recent articles deal with the hotel industry’s Cold War-style amenities escalation. Two from fairly reputable papers, the SF Chronicle and the Washington Post, and a more sympathetic but rambling account in the East Bay Express.

For folks who don’t know about this, here’s the gist from the Chronicle.

Travelers are raving about the enormous, fluffy new beds that the nation's biggest hotel chains are spending millions on as they one-up each other in an escalating mattress war...The same beds that are so kind to travelers' backs are wreaking havoc on hotel housekeepers who wrestle with the behemoths -- not to mention the amazing array of pillows, duvet covers, down comforters, 300-thread-count sheets, shams, bed skirts, bolsters and bed scarves that need daily tending...Federal statistics show it's a real problem, and a study published in July by UCSF researchers found 3 out of 4 hotel housekeepers experience "very severe" pain...The problem, according to union representatives, doctors and those charged with keeping those beds made, is housekeepers are being forced to clean the same number of rooms per shift even as the beds grow ever bigger and more elaborate, requiring more time to change. The housekeepers are hurting themselves trying to keep up.

In upscale hotels, this problem has been obscured for so long that chronic injury and medical complications, as well as frequent over-reliance on pain medication have become the status quo in hotel housekeeping. And it’s not limited to housekeepers. According to the BLS, hotel workers suffer an on-the-job injury rate second only to healthcare workers.

The hotel industry, as it struggles to make amenities more and more luxurious, is literally breaking down the bodies of the women and men (it’s overwhelmingly women, and low-income, immigrant women at that) it employs.

I brought all this up not because if its relationship to my job, but because I think it’s worth probing the concept of luxury, and its “unseen” cost. Luxury is the next frontier, or rather the only remaining frontier, for American companies looking to beat out their foreign competitors (assuming they aren’t interested in challenging the various norms of the market). It’s critical that we recognize both the visible and obscured cost of luxury, in whatever segment of the economy. We have a tendency to equate the cost of luxury with its price, when of course the relationship is much more complicated. This holds true whether we’re talking about sprawl, household appliances, hotel amenities, technological development, or whatever luxury offers consumers something above and beyond their expectation. Paying for the luxury somehow seems to both justify it and distance consumers from its consequences.

To me, UNITE HERE’s rhetoric and framing of housekeeping workloads effectively closes that gap, and thus offers an ideal example for how to approach this kind of problem. It confronts consumers with the less savory side of their own satisfaction. It forces them to recognize not just the impact of their thirst for luxury, but also their basic identity as consumers. Their comfort relies on underpaid, backbreaking physical labor, and their money makes them partially responsible for the welfare of those who serve them.

Lots of implications for the Wal-mart campaign as well, but that’s another thing.

Syriana

I saw this movie with Camille last week. I don’t know if you were aware, but “Syriana” is actually Farsi for “Traffik.” Seriously, the critics’ comparisons between Steven Gaghan’s script for Traffic (the American adaptation) and his script for this new film have completely understated the case.

All the same elements are there:

- insulated American family torn apart by exposure to the seamy underbelly – with disastrous consequences.

- brown person, acting as a humanizing counterpoint, struggles on the other side against the effects of white bureaucrat’s policy and power struggles – with disastrous consequences.

- investigator(s)drawn deeper into the puzzle through personal involvement – with disastrous consequences.

- wistful/subtle human moments, thrown in at random to remind us that all the characters are alive, and have concerns we’re supposed to remember.

- absurdly intricate political, legal, financial maneuvering.

- every character pre-equipped with personal dimension and professional objectives, tailor-made for dramatic conflict.

But the first movie was much better. Good enough to give the original BBC mini-series a decent run for its money. Syriana, though entertaining and beautiful to watch, and really well acted by everyone, still gave off the overpowering impression that there was one, maybe even two better movies buried in it somewhere.

The hinge, the emotional hook for a film like this ought to be the relationship between macro-economic/political/cultural forces and the personal motivations of those affected by them. The movie tries repeatedly to get this right, but for me it kept falling flat.

The main problem is believability. I have no qualms with the suggestion that energy companies dictate foreign policy, or that we kill our enemies to promote our interests, or that regulatory bodies are in bed whoever they’re supposed to regulate, or that economic hardship and tantalizing French fries can combine to create a recruitable terrorist. But if you’re going to put these suggestions forth, it should be done credibly and compellingly, in a way that fleshes out the underlying motives rather than reducing them to caricature. The Manchurian Candidate remake suffered from the same problem.

One last question: Steven Soderbergh was (obviously, to anyone who’s seen it) associated with this film.

Is his name pronounced Soderbergh like how someone from Providence would say “soda pop,” or Soderbergh as in the soldering iron of justice?

the skinny

Here are the top ten important developments in my life, presented in descending order of importance.

1) I am engaged to be married.

2) I am currently running the hotel boycott for UNITE HERE Local 2 in San Francisco.

3) I am applying to law school.

4) I have officially been exercising at a gym for the last whole, entire year. There is no visible change. Except it hasn't prevented me from losing a little more hair.

5)...which brings me to number five. I am losing my hair, slowly. Folks who've known me for a long time probably won't notice the difference. I could give a fuck, frankly. Just like to get it out in the open.

6) Having achieved some vague proficiency on the guitar, I'm now learning the mandolin. If necessary, go ahead and read that sentence again.

7) After you've prepared the various ingredients of an egg-and-cheese breakfast sandwich, you can't just slap them together and eat it. You have to give the sandwich ingredients some time to get to know each other. The whole thing has to pull together and accept that it's a sandwich, and not separate breakfast (or in my case, dinner) ingredients. I can't stress this enough. In fact, if I was making this list again, I'd put this one higher. Dammit.

8) Achewood. Achewood Achewood Achewood. Achewood.

9) There's a lot more fake meat in my diet now. Between Morningstar Farms, which makes eerily believable bacon and sausage, and Golden Era on O'Farrell St., this has been a banner year for suspended disbelief. Of course, I have no clue how close in taste and texture this stuff really is, since it's been so long since I ate the real thing. It'd be like if someone gave me a fake Squeeze-It (TM) and asked me to compare it to the real thing. It's just been too long, man.

10) Our cat has developed into a bloodthirsty biting machine. Compare and contrast the following:

Scene from 998 Divisadero, #201, ca. 12/04:

Alek: Hey, furball. You look like you wanna wrestle. Huh? (waves arms in cat's face) Wanna wrestle? Oh, you're getting in some good chomps now. Yeah, you're chomping good now. (to fiance) Hey, check out Chompsky over here.

Camille: (silence)

Alek: She's manufacturing some serious consent! (beat) Chompsky!!

Camille: (sighs)


Scene from 998 Divisadero, #201, ca. 12/05:

Alek: Okay, I'm going to get up and take a shower...

(pause)

...Ow! Oowww!!!! Stop attacking my calves! Get, off! Ow, fuck!! That hurt, goddamnit!

Camille: What's going on?

Alek: Nothing, just -- (dull thud) -- Son of a BITCH!

Camille: ... are you OK?

Alek: I hit my head on the door.

(pause)

Alek: Stop biting me!

it wouldn't be newplastic...

...without periods of total inactivity punctuated by spasmodic appearances of content.

Howdy.

Update to follow.

old plastic

So sorry.

I badly wanted to keep this weblog going through my transition to a new job, but things have been far too busy and, frankly, I can't get perspective. I'm dividing my time between San Francisco and San Jose, trying to get my arms around a difficult and draining job. All of you who have done full-time organizing know how much it insulates you from the rest of the world -- it's a challenge to maintain a personal life at all, and my determination to do that (I'm sorry to say) far outweighs my desire to project half-truths, insults, and jumbled political analysis into cyberspace.

So, it's time to recognize the inevitable and put this blog on layaway, for when I have more money or leisure.

If NewPlastic re-emerges again in the future, which it very well might, I'll let everyone know.

Until then, keep on.

The Papal Platform

Daniel Munz over at Politics and War made an important point amidst all the hubbub around what JPII did and didn't stand for.

I’ve seen the same phenomenon, writ larger, coming from both the left and the right: The Pope should have been more responsive to women’s needs; the Pope shouldn’t have been so suspicious of capitalism; the Pope should have been more sympathetic towards [random partisan cause/viewpoint]. Well, I’m here to say: Cut it out. None of this stuff is the Pope’s job, and the reason it’s not is the most valuable lesson liberals could possibly learn from his passing. Reading Linker’s piece, and listening to the left and right claim him for his own, something really odd started to emerge: They were all talking about the man as though he were a Senator, not a Pope.

Dan claims, and I agree up to this point, that

It is not his job to be maximally inclusive - as Linker puts it, to acknowledge that “[many] positions have moral weight” - or to represent everyone’s viewpoint or concern. It is his job to make pronouncements of Church doctrine, based solely on holy scriptures, his own moral intuition, and the divine guidance that is provided to him. Nothing more, nothing less, and no obligation to represent any viewpoint but his own.

But here's where we diverge, which you'll see in the comments. Of course the Pope is a politician, because anyone playing in his league has to be. But his real responsibility is to lead and protect the church based on those three elements (scripture, intuition, divine guidance). I don't know what God told the Pope about abusing pre-pubescent Catholics, but I'm guessing that He didn't say "Just look the other way, it'll blow over." As for condoms, it's not in the Bible, and you can even ask these guys.

People have since told me that, given the political realities of the Catholic Church, the Pope could never take a stand for condom use to prevent AIDS. But we know well how successful this very Pope was at subtly bypassing the Church's archaic dictates in favor of a more humanist approach. People told me, and I believed them for a while, that what the Pope said didn't matter to the ground operations of AIDS-relief organizations...but it did (and this link is from less than three months ago).

The bottom line is, the Bible gives him leeway to endorse birth control to prevent AIDS, and nothing excuses his pathetic response to sexual abuse within his ranks.

I admire JPII tremendously for his efforts and accomplishments, but in light of these failures I placed little faith in his moral intuition or his interpretation of scripture, and, obviously I don't think he and God were on the Nextel everyday.

Thought that would have been great fodder for one of those late-in-the-episode SNL sketches that beat a single half-formed joke to death over the course of fifteen minutes.

Boo-BEEP.

"John Paul, it's God."
"One second, man, I'm six minutes into my 8-min abs."
"You fat liar."
"Okay, I'm done. Did you page me before?"
"No."
"Shit." Boo-BEEP. Fuck, I don't know how to work this thing."

etc.

Lama vs. Boss

JPII is universally recognized as the human being seen in person by the largest number of people, ever.

So, who's second?

Basically, as with many thorny questions facing modern humanity, it comes down to a choice between Bruce Springsteen and the Dalai Lama.

Friends of mine will know where I come down on this one.

I will do a review of the new Springsteen album, unlike all the other ones I promised but never wrote. Just so you know, I made notes for those reviews, extensive notes, but never have time to sit down and write them. From now on when I go to shows I'll just publish my notes verbatim, so it'll be more immediate and authentic. Plus you'll be privy to such critical aesthetic insights as "Move your fucking head, woman!" and "This would probably sound better if I was drinking."

More on the pope tomorrow.

from the latest hi-atus...

Sorry it's been so long. I was worried that my job would take away time from doing this, and I was right. I know the content has been vaguely slipping recently as well.

Believe me, it hurts me more than it hurts you.

Especially since it doesn't affect you at all.

So, I mighta been overly ambitious in promising only a slight reduction in posting frequency, but don't get it twisted -- the newplastic weblog takes some catnaps but it's still alive and ready to rumble like Koko B. Ware.

From now on, look for a couple posts a week, more when there's time and less when there's not.

That's all.

I'll be back.

my readers = thieving bastards

As we approach the end of March, I was checking my domain stats to see who all is visiting the site and why.

I was glad to see that, as with the last two months, my number of visitors is steadily increasing. And, as before, I'm simultaneously validated and embarassed by the search phrases which yield links to my site. For every "Senegalese music and politics" (hooray!) search string, there's also someone out there looking for "little girls fucking," or a completely baffling phrase like "simultaneous and sequential strategic thrusts starbucks."

And, obviously, I'll transfer the total current balance of my bank account to anyone who knows why somebody would open the Yahoo browser and type in the word "pantswetting." Unless it actually was Lawrence V. Jackson looking for help with a problem which may or may not be afflicting him due to the gross tonnage of asskicking his employer has received recently.

More to the point, I wanted to take a moment to let you all know that people are stealing my scholarship hardcore. After the blog, my analysis of Mozart K.332 is the most visited section of my website, with the other analytical essays close behind. I'm desperately hoping that some of these folks are from Yale and taking the same courses from the same professors that I was, so when the paper eventually gets read the prof. will be like:

"Wait a minute, that's the same dumbass, garbage idea Alek tried to pass off as legitimate...Hmmm, I better get to the bottom of this. Teaching Assistants! To the Subcontracted Batcave!"

Alright. Clearly I can't wrangle this post into cohesion.

Stop stealing my papers.

lights out! Guerrilla Radio!!!

You remember that song?

"lights out/guerrilla radio/turn that shit up!"

That song knocked me on my ass. This post should be about how that song, and by extension, all of Rage Against The Machine's The Battle of Los Angeles knocked me on my ass, and why, but now that my salary's paid by hotel worker union dues instead of lawyers I have to stop slacking off at work.

In fact, I only mentioned it here because Blogger.com is crashing all over the place and I haven't been able to post in two days. So I was idly contemplating whether guerrilla blogging would work, and wondering if it'll could take off in Chiapas or Chechnya. They could pass recipes back and forth.

Regardless: I wanted to let my attentive readership know that while the quality of New Plastic Weblog will never waiver (see guarantee), the frequency will probably need to be scaled back to 3-4 posts per week.

I know, I know. Where will you get random, poorly-researched musings on what makes radio loud, or half-hearted reviews of live performances by bands about which the reviewer has already made up his mind? Not to mention, where will you get an unending stream of union-babble (which is like psycho-babble, but sweatshop free)?

The thing is, I have less time now that I'm working at Local 2, but I still feel (no disrespect to others in the blogosphere) that simply posting links to interesting current events isn't worth it. Y'all can read the news online yourselves. My position so far has been that if I don't plan to add something substantive to a current controversy/development, I won't post up a link about it. Of course, I like to keep my definition of "substantive" flexible enough to include unprovoked vicious personal attacks on people whose politics I dislike.

But never fear. Once I've got a decent sense of my work schedule I'll be ramping it back up to 5/week.

In the meantime, Jesse Jackson has embarked on his most recent bout of economy-sized shark jumping.

Mountain of medical science/due process, get out of his way.

shit.

They're coming. They must be reading my blog.

Oh, man.

tired of taking it to the bridge?

Here are a few recommendations of bizarre but rewarding music that is most likely off your radar. This post was inspired by my recent exposure to "The Most Unwanted Song" (described below). People with a healthy and/or nerdy interest in music will enjoy these.

Negativeland - Dispepsi. I never listened much to Negativeland, I think because their deliberate efforts to provoke copyright litigation seemed contrived. But the truth is I ignored them into I heard Dispepsi yesterday, which was awesome. It's a sound-collage on the subject of Cola Wars, marketing, consumerism, and market greed, set to music and interspersed with original songs. Incredible richness of archived sound footage from commercials, talk-radio, news broadcasts, and interviews, as well as internal memos from Pepsi marketing. Hilarious, thought-provoking, sad, angry. Serious background work went into this album, and it shows. Plus it's pretty groovy.

Komar & Melamid (w/Dave Soldier) - The Most Wanted Song/The Most Unwanted Song. You might have heard about this on This American Life, but in essence: two guys did an online poll of likes and dislikes in music, then composed the Most Wanted and Most Unwanted song. The most wanted song, incorporating as it does every one of the elements that people like (moderate tempo, volume, smooth instrumentation, lovey-dovey lyrics, etc.), is fucking awful. The Most Unwanted Song, however, is a wonderful achievement and unbearably hilarious. I'm not kidding, it's physically impossible not to laugh when an operatic soprano (opera hate) begins kicking rhymes (rap hate) about being a cowboy. And, of course, since it's the Most Unwanted Song it's also over 20 minutes long. The precise moment when I fell on the ground uncontrollably weeping from hilarity was when the kids singing holiday songs scream out the following: "Ramadan, Ramadan, lots of praying but no BREAKFAST!" That is an actual lyric.

John Oswald - Plunderphonics. You can't buy a new John Oswald CD anywhere because he's been sued so many times that he now gives them away to avoid litigation. However, he graciously allows other small record labels to bootleg and release his albums, which are entirely constituted of uncleared, pre-released, recognizable sound material (albeit heavily manipulated). Dolly Parton sings "The Great Pretender" with a pitch-modulated male version of herself. Every grunt, growl, and scream from James Brown collide with hiphop samples of Brown, making a stuttery funk that pays tribute to the Bomb Squad and Eric B. while also presenting them with a biting critique of their parasitism. Michael Jackson's "Bad" becomes a Reichian phase pattern. And Carly Simon duels with Chocolate Starfish over who does a better version of "You're So Vain." Luckily, the gimmicks rarely get in the way of compositional craft, so Plunderphonics is anything but a novelty. It contains a great deal of humor (including the now-unfortunate Michael Jackson lyrical pastiche "your butt is/love"), but overall the mood is fairly serious. Get the "Plunderphonics 69" two-disc set if you can find it on Gemm or elsewhere.

That's all for now. I can burn some of this stuff for anyone who wants. Review of last night's Rainer Maria/Minipop show coming up tomorrow or the next day.

together again, for the very first time

here are some folks that, had they worked together, would have made wonderful music. Note: these are all artists that could, based on time period, geography, etc. have realistically collaborated (or could still). Please hit me back with your own in the comments section. Or, if you're shy, you can just email your additions to me. Soon as I get them, I'll just post them up here along with your full name and my general thoughts on your personality, physical appearance, etc.

Prince/Stereolab
Kate Bush/David Byrne
Rachel's/Leonard Cohen
DJ Spooky/Bernard Parmegiani
Laurie Anderson/Greenwood bros. (Radiohead)
Morton Feldman/Sun Ra

and my alltime hail mary nothing-on-the-line backcourt dying wish request:

George Gershwin/Dave Tarras

Man, how tight would that have been? Only in dreams.

(p.s. I just finalized the boycott organizing details, so I start my new job with UNITE-HERE this coming Monday. Here's more info on what I'll be doing)

From Fiddler on the Roof to Beatbox in the Hood

From Fiddler on the Roof to blah blah blah blah. Any panel discussion that starts with "From Fiddler on the Roof to..." inevitably ends up like a Shabas dinner when you were ten -- boring, irrelevant babble from old people punctuated by moments of keen, unbearable embarassment.

That certainly covers much of the panel I attended last night at the JCCSF (same title as post), but luckily it had a few wonderful moments too. The guests were Theodore Bikel, Hankus Netsky, Jewlia Eisenberg, and DJ SoCalled (who one old lady, in a moment of surreal hilarity, referred to as "DJ" like it was his first name).

Like many panels I've attended, the people on stage were smarter than anyone else who spoke, and should have been left, unmoderated and unquestioned, to their own devices. Instead they had to struggle through incoherent questions and badly-parsed cliches just to say something interesting. I wish I'd brought a notebook because Netsky and SoCalled actually built a decent dialogue on their divergent aims regarding musical reconstruction. A few things that did stick with me:

- Theodore Bikel saying that Fiddler on the Roof is great theatre, but it's still a "substitute schtetl," which many (Jewish and not) use to assuage their guilt or fulfill their quota of Jewish awareness. He called it "paying someone to Jew for you," which sounds more bitter out of context than it was intended. He believes that Fiddler can be an excellent starting point, inspiration, or confirmation in the journey of Jewish experience, but it "better not be the endpoint."

- Hankus Netsky decrying the dismissal of Jewish arts in contemporary Academia, and the relegation of music to the back burner in Yiddish theatre specifically.

- SoCalled reminding the audience that Copeland and Bernstein are "wonderful Jewish American composers...who wrote like white people."

- SoCalled objecting to the label of "Jewish hiphop," not because it pigeonholed him, but because it misunderstood the nature of hiphop music. This was a perfect comment (roughly quoted): "Hiphop is about representing who you are. I'm Jewish, and that has come to heavily inform the hiphop that I make, but it's still hiphop. It's time for the ghetto to end."

What was missing from the talk, but what presumably gets said quite a bit, is the remarkable tool hiphop has contributed to the American Jewish struggle for identity. As last night's introductory monologue from Aaron Davidman (of Traveling Jewish Theater) observed, our religion is about wrestling with ourselves and God. The ability of hiphop (through sampling, wordplay, and cultural association) to continuously re-engage history fits perfectly into the ongoing metaphysical Wrestlemania that defines our religion. SoCalled tried to explain why it made such a natural match, and why it should not be dismissed, but there was too much Bikel-related asskissing nostalgia for that point to get through. Not to say he doesn't deserve it. But SoCalled and others are right to warn the older generation that the next wave of Jews need something besides Tevye to hold onto.

Oh, also. Buy all of SoCalled's albums, because, instead of falling prey to all the gimmicks you might expect, they kick total ass.

I'll change my name to Waspy McKillThoseGuys

That is, if I want to get on a jury around here.

A prosecutor revealed last week that, apparently, it may have been standard practice to exclude Jews and black women from juries on cases involving capital punishment. Your first question might be:

"Yo, that sounds a little multiculturally questionable, but if the effective purpose of jury selection is to give both sides an equal shot at building a receptive jury, how come it's wrong for prosecutors to challenge jurors they think are likely to sympathize with the defense?"

Well, I hope that's not your first question. Because in the courtroom, like in the classroom, workplace, and lunch counter, discrimination based on race or religion is (at least nominally) prohibited by law. And in all of these arenas it's often tough to provide evidence of discrimination, so explicit public testimony from a prosecutor makes a nice change.

Needless to say, the issue has created an enormous amount of turmoil. But there's one question which hasn't been widely addressed, as far as I can see. I won't speak on black women, but are Jews actually less likely to support the death penalty? From the extensive public opinion research I've done so far (to my foreign readership, that's pronounced "Google"), Jews seem to be roughly in line with national trends on capital punishment. I wish I could say different of my people, but hell, it's not like that's a first for me.

So I wondered why prosecutors would stick with this formula if the polls don't bear it out. Geographical difference undoubtedly affect jury selection techniques. Also, it may be that the strength of opinion (i.e. how much they care) makes more of a difference than the basic for/against.

Anybody out there know more about this? Hit me with some comments.

i can't escape

I know people are sick of reading about this damn corporation, but they're just getting their ass kicked so hard that my manhood requires me to post about it.

Walmart paid $11 million today to settle an impending civil immigration case involving the use of "illegal" immigrant workers. This was a no-brainer, since Walmart has been the subject of a four-year federal investigation for using the workers in the first place, not paying them or covering their injury insurance, and...wait for it...LOCKING THEM INSIDE THE STORES DURING THE NIGHT-SHIFT. This is actually a more common practice than you'd think, but the Wal-Mart suit helped bring this hazardous and degrading "anti-theft technique" to light.

As always, though, when Walmart loses it tends to still win. In this case, the $11 million settlement is the largest civil immigration settlement to date, but Wal-mart avoided any criminal charges on the issue.

Eh. Regardless, this settlement demonstrates again why the legal battle against Wal-Mart will form such a crucial part of the overall Wal-Mart campaign. We need a sea change in public perception of Wal-Mart, a wholesale recognition and condemnation of the enormous gap between what America's largest employer preaches and what it practices. High profile suits, while of course providing justice for Wal-Mart's victims, also bring the continuing injustices -- and our willing dismissal of them -- into stark relief. So even when cases like this don't present us with a complete win, they set the framework for an ongoing fight and bring us a few steps closer to the inevitable reckoning.

So to speak. I enjoy talking about the Wal-Mart campaign in Messianic terms.

Otherside, Invisible Cities, etc. 3/16 at 12 Galaxies

Though the show itself had its ups and downs, it’s been almost two months since I’ve seen some live music so I remained completely content throughout. Plus, 12 Galaxies (on Mission St. in San Francisco) has Full Sail on tap.

The venue is bizarre, to say the least. It’s sort of like seeing a show in an Iroquois longhouse, if you can imagine. The shape doesn’t adversely affect the sound in any serious way, but it creates a feeling of emptiness even with a good-sized audience. Given that it was a Wednesday night four-act show starting at 9PM, the crowd was decent. Had my girlfriend not been under the weather I would have had someone to talk to, but nice folks were all around.

Okay, music. The opener, Habit Forming, did an excellent job of completely weirding everyone out. I had a blast imagining them as the band for Peewee’s Playhouse – a position in which they would have excelled. They’re a local dance-rock outfit with vague funk and metal leanings, and no discernible self-awareness. The highlights were a fragmented song-cycle dedicated to Josie Wales and an absurd, jerkily dance-able cover of Slayer’s “Angel of Death.” As usual, I was much more interested in hearing other people play Slayer than in listening to the actual albums themselves.

Fastpass, the second band, burned through about twelve uptempo indie screamers, a la The Thermals or the Get Up Kids of a few years ago. I can’t offer a lot of comment here because this particular indie subgenre tends to leave me lukewarm. Great to bounce around to, difficult to remember afterwards.

The main reason I went to the show was to see The Invisible Cities live, since their album has been in non-stop rotation at work and at home for the last month or so. Like I said before, this band has a huge talent and tons of potential. The live show covered all the same emotional territory as the album, and I was glad to experience in person the unique moments of reckless joy, doubt, humor and quiet resignation that made Watertown so special. The absence of some of my favorite cuts was mitigated by a run-through of what seemed like a newish song, “A Squared Plus B Squared.” It’s about triangles, among other things, so awesomeness immediately followed. Anyway, reviews (even informal ones) make it nearly impossible to communicate the nature of the music, so I’ll again fall back on the tired old mainstay of accessible-but-still-slightly-insiderist comparison. Ahem: The Invisible Cities sound roughly akin to a mixture of Exile in Guyville, Life’s Too Good by the Sugarcubes, and Yo La Tengo’s mid-nineties LP, Painful. If that doesn’t explain it, I guess I’m not surprised because writing it certainly made no sense. Anyway – buy the CD and do your best not to completely adore it, I dare you.

As for The Otherside, when they started playing I went to The Otherside of the room, where the bar is. I liked the band fine, but the sound system wasn’t doing any favors for their particular brand of dark, jagged alterna-rock. Plus by then it was 12:45AM and I had to get home. You can find some of their stuff here, which sounds considerably better than it did last night. This will sound strange coming from someone who worships Mahler and Nine Inch Nails, but The Otherside came across as altogether too serious for my taste.

That's all. I hate writing reviews, but I desperately want people to listen to new music. Speaking of which, look forward to upcoming reviews of Corey Harris, The Decemberists, and Toychestra. (I'm really excited about Toychestra)