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Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal Compares Women to Criminals
July 7th, 2011 by Gray Hurlburt
Apparently pretty much all women are quasi criminals in Louisiana.
Only in America, with the world’s highest incarceration rate, would a governor characterize half his state’s population with criminal propensity. Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana, compared women to criminals in an ill-formed allegory.
His statement came at the signing of House Bill 636 at the First Baptist Church of West Monroe. The measure “requires women to be informed of their specific legal rights and options before they undergo an abortion procedure.” Abortion clinics therefore have to inform patients that “it is illegal to coerce a woman into getting an abortion, that the child’s father must provide child support, that certain agencies can assist them during and after the pregnancy and that adoptive parents can pay some of the medical costs.”
Making sure women get accurate, balanced information about medical procedures sounds innocuous enough. But the way Jindal words his support for the bill will raise the hairs on the back of your neck:
“When officers arrest criminals today, they are read their rights,” he said. “Now if we’re giving criminals their basic rights and they have to be informed of those rights, it seems to me only common sense we would have to do the same thing for women before they make the choice about whether to get an abortion.”
The implicit comparison of any woman considering an abortion to a criminal is shocking. And beyond that, the subtext behind the clause, “we would have to do the same thing for women,” speaks volumes about the entire agenda of the GOP over the last three years. The Republican party has no interest in growing women’s influence in politics, except for how token examples serve to grow their voter base with independent female voters.
Politicians like Jindal and Michelle Bachman, who denigrates abortion, will continue to pay lip service to ascending women in politics, but switch the bait and sap the constitutionally protected personal rights of women.
Girls Announce Info on New Album, ‘Father, Son, Holy Ghost’
July 7th, 2011 by Gray Hurlburt
A new set of details emerges on the second album from Girls, who are always such a tease!
The second full-length album from Christopher Owens and Chet White as a band—the third Girls record overall—underscores just how high they’ve climbed. As a matter of fact, thanks to their work in audio and film, their website now comes up above the Spice Girls when you google their band name. The next step is to see if “Father, Son, Holy Ghost,” will overtake the Holy Trinity online, too.
According to the press release, the group recorded in the “bowels of [a] San Francisco office building” with a new drummer and guitarist, using a “vast collection of amplifiers as well as tube and transistor based recording equipment.” And to remind us not to worry that all the love and attention has not gotten to their heads, Owens says, “I’m still all the same. I still know I have to do it. I still love the songs and writing songs.”
And there you have it. The release date for “Holy Ghost” is September 13th, 2011, when it releases via True Panther Sounds. A widget below, released yesterday, contains lines of text, likely lyrics—the track list is below. We will post any music when it becomes available.
Track Listing
1. Honey Bunny
2. Alex
3. Die
4. Saying I Love You
5. My Ma
6. Vomit
7. Just A Song
8. Magic
9. Forgiveness
10. Love Like A River
11. Jamie Marie
Tea Party TV Brews New Colonial American History
June 24th, 2011 by Gray Hurlburt
Nothing gets a tea party started like myth-building.
Earlier this spring, moviegoers took the literal route when Atlas shrugged and ignored the first feature film geared at tea partiers. The debut of “Atlas Shrugged: Part I,” framed around what William Buckley calls the greatest-selling novel of all time, ballyhooed government control of private enterprise but failed to gross enough money to remain in theaters and manifest the logical sequel.
The fate of “Part I” should look like a head on a stake in the road to movie directors, but James Patrick Riley and Jonathan Wilson whizzed right on by without taking any notice. The pair have teamed up to make “Courage, New Hampshire,” a one-hour period piece set in the 1770s of colonial America that premieres Sunday in California. Current estimates on tea party gathering numbers—most essential in this case—spell a disastrous week ahead.
Our first glimpse of the two-part series oozes with kitschy embellishments, with wardrobe apparently one of the biggest expenses and scriptwriting firing on all cylinders. What comes to mind is some remake of “The Patriot” with all the air let out. Here’s an example: “Have you been to Boston lately? It’s a full-tilt, hammer-and-tongs cock fight down there!” Pure gold.
The first episode of the series, “The Travail of Sarah Pine,” a woman from Rhode Island accuses a British sergeant of having a child out of wedlock. This fits into the grander allegory of Americans giving the finger to authority in the name of family values and “unalienable rights.” The film’s site puts it this way:
They were a sturdy lot of men and women who dreamed of a city built on a hill. Their struggle to create that city and to sustain a republic dedicated to the rare notion of individual freedom and “unalienable rights” has outlived them, but there’s a side of their story we don’t often study: what made them strong enough to fight?
According to Talking Points Memo, Riley, a self-proclaimed tea partier, said, “I’d like to concentrate on some of the regular folk who made the Revolution possible,” and “mix the narrative tension of The Sopranos and the redemptive, heroic American exceptionalism of Frank Capra.”
Fusion between mafioso television drama and fantastic propaganda to devise new pseudo-American history is nothing new. In fact, one of the founding mothers of the tea party movement did so in cock-fighting Boston, editing the famous ride of Paul Revere.
For what it’s worth, “Courage, New Hampshire” won’t stack up to colonial classics “The Crucible” and “The Last of the Mohicans.” But, for many children in the coming years, it will take up a day or two when teachers don’t care to teach.
[TPM]
Live Review: Jump Into The Gospel
June 9th, 2011 by Gray Hurlburt
Pop at Pianos.
Last night, five synth-pop bands squished into the tiny back room of Pianos Bar. Musicians accounted for half of the audience at Jump Into The Gospel’s residency showcase, which premieres the band’s debut EP over the month of June. Because the acts were relative newcomers, or maybe for a different reason altogether, only a few in the crowd danced and even fewer sang along. But opening nights are always a bit dicey. So, who’s The Gospel?
The Gospel comprises touring members of The Drums and Holy Ghost!, bringing the total to five. They take cues from The Bravery and The Cars, a perfect recipe for radio airtime and comercial viability down the road. And that’s safe to say, because their music hammers with catchiness and amplifies through snappy choruses and cheerful melodies. It’s good pop.
Fronting the group, Louis Epstein handled the stage like a hipster David Bowie. His fist pumps, chest bumps, and reaches up to higher ground went a bit over the top, but he sings with an excellent Ric Ocasek hiccup. Otherwise, the group remained tight and refrained from any artistic flourishes.
I would not expect Jump Into The Gospel to grace many summer stages this summer in Brooklyn, because they missed the train for new new wave acts by a year or more. The town’s saturated enough as it is, with more synths per capita than Brandon Flowers’ basement. Then again, The Gospel won’t need Brooklyn to gain listeners.
June 15th – New York, NY – Piano’s – 10pm
June 22nd – New York, NY – Piano’s – 10pm
June 29th – New York, NY – Pianos’ – 10pm
Photo by Xavier Aaronson
Tornado Deaths More Likely Tied to Hand of God Than Global Warming
June 3rd, 2011 by Gray Hurlburt
“The wind’s blowin’ up a gale today.”
The profusion of deadly tornadoes this year resulted in more fatalities so far than the last nine years combined. Along with billions of dollars in damages to homes and buildings, 523 Americans are dead. With this twister season not over and already the fifth worst year on record, people wonder what’s behind the phenomenon. Could global warming be the culprit?
Many think so, and many think not. We’re not scientists, so we won’t even try to answer that. But regardless of the science of what causes tornadoes, we can say definitively that 2011 has seen an outsize number of tornado deaths without an outsize number of tornadoes.
NOAA information states the average number of tornadoes for the past decade is 1,274. So far this year’s tornado count stands at 1,314. With the season ending in June it’ll likely end up around 1,500. By contrast, more touched down in 2004—1,817 total—but only 34 deaths were recorded that year. This year the death toll stands at more than 15 times that number, despite a much lower number of tornadoes. Why?
Last week, NPR posed a few questions about trends in tornado activity to Dr. Harold Brooks, a meteorologist with the National Severe Storms Laboratory at the University of Oklahoma:
What stands out most about this year’s twisters is the number of deaths. But Brooks says there’s no evidence that in the long term, tornadoes are becoming more frequent. Our perception of the frequency of tornadoes is skewed, he notes, because we naturally focus only on storms that have a large human impact. For example, the tornado that touched down in Joplin, Mo., on Sunday, killing at least 125 people, wasn’t a statistical outlier. In fact, it came on a day with fewer-than-average tornadoes.
As for the connection between global warming and twisters, who knows. But one thing seems to be certain: the death toll this year seems to result not from the multitude of twisters, but from the unusual number of direct hits.
The deadliest events that flattened Joplin, MI, and Tuscaloosa and Birmingham, AL, cut through densely-populated regions, giving people little room to flee. Another string of tornadoes crushed the town of Springfield, MA, where they are so rare, or rarely violent, that residents would never think to prepare for such an event.
While 2011 will go down in history for its tornado season, the takeaway from this spur of disasters doesn’t necessarily require trumpeting the horn of global warming. More accurately, the tragedies are attributable to something even less understood than climate science: blind, dumb fucking luck. Fate. Hand of god. Whatever you want to call it.
It can, however, serve as an admonition to Congress for reaching a responsible CO2 benchmark with the United Nations—not just a bunch of hot air.
Interview: BOBBY
May 20th, 2011 by Gray Hurlburt
All good things come in wrapping paper.
An electro-acoustic band from western New England premiered its debut album on Cinco de Mayo at The Knitting Factory. Leading up to this performance, our only grasp on who BOBBY is came through a curious introduction.
The band bio on Partisan Records’ website mentions one more member than the six who appeared in Brooklyn that day. Missing from this assortment of students and recent grads of Bennington College was the namesake himself, a tap dancing polymorph.
Tom Greenberg, the guitarist, singer and mastermind behind BOBBY, put it obliquely. “He is the Jesus breaking bread at our table at the end of every day, in a very spiritual way, for all of us. But we don’t really know how to approach him. He’s inside of us but feels guilty a lot; he means well, he’s just not very friendly.”
Sitting together at a cafe not far from the venue, it became apparent by the knowing look on their faces that Bobby is not real and probably never was. Instead, his character anchors the artists and listeners to music fused with imagination.
The album, “BOBBY,” is low-tempo and a singular texture of light guitars, drums and ambient wisps. Soft and warm vocals from Greenberg and Mountain Man’s Molly Sarle accompany the songs with a mellow tone and lines that draw back to childhood. In one song, Sarle sings about, among other things, going to Chuck E. Cheese’s.
They sound mellower than BRAIDS and not far from The Moldy Peaches, but not close enough in one way or another to place them within a specific genre aside from experimental indie rock. Many times an association to folk is mentioned in writings about BOBBY, but they were quick to dismiss this handle when it was suggested to them at the cafe.
“You know, I kind of don’t see that,” said Greenberg. “We don’t think of ourselves as ‘folk’ in any way. [We are] definitely on the experimental side, way more on that. But every time we read something about us being called folk, we wonder where it’s coming from. Is it the guitars or something like that? It spawns the interesting question of what do people consider folk now. The fact that we don’t consider ourselves folk says a lot.”
And it should say a lot. They want to avoid the common pitfall many up-and-coming bands have fallen into by treading too close to a popular movement. It has the danger of encompassing artists in a time and place, cutting their careers short. For example, in an interview with Toro y Moi on his latest album, Chaz Bundick described having to create an album that is wider in spectrum and “more enjoyable in a live setting,” shaking off the stigmas attached to his given “chillwave” modifier.
With this already in mind, the group planned to govern their own publicity and connection to listeners and writers, wary of elucidating signs that could pin them to something prematurely. Roby Moulton, who plays keys for BOBBY, said, “I think labels in general are just detrimental to the way that anyone can really experience the sound of a band, because they instantly provide a preface to what you’re going to be hearing. I just don’t think that’s how music should be listened to.”
The six extant members of the band completed “BOBBY” under the cover of small-town isolation, in a house in Western Massachusetts. Guitarist Paolo Menuez said that workshopping happened in the property’s shed. And for “Sore Spores,” a single off the debut, Sarle mentioned, “I had never played with drums before, so my mind was playing with the drums and I started singing. That song come together in about an hour in Paolo’s room.”
The months in Northampton put the added touches on what began as Greenberg’s senior project. As he added friends to the mix, the more it seemed that BOBBY had legs. One year on, the album will be released by Partisan Records on June 21, 2011.
Picture by Organic Mobility
Royal Wedding: 53 Protesters Arrested
April 29th, 2011 by Gray Hurlburt
Don’t rain on the prince’s parade.
Police in England rounded up more than 50 people on suspicion of planning to disturb the royal wedding. It was not a matter of dismantling riots or violent plots against the Windsors and their entourage. Instead, the targets were predominantly non-violent street theater demonstrators aiming to satirize the pomp of the day’s ceremonies.
They prevented a college professor and anthropology students from staging a “zombie wedding” in one case, and in another swept in to stop 10 or so people in Soho from participating in the Right Royal Orgy, which would’ve been awesome.
Activists described the preemptive strikes by Scotland Yard and Metropolitan Police the same as enforcing pre-crime in “Minority Report.”
On the night before the wedding four individuals were arrested, three in London and one in Cambridgeshire, for conspiracy to cause a public nuisance and breach of the peace. One of those arrested, Chris Knight, was planning to behead an effigy of Prince Andrew using a theatrical guillotine, in what his friends said was a piece of street theatre.
The clampdown against theatrical demonstrators runs counter to protecting the right to free speech, no matter how passe zombies have become. It also enhances the opinion that royalty, as ordained by God, has run its course and lowered to the importance of sideshows and carnival barkers.
After all, what’s the price of stepping on a few disagreeable feat in the name of quality television?
[Guardian]
Dorian Gray Is Totally Into Guys
April 28th, 2011 by Gray Hurlburt
After 120 years in the closet, the original gay version of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” can finally be yours.
About time “Dorian Gray” stepped out of the closet, because we wondered if the book would ever show its true colors and embrace the gay novel it always was. Apparently, this took 120 years of mounting confidence, but now the original version by Oscar Wilde can see the light of day
In this original version of “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” a story about a young man with his soul tied to a portrait, it featured homoerotic overtones that were later penciled out by the author’s editor, JM Stoddart, who felt it went too far for Victorians.
For example, the line “It is quite true I have worshiped you with far more romance of feeling than a man should ever give to a friend” became “From the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence on me.”
The first time around the writer reveals his boner to the world in the mind of Lord Henry; the edited line downgrades Lord Henry into an iffy Sean Maguire from “Good Will Hunting.” Directness is important and will sell better to Americans down the road.
It is rumored by us that the soon-to-be-released original version, prepared by Nicholas Frankel, will alter the classic story in the minds of readers: Dorian Gray attends not Shakespeare plays but performances of “Bye Bye Birdie” and an underground Wham! concert. The painting becomes more decadent as time goes bye, Lord Henry marries Dorian Gray, the world collapses into hell.
All of this can be found in Oscar Wilde’s only novel, published by Harvard University Press, as it appeared in the spring of 1890. As a consequence,“Dorian Gray” will transfer from the “Classic Literature” section of bookstores to “Adult Romance.”
How to Make the New VW Beetle Even More Manly
April 21st, 2011 by Gray Hurlburt
And we can make it manlier.
Volkswagen unveiled the successor to its famous New Beetle on Monday, with a redesign that flattens out the humps and circles on the exterior into a shape that’s decidedly more masculine. The sex change involves a number of calculated measures aimed at severing an association with “girliness,” and comes away with a beast that’s ready to trample any hostilities that spring up down the road.
The German automaker rebuffed the only stronghold for female and gay motorists in production and replaced it with what’s being called “the 21st Century Beetle.” Faster, angular, and complete with a Fender-produced sound system. Male-tastic.
In these end times of bankruptcies and bailouts, rising fuel prices, and natural disasters, there’s no room for flower vases attached to dashboards. The world, VW seems to contend, needs a Beetle that can power past any pressing problems at full-tilt and never look back.
We’re not advocating a restrictive definition of traditional masculinity. Still, sometimes if you’re gonna go for it, you should just go for it. Here are simple ways to man-up your new 21st Century Beetle for the roads to come. Trick it out and drive over to the local Slut Walk in your city.
Splash guards
Watch ‘Drift’ by Kodomo
April 21st, 2011 by Gray Hurlburt
Kodomo is better for you than reggae.
Chris Child spoke with Death and Taxes in a recent interview on his new Kodomo album, “Frozen In Motion,” which he composed using field recordings from New York City. The electronic musician has since teamed up with visual artist Aaron Munson to create a music video for “Drift.”
Trust me, this study on texture and visual patterns and whathaveyou will straighten you out after a night with Kaya on 420 at Terrapin Station.
“Frozen In Motion” will be available in early June on 5 Points Records.
Soundgarden Announces North American Tour Dates
April 14th, 2011 by Gray Hurlburt
Owing to a Twitter faux pas, the seminal grunge group broke its you-know-what and announced four live dates for July.
After falling from prominence over a decade ago, the four members of Soundgarden have reformed and announced plans to tour North America. Except for two special appearances last year in Seattle and at Lollapalooza, it will have been 14 years since the seminal grunge outfit took to the road, with plans to stop in four cities during July.
The Guardian reports that this stems from an announcement over Twitter on the launch of the band’s official website:
“The 12 year break is over amd school is back in session,” said frontman Chris Cornell on New Year’s Day 2010. “Sign up now. Knights of the Soundtable ride again! soundgardenworld.com”
Without further clarification from Cornell, this apparent call to arms stirred fans and friends into a flurry of anticipation. The reaction to the tweet made such an impression on the group that they, faithful to their legacy and fans, chose to return to the studio a year later.
Along with these four dates below, Soundgarden hopes to write new material and perhaps even record an album. According to the mentioned article, guitarist Kim Thayil said, “The last thing we want to make is another grunge or metal record.” Lord knows they can still rock, but, basing this on Cornell’s current focus on writing soulful acoustic rock, whatever comes down the road would probably roll at a slower pace than before.
Soundgarden 2011 Tour Dates:
07/02 – Toronto, ON @ Molson Canadian Amphitheatre
07/13 – Philadelphia, PA @ Festival Pier at Penn’s Landing
07/18 – Morrison, CO @ Red Rocks Amphitheatre
07/22 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Forum
Enter ‘The Hobbit’ With Peter Jackson [Video]
April 14th, 2011 by Gray Hurlburt
Go for a tour with Peter Jackson on his newest movie about short people.
One does not simply walk onto the set of “The Hobbit.” Trespassing is illegal even in New Zealand, where production on Peter Jackson’s latest opus has begun, but the award-winning director has taken the step to lead fans around his Middle Earth with the help of a video camera.
As you will see below, Peter Jackson posted the first behind-the-scenes video on the making of “The Hobbit” to his Facebook page this morning. We follow him around to familiar sets from “The Lord of The Rings” film trilogy, see many of the important new faces to the cast (albeit without makeup), and gain a special look at costume production. It’s all really exhilarating for hardcore Tolkien nerds such as myself.
The ten-minute video, along with those to come, makes waiting three more years for the movie to arrive manageable. Even if it seems, like Aragorn arriving with the army of ghost pirates, the wait’s too long.
Hopefully next time Jackson provides us with a peek at Smaug, the dragon who placed 7th on the 2011 Forbes Fictional 15 ranking of the richest fictional characters. Way to go, Smaug!
On a similar note, if you want to learn more about “The Hobbit” from the perspective of the man who plays the character with that really big hat, Ian McKellen keeps a good blog on his personal website.
[Reddit]
