by David Burn | Oct 11, 2005 | Music
CNN: A few hundred lucky wedding guests got the surprise of their life last weekend as R.E.M.’s original four members reunited to play a seven-song set at the wedding of one of the group’s road crew.
The action went down Saturday at Kingpins Bowl & Brew in the group’s Athens, Georgia, home base and marks just the second time Michael Stipe, Peter Buck and Mike Mills have performed with drummer Bill Berry since his amicable 1997 departure.
“Nobody really knew it was going to happen,” Kingpins owner Ed Connolly told Billboard.com. “As a matter of fact, I think it was fairly hit and miss up until the time it happened. I heard they didn’t know if Bill was even going to make it, and I don’t know if they had a chance to rehearse.”
Connolly, who has known the groom, guitar tech Dewitt Burton, for years, said the actual wedding band was taking a break when he noticed vocalist Stipe and company setting up in the bowling alley’s arcade.
“I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I was transfixed. I heard the count in and then ‘Sitting Still,’ and by the time they got to the first chorus, it was packed shoulder to shoulder.”
The group went on to play some of its most beloved early tunes: “Don’t Go Back to Rockville” (with bassist Mills on vocals), “Wolves, Lower,” “Begin the Begin,” “The One I Love,” “Permanent Vacation” and “Radio Free Europe.”
by David Burn | Oct 9, 2005 | Politics
Defedning the bar tabs he picked up for visiting dignitaries, Salt Lake City Mayor, Rocky Anderson, said, “I truly feel like we’re in the middle of a Kafka novel sometimes. With a little bit of Taliban thrown in.”
Jon Armstrong of Salt Lake-based Blurbomat said, “I can’t decide whether this is the most outrageously true thing ever said by a politician, or the most insane career killing brain fart ever said by a politician.”
by David Burn | Oct 9, 2005 | Music
Independent Lens is airing a documentary on Parliament Funkadelic this Tuesday night. Tune in to your PBS station for more on the Mothership.
Known to its legions of fans simply as P-Funk, Parliament Funkadelic has had a profound impact on the development of contemporary music, aesthetics and culture. PARLIAMENT FUNKADELIC: One Nation Under a Groove chronicles the unique alchemy of the musical influences that fed into the band’s singular approach to music, documenting P-Funk’s continuing influence on today’s artists and musicians and featuring an in-depth look at the musical and entrepreneurial mastermind of its leader George Clinton.
To create a film that reflected the distinctive nature of P-Funk, filmmaker Yvonne Smith used animation–both cell- and computer-generated–to create the special sequences and virtual environments that reflect the P-Funk aesthetic. Inspired by a P-Funk lyric, she created the “Afronaut,” a cartoon character from outer space who serves as the film’s host and narrator.
by David Burn | Oct 9, 2005 | Politics, The Environment
Washington Post: The Bush administration is proposing far-reaching changes to conservation policies that would allow hunters, circuses and the pet industry to kill, capture and import animals on the brink of extinction in other countries.
Giving Americans access to endangered animals, officials said, would feed the gigantic U.S. demand for live animals, skins, parts and trophies, and generate profits that would allow poor nations to pay for conservation of the remaining animals and their habitat.
This and other proposals that pursue conservation through trade would, for example, open the door for American trophy hunters to kill the endangered straight-horned markhor in Pakistan; license the pet industry to import the blue fronted Amazon parrot from Argentina; permit the capture of endangered Asian elephants for U.S. circuses and zoos; and partially resume the trade in African ivory. No U.S. endangered species would be affected.
The proposal involves an interpretation of the Endangered Species Act that deviates radically from the course followed by Republican and Democratic administrations since President Richard M. Nixon signed the act in 1973. The law established broad protection for endangered species, most of which are not native to America, and effectively prohibited trade in them.
The Endangered Species Act prohibits removing domestic endangered species from the wild. Until now, that protection was extended to foreign species.
Thanks to Smudge Report for the pointer.
by David Burn | Oct 9, 2005 | Go Big Red
After seeing mile upon mile of cotton fields bursting with the puffy white subtsance last week on our trip to Greenville, I now find the following map all the more interesting.
by David Burn | Oct 8, 2005 | Lowcountry
Minor league baseball is making a home for itself in Bluffton.
Bluffton Today reports that the newly formed South Coast League has established operations on 29 Plantation Park Drive.
SCL will be an independent league unaffiliated with Major League Baseball. Several other independent leagues already exist, so the move is far from unprecedented.
The new league is headed up by CEO, Jamie Toole. Toole is a Columbia, SC native. He recently resigned his job as Vice President and General Manager of Virginia’s Salem Avalanche, part of the single-A Carolina League, to assume full time responsibilities with the SCL.
The league will be privately financed by a group of backers that prefer to stay silent “for now,” Toole told Tim Wood of Bluffton Today. The SCL will own and operate all teams to start, with the hopes of eventually securing local ownership in each market.
Bluffton is on the short list of potential target areas for a franchise.
Toole said the league plans to have working agreements and facility leases in place for each franchise by next spring. The 120-game schedule is slated to kick off in May 2007.
by David Burn | Oct 7, 2005 | Go Big Red
I didn’t realize “The Patriot,” the Hollywood film starring Mel Gibson, is actually the story of Francis Marion, one of South Carolina’s Revolutionary War heroes. Marion was known as the “Swamp Fox” for his ability to use decoy and ambush tactics to disrupt enemy communications, capture supplies, and free prisoners.
Born sometime in 1732 in St. John’s Parish, Berkeley County, S.C., his parents were French Huguenots who lived and farmed along the Santee River.
After the capture of Charleston, South Carolina on May 12, 1780, Marion organized a small troop, which usually consisted of between 20 and 70 men–the only force then opposing the British in the state. Governor John Rutledge made him a brigadier-general of state troops, and in August 1780 Marion took command of the scanty militia, ill-equipped and ill-fed. With this force he was identified for almost all the remainder of the war in a partisan warfare in which he showed himself a singularly able leader of irregulars.
Today, there is a state-supported liberal arts college, a National Forest, a prominent Charleston hotel and a well constructed website that pay homage to Marion.
For another perspective, historian Christopher Hibbert said that Marion was “a wily and elusive character, very active in the persecution of the Cherokee Indians and not at all the sort of chap who should be celebrated as a hero. The truth is that people like Marion committed atrocities as bad, if not worse, than those perpetrated by the British.”
Apperently, this interpretation (and potential for controversy) led Hollywood producers to change Marion’s name in the film to “Benjamin Martin.”
by David Burn | Oct 6, 2005 | Digital culture, Lowcountry
Swamp Fox: The city of Charleston is drawing up a contract with Mount Pleasant-based Widespread Access to blanket the peninsula with a wireless Internet network in an effort to boost economic development and increase computer literacy in poor households.
Evening Post Publishing Co., which owns The Post and Courier and 22 other media outlets, will provide the network’s content, essentially a home page including links to area news articles, weather reports and restaurants.
“Hopefully, it will drive readership, but it’s also important to show that Charleston can be a technological base,” said Charles Bauman, chief information and technology officer for Evening Post. “This is totally different from news.”
Widespread Access and Evening Post started talking with the city in May and eventually formed a company, Access Charleston.com LLC, to bid on the business. The city put out a request for proposals June 8 and collected two bids by the June 28 deadline.
“These services are being provided in Bangalore, India; they certainly ought to be provided in Charleston, South Carolina,” said Ernest Andrade, director of the city’s efforts to recruit technology companies.
The Charleston Wi-Fi plan, like similar projects nationwide, has come under fire from telephone and cable companies that say municipal Internet services unfairly compete with them and undermine private-sector investment.
The city and bidding companies said the criticism is unfounded, because Charleston is not subsidizing the project.
“This is just a business plan put together by two companies,” Bauman said. “It’s going to provide services that the phone companies and the cable companies weren’t providing, and for a good price — that being free.”
Andrade said that the Charleston public Wi-Fi network will be the first in the nation supported by a media company.
If the Charleston project goes as planned, Evening Post will try to set up similar networks in the other communities where it does business. The company owns 23 media outlets, including newspapers in South Carolina, North Carolina and Texas; TV stations in California, Colorado, Kentucky, Louisiana, Montana and Texas; and a daily English-language newspaper in Buenos Aires.
by David Burn | Oct 4, 2005 | Place
We went to Greenville, South Carolina for the weekend. This is what it looks like at Falls Park in the center of town. The Liberty Bridge over the Reedy River is one of only two suspension footbridges in the world. The other is in France.
Greenville has a vital downtown. It was busy with pedestrians on Saturday and Sunday. The city planners must read Jane Jacobs.
The city boasts a new tea bar and non-corporate coffee thanks to Coffee Underground on Coffee St. Yeah! I love non-corporate coffee, locally roasted and prepared by a caring, professional barista.
Adjacent to downtown, Greenville’s West End is a developing art and warehouse district with historic lofts and lots of new construction. A new baseball park for the Greenville Bombers is slated to be built in the neighborhood.
We ate dinner at Smoke On The Water, a West End establishment that serves a mean brisket and kindly features Rogue’s HazleNut Brown Nectar on tap, a true delicacy from coastal Oregon.
On one hand, Greenville may indeed be the “buckle on the Bible Belt,” as we were told it was by one well-meaning gent. On the other, it’s clearly a sophisticated small city with a lot to offer.
by David Burn | Sep 30, 2005 | Digital culture
Nicholas Negroponte, MIT Media Lab chairman and co-founder, is working to bring $100 laptop computers to schoolchildren in developing nations. To achieve this goal, a new, non-profit association, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), has been created.
The proposed $100 machine will be a Linux-based, full-color, full-screen laptop that will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data. These rugged laptops will be WiFi- and cell phone-enabled, and have USB ports galore. Its current specifications are: 500MHz, 1GB, 1 Megapixel.
When these machines pop out of the box, they will make a mesh network of their own, peer-to-peer. This is something initially developed at MIT and the Media Lab. We are also exploring ways to connect them to the backbone of the Internet at very low cost.
The idea is to distribute the machines through those ministries of education willing to adopt a policy of “One Laptop per Child.” Initial discussions have been held with China, Brazil, Thailand, and Egypt. Additional countries will be selected for beta testing. Initial orders will be limited to a minimum of one million units.
Five initial companies who have committed to this project are AMD, Brightstar, Google, News Corporation, and Red Hat.
