I’ve never purchased an album by PJ Harvey before, but today I did. And I have every confidence that the $7.99 I spent with Amazon.com is money well invested.
Here’s a video for “The Words That Maketh Murder,” track number four from the new album, Let England Shake.
Alexis Petridis of The Guardian says the new work is “a richly inventive album that’s unlike anything else in Harvey’s back catalogue.”
The music sounds muted, misty and ambiguous, which seems to fit with Harvey’s vision of England: “The damp grey filthiness of ages, fog rolling down behind the mountains and on the graveyards and dead sea captains,” she sings on The Last Living Rose.
Scrupulously avoiding the usual cliches that arise with self-consciously English music – Kinksy music-hall observations, eerie pagan folkisms, or shades of Vaughan Williams – the central sound is guitars, wreathed in echo that makes them seem as if they’re playing somewhere in the middle distance. Around them are scattered muzzy electric piano, smears of brass, off-kilter samples and musical quotations: a reference to Eddie Cochran’s Summertime Blues somehow works its way into The Words That Maketh Murder, while an incessant trumpet reveille sounds during The Glorious Land, out of tune and time with the rest of the song.
Harvey recently appeared on NPR’s Fresh Air. Take half and hour and listen to Harvey discuss her work. She’s hypnotic on record and on radio.
NPR describes the album’s topics are brutal and bitter. Soldiers, landscapes and limbs are yanked apart, “falling like lumps of meat / blown and shot out beyond belief / arms and legs in the trees.”
It took Harvey 18 months to compose the music for Let England Shake, a process she undertook only after writing all the lyrics. Many of the songs feature the autoharp, an instrument she began playing only four years ago while touring for her album White Chalk.
Last night at the Alladin Theater, Puddletown music lovers were treated to a feast of Louisiana music, care of Voice of The Wetlands Allstars, featuring Tab Benoit, Cyril Neville, Anders Osborne and other legends of the swampy sound. It was an interesting show, which became more interesting every time Osborne stepped forward to be heard.
As you can see from the video above, recorded just nine days ago, Osborne is an amazing talent. He’s also a troubled talent, and his latest latest album, American Patchwork, released last April on Alligator Records tells the story of his troubles.
It’s a powerful record. John Swenson of Offbeat certainly shares in this opinion.
American Patchwork is the album Osborne fans have been waiting for since Ash Wednesday Blues. The record is a triumph in several ways— as a coherent musical statement, as an account of one man’s struggle to transcend his own existential problems, as a tale of New Orleans loss and recovery, as a rumination on the entropic inevitability of death and a possible redemption by love. The back story is that it’s an album about recovery from substance abuse, but to leave it at that is like saying John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band was an album about primal therapy.
Back to the Voice of the Wetlands Allstars show…between songs Tab Benoit, made passionate plea after passionate plea for help preserving the Louisiana way of life. He said they’re losing an acre of low-lying land a day to the Gulf due to man-made causes. I know some in the audience were looking for more music and less talking, but it’s hard to blame a man when the ground under his feet is shifting so radically.
I’ve long held that “the real you” needs to show up for a job interview. You may as well dress the way you dress, act the way you act and generally be yourself, because it’s you that has to show up every weekday for years on end, not some flimsy projection of you.
Turns out, Hunter S. Thompson was on this page back in 1958 when he was looking for a newspaper job after the Army.
A book blog from the staff of AbeBooks has the entire text of a letter that Thompson sent Jack Scott of the Vancouver Sun. Here’s one of the juicier parts of Thompson’s appeal:
The enclosed clippings should give you a rough idea of who I am. It’s a year old, however, and I’ve changed a bit since it was written. I’ve taken some writing courses from Columbia in my spare time, learned a hell of a lot about the newspaper business, and developed a healthy contempt for journalism as a profession.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity. If this is what you’re trying to get The Sun away from, then I think I’d like to work for you.
Thompson didn’t get the job, but there’s still a lot we can learn from his approach. Writers, of all people, must have a point of view, or they’re not writers, they’re typists.
But even if you’re not a writer, you’re a vital person with a past, present and future. Inject some of your dreams, struggles and most importantly your personality into a query letter. Sure, there’s risk involved when you reveal your true self, but if you fail to communicate anything of value, you’ll also fail to be noticed.
Ah, the music business. Like all business, it can get a little hairy, especially where art meets commerce.
Letters of Note unearthed this old letter from Warner Brothers Records executive Joe Smith to Danny Rifkin, co-manager of Grateful Dead in 1967. In it, Smith expresses dismay at the band’s unprofessional studio behavior.
I love Smith says Phil was the main problem in the studio. The guy’s had an attitude for a long time! But he plays amazing bass, so it’s mostly all good.
I also love how someone from the band, maybe Phil, wrote “Fuck You” on the letter. Legend has it that the letter was then returned to Smith.
Marc Ambinder is the White House correspondent for National Journal and a contributing editor at The Atlantic. In November he wrote about being “a blogger no longer.” Here’s an interesting passage in his sign off piece about the difference between writing traditional journalism and writing a blog.
Really good print journalism is ego-free. By that I do not mean that the writer has no skin in the game, or that the writer lacks a perspective, or even that the writer does not write from a perspective. What I mean is that the writer is able to let the story and the reporting process, to the highest possible extent, unfold without a reporter’s insecurities or parochial concerns intervening. Blogging (on the other hand) is an ego-intensive process. Even in straight news stories, the format always requires you to put yourself into narrative. You are expected to not only have a point of view and reveal it, but be confident that it is the correct point of view.
So, blogs are first person affairs? Many of them are indeed, but there’s no bloggers’ rule book that says, “Insert your opinion” or “Write in fist person.” Blogging is more about the platform. It’s where writers rush to publish. Again, there’s no rule book that says speed is of the essence, it’s just that pro bloggers feel compelled to publish a handful of times per day.
Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb, in a reflective piece about how he used to write for AOL for a mere $5 per post, says he’s now having a hard time filling RWW’s current opening for a full time tech blogger.
Big league bloggers and writers these days need to be able to write well, in large quantity and quickly. It’s not easy, but who said writing for a living, in an era when anyone can publish with ease, was going to be easy?
In yet another thought piece on the lost art of blogging, The New York Observer observes that the best pro bloggers are writing original material today.
“I think the story of blogging in the last couple of years or more, professional blogging, is that we all do a lot more original content,” said Lockhart Steele, publisher of the Curbed network. Choire Sicha of The Awl also notes the importance of original content. Specifically, he referenced the flyaway success of their newest property, The Hairpin, which he credits to its editor, Edith Zimmerman.
“She’s not aggregating blog posts about the thing that just came down the wire. She’s making things, and I think one of the mistakes that a lot of blogs make that kind of dead-end them as blogs is covering the same thing that everyone’s covering instead of like creating things and stopping to make stuff,” Mr. Sicha said.
To recap, pro bloggers (or those who make money from their efforts) are no longer writing personal journals while dressed in pajamas. Whatever their beat, pro bloggers have a distinct point of view, create a mountain of content every day and the best of the best don’t just write things, they make things.
Stephanie Flanders, the BBC’s economics editor, is in Davos, Switzerland this week, reporting from the World Economic Forum.
I don’t pretend to understand economics any more than I understand international politics, but I know enough to know I need to know more.
The rule is that America gets a free pass to run larger deficits, for longer, than anybody else. But you have to wonder – and everyone I speak to in Davos is wondering – how long America’s “exorbitant privilege” is going to last.
It took several decades, and two punishingly expensive wars, for the world to tire of holding sterling. But when they did, it changed British economic policy making forever. Indeed, we are still seeing the consequences today. Rightly or wrongly, the British government believes it cannot risk borrowing a lot more from international markets. The Americans know they have a lot more leeway.
They will have it for some time yet. But the lesson of sterling’s rise and fall is that if you run current account deficits long enough, and depreciate your currency far enough, the world will eventually stop giving you the benefit of the doubt. The biggest difference between Britain in 1945 and America now is that back then, there was a ready replacement for sterling, in the form of the dollar.
The word “empire” does not appear in the text above, but the concept of empire is certainly present. And as history shows, empire is not sustainable.
Meanwhile, President Obama delivered his State of the Union on Tuesday. Here he is saying, “We have to do more.” Roger that.
Public transit has to be better than one’s car for it to be an option that I (and most Americans) will consistently choose.
Here in Portland, it’s not better. I can drive from our cottage to my office in the heart of downtown in 20 minutes, door to door. The same trip on on bus and train takes 50 minutes, one way. So, it’s 40 minutes round trip versus one hour and 40 minutes.
TriMet costs $2.05 each way, or $4.10 per day. Parking a car downtown costs from $6.50 to $12 per day, depending on the lot (plus gas, insurance and maintenance). But what’s that extra hour worth in financial terms? Given that I bill clients by the hour for my time, I actually know what that hour is worth.
Despite the loss of time and money resulting from the TriMet experience, we are a one-vehicle family, so I do rely on the bus and train to take me to and fro. Not every day, but often enough. Apart from my cost-based analysis, there’s also the smell to consider. The smell of urine, in particular. Like the urine smell, one is also forced to entertain a certain amount of bullshit , whether it’s a screaming kid, a punk who cuts in line or a crazy person doing crazy person things.
The point of this piece is not to complain about TriMet, or public transit, in general. It’s obvious that lots of people need the system to work, and work well. I’ve lived in cities–Washington, DC and Chicago, in particular–where it does work well. The point is that Portland’s public transit has to be a much better option for people, if lots of people are going to use it. Before it can become that better option, we need to assess what’s wrong with it and how to make it better.
For some reason, Portland gets a lot of credit (especially in the press) for its public transit system, but as I’ve outlined above, public transit in Portland is actually pretty weak. And I haven’t even touched on the short hours of service and length of time between buses, nor the fact that so many Portland communities are nowhere near a TriMet train track.
Of course, to see better public transit options in Portland, Portlanders will need to fund TriMet. The metro area’s transportation organization faced a $27 million budget shortfall during the last fiscal year.
Here’s a graph that indicates where TriMet gets its money:
Portland is pursuing elite green status as a smart growth strategy, and also as an identity for the city. I like the plan, but for the plan to become real, steps need to be taken.
Recent episodes feature Spoon, The National, Band of Horses, Monsters of Folk, Jimmy Cliff, Roseanne Cash, Alejandro Escovedo and as you can see above, Robert Earl Keen and Hayes Carll in a Texas Troubadour throw down.
Go-Go Boots, the new record from Drive-By Truckers, will be available from ATO Records on Feb. 15th. In Europe it’s coming on the 14th from Play It Again Sam Records.
“It’s the album where we finally fully embrace the music of our original hometown area of Muscle Shoals, exploring the waters of country/soul and that mystical intersection between to two dominate poles of our shared musical heritage,” says Patterson Hood. “It’s also definitively a Drive-By Truckers album and an album that benefits heavily from the work we did backing up Bettye LaVette and Booker T. Jones a few years back.”
Here’s writer Rick Bass of Missoula, MT on the progress the band is making:
Something undefinable has changed within the Truckers. They’re still rocking on, but a few more strands of lightness of being, and happiness, have infiltrated their being. They’re happier. Do not hold this against them, nor worry that it will corrupt their blues and rock, their snarl and anguish. Instead, the happiness will continue to whet these things – the things for which their old fans love them. Theirs is an earned happiness, and therefore does not temper or weaken their sound. Indeed, this new light forges the sound – the rock. You can hear it in every chord. It’s their finest yet.
Okay then. I’m in!
If you’re not yet sure, check out some more of the Go-Go Boots Episodes on Vimeo. DBT will also be touring in support of the new album. Thankfully, they’re including a West Coast swing that includes San Francisco, Eugene, Portland, Vancouver and Seattle.
Last night’s national championship game between Auburn and Oregon was a big deal for the people of Oregon, especially for those Oregonians with ties to the school, like the 500 Nike employees who attended the game.
Allan Brettman of The Oregonian reports that Nike Chairman and U of O grad, Phil Knight, displayed the “sunniest disposition in the house,” before kickoff.
While the game’s outcome was a letdown for the team, representatives of Nike and the university emphasized before and after the contest how this football season has signaled an arrival of sorts. The football team and, by extension, the university, are no longer a distant oddity to the rest of the country. And the sports equipment and apparel giant based near Beaverton contributed significantly to that shift of public opinion.
“I guess it was in 1996, after the Cotton Bowl,†Nike designer Tinker Hatfield said after Monday’s game, “we had played very well, but there was clearly a difference between the quality in terms of the size and speed of Colorado versus Oregon.
“We felt like – we, being Nike — felt like we could help the University of Oregon just improve the level and quality of athletes. It’s been a long, kind of steady build. And I think as you can see today we’re quite equal to the best in the country in terms of athleticism and it’s a good feeling to know that we had a little hand in that.â€
What I find interesting in the Nike – Ducks marriage is the fact that Oregonians are not a brash people. Oregonians are reserved, maybe to a fault. But Nike is not reserved, and the Oregon Ducks football team is not reserved. In fact, the two are about as IN YOUR FACE* as a team and a sporting goods manufacturer can be.
I’d love to know where Knight and Hatfield stand on this? Are they trying to push all Oregonians into the limelight? Do they think such a course of action might be good for business and good for morale? I do.
*In last night’s game alone, Oregon went for two and converted, not once, but twice. Oregon also executed a fake punt perfectly, went for it on fourth down and generally called unexpected plays throughout.
