A new record from The Decemberists, The King Is Dead, will be available on January 18th, 2011.
To whet our appetite for this release, the band is offering “Down by the Water,” a track from the new album that features the illustrious Peter Buck on 12 string guitar and Gillian Welch on vocal harmonies.
The record was made during the summer months at Pendarvis Farm in Southeast Portland.
Buck appears on three tracks and his influence is felt throughout. In fact, the end result, according to Colin Meloy, is a record heavily inspired by Buck’s legendary outfit R.E.M., with a sound that is more “straightforward, driving folk/rock.”
It’s been way too long since I’ve seen one of my favorite bands, Gov’t Mule. Thankfully, the band came to Portland’s Crystal Ballroom last week and I was able to get back on the Mule train.
It was the first time I’ve seen this particular lineup with bassist Jorgen Carlsson. He seems like a great fit for this hyper-talented outfit. All four players–including Warren Haynes on guitar and vocals, Matt Abts on drums and Danny Louis on keys–are masters of their instruments, and damn did they ever show it on this night. By the time Mule starting kicking “Gameface > Mtn Jam” in the first set I was fully on board and loving the power and musical sensibilities of this band.
Sometimes a man needs to be kicked by the Mule, and last Thursday night I was that man.
Gov’t Mule at Crystal Ballroom
Portland, OR – 10/28/10
Set 1
Jam In A >
Soulshine with Gospel Intro
Driving Rain
Slackjaw Jezebel > Gameface > Mountain Jam > Gameface
I’ll Be The One > Blue Sky > I’ll Be The One
Broke Down On The Brazos
Inside Outside Woman Blues
Set 2
Bad Little Doggie >
Steppin’ Lightly
Red House
Blind Man In The Dark >
Drums >
Blind Man In The Dark >
Gordon James >
Working Class Hero >
Thorazine Shuffle
MGM, led by Republican activist and movie mogul Louis B. Mayer, produced three fake newsreels to attack Sinclair before election day, using shots from old movies and Hollywood actors. The newsreels sparked riots in theaters. Irving Thalberg later admitted producing the newsreels. “Nothing is unfair in politics,” he explained.
Just yesterday on Twitter I said, “politics is war,” which led to an interesting exchange with Chris O’Rourke.
As we know, there are all sorts of wars today. Culture wars, drug wars and very real and bloody wars. In all of them lives are at stake. That’s certainly true when we look at the war on poverty, which has been ongoing in America for generations.
Let’s hear from Upton Sinclair about the lives at stake during the Great Depression.
The “EPIC†(End Poverty in California) movement proposes that our unemployed shall be put at productive labor, producing everything which they themselves consume and exchanging those goods among themselves by a method of barter, using warehouse receipts or labor certificates or whatever name you may choose to give to the paper employed. It asserts that the State must advance sufficient capital to give the unemployed access to good land and machinery, so that they may work and support themselves and thus take themselves off the backs of the taxpayers. The “EPIC†movement asserts that this will not hurt private industry, because the unemployed are no longer of any use to industry.
Ultimately, Sinclair lost the race to Frank F. Merriam. It’s now 76 years later and we’re still burdened by an inordinate number of people on the sidelines in America, and that’s no way to manage a city, state or nation. But who among us has the faintest clue about how to fix the mess that is the American economy? Sure entrepreneurs can and do create businesses and new jobs, but as Sinclair argues above, the unemployed are not aided by this.
At any rate, we’re 48 hours from another mid-term election and polls indicate that the Republicans will do well on Tuesday. Why will they do well? There are many reasons, one of which is the skilled use of advertising and the media by the Grand Old Party.
In the end, we can call today’s attack ads propaganda, but identifying them as such and rendering them meaningless and ineffective are not the same thing. As long as political propaganda works to get people elected, there will always be people of all political persuasions willing to employ it. Sure, it’s a sad commentary on our values as a nation, and all the lying and manipulation that goes on erodes the fabric of what’s good in our society. But the problem with lies is they’re not seen as lies by the people who retell them. For Loius B. Mayer and Karl Rove and the like, sure, they know the lies they tell, but the audience, sadly, isn’t that discerning.
“Buildings, too, are children of Earth and Sun.” -Frank Lloyd Wright
I work in an industry–marketing communications–that has taken a beating during the recession. But people who build brands for a living are not alone in these tough times. In fact, this Los Angeles Times article paints a dour picture for another design-centric profession.
Architects, the exalted artists who design structures that will stand for generations, are feeling a lot less glamorous these days.
When people look back, there will be few signature buildings on the country’s metropolitan skylines to point to that were built in the years around 2010, said Kermit Baker, chief economist for the American Institute of Architects.
The AIA’s measurement of commercial real estate work that architects have on their boards is at a low ebb, a 40% decline since late 2008. “You need to go back to the Great Depression to see something of this magnitude,” Baker said.
Employment at the nation’s architecture firms has dropped 25% since 2008, Baker said.
No one wants to see idle talent on the sidelines. Personally, I think we need to find new ways of working together to keep our collective balls rolling in the right direction. Maybe out of work architects can band together to do public works. Naturally, someone needs to pay for this valuable work and there’s no question there’s a real need for the work.
During the Depression, the federal government put a lot of talented engineers and others to work on infrastructure needs. The Obama administration is doing this again, but on a much smaller scale. Yet the need isn’t reduced today, just our will to use tax dollars to make it happen is reduced. That’s why a combination of private sector solutions is, once again, necessary to address our public needs.
I think The Nature Conservancy’s model for saving habitat is instructive here. The Nature Conservancy buys sensitive habitat outright and protects it in perpetuity. It’s a simple and highly effective way to get the job done. So, “a Nature Conservancy for architecture” would endeavor to identify significant project opportunities and then raise the money to get the public-minded projects designed and built–all of which would require a great deal of work from lots of skilled people.
It’s also true that these type of efforts will need the support of writers, designers, filmmakers and the like, for someone needs to communicate the value of all these public-minded projects before, during and after the construction phase.
A group of filmmakers from Corvallis are in production on a documentary about Willamette Valley and Pacific Northwest winemakers.
Vino Veritas: An American Wine Movie is slated for release in 2012. But before that can happen, the team needs funding and they’re using Kickstarter and local events to reach out to fans of the project.
According to Gazette Times, David Baker, an Oregon State University employee in multimedia web production, and three filmmaking friends brainstormed this summer.
We want to focus on the local level, but we also want to make it national,†Baker said. “And we’re not just looking at the wine-makers. We’re focusing on the wine geeks and wine lovers, too.â€
Darby and I attended the Cully Association of Neighbors monthly meeting last night in the social room at Grace Presbyterian Church on NE Prescott. City Commissioner Amanda Fritz opened the meeting by running down the many concerns on her plate. She said she’s working on a proposed Alcohol Impact Area in the downtown corridor that would cut down on public drunkenness, which is a big tax on city services. She also took questions, including one about the additional taxpayer burden to build a new Sellwood bridge. Frtiz said she’s happy that a deal was made because the Sellwood Bridge has a safety rating of 2 on a scale of 100, which makes me concerned to drive over it.
Good as it was to hear from Fritz, who is a whip smart City official, we were in the room to hear from John McKinney of Columbia Biogas. McKinney is leading the charge to open a state-of-the-art green energy facility at 6849 Columbia Boulevard, which is located in an industrial section of the Cully neighborhood. First, let me say that Darby and McKinney know each other from work–Columbia Biogas sublets office space from Cascadia Green Building Council in the EcoTrust Building. So, you might say we were “plants” in the audience, ready to support this important green business initiative. But I didn’t feel like a plant. I felt like an interested student. And we live in Cully.
McKinney explained his project in down-to-earth terms despite the complicated engineering at the center of it all. He said the production of biogas by anaerobic digestion of source-separated food waste is well-proven technology in Europe. His company’s proposed biogas plant in NE Portland will generate 5 megawatts of power–enough to run 4000 to 5000 residential homes. That’s a lot of power, all generated from locally-collected food waste that would otherwise go to landfills, and turn into methane gas, which is over 20 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.
Naturally some citizen activists spoke up with concerns about the need for industrial safety, potential environmental impacts and the cultural and historic value of the site. McKinney patiently addressed everyone’s concerns and will do so again next week in a special meeting of the Concordia and Cully neighborhood associations at Word of Life Community Church on NE 55th Avenue.
After McKinney’s presentation, representatives from Changing the Climate in Cully, a neighborhood organizing project of Metropolitan Alliance for Common Good, spoke about their program that offers Cully homeowners free energy assessments and help with key weatherization efforts like insulation, air sealing and duct sealing and hot water upgrades. They mentioned that the deadline to apply for these free upgrades is fast approaching.
Overall, one couldn’t help but come away with the impression that there are a lot of committed, intelligent people working on civic solutions in this city. With so much media focus with what’s wrong with the economy, it’s nice to learn first-hand what’s right with it.
I don’t know how this gem of a political thriller escaped me, but now that I’m hearing about Alvin Greene and reading up on his run for a U.S. Senate seat in South Carolina, I can’t look away.
Greene won a whopping 59% of the vote in the primary, despite the fact that he’s an unemployed veteran who with no political background to speak of.
After Greene’s primary victory last spring, U.S. Representative Jim Clyburn, called for an investigation and forwarded the notion that Greene was a “plant.” The Democratic Party in South Carolina also asked Greene to step off, given that he has a felony obsenity charge handing around his neck. Green refuses to admit any wrongdoing in the case and he refuses to remove himself from the race.
But can he defeat Jim DeMint next month and become the freshman Senator from the Palmetto State? It’s highly unlikely, but so is everything else about Alvin Greene’s candidacy. Including the publishing of his “manifesto for a fairer America” in The Guardian.
I’m unemployed, and, if elected, I can teach the Harvard rich kids in the White House and the senate a thing or two. I will vote for any law and propose any measure to keep jobs in my state of South Carolina. I will vote for huge tariffs, and, if necessary, vote to ban imports of foreign goods. Millionaire egghead politicians in the pocket of big business talk about “free trade” – and let all of your jobs get shipped overseas.
No more free trade. Your job is not going to Indonesia.
In this time of internet hoaxes and fake news, it’s only natural to bring a lot of skepticism to this story. When you watch Greene get grilled by ETV, CNN and MSNBC it’s hard to image that his run for Senate is for real.
Yet, his run for Senate is real. Some of the explanations for Greene’s primary win include the fact that his surname is a popular name in the African-American community. Others have pointed out the simple fact that Greene’s name appeared first on the ballot–a ballot with a lot of unknowns–helped him win. Then there’s the fact that some South Carolina voters made the association with soul singer Al Green.
According to the Spartanburg newspaper, Greene spoke in upstate recently about widening roads, expanding water and sewer access in rural communities and the need to invest in alternative forms of energy. He also reminded the 80 people in the crowd three times that South Carolina ranks 49th in education. The reporter also noted that Greene “was noticeably more confident than the last time he spoke in Spartanburg County.”
I say, Go Greene! South Carolina could do a lot worse, and will, with six more years of radical conservative Jim DeMint.
The study of American subcultures is something I’ve long been fascinated with, for it touches on one of my other favorite themes—cultural geography.
Naturally, people gather in tribes and those tribes then link up in regional clusters to form a “nation” of sorts. One with a strong cultural identity and all the customs to maintain it. In America today there are many such “nations,” like the Redneck nation and the Hipster nation. Then there’s that tired cluster of Preps—an East Coast tribe of White Anglo Saxon Protestants that’s famously resistant to assimilation, or change of any sort.
Lots of famous writers have chronicled the ways of this “nation,” but from a tongue-in-cheek, self-help perspective, there’s no one quite like Lisa Birnbach. Birnbach wrote the 1980 best seller, The Official Preppy Handbook, and now 30 years on, she’s back with a follow-up book, True Prep, co-written by graphic designer Chip Kidd.
Benjamin Schwarz of The Atlantic took the time to read the book and review it.
Three decades later, the sequel, True Prep, by Birnbach and Chip Kidd, lacks the observational precision of the original. Whereas OPH was crammed with fine-grained analysis—defining, say, the subtle distinctions between Brooks Brothers (mainstream), J. Press (old guard), and Paul Stuart (urbane)—True Prep’ analysis seems vague and flabby. Whereas OPH’s preppies belonged to a distinct and inward-looking subculture, the preppies of True Prep, defined largely by what they buy and wear, are in many ways indistinguishable from fancily educated professionals.
Rather than demonstrating a failure of the authors’ powers, True Prep’s imprecision actually reflects the erosion of the distinctiveness of the subculture it attempts to reveal—an erosion engendered by the progress of capitalism and the attendant triumphs of meritocracy and consumer culture. The northeastern establishment has been absorbed by a broader national and international elite; that process has been under way since the late 19th century and, as True Prep inadvertently shows, it is all but complete today. Preppies’ best schools and universities, their professions, even their Park Avenue co-ops are now the province of the phenomenally talented and ferociously competitive—qualities seldom found among the tribe.
Interesting. The one thing Preps can’t stomach–new money–dilutes their stream and eventually washes them out to sea.
A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll has found that the tea-party movement has emerged as a potent force in American politics and the center of gravity within the GOP.
In the survey, 71% of Republicans described themselves as tea-party supporters, saying they had a favorable image of the movement or hoped tea-party candidates would do well in the Nov. 2 elections.
“These are essentially conservative Republicans who are very ticked-off people,” said Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who conducted the survey with Democratic pollster Peter Hart.
If the Republicans win control of the House or Senate this fall, Mr. McInturff added, the survey shows “enormous amounts about how limited the interest is going to be in those new majorities to try to seek negotiation with the president or the Democratic leadership.”
All of which leads me to ask, what do these people want? According to the report they want to cut federal spending. Guess what, that’s not radical. We all want to cut spending. The question is where to cut? Tea-partiers want to cut entitlements. I’m for that. How about we cut the defense industry’s entitlement to half of all the taxes collected in this nation?
Tea-partiers are for small government. Again, that’s not a radical position. Topics like efficiency and productivity are truly not political. There may be a bureaucrat or two quaking in his boots at the thought of a smaller federal government, but downsizing is the trend, everyone and everything is moving in that direction.
Ultimately, I think many on the left and in just as many in the middle share the frustration and anger at “the way things are” in Washington, DC. But anger and frustration do very little for the nation. Frankly, it’s time to rise above. It’s also time to realize that two political parties can not possibly represent the plurality that is America.
