Each time Paste Magazine arrives in my mailbox I go directly to the free compilation disc inside. This is so much better than the toys I used to find inside cereal boxes.
The current release, Paste Magazine Sampler 31, features 21 tracks by bands I know–The Hold Steady, The Avett Brothers, Dinosaur Jr., The Greyboy Allstars and Mary Chapin Carpenter–and even more from bands I don’t. It’s the artists that I don’t know well, and in many cases have never even heard about, that provide the real value. It’s hard to put a price tag on discovery.
For me, Joseph Arthur & The Lonely Astronauts is a particularly nice find on Sampler 31. The band has a new album out as of Tuesday. Let’s Just Be, not yet stocked at Amazon, is now playing on my desktop thanks to iTunes. And it’s one of the better new albums I’ve heard this year.
Portland-based performer and producer M. Ward spoke to the Boston Herald last month backstage at the Somerville Theatre before his opening set for Bright Eyes.
He’s a purist and that’s not easy to pull off.
Q. People seem surprised that you’re not an old African-American man.
A. Yeah, one of those things that I make certain with my publicity people and label is that I’m not somebody who wants my face on park benches and on the covers of my records. I’d much rather people be tied to the music rather than image. I think images do a disservice to the imaginative connection people can have with music. It doesn’t allow your imagination room to grow.
Q. There’s a bunch of fairly like-minded throwback folk artists out there now such as Iron & Wine, Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom. Is this a positive trend you see developing?
A. It doesn’t matter to me. It’s just encouraging to hear a good song in the universe. It doesn’t matter to me if people are picking up on it or not. The reason I leave the marketplace to my manager and label is because I’m simply not that interested. A long time ago I used to have a subscription to Rolling Stone. I used to think, ‘Why isn’t Vic Chesnutt on the cover? Why isn’t John Fahey?’ I’ve lucked out. I have great people working for me who cover the marketplace for me. I think it poisons a lot of people’s songwriting when they get too tangled up in selling.
The Independent picked up on a growing environmental disaster story about the sudden and alarming disappearance of bees.
The implications of the spread are alarming. Most of the world’s crops depend on pollination by bees. Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, “man would have only four years of life left”.
No one knows why it is happening. Theories involving mites, pesticides, global warming and GM crops have been proposed, but all have drawbacks.
German research has long shown that bees’ behaviour changes near power lines.
Now a limited study at Landau University has found that bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby.
According to a New York Times story from February, honeybees annually pollinate more than $14 billion worth of seeds and crops in the United States, mostly fruits, vegetables and nuts.
The bee losses are ranging from 30 to 60 percent on the West Coast, with some beekeepers on the East Coast and in Texas reporting losses of more than 70 percent; beekeepers consider a loss of up to 20 percent in the offseason to be normal.
Researchers say the bees are flying off in search of pollen and nectar and simply never returning to their colonies. Presumably they are dying in the fields, perhaps becoming exhausted or simply disoriented and eventually falling victim to the cold.
Austin Mayor, Will Wynn, has long been a leading advocate for transforming downtown Austin into the most vibrant urban core in the country. Naturally, live music is at the heart of that plan. Here he is speaking on the subject at SXSW in March.
The Mayor is introduced by New York City-based Earl Greyhound.
Yesterday afternoon, Darby picked up a handful of $.20 cents books from Habitat for Humanity’s discount store in downtown Bluffton. I’ve already ripped through the one that jumped out at me from the pile on the coffee table.
Tom Wolfe’s 1981 architecture essay in book form, From Bahaus to Our House, explains modernism in a smart but biting manner, a style he trademarked along with his white-suited public persona.
Let’s look at a small but telling passage about one of the founding fathers of the International Style.
Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing concentric circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundemental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.
After putting the book down this morning, I wondered if any criticism might exist on the series of tubes. Google in concert with The New York Times provided the answer, as one might expect. Once upon a time, I visited libraries with card catalogs and microfiche for this type of information. Not now. Now Paul Goldberger’s 26-year old review in the Times is but a few keystrokes away. Goldberger says Wolfe has “a great ear, but no eye,” dismissing the book as a serious contribution to architectural thought.
Mr. Wolfe’s agility continues to dazzle, more than fourteen years after his essays first began to appear in print. But dazzle is not history, or architectural criticism, or even social criticism, and it is certainly not an inquiry into the nature of the relationship between architecture and society.
Of course Mr. Wolfe isn’t really writing history; he is writing social criticism, as he always does. I think that he is finally not very interested in architecture, anyway. What interests him much more are society’s reactions to architecture. And there he makes some observations that, while as simplistic and selective as his history, are at least amusing.
Architecture is unique among the arts for its formidable practicality. The product of architecture–buildings–can be understood in the most mundane terms as places to house a family or a business. Theorists can also spend decades elaborating radical, sometimes incomprehensible ideas about the built environment. For instance, Wolfe goes to lengths in this book to expose the socialist underpinnings at the foundation of modern architecture (and the various failings of its proponents to live up to those ideals).
Wolfe gets to the heart of client-architect relationships during this era. He depicts modernists from the Corbu/Gropius/Mies Van Der Rohe schools as pompous artistes with no interest whatsoever in pleasing clients, nor the masses. The academy’s complicit role in all this is also explained with little delicacy.
I don’t subscribe to Sirius satellite radio, but if I did I know what I’d be listening to at 10:00 pm Eastern each weeknight—Blog Radio on Sirius channel 26, Left of Center.
MOKB is also working with Pendleton Heights (Indiana) High School radio station, 91.7 WEEM, to deliver studio sessions from bands like The Broken West, The Whigs, Catfish Haven and Margot & The Nuclear So & Sos.
Danah Boyd is a smart lady with fabulous hats. She is a PhD candidate at the School of Information (SIMS) at the University of California – Berkeley and a Fellow at the University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Communications. Her dissertation looks at how youth engage with networked publics like MySpace, LiveJournal, Xanga and YouTube. She is interested in how the architectural differences between unmediated and mediated publics affect sociality, identity and culture. Ergo, the following riff on the myth of meritocracy and the unreality of reality TV is her intellectual sweet spot.
American individualism (and self-esteem education) have allowed us to uphold a myth of meritocracy. We sell young people the idea that anyone can succeed, anyone can be president. We ignore the fact that working class kids get working class jobs. This, of course, has been exacerbated in recent years. There used to be meaningful working class labor that young people were excited to be a part of. It was primarily masculine labor and it was rewarded through set hierarchies and unions helped maintain that structure. The unions crumpled in the 1980s and by the time the 1987 recession hit, there was a teenage wasteland No longer were young people being socialized into meaningful working class labor; the only path out was the “lottery” (aka becoming a famous rock star, athlete, etc.).
Since the late 80s, the lottery system has become more magnificent and corporatized. While there’s nothing meritocratic about reality TV or the Spice Girls, the myth of meritocracy remains. Over and over, working class kids tell me that they’re a better singer than anyone on American Idol and that this is why they’re going to get to be on the show. This makes me sigh. Do i burst their bubble by explaining that American Idol is another version of Jerry Springer where hegemonic society can mock wannabes? Or does their dream have value?
As for her rhetorical question at the end, I’m inclined to say all dreams are valuable. However, I don’t think Boyd is talking about dreams, nor even aspirations. She’s talking about delusions that are created by, and daily reinforced by, our media-centric culture.
There is a meritocracy in America. But it’s not sexy. “Success” takes hard work, plus discipline in school and later in the workforce. It requires decades of untold sacrifices, with no hope of wealth nor fame in one’s future. Instead, the struggle toward something like being the best history teacher, city planner, or bus driver one can be, leads to a greater civic good. And with any luck the inner satisfaction of a job well done.
But who is holding up these true American values today? Who is motivating youth to act on them? My hope is lots of great parents, aunts, uncles, coaches, teachers and other mentors who laregely go unheralded.
Jason Isbell has left Drive-By Truckers. This is sad news to me. I have only seen one show by DBT at this point, but I was mezmerized by the three-guitar attack and the band’s turn-taking singer-songwriter left-middle-right exchange.
It’s with a wide range of emotions and feelings that I’m announcing that we have parted ways with Jason. The split, which I consider extremely amicable is the result of a period of personal and artistic growth from all sides which has left us with differing dreams and goals.
It is my sincere and and adamant hope that everyone will support all of us, and by that I mean our band and Jason’s, as we deal with this transition. Jason’s tenure in this band has been one of the greatest things that has ever happened to me on a personal and musical level and our love for him and his music is in no way changed or endangered by our collective decision to move into different directions.
Blogger and DBT fan, The Weight, looks at it like this:
He (Jason) has been a part of this band since 2001 and has joined them on their ride from obscurity to critic favorites. He is a big reason for their recent success. His writing credits include what has become my favorite DBT lyrics in “Outfit”. Whereas the Truckers will be a different band without him, even with all he has provided to them, I am certain that they will be able to carry on without missing a beat. And Jason will be better off in the long run. He was the third guitar in that three guitar attack and he is much too talented in playing and writing to be the third wheel. He deserves this opportunity to advance his solo career, where he can get the attention and respect his talents warrant.
Further complicating this situation is the fact that Jason is married to Shonna Tucker, DBT’s bass player, who remains in the band. Jason is currently on tour with his own band. He’s playing Iowa City tomorrow night. I wish I could be there to support the man because he fucking rips.
The writing in this 2006 Bloodshot Records self-promo is brilliant. Here’s a snippet transcribed:
Fueled by boredom, hubris, naivete, and a complete ignorance of what may lie ahead in the venal snakepit that is the music industry, a quixotic plan to undermine the towers of Babylon was concocted. Bloodshot dedicated itself to encouraging and documenting the cross pollination of the spirit and sound of punk and the craft and tradition of country, bluegrass, soul and roots all wrapped up with the general disinterest and disdain for the confinements of mainstream taste making and genrefication. Eleven years and 130 releases later the little lable with a lofty idea has successfully, and some might say ruthlessly, forged an empire using this intuitive template.
In yesterday’s paper, David Lauderdale of The Island Packet dropped in on softshell crab season at the Bluffton Oyster Factory. Lauderdale is a seasoned reporter who cares for the subjects he covers and the real life impact his work can have. Thus, he carefully introduces a native species to the human population.
We’re lucky to still have white bellies, red liners, busters and jack ups around here.
They rake around in brackish Lowcountry waters, performing a springtime ritual not visible from the hill, where all the new neighborhoods are starting to spit tainted runoff into the wetlands.
At this time of year — usually around Easter — the white bellies on female blue crabs start showing red lines. That means they’re about to molt — “bust” their hard shells, jack them up and then pull themselves out of their safe, crusty shells, eyeballs and all.
For a few hours their dull gray shell is soft like sponge, their orange snapping claws limp as noodles. If pulled from the water at the right moment, they’re a delicacy sought the world over.
Note how Lauderdale introduces the whole web of life and personal responsibility message in his second paragraph. He’s a pro.
