by David Burn | Mar 8, 2007 | Music
According to Associated Press, Blues Traveler singer and harmonica player John Popper was arrested after the vehicle he was riding in was clocked going 111 mph.
Popper, 39, was arrested the afternoon of March 6 on Interstate 90 near the Spokane/Lincoln county line, the Washington State Patrol said.
Inside the black Mercedes SUV, officers found a cache of weapons and a small amount of marijuana. A police dog searched the vehicle, finding numerous hidden compartments containing four rifles, nine handguns and a switchblade knife. Authorities also found a Taser and night vision goggles.
The musician, who lives in Snohomish, Wash., is the owner of the vehicle, which was being driven by Brian Gourgeois, 34, of Austin, Texas. The vehicle also had flashing emergency headlights, a siren and a public address system.
“Popper indicated to troopers that he had installed these items in his vehicle because (in the event of a natural disaster) he didn’t want to be left behind,” the Patrol said. He also told officers he collected weapons.
In April 2003, Popper was arrested in Texas and charged with misdemeanor marijuana possession. Records indicate he was arrested previously in September 1995 in New Jersey for possessing illegal weapons and driving a car with an expired registration.
by David Burn | Mar 7, 2007 | Lowcountry, The Environment
Island Packet columnist and long time Lowcountry resident, David Lauderdale, unloads in his front page opinion piece today. He says Bluffton’s natural beauty makes it a unique place to live, and that it’s wrong to apply the same standards here that are relied upon in “Anywhereville, U.S.A.”
Here’s the essence of Lauderdale’s argument:
In the past five years, Beaufort County has issued more than 10,000 building permits in greater Bluffton, and the town of Bluffton issued more than 3,400. Too few people oversaw the environmental impact of all this construction.
Our dear, wacky Bluffton has been turned into a verb. People now refer to unchecked growth as getting “Blufftonized.” Getting Blufftonized means too much, too fast. It means developers set the pace. It means years of citizen outcry goes largely unheeded. It means sitting in traffic. It means do-it-yesterday growth takes control when local governments need to say, “Do it our way, or hit the highway.”
We need the same things today that were asked for a decade ago: a limited-access bypass, secondary roads, interconnected neighborhoods, parks, and a throttle on the rate of growth so it is timed to the availability of roads, schools and parks.
We need to plant tens of thousands of oak trees all over Okatie. We need a land-buying program for Bluffton.
We need strong enforcement of the laws and regulations already on the books.
Personally, I’ve never seen anything like Bluffton. The pace of building is astounding. When we moved here just over two years ago, I said in jest that soon there would be an interstate running from downtown Bluffton to downtown Savannah, replacing the tree-lined two-lane roads. Having taken those roads to and from Savannah yesterday, I can see that my “joke” is fast becoming reality.
by David Burn | Mar 5, 2007 | Music
In anticipation of tomorrow’s release of Son Volt’s “The Search,” Hartford Courant Rock Critic, Eric R. Danton, sat down with Jay Farrar at a Williamsburg diner over coffee.
Farrar says he sees himslef as a “subliminal agitator”. He also says he’s still looking for his role as a songwriter, even though he’s 20 years into his music career.
John Agnello, who recorded and mixed Son Volt’s latest effort and has produced albums by Farrar, the Hold Steady, the Kills, Drive-By Truckers and Dinosaur Jr. says, “I think that’s important. And I think it’s good that he doesn’t feel like he’s found his place yet, because his search benefits the listener. He’s very quiet. He’s got a real kind of Midwestern strength to him,” Agnello says.
Farrar and his former bandmate in Uncle Tupelo, Jeff Tweedy, both hail from Belleville, Illinois near St. Louis.
by David Burn | Mar 3, 2007 | Music
Fearless Freaks, a documentary about Oklahoma City’s finest rock band, The Flaming Lips, is a serious film about professional pranksters.
Eric Waggoner writing in Detroit’s alt weekly, Metrotimes, in May of 2005 says:
Let me be direct: I’m a fan of the Flaming Lips, though not a rabid one. I’ve just spent four days revisiting Fearless Freaks, Bradley Beesley’s documentary which world-premiered last March at the South By Southwest conference. I’ve watched it straight through, I’ve paused, rewound, fast-forwarded and slow-mo’ed. I’ve thought about this a lot, and I mean no hyperbole when I say that Fearless Freaks may be, in its way, the best music documentary ever made.
Some great rock films capture an event or a zeitgeist — Woodstock, Gimme Shelter — and some function as a sort of visual adjunct to a band’s music: Think The Last Waltz or I Am Trying to Break Your Heart. But I’m hard pressed to cite a film that captures the history and the personality of a band more honestly, or more movingly, than Fearless Freaks.
High praise, and from my viewing of the film last night, I’d say worthy praise. The film itself is incredibly well put together, but the subject is what makes it work. Wayne Coyne is an eccentric artist, a.k.a. freak. The people around him are freaks. And they’re all freely freaking in Oklahoma, which adds to the wierdness and intrigue around the band. The film also does a great job of revealing the human side of the protagonists, with their native humbleness and personal infallibility offered up for all to see.
by David Burn | Mar 2, 2007 | Media
I’m loving Frontline’s “News War” multipart documentary. Watching a 90-minute installment the other night on my local PBS station afforded me the opportunity to hear from John Carroll. Carroll, now at Harvard, was the editor of the Los Angeles Times and prior to that, the Baltimore Sun. The way he speaks about newspapers really resonates with me.
Here’s a small slice of his interview, care of the PBS website:
I estimate that roughly 85 percent of the original reporting that gets done in America gets done by newspapers. They’re the people who are going out and knocking on doors and rummaging through records and covering events and so on. And most of the other media that provide news to people are really recycling news that’s gathered by newspapers.
It is very evident that the new media, the media that are coming along with the Web, are investing almost nothing in original reporting. If newspapers fall by the wayside, who’s going to do the reporting? What will we know? Who will stand up [against] the government when the government, for example, nullifies a couple of generations of law and secretly decides to wiretap us? Who will go to the courthouse? Who will go the police station in all the towns across America and make sure that things are being done properly? Who will examine all the people who seek to become political officeholders in the United States?
On why people go into journalism in the first place:
I think journalists — good journalists — have always looked upon themselves as public servants. … I don’t know why they want to go into it. I don’t think it’s really the money. The money’s pretty bad unless you become a superstar. I think it’s a combination of things. For a certain type of person, … it’s just an exciting way to make a living. It’s an exciting job. It’s fun. It gives you an excuse to satisfy your curiosity, gives you a reason to ask people questions and talk with interesting people and see interesting things, … and you get paid for it. … Just the sheer entertainment and satisfaction of crafting a story and seeing it in the paper, that in itself is a reason to go into it.
Then when you sit back and you think, well, is there a larger purpose to it? Yes. I’ve been involved in stories that have actually done some good for people. You have, too, stories that may have saved lives, stories that have increased the quality of justice in America, stories that have enlightened the public in helping to exercise their vote with more pertinent information.
So in the reflective moments, you can say not only am I entertaining myself; I’m actually doing some good.
And here he is speaking to the economics of the newpaper business:
Wall Street and corporations are becoming disillusioned with owning newspapers. … They’re extremely profitable — they make barrels full of money — but they don’t grow much from year to year. Let me illustrate. … A typical newspaper makes a 20 percent operating margin. That’s roughly double what the typical Fortune 500 company makes. They’re very profitable. … This is true at the Los Angeles Times; it’s true at the Baltimore Sun, where I used to be editor; it’s true at the Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky, which is a money-making machine. People think of this as a washed-up old business. It’s not.
It makes tons of money. But the owners are under great pressure to increase earning.
To sum up, journalism is a noble profession and the support beams of American democracy. Good reporters seek to reveal the truth and their actions turn a mean buck for the capitalists who organize them and distribute their work.
by David Burn | Feb 25, 2007 | Digital culture, Media, Politics
Anna G. Arutunyan, an editor at the Moscow News, writing about the Russian blogosphere for The Nation, reports that 700,000 LiveJournal users post in Cyrillic, making them second only to English speakers.
The LiveJournal community in Russia is known as Zhivoi Zhurnal, or ZheZhe for short. Arutunyan says Russian bloggers are becoming a lively alternative to mainstream media, and they’re using the site as an online organizing tool for offline protests.
LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick first visited Moscow last October when his company, Six Apart, announced a partnership with the Russian media company SUP-Fabrik, which would service the enormous Cyrillic sector. What struck him was the social magnitude of ZheZhe and the serious content of its journal entries. In America, “LiveJournal is lots of people writing to ten people [each, and] reading each other,” he told me. In ZheZhe this is magnified into thousands of readers. What for Americans is an electronic diary accessible to a few chosen acquaintances became, for Russians, a platform for forging thousands of interconnected virtual “friends.” And Fitzpatrick believes it has potential as a tool for activism. “I really appreciate what it is as a political platform.”
What ZheZhe seems to illustrate is that a crucial aspect of civil society is not just the freedom to report on what you see but the ability to get people inspired enough to react. Russians are already notorious for their centuries-old communal spirit–or sobornost. ZheZhe might be one of the technologies that will finally get them to act on it.
For additional user-generated content from Russian, check out RuTube.
by David Burn | Feb 23, 2007 | Music
Jude Rogers from The Guardian crossed the pond and made her way to one of the more musical cities in middle America, Denton, TX. She writes, “Denton, like Nashville, Memphis, Seattle or Portland before it, is fast becoming an American musical heartland where something is happening.”
The reason for her assessment is largely credited to Midlake, a group comprised of former jazz students from the University of North Texas. Midlake first gained popularity in England, thanks to Simon Raymonde–former Cocteau Twin and boss of British label, Bella Union. Raymonde has signed five Denton bands since 2000.
“Denton is a very curious place. It’s a place where music, for some reason, is the lifeblood of these people, their main form of expression.” He should know. The cult band Lift to Experience were his first signing, their only album, The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, being a concept LP about the end of the world with Texas as the promised land. Punky blues band Jetscreamer and the experimental Mandarin followed, before Midlake inked their initials in 2005. New signing Robert Gomez, a soft, wistful singer-songwriter and a friend of the Midlake boys, joined the label’s ranks late last year.
“Denton’s a little like how Brighton used to be,” Raymonde says. “Everyone knows everyone’s business, but not in an intrusive way. Perhaps because Texas is so huge, there’s a real sense of small-town togetherness within this huge expanse of land. And, for some reason, everyone I keep getting recommendations about from there is talented, gracious and good company.”
I would be remiss here if I failed to mention that Grammy Award-winning musician, Norah Jones, attended the University of North Texas, where she majored in jazz piano before moving to New York City.
by David Burn | Feb 23, 2007 | The Environment
World Changing takes a close look at news that a consortia backed by Airtricity has committed to the construction of a 345-kilovolt transmission loop in the Texas Panhandle. The $1.5 billion Panhandle Loop will bring 4,200 megawatts of wind energy to more than one million homes in Dallas, Austin and San Antonio.
One of the great limitations of the development of renewable energy in America is the transmission infrastructure. Think of the arrangement as a national highway system for electrons, except there’s no national organization. It’s just a patchwork system of private roads built over the years to suit particular needs.
In a perfect world, we’d already have transmission lines intersecting the windiest and sunniest regions across the country and across globe. Unfortunately, most transmission lines weren’t designed with renewable energy in mind, they were built to deliver power from fossil fuel plants.
Texas leads the nation in wind energy production. Nearly one third of the new turbines erected last year went up in Texas. The state also hosts the single largest operating farm in the world, the 735 MW Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center.
The Panhandle Loop will carry more than a third of the total existing wind-genrated capacity in the United States. Eddie O’Connor, Airtricity’s CEO compares the project to constructing a power station greater than the entire generation for Ireland and building it by 2010. In other words, it’s Texas-sized in its ambitions.
by David Burn | Feb 22, 2007 | Music
It’s far from enough to just release a record today. An artist seeking cultural cache must release an album with some marketing elan. Of course, we needn’t share that with Tori Amos. She’s all over it.
Tori Amos has had five albums debut in the top 10 in the USA. That puts her in an elite category of female performers including Madonna, Mary J. Blige, Celine Dion, Britney Spears, Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey, Celine Dion and Barbra Streisand. Her ninth, called “American Doll Posse” is due out May 1.
Los Angeles Times describes the advance release of her cover art as a well conceived viral marketing ploy.
In it, the American-born, England-based singer-songwriter — notable for both her piano-driven pop and naked emotionalism — is photographed with a Bible in one hand and the word “shame” scrawled across the palm of the other. Looking willfully weirded out, she stands in front of a suburban tract home wearing a shimmering, burgundy-colored dress; a trickle of blood wends down her leg to her broken high-heel shoe strap.
Her vacant stare also alludes to the Stepfordization of American culture.
by David Burn | Feb 18, 2007 | Food & Beverage
My local wine retailer handed me a $20 bottle of Smith & Hook Grand Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon on Friday, while pointing out that one might not expect a Cab of this quality to come from Monterey.
Here’s how the Hahn family describes their product:
The Smith & Hook Grand Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon is crafted from the finest of the Hahn Family’s estate vineyards in the Santa Lucia Highlands Appellation, a wine region proving to become one of the crown jewels of California viticulture.
The Smith Vineyard and the Hook Vineyard are east facing slopes with the vines between 400 and 1200 feet in elevation in the Santa Lucia Highlands appellation. These grapes are truly mountain grown. The final blend of our Grand Reserve Cabernet is 88% Cabernet Sauvignon, 5% Cabernet Franc for mid-palate, 5% Petite Verdot for bright berries and spice, and 2% Malbec for color and to tie everything together.
Aromas of blackberries, currant, leather, and tobacco. A warm rush of cherries and plum start at the fore-palate before fading to chocolate and toffee with a hint of mint towards the back. The tannins are firm, smooth, and polished, leaving a silky and supple texture in the mouth, supported by a subtle seam of acidity. Our Enologist, Greg Freeman, describes the wine as “a warm cedar chest at Grandma’s house.â€
That’s an interesting way to descibe wine, but I know what he means.
