Aquarium Drunk was kind enough to post Kathleen Edwards 6-song EP, “Building 55” for download.
Edwards pressed 500 copies of the “brittle, affecting alt.country” EP in 1999, prior to her record deal with Zoe Records, a division of Rounder.
Gold old Texas gal, Molly Ivins, has got some news for the fools on Capitol Hill.
I’d like to make it clear to the people who run the Democratic Party that I will not support Hillary Clinton for president.
The recent death of Gene McCarthy reminded me of a lesson I spent a long, long time unlearning, so now I have to relearn it. It’s about political courage and heroes, and when a country is desperate for leadership. There are times when regular politics will not do, and this is one of those times. There are times a country is so tired of bull that only the truth can provide relief.
If no one in conventional-wisdom politics has the courage to speak up and say what needs to be said, then you go out and find some obscure junior senator from Minnesota with the guts to do it. In 1968, Gene McCarthy was the little boy who said out loud, “Look, the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.” Bobby Kennedy — rough, tough Bobby Kennedy — didn’t do it. Just this quiet man trained by Benedictines, who liked to quote poetry.
What kind of courage does it take, for mercy’s sake? The majority of the American people (55 percent) think the war in Iraq is a mistake and that we should get out. The majority (65 percent) of the American people want single-payer health care and are willing to pay more taxes to get it. The majority (86 percent) of the American people favor raising the minimum wage. The majority of the American people (60 percent) favor repealing Bush’s tax cuts, or at least those that go only to the rich. The majority (66 percent) wants to reduce the deficit not by cutting domestic spending, but by reducing Pentagon spending or raising taxes. The majority (77 percent) thinks we should do “whatever it takes” to protect the environment. The majority (87 percent) thinks big oil companies are gouging consumers and would support a windfall profits tax. That is the center, you fools. Who are you afraid of?
You sit there in Washington so frightened of the big, bad Republican machine that you have no idea what people are thinking. I’m telling you right now, Tom DeLay is going to lose in his district. If Democrats in Washington haven’t got enough sense to own the issue of political reform, I give up on them entirely.
Wall Street Journal: When Ted Koppel appeared on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” in 2002, he plugged National Public Radio to so much studio applause that host Jon Stewart cracked, “Somebody got themselves a tote bag.”
At the time, Mr. Koppel was simply another NPR admirer. Now, the former “Nightline” anchor is getting more than just swag — he’s got a new part-time job with NPR, joining the growing ranks of television news stars who are seeking refuge at the Washington, D.C., public broadcaster.
Michel Martin (on right)
While some of the NPR recruits, like Mr. Koppel and CBS newsmen Walter Cronkite and Daniel Schorr, have joined the organization at the end of their long broadcast TV runs, other television news talent is defecting to NPR mid-career. ABC News, for example, has almost become a farm team for NPR. Last week, NPR announced it had hired Michel Martin, an ABC News correspondent, to jump-start a new program targeting African-American listeners. Last month, it reeled in Robert Krulwich, another ABC News correspondent, to join its science squad. The new hires will be greeted by a familiar face: ABC News correspondent Michele Norris signed on to NPR in 2002.
Network news is increasingly generating prospects for NPR in part because some broadcast journalists think the networks are veering away from serious, in-depth reports. Many television journalists say they are fed up with the move toward consumer-friendly news-you-can-use and away from weightier subjects like foreign affairs and government.
“When I started at ABC News, it was a large division of a communications company,” says Ms. Martin, recalling the days before Walt Disney Co. bought the company. “Now, it’s a small division of an entertainment company, and that creates different pressures.”
Alan Light for TNYT: With her characteristic sense of craft and precision, Ms. Cash explores a kaleidoscopic range of experiences related to loss and mortality on “Black Cadillac,” reaching from when her parents first met through her responses to their passing, her anger, her regrets. Sipping tea a few blocks from her home in Chelsea, she described the album as “a map – a geographical map, a spiritual map, an emotional map – and I was just examining the different spots and corners.”
She added that she had been intimidated by tackling this subject matter, and that despite a career nearing 30 years, these songs “felt like a paradigm shift for me as a writer, and as a person.”
“You kind of get transformed when you lose your parents,” she added. “There’s nobody to rebel against, nobody to report to.”
Musically, Ms. Cash has long blurred the line between country, pop and rock, even experimenting with new wave on 1985’s “Rhythm and Romance” before settling into the roots-tinged adult pop sound of her recent work (a style much closer to Mary Chapin Carpenter, Shawn Colvin and even Sheryl Crow than to anything on country radio). “Black Cadillac” flows effortlessly from intimate acoustic moments to bluegrass-inflected songs like “House on the Lake,” mirroring the scope and ambition of the lyrics.
“Rosanne’s writing is perfectly in sync with her life,” said Lyle Lovett, who has toured and recorded with her. “What makes her special as a writer is what makes her special as a person – she’s thoughtful, sensitive, perceptive. She writes about things that are real to her, and that’s why you don’t just listen to her songs, you feel them.”
Ben Ratliff for TNYT: Chan Marshall, who records under the name Cat Power, and Beth Orton, are among the best slacker divas. Both have similar-sounding, slouchy-beautiful, middle-range voices. Both are about 10 years into their careers. Each has an exceptional new album: “The Greatest” by Ms. Marshall (Matador Records), which comes out next week, and Ms. Orton’s “Comfort of Strangers” (Astralwerks), to be released Feb. 7. In both cases, the artists have changed bands, changed sounds and dropped some of their pretenses, though luckily for us, not all of them. In both cases, these albums are the best work of their lives.
Chan Marshall is the rare female pop singer who hides her own attractiveness. She has a large audience by the standards of indie rock, though no one could accuse her of being popular. Ms. Marshall started playing guitar at 19, formed Cat Power when she was 20, and in 1995, at 22, made an EP as a trio with the guitarist Tim Foljahn and Sonic Youth’s drummer, Steve Shelley, called “Dear Sir.”
Hers was a hurt, disembodied, voice, operating on lulling frequencies over draggy tempos, like old Neil Young without the sense of direction. She sang about being all jammed up inside, about counterintuition, things adding up to nothing. (Consequently, she found a devoted audience among college-aged listeners.) She didn’t convey defiance or rejuvenation or youthful suffering. She just sounded like she was blankly persevering.
Her songs seemed to ignore linear time. They could be beautiful for a minute, and then fall off the aesthetic grid, like music from some dim point in the future, after there had ceased to be any point in making music.
Marin Independent Journal: This hilltop site in Corte Madera was once home to the late rock impresario Bill Graham.
Today it holds what its designer says is probably the largest “green” – ecologically correct – house in America.
Designed by Inverness architect Sim Van der Ryn and under construction for more than five years, the 15,000-square-foot house was built for owner Michael Klein, a passionate environmentalist and board member of the Rain Forest Action Network. It replaces the Graham house, which has been razed.
It will be open to the public for the first time on Jan. 21 when a Marin committee of grassroots political activists hosts a fund-raiser for Vermont Rep. Bernie Sanders, an independent candidate for the Senate seat to be vacated by Sen. Jim Jeffords, also an independent.
The house has an assessed value of $17.8 million, according to the Marin County assessor’s office.
Jambands.com has a feature up about Jam Cruise 4, which took place on the high seas Jan 7-13th.
It’s hard to imagine a more decadent vacation than this, but it wasn’t all a belly full of laughs. Having this much fun is serious. Here’s how Michael Franti, one of the most conscious performers working today, sums up Jam Cruise:
It’s a celebration of free expression; musical expression and also the freedom of expression of the people that are contributing to music. There are very few safe places in our culture where you can feel free. And I think that’s why the festival scene has flourished so much, not just the music, but the audience and the fans that take the festivals on and turn them into their own thing. The freedom of expression of the audience is a reaction to society at large. It’s a time when people can go away and not have to feel confined by the rigidity of American life.
One of the Donna The Buffalo songs I’m enjoying at the moment is “Seminole Wind,” off of their 1998 Sugar Hill release, Rockin’ In the Weary Land.
It’s a cover song, made famous by country artist, John Anderson.
Seminole Wind
Lyrics and Music by John Anderson
Ever since the days of old,
Men would search for wealth untold.
They’d dig for silver and for gold,
And leave the empty holes.
And way down south in the Everglades,
Where the black water rolls and the saw grass sways.
The eagles fly and the otters play,
In the land of the Seminole.
So blow, blow Seminole wind,
Blow like you’re never gonna blow again.
I’m calling to you like a long lost friend,
But I know who you are.
And blow, blow from the Okeechobee,
All the way up to Micanopy.
Blow across the home of the Seminole,
The alligators and the gar.
Progress came and took its toll,
And in the name of flood control,
They made their plans and they drained the land,
Now the glades are going dry.
And the last time I walked in the swamp,
I sat upon a Cypress stump,
I listened close and I heard the ghost,
Of Osceola cry.
This song–Florida’s state anthem–has echoes of Peter Rowan’s “Land of the Navajo.”
The Atlantic is 150, and alive to tell about it.
According to the magazine, “fifteen decades is a long time; only a handful of publications anywhere have exceeded that benchmark. A great deal has occurred since a small group of writers and editors met in the dining room of a Boston hotel to plan the first issue of what would become The Atlantic Monthly. The economy of the United States at the time was smaller than Britain’s, and its armed forces lesser than those of France. Germany and Italy didn’t exist, and Das Kapital and The Origin of Species hadn’t been written. American territory already stretched from coast to coast, but there were only thirty-one states in the Union. The vote was restricted to men, and a system of public education was a thing of the future. The most salient fact about this country was that slavery remained legal in the United States. The Atlantic’s founders were leaders of the abolitionist cause.
But if some things about The Atlantic Monthly have changed in 150 years, the most important things have not. First, the founders of the magazine understood that breaking news was not always worth paying attention to, and in fact could distract the public from important stories that needed to be told–and that took more time to tell.”
Globe and Mail: Argentina’s defiant “no mas” to the International Monetary Fund does more than confirm its painful return from financial ruin.
Its repayment yesterday of its debts to the Washington-based lender marks a symbolic rejection of everything the fund represents — the United States, market reforms, privatization, free trade, foreign investment and globalization.
The leftward shift is occurring, to varying degrees, throughout the region. Right in the United States’ backyard, nations are rejecting the region’s once-dominant economic and political influence. The vacuum is increasingly being filled by the likes of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, whose anti-American rhetoric has become the region’s rallying cry.
Bolivia’s new socialist leader, President Evo Morales, for example, has threatened (and since stepped back from those threats) to cancel foreign-held oil and gas contracts and nationalize the industry.
This year could mark a further populist shift to the left in several more countries. Elections are slated for nearly two dozen countries in South America, Central America and the Caribbean. Among them: Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Peru.
Mexico, Brazil and Chile are still tentatively holding out against the leftward tilt, says Mauro Guillen, a business professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. But nearly everywhere else, political leaders are growing skeptical of free trade, foreign investment and free-market pricing.