Like a lot of people, I’m fascinated by magic. Oh, not the real kind - you know, the sleight-of-hand/parlor trick/Houdini stuff. I used to know Whit Haydn and have seen him do tricks so well that even though I was pretty sure I knew how he was doing it, and even though I was able to stand about a foot away and watch, I still couldn’t catch him.

I’m not sure I understand exactly what it is in us that responds so powerfully to illusion - maybe it’s that the day-to-day world is so mundane and bereft of hope that we’re automatically drawn to even the most subliminal suggestion that there could be more to life than meets the eye. Full Story »

New footage has just come to light showing us the full exchange between Papa Bear and his behind-the-camera producer during his famous F-bomb flinging tirade a few years back. Must-see TV, you bet.

Every news show needs a producer like that if you ask me.

Thanks to CollegeHumor.com for the clip and to JS O’Brien for passing this along.

The Old Man and The Hawk
for Carrie

If he hadn’t been thirsty, the boy might have missed it. He saw it when he raised his canteen. It didn’t seem like much at first, he thought, just a black speck curling through the blue Utah sky. But he kept looking, curious. He squinted at the distant mystery, his thirst temporarily forgotten.

“Mr. Seth, is that a bird?”

The old man leaned against a stout but gnarled juniper, thumbs hooked in the shoulder straps of his worn canvas pack. He knew how and when to steal a few seconds’ rest as the minutes and the hours and the days and the life flowed by. He curled his arm around the juniper, letting his palm see and know the tree’s rough bark. He didn’t look up. He didn’t need to.

“It’s a hawk, son.”
Full Story »

There is nothing new under the sun, or so they say.

I’m not a big fan of groups that slavishly imitate their influences, but I do love bands with a sense of history and a desire to explore older styles in search of new angles. This obviously establishes a tricky standard - be true to the masters, but not … too true. It’s equally tricky for me as a listener and armchair critic, as well - I might like a contemporary band for the same reasons I liked the bands they’re riffing on, but is there enough in the way of originality going on? As I’ve noted before, the CDs I like and those I think are great aren’t always the same ones. Full Story »

Whores no more.

On the job, the key for many of us is adapting by adopting — an alternate personality, that is. But some jobs arouse emotions and sensations that are too overwhelming for the conscious mind. In the process called splitting, we shunt those off to a kind of branch line of our consciousness.

Sex work is such a job. Its laborers often find the only way to survive is by putting as much distance as possible between their real and work selves. The lack of self-respect inherent in these evasion tactics is magnified by the need to hide the nature of their work from loved ones. Full Story »

If our profits are taxed, that means we’ll have less capital to invest in new production.

— John Hofmeister, president of Shell U.S., to CNNMoney.com; May 6.

These companies are spending a very small amount of their operating cash flow on exploration. They are spending the majority of their funds buying back stock.

— Amy Myers Jaffe, a fellow in energy studies at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, discussing results of her just-finished a two-year study looking at oil companies and how they spend their money; May 6.
Full Story »

Long ago, in the beginning, a newspaper developed a Web site. Hundreds followed that lead. Now, one newspaper has only a Web site. In the end, what will there be? And what will be the consequences for readers?

A Wisconsin daily newspaper, whose readers have been increasingly shedding it, has now shed a significant expense — newsprint. The Capital Times of Madison, whose circulation has fallen from more than 40,000 to 18,000, said “-30-” to its printing press. It has become an online information enterprise around the Madison.com portal.

The 90-year-old newspaper — one of two serving Madison under a joint operating agreement — will only publish a tabloid-sized edition twice per week carrying some news, opinion and a weekly arts, entertainment and culture section. It will be distributed in its home-delivered partner paper, the Wisconsin State Journal.

It’s a dicey move, but critics like me have said for years that the Web-only newspaper will see its day come (which does not mean we have argued that online-only is a good idea). So what does this end-of-print mean for Madison and beyond?
Full Story »

In case you missed it, Trent Reznor yesterday released the new Nine Inch Nails CD, The Slip, as a free download. I’ve only had time to listen to it once, and that was while I was working. So I’ll let you know what I think once I’ve been able to give it a few minutes of real attention. In any case, it’s free NIN, and what’s not to love about that.

Industry watcher and pundit extraordinaire Bob Lefsetz predictably has some thoughts about the release. I’m a big Lefsetz fan, mainly because of his relentless assaults on music industry greed and stupidity, and if you’re somebody who’s disgusted, dismayed or confused by how bad the music biz has gotten in recent years, you need to be a Lefsetz Letter subscriber. Full Story »

Oh, my. This is … uhhmmm … I guess this what happens when a crew of Obama’s kids gets a little punchy after watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode #107 ten times in a row.

Thanks to Jim Gilliam for pointing this out. I think.

I think blogs are dedicated to cruelty, they’re dedicated to dishonesty, they’re dedicated to speed.

— Buzz Bissinger, author of “Friday Night Lights” and other bestsellers, castigating blogs on HBO’s “Costas Now”; May 1.

It’s one of the bigger Cadillacs. I’ve got a desk in it. It’s like an airplane. … I want them to feel that they are somebody and their congressman is somebody. And when they say, ‘This is nice,’ it feels good.

— Rep. Charles Rangell, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, describing the 17-foot-long, 300-horsepower, 2004 Cadillac DeVille he leases for for $777.54 a month; House rules permit members to lease any vehicle at taxpayer expense; May 1.
Full Story »

One of my favorite musical sub-genres is sort of an off-shoot of trip-hop, a sultry urban electropop district where the downbeat influence of Portishead meets up with all kinds of interesting characters dressed like David Bowie in the ’70s. California pure pop a la Burt Bacharach, for instance, which we find in the likes of Saint Etienne (and the solo work of singer Sarah Cracknell), Mono and Hooverphonic.

These groups are almost always fronted by female vocalists, and every year or two I trip across another one that just blows me away. Full Story »

Don’t tell me you haven’t fantasized about it. HilRod. BaRock. John Dubya McCain (one-half of the Double Talk Express). Three-way dance inside a STEEL CAGE for the USA Heavyweight Title. Yeah, I’m feeling ya. We’re getting there, too. This past Monday night on WWE Raw, all three candidates ran some lame smack for the national cable audience. In case you missed it:

Full Story »

Luke Haines isn’t very well known in America, and that’s a damned shame. He got a little attention here back in the early ’90s when his first band, The Auteurs, released their fantastic debut, New Wave. And then - it was like he never existed. Maybe this is because his music is so quintessentially English - after all, he was arguably a significant influence on the Britpop movement, and even the most popular of those bands - Blur, Oasis, Supergrass - never made much noise on this side of the Atlantic.

Nonetheless, he’s made a living for himself Over There, and has done so in a number of incarnations: The Auteurs, Baader-Meinhof, Black Box Recorder, and now simply as Luke Haines. Full Story »

In a garbage dump in Haiti, people scavenge for food.

They look at me and say, ‘Papa, I’m hungry,’ and I have to look away. It’s humiliating and it makes you angry.

— Saint Louis Meriska of Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, whose “children ate two spoonfuls of rice apiece as their only meal recently and then went without any food the following day”; food prices in Haiti have spiked 45 percent since 2006; April 18.
Full Story »

Give me one last dance
We’ll slide down the surface of things

You’re the real thing
Yeah the real thing
You’re the real thing
Even better than the real thing

I figured out a long time ago, even before I began encountering grad-level feminist critiques, that our media’s stylized construction and portrayal of female beauty was problematic. It’s bad enough that unattractive people don’t appear in movies, on TV or in magazines unless the narrative expressly requires someone unattractive, and sometimes even that isn’t enough. I mean, the star of Ugly Betty isn’t really ugly.

But it goes beyond this. Full Story »

I used to work with a HAL 9000. Back when I was at US West in the late ’90s we had a voice system into which we would record the day’s company news so that employees without Internet access could dial in and keep up with the latest events. As with any such system there was a dial-in sequence, buttons that had to be pressed in a certain order, etc.

One day, as I was working through the first stage of the sequence, our phone system apparently achieved sentience. For reasons that I still can’t explain, a decade later, and that nobody at the time had any clue about, the machine sort of … intuited what I was about to do. It performed an action or two that, put simply, it could not do. Full Story »

Hi folks, and welcome to SVR’s Halloween in March special. Today we’re going to have a look at things that just scare the bejeezus out of us. First up, Tiny Toons. I was never as big a fan of the series as some of my friends, but it did have its moments. The subtle homomegalomaniacism of Pinky & The Brain, for instance, never ceased making me wonder “how the hell did they get that past the censors?” But as the original Warner toons taught us, the best kids’ shows are really aimed at adults, anyway. Full Story »

It’s fair to ask whether a college kid should have to wash dishes in the dining
hall to pay his tuition when his college has a billion dollars in the bank.

— Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, “the ranking Republican on the Senate committee that oversees tax policy, [who] has written to the nation’s 135 leading universities, asking them to explain what they do with their tax-free endowments“; according to The New York Times, “Last year a record 76 American colleges passed the $1 billion mark in total endowments”; March 18.

I liken N.C.L.B. to a mile race. Under N.C.L.B., students are tested rigorously every tenth of a mile. But nobody keeps track as to whether they cross the finish line.

— Bob Wise, a former West Virginia governor who is president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a group that seeks to improve schools; according to The New York Times, “… many states use an inflated graduation rate for federal reporting requirements under the No Child Left Behind law and a different one at home. As a result, researchers say, federal figures obscure a dropout epidemic so severe that only about 70 percent of the one million American students who start ninth grade each year graduate four years later”; March 20.
Full Story »

In today’s special edition of SVR, S&R asks a critical question: what the fuck is wrong with you people?

Let’s start here. While we watch, will somebody get Drs. Phil and Laura on the line?

Full Story »

My old pal and bandmate Mike asked me to write a few lines about this, so I will:

This year’s induction group for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (hereafter referred to as the R&R HOF) includes the following:

Leonard Cohen, John Mellencamp, The Dave Clark Five, and The Ventures. Madonna’s been inducted, too, but I’ll get to her in a few….

Let’s look at this group with a purely jaundiced eye (mine) for a few moments, shall we? And let’s NOT look at them as fans but as reasonable, rational creatures who know something about music, the music business, and about the traitor to music horse shit purveyor that is Jann Wenner, chair of the artist selection committee, who manipulates the selection system. Full Story »