Warning Signs of Satanic Behavior. Training video for police, 1990
the perfect photoset
I wish this set included every single frame.
Baby I’m a Star – Southern High School (at Durham County Stadium)
October 18, 2014
Firmed up the details enough to announce the Know Your Poll Party, a get-out-the-vote rally & concert sponsored by WXDU, the Pinhook, and Democracy NC (and organized by the tireless & endlessly persistent Reid Johnson).
Next Sunday, October 26, from 2-7 p.m, with bands playing both inside the Pinhook and outside on Main Street. Early Voting will be happening that afternoon just a few blocks away, at the recently-relocated Durham County Board of Elections, which is now at the corner of Parrish & Roxboro.
Lineup:
PIPE
Shirlette Ammons
Daniel Bachman
Hammer No More The Fingers
Some Army
Midnight Plus One
SOON
DJ Direwolf
(not necessarily in that order)
We are VERY EXCITED about this show & I hope everyone (especially parents!! no excuses!!) will stop by, see some music, and then walk over & vote.
The rest of the day was kinda meh, so much so that a trip to Target was actually a welcome diversion. Another welcome diversion: buying two of the last four bottles of Fidencio mezcal left in Durham County, since apparently it’s never coming back.
A measure of just how generally meh the day turned out to be: we had dinner at the Whole Foods hot bar.
But! That was because we needed to eat in time to go to Baldwin to see The Bad Plus, augmented by Tim Berne, Ron Miles & Sam Newsome, blasting their way through Ornette Coleman’s Science Fiction album, a record which I have never heard.
I was pretty exhausted, so I spent the entire show kind of drifting in & out of focus – not really dozing off, but definitely drifting, which let the music do all kinds of weird things to my brain. Not a bad way to take it all in, really, even if I wasn’t completely following every line.
The piano was kind of hard to hear, but all three of the horn players were very audible and pretty fucking mindblowing. I’ve seen Tim Berne a few times before, and I remain a fan – he was able to channel Coleman’s emotive feel without overtly aping him. Cornetist Ron Miles was a revelation & I want to seek out more of his work.
I still find whole sets of balls-out frenetic everything-a-16th-note nonstop flailing free-jazz drumming pretty hard to take, though, especially when there are extended passages of simultaneous two-handed wailing on the cymbals. I’m a notorious cymbal-hater.
That room is a tricky room, too – it was redesigned beautifully to be a space for chamber music, which means it projects sound out from the stage rather moreso than in a club. Sit too close for a loud/amplified show, and you risk an unbalanced mix. We were getting a LOT of drums out in the 4th row, even on the opposite side of the stage.
I need to remember that when buying tickets for loud shows in Baldwin. It’s an amazing space for quiet music, though.
October 17, 2014
More or less constant stream of Good Stuff happened at work – today was my early deadline for project proposals for next summer, and I got some really interesting ones. Had a great conversation with a potential sponsor who wants to do something in collaboration with an intern team at a major customer. Interviewed an awesome student. Got good news about some interns accepting full-time offers. Hung out with one of my all-time favorite former interns, Lauren Schaefer.
In between all of that fun, I was spurred by a ridiculously high Pitchfork score to seek out & listen to Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy for the first time ever. I’m not even sure if I had ever consciously heard any Jawbreaker before. By the early ‘90s I was living in Raleigh & was pretty heavily immersed in North Carolina music culture. It’s weird, though, since I had a lot of friends who were ~5-6 years younger than I was, and I know for an absolute fact that Jawbreaker were hugely important to them. I was kind of a purist at the time, I guess.
To be honest, I found it difficult to pay close enough attention to the record to draw any detailed conclusions. I found it surprisingly generic-sounding, but that’s possibly because I’ve been exposed (mostly indirectly) to a lot of bands who were heavily inspired by Jawbreaker. Mostly I was thinking “yeah, that’s definitely a 90s punk singer vocal archetype.” But also “these songs are all kinda slow, and that rhythm section is pretty flabby.” Like seriously, give me ’94-era Ballance & Wurster over these dudes any day.
But at least now I know where Resol’s guitar sounds came from.
After dinner we watched the 2nd part of Lonesome Dove. This is a fairly recent widescreen Blu-Ray edition, and while I can’t be sure (and don’t feel like figuring out how to check), it seems like they widescreened it by cropping the 4:3 TV framing. The closeups seem awfully close up. I wonder if they just didn’t frame it well for widescreen when they were shooting it & wound up with too much clutter on the sides of the screen.
The HD transfer looks pretty good, so I’m assuming they went back to some reasonably high-quality master. Tis a mystery.
Also a mystery: They showed this stuff on TV? I’m pretty sure I read the book shortly after its publication in ’86, and certainly before the miniseries. And since I’m not sure I had a TV in ’89, I don’t think I have ever seen the miniseries before. Last night there was dirty talk about Robert Duvall’s junk shrinking up in a cold stream, and then a closeup of a scalping of a [still living] bandit.
It’s bleak, unsurprisingly crappy in its depiction of Native Americans, has a higher body count than I expected, and kind of engrossing despite feeling TV-dated. I can see why Robert Duvall called it his favorite screen role ever – he gets to be as goofy as he wants to be for 6 hours, basically. He does some good work in between the hammy bits, though.
very into charts about naps
Nap charts guys.
want the NASA nap, but fear I would get stressed out by its proximity time-wise to the Bad Nap
October 16, 2014
The past week or so there has been a slight uptick in interest in the case of Lennon Lacy, a black high school student from a small town down east, south of Fayetteville. Back in August he left his house one evening & was found the next morning, hanging from a swingset. According to press coverage, the police seem eager to call it a suicide and be done with it.
It’s a mark of these strange times that all of the social media posts I have seen about the case have linked to this article from the Guardian [UK]. There may well have been other, more local coverage (I found this in the Indy, for instance), but somehow that Guardian article is what finally caught on, at least among people I follow on Facebook & Twitter.
The story itself is all kinds of sketchy, and horrible, and the fact that I could so easily believe that it’s a lynching being covered up is a whole nother kind of horrible on top of that. The past couple of years have been rough ones, in NC and all over.
Last night I drove to Carrboro to see tune-yards; my mood was elevated substantially before I even got there because I grabbed the Capstan Shafts’ Fixation Protocols to listen to on the way. Now that Guided By Voices have broken up again, maybe Dean Wells can finally have his moment.
tune-yards were amazing, of course. I’ve seen them three times (the only three times, as far as I know, that they’ve played the Triangle), and every time they’ve put on my #1 show of that year. Back in the day you’d go see them & it would just be Merrill and Nate, and she’d stand there before every song, tapping her loop pedals and building the entire rhythm track for each song from scratch.
Nowadays you go see them and it’s Merrill and Nate and a drummer and two backup singers, and she *still* manually constructs the underpinnings of every song live, in realtime, using her loop pedals, before they play it. Only now she has to do it – all of these amazing syncopations & polyrhythms & self-harmony vocal layers– while 600 people in the audience are trying to clap along in straight 4. Or yelling “I love you! Marry me!” over & over.
The music is so funky and the politics are so upfront and the joy onstage is so totally overflowing. I’m not as enamored of the latest album as I was of the first two, but in a live context, all of the studio noodling falls away and they mostly turn into mega dance jams. (Still iffy on “Water Fountain,” though – kind of surprised that it was one of the biggest crowd-response hits of the night.)
Abigail Nessen-Bengson, Merrill Garbus, Jo Lampert – photo by instagram user designofeye
Weirdest moment: backup singers/dancers Jo & Abigail had this squishy picture frame, and between songs Abigail was holding it up for Jo to pose in. Jo struck this incredibly emotional & sad face – it went well beyond goofing, & looked like she’d tapped into some real depth of sorrow all of a sudden – and then suddenly she toppled over. Passed right out for a second.
They got her offstage, and Merrill & Nate did a song or two in duo format, and then later in the set she seemed to be fine. Fatigue & stress are weird things; people who think performing on tour is an easy gig are just so totally wrong.
Anyway. Lives weren’t ruined, and neither was the show, and we all left on a high note.
In the car on the way home I listened to Big Science. Perfect segue (and totally apropos).
Although mostly I found myself wondering whether there has been a remaster since the mid-80s CD version that I own. Like, maybe one with at least some low end?
October 15, 2014
I’m not gonna talk about how stupid it seems to allow nurses who were directly handling an Ebola-infected person to up & get on airplanes within the 3 weeks immediately thereafter. Nobody makes medical personnel stay under house arrest (voluntary or otherwise) when they’ve been working, professionally, with any of a huge variety of pathogens.
So instead I’m going to wonder how it was that these nurses hadn’t read the Hot Zone or seen any of two zillion epidemic-paranoia movies, and thus didn’t balk [or didn’t balk sufficiently strongly] at being assigned to care for the Ebola victim for 2 days before they got proper protection & training.
Rainy this morning, sunny this evening. Lingering malaise that I’m fully confident is not Ebola. Myra Breckinridge arrived in the mail today but I was too busy doing work-after-work for us to have time to watch it.
Too busy doing work to have much else to report today, in fact, which is a drag. I *did* check out James Tillman, the guy opening for tune-yards tomorrow. Very nice fragile neo-soul:
October 14, 2014
Got a new t-shirt. One washing & it’s already starting to flake away, so I guess it’s more a museum piece. But it brings my Cthulhu-related shirt collection to three, and my general tentacles collection to, I dunno, at least 7 or 8?
Anyway. Honestly not a lot to report today. A lot of work. Work and some nice monkfish from Saltbox Seafood, then more work, then part 1 of Lonesome Dove, which we’re watching because why not, but also because last week in the NYT magazine, Robert Duvall said it was his favorite role. He certainly is the core of the movie. So far poor Tommy Lee Jones hasn’t quite found his way out from under his Kenny Rogers hair & beard.
Short discussion about ticket scalping on Twitter. I currently feel like limiting folks to 2 tickets apiece, especially for general admission club shows, is more than sufficient, but clearly some touring acts think differently. Which is why I’ll be standing in line at will-call at the Cradle on Thursday for tUnE-yArDs, instead of printing at home like a civilized person.
October 13, 2014
Halloween!
OK, not really, but it’s a safe bet that right about now, the Baker 13 are lathering up in the bathroom next door to my freshman-year dorm room. I never ran (although I made one of what I’m sure must be many many short student documentaries about the phenomenon).
Switching gears: There has been mass civil disobedience in St. Louis this weekend, culminating in a lot of building takeovers today & tonight. It’s exciting to follow it on Twitter; I recommend Shaun King as a good single-stop resource.
So much lately has my mind been on Ferguson, St. Louis, police brutality, institutional racism et al, that this morning when I walked past a truck with a Cardinals sticker on it, literally the first word that came to mind was “racist.”
In other news, I did a remote video briefing this evening to a classroom full of Cornell MBAs. They had some kind of fancy remote-instruction camera setup in the classroom, such that each student had a button, and when they wanted to ask a question, they pushed their button, and the camera would do a swish-pan and fast zoom in to that student. It was hilarious.
I actually found it easier to do the briefing if I just pretended that I was talking to the video window of myself in the corner of my screen. Is that weird?
This is what a REAL rape prevention campaign looks like
All the awards.
DO ME A HUGE FAVOR AND REBLOG THIS!
This is perfection in a campaign
I love how they included a situation where a guy could’ve gotten raped. People don’t seem to realize that males get raped too. It’s less common, but it happens. That is what sets this campaign apart from others.
These rape prevention posters are light years ahead of the victim-blaming that still seems to be the norm in too many places.