“Not the least wonder of science is its ability to convert shellac—excreted by an insect—into a vehicle for profound emotional experience,” wrote research physicist George R. Harrison in the November 1938 issue of Technology Review. The January/February 2009 issue resurrects his spirited description of the industrial process behind phonographs and his prescient thoughts on the ways improved recording technology could change the art of music making.

“The sight of hundreds of steam-heated presses stamping out phonograph records is likely to give rise to that exaltation which is occasionally felt on viewing one of man’s accomplishments in fashioning nature to his ends…At one moment we see a mass of dough; 30 seconds later it emerges from the press transformed—the “Prelude to Lohengrin”!

“At least one scientist with a musical bent, who possesses a home sound recorder, has gone so far as to play string quartets with himself…If the quality of the recording can be made such that the music does not lose appreciably by successive re-recordings, the only limitation on any performer who wishes to make a full orchestral rendition by himself should be his own virtuosity! Of course there is also the less pleasing possibility that an amateur tenor might equally well thus take advantage of the wonders of science and produce his own barbershop chords.”

Listen to an 1897 gramophone recording below:

A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight 

Image by sogni­­ hal, licensed under Creative Commons.

Matthew Glass has been collecting records for the better part of four decades. In a his Manhattan living space he has a “record room” where 10,000 records live. Framed records are his wall art. For years he sold records at the flea market on 24^th Street. There are times in his life when he was frequently bringing records home by the box.

None of this would surprise you if you were to spend a single short second on LP Cover Lover, the website where he posts strange record covers in daily batches. He’s got a camera on a tripod in his record room and he is forever pulling records, photographing them, and posting them to his site, which boasts a comprehensive collection of “the world’s greatest LP album covers.”

“It’s helped me to spend time with my collection,” says Glass, who works in event promotion, “I appreciate what I have more.”

What he has is an eye for the beautiful and the beautifully absurd. There are plenty of websites showcasing goofy album art. Glass’ eye is well calibrated. “My tastes tend towards the ‘50s and ‘60s,” he says. “The art of the ‘80s was mostly just sort of gross.”

I asked Glass to suggest a few choice stops for anybody who spends some time with his site and wants more from the music blogosphere. His suggestions: Stupefaction, Show and Tell Music (check out their DIY cover gallery), and If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats (don't miss this forgotten piece of history).

"When starting a play, I ask myself, 'What's the last play in the world I would ever want to write?'  Then I force myself to write it." That is how playwright and director Young Jean Lee describes her process. Since The Appeal debuted at SoHo Rep in 2004, Lee has been considered a leading new voice in American theater. Determined to shake both herself and her audience free from complacency, she states, "I want to create work that disarms audiences with humor and then excoriates them … until they are left disturbed, exhilarated, and without answers." 

Church, which premiered in 2007 at P.S. 122 and was recently performed at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, is a provocative exploration of religion that straddles the line between earnestness and irony so delicately as to leave its audience in a constant state of unease. Structured as a religious service complete with preaching, testimonials, singing, and dancing, Church works on its audience like its namesake. Through its cast of liberal Christian characters, the show calls people out on their ego-based, petty worries and challenges them to meaningful action. What makes it all tolerable, and indeed compelling, is Lee's ability to balance piercing social satire with disarming sincerity. At various moments in the show, you may feel uplifted, moved, amused, ashamed, or devastated. But you will never feel complacent.     

Image by Ryan Jensen, courtesy of Young Jean Lee Theater Company and Walker Art Center.

Utne’s own Julie Hanus recently reported on some promising and ingenious ways in which the fair use doctrine is thriving, but technicalities are still tripping up artists who should be protected by fair use.

Producers of the intelligent-design documentary Expelled have been exonerated in court after Yoko Ono and EMI Records sued the filmmakers for including a 15-second clip of John Lennon’s “Imagine”—but not without some difficulty. The film was released on DVD without the clip while the case was pending, which, Cyndy Aleo-Carreira at the Industry Standard argues, is an unfortunate side effect of what should have been an open-and-shut case. What’s more, she points out, fair use might not be enough to protect those who can’t afford to defend themselves in court: “If a film with Hollywood producers has trouble using media clips, what hope does an average citizen have of using something without worrying about huge legal expenses that could result?”

But Anthony Falzone, blogging for Stanford Law’s Center for Internet and Society, hails the case as a victory for fair use, in part due to the efforts of Media/Professional Insurance to cover the legal expenses of Expelled’s producers and others sued in fair use cases.

At Slashdot, Ian Lamont reaches the same conclusion I did: It’s a bit ironic that the song sparking the lawsuit is Lennon’s utopian manifesto “Imagine.”

Image by orsorama, licensed under Creative Commons.

We all know how much fun it is to gather around a television with like-minded friends and shout snide things at the unpalatable speeches being broadcast. Now imagine doing that in a theater filled with 300 drunk liberals. 

That’s precisely what I did last Thursday, at the tail end of Daily Show creator Lizz Winstead’s multimedia satire, Shoot the Messenger. The show holds weekly performances in New York City, where Winstead and her ensemble spoof the week’s headlines during a parodic morning news show called Wake Up World (“America’s only 6-hour morning show!”)

But last week, in dubious honor of the RNC, Winstead’s troupe brought their show to her native Minneapolis for three nights at the Parkway Theater. Each evening’s events went beyond mere theater to include live feeds from the RNC and musical performances from revered protest singer Billy Bragg and local legends Dan Wilson, Jim Walsh, and Grant Hart.

Before the show, the Parkway’s seats were mostly full of chatty people munching popcorn as the onstage screen showed eminently believable ads for the “24/7 Infonewsment Network’s” fake shows, such as Poll Dancing with sexy anchorwoman Emily Rackcheck and MedicAsian with Dr. Vijay Jay.

Winstead and her co-star Baron Vaughn starred as Wake Up World’s chipper, clueless hosts Hope Jean Paul and Davis Miles. Hope Jean Paul is, like her creator, from the Twin Cities area: “I’m originally from Coon Rapids,” she chirped, to which Vaughn (who is African American) replied, “Wow! Sounds like my kind of place!” Naughty laughter erupted and Winstead replied, “Now, Davis, try not to be offended by the name, just because it contains the word Rapids.”

That joke set the tone for the show, whose mix of absurdity and topical satire has made Winstead’s more famous brainchild the Daily Show a media phenomenon for over a decade. Wake Up World, even more so than the Daily Show or its cousin the Colbert Report, is an acerbic and overtly partisan takedown of our leaders’ hypocrisies and the 24-hour news cycle’s vapid excesses.

In true morning-show form, Winstead and Vaughn hyped insipid segments like Lumpy the Cancer-Sniffing Dog, who they promised would find the one lucky audience member with a malignant tumor. A pro–big oil energy “expert” was brought in to discuss his new book The Town Pump: Alternatives to Alternative Energy. And a member of private security contractor Blackwater sat down with the hosts to discuss his new miracle fitness regimen: “Extreme Waterboard Abs.”

Pulchritudinous newsgal Emily Rackcheck delivered hourly news updates in a low-cut sweater and miniskirt. Bloviators Hunter Carlsbad (wearing a bowtie) and Daniels Midland (host of the Complication Room) shouted at each other during a Crossfire-style segment touted as “a debate between both sides of the political spectrum: the Far Right and the Right of Center!”

Winstead also tailored the show to the region with pre-taped biographical puff pieces on Laurie Coleman and Michelle Bachman subtitled “Behind the Taut Canvas.” There were ads for “a 31-part investigative series” called White in America and a gauzy video appeal from Sarah Silverman for charitable donations to private contracting firms.

After Wake Up World concluded, the evening shifted gears for its second segment, where Winstead reappeared as herself and sat down with liberal talk-radio host Ed Schultz to discuss the RNC—specifically Palin, whose fur-coat photo Winstead captioned “Wasilla DeVille.” Schultz was witty and affable, assuring us that McCain’s campaign would buckle under the weight of its own hypocrisy: “Look, everything’s going to be fine. And if it’s not, then we get another vice president who might shoot someone in the face!”

This marathon mix of political discourse, satire, and campy theatre was only a prelude, however, for the evening’s main event: a massive group viewing of John McCain’s speech. The audience, now well-lubricated and ready to laugh not so much with satirical glee as incredulous derision, filed back into the theater as McCain’s hagiographic video was playing on the giant screen, which had been tuned to MSNBC’s live feed from the convention.

As the man himself took the stage, the theater audience erupted with boos and squeals. The people around me gladly obeyed the rules of a drinking game Winstead had announced earlier: that we hoist our glasses every time the word maverick was used. Genuine cheers burst forth when MSNBC’s cameras zoomed in on the IVAW and Code Pink protestors who had infiltrated the hall.

As the speech dragged on and John McCain’s smiling rictus became increasingly creepy, the Parkway crowd got rowdier and my convention fatigue peaked. Around the moment when the last poorly programmed image appeared behind the penis-shaped stage, I fled the theater for some fresh air. When I went back inside a few minutes later, I encountered a completely different scene which cleared my head, the perfect antidote to the televised nightmare we’d just seen: Dan Wilson was playing his ubiquitous and charming hit single “Closing Time” to a much smaller crowd gathered near the front of the theater, kicking off one of Jim Walsh’s famous Hootenannies. Then Grant Hart took the stage, and the aging avatars of the Minneapolis counterculture settled further into their seats to watch their heroes perform, resting after a long evening—and week—of politicized sensory overload.

In his book The Roma Journeys,  photographer Joakim Eskildsen documents the lives of the Roma people, an oppressed and misunderstood minority often known as gypsies. The September-October issue of Utne Reader features Eskildsen’s lush color photographs and explores the lives and history of the Roma people.

For the latest episode of the UtneCast, Eskildsen sat down with senior editor Keith Goetzman to talk about the stereotypes that surround the Roma, how he immersed himself in their culture, and what he admires about them.

You can listen to the interview below, or to subscribe to the UtneCast for free through iTunes, click here.

Listen Now:

 Joakim Eskildsen on The Roma Journeys: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Copyright Joakim Eskildsen.
The Roma Journeys by Joakim Eskildsen published by Steidl
(www.steidlville.com)

The public art project TRASH: anycoloryoulike, launched this summer by the artist Adrian Kondratowicz, replaces traditional black trash bags with bright, colorful, biodegradable bags. Kondratowicz hopes that, in addition to making city streets look a little better, piles of flashy pink and white polka-dot garbage bags will get people thinking about how much they throw away.

“People are sensitized to seeing mounds of black trash bags lining sidewalks,” writes Kathryn Kondracki at the Next American City blog, “but the use of multi-colored bags will hopefully make by-standers stop and think about the impact.”

Individuals and businesses can sponsor city blocks or schools for one or more trash-collection days, and Kondratowicz can produce bags in just about any color.

If you want to see the pink polka dots in action, head to Brooklyn on August 21—the bags will be out on Broadway between Marcy Avenue and Hewes Street.

Images by Gina Marie, courtesy of anycoloryoulike.biz.

With over seventy years of musical experience between them and countless musical collaborations, film soundtracks, and multimedia projects gracing their resumes, Brian Eno and David Byrne could be forgiven for resting on their laurels. But the release of their new collaboration Everything That Happens Will Happen Today—their first work together since 1981’s acclaimed My Life In The Bush of Ghosts—marks the beginning of yet another creative chapter for the a capella enthusiast and the bike-rack designer.

With other rock juggernauts like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails devising innovative ways of distributing music in the digital age, Byrne and Eno are placing a premium on their album’s physical packaging. Hardcore devotees can pony up $70 for the elaborate decorative box, Idolator reports, with traditional CD and digital downloads also available. Listeners can preview the album at its website and read Byrne’s characteristically low-key description of the project: “For the most part, Brian did the music and I wrote some tunes, words and sang. It’s familiar but completely new as well.”

Brazilian artist Nele Azevedo created a beautiful installation of tiny ice men who sat out in the sun until they melted. I like the ephemeral nature of the pieces, and how they changed and seemed to slump as the sun took its inevitable toll. You can also see more photos of the installation on Flickr.

(Thanks, Neatorama.)

If you believe conservative media conspirators, the only reason a majority of film critics have embraced Pixar Animation Studios’ WALL-E is because of its anti-corporate take on our environmental future (or lack thereof). But in a recent piece comparing Pixar to competitor DreamWorks, Film Comment (article not available online) argues that the movie’s magic—like its studio—is all about old-fashioned storytelling.

“Why are Pixar films so vastly superior to DreamWorks’ sorry output?” Ken Jones asks, setting up his piece in the magazine’s July-August issue. It’s because Pixar, which also produced Cars, The Incredibles, and the Toy Story movies, respects “their audience as sentient human beings rather than average consumers. There is no compulsion to check off categories (up-to-the-minute hipstermism, fart jokes for the kids, blueish double-entendres for the teenagers and adults, a barrage of visual and aural cues that keep the action cynically grounded in hip-hop/mall/Internet culture), none of the relentless calculation that renders the average commercial product, animated or live-action, nothing more than pricey yet expendable box office fodder.”

Jones argues that the creative forces at DreamWorks, which recently released Kung Fu Panda, are so driven by profit and opinion polls that they’ve scared themselves out of taking risks or challenging audiences. As a result, their movies lack the sense of wonder essential for escape. “It’s not that Pixar is less concerned with turning a profit,” Jones writes, “but that they care about making movies as much as they care about making money.”

Listening to WALL-E writer and director Andrew Stanton talk about the project on a recent episode of National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, you can’t help but conclude Jones is on to something. His tales about creating the characters and storyboarding the film make it clear that Pixar’s creative teams are given an unusual amount of freedom, as well as the time and resources necessary to execute originality. They’re also encouraged to challenge cinematic convention.

Stanton also addresses the political storm around his hit, which New York Times columnist Frank Rich concluded, unintentionally adding fuel to the echo chamber’s fire, was no less powerful than The Inconvenient Truth. The animator convincingly claims that when writing the script there was no “liberal” agenda. The circumstances simply fit the story arc of his main characters, who aren’t environmentalist, politicians, or blowhard pundits—just romantic robots in love.

Photo courtesy of Walt Disney Internet Group.

Finally, some pleasant news related (however tangentially) to the oil industry: Minnesota Public Radio and MNSpeak are celebrating the 50th anniversary of what might be America’s most aesthetically pleasing gas station—the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Lindholm Service Station in Cloquet, Minnesota.

This milestone inspired me to browse images of other Wright structures, whose practical designs and clean lines ensure a calming, refreshing effect on the viewer. You can browse his work at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation’s website and view a list of the many public sites designed by the architect, in case you want to see one up close.

Image by Elkman, licensed by Creative Commons.

Not to be confused with the personalized mixes we make for ourselves and our friends, underground mix tapes—or these days, mixes burned to CDs—are the DIY recordings that unsigned hip-hop acts hawk on the street and at their shows.

Hip-hop mix tapes emanate from an involved subculture that the young magazine Foundation covers with an insider’s expertise. Philadelphia Weekly profiled the magazine’s founders, a trio of young men who began the magazine four years ago, lacking any formal writing experience but recognizing an underserved niche of mix tape criticism and commentary.

While rock bands peddle demos, unsigned hip-hop artists make mixes of themselves rapping over cobbled-together beats. It’s how most major performers, such as 50 Cent and Lil Wayne, got their start, and many major-label artists still reserve their rawest material for the medium, as if to repay their oldest and most loyal fans.

It’s an ethos that naturally appeals to DIY enthusiasts in other art forms, like writing. In the Believer, Found magazine’s Davy Rothbart was moved to sing the praises of mix tapes—arguably the sonic analog to his scrappy literary enterprise:

“The sleek and sanded major-label concoctions on sale at Circuit City are counterbalanced by hundreds, maybe thousands of great, unheard albums … I can’t help but respect the punk-rock, DIY spirit of anybody who makes art and tries to sell it to strangers on the street. After all, I do the same shit myself: Every year I hop in a van and go city to city selling my zines.”

Foundation has followed an upward trajectory similar to the artists it covers, from small-time music mag to venerated authority. Its story is heartening not simply because its writers are passionate about their subjects, but also because the magazine is a runaway success—an increasingly rare thing in today’s print-media landscape.

Flipping through channels a while ago, I stopped on an episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, revamped with menacing faces and mega muscles. Their newly designed image, devoid of the friendly smiles characteristic of the late-eighties version, made me question why 4Kids Entertainment, the owners of said turtles, felt the urge to modernize these much-loved reptiles with ‘tude.

The Ninja Turtles aren’t the only ones to get a makeover. American Greetings Co. has glammed up Strawberry Shortcake and the Care Bears. D.A. Kolodenko, writing for San Diego CityBeat, describes the new, slimmed-down, cell phone-toting Strawberry Shortcake as a “ripe and sexy little 21st-century confection.” The Care Bears were redesigned in 2007 with “less belly fat and longer eyelashes.” Sleek and sinister, slim and sexy—are these the characteristics that are emblematic of our modern culture? If anything, I think the eco-conscious Captain Planet deserves a comeback.

So why are companies reinventing old cartoon characters instead of designing new ones? According to Kolodenko, playing off of parents’ nostalgia has proven to be a safer investment than creating unknowns in our poorly functioning economy—Strawberry Shortcake has brought in $2.5 billion since 2003.

In an attempt to get ahead of the game, Kolodenko rounded up some lesser-known characters to see how their modern selves could lend some big bucks to corporations. Among forgotten favorites like the Wuzzles and the Herculoids, the heartrending story of the Biskitts comes to light:

Biskitts—Hanna-Barbera’s “smallest dogs in the world” guarded a treasure in a castle in a swamp on a tiny island. The island was swallowed up by Hurricane Katrina, and most of the Biskitts drowned. The only remaining Biskitt, Mooch, lives on the streets of New Orleans, mooching biscuits and mumbling to himself about the “g*ddamn Smurfs.”

Won't somebody give that sad mutt a makeover?

Image by  johntrainor , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

With its complex moral dilemmas and dystopian vision, The Dark Knight is an unlikely summer blockbuster and unquestionably dour as a superhero movie—but it’s still  performing ridiculously well at the box office and with critics.

Some of the commentary is inevitably political, framing the film as an overt 9/11 allegory. Andrew Klavan takes things a step further in the Wall Street Journal, making a favorable comparison between the latest iteration of Batman and the Bush administration’s absolutist approaches to geopolitics, applauding the Caped Crusader for demonstrating the same decisive, nuance-free heroism that Bush supposedly does.

What Klavan seems to be missing is that The Dark Knight portrays Batman as a deeply conflicted and flawed antihero; the film excels at illustrating the moral ambiguities inherent in fighting crime or governing a populace.

On his blog, Andrew Sullivan provides an articulate rebuttal to Klavan, ultimately focusing on the failures of Bush’s cowboy swagger, use of torture, and with-us-or-against-us version of diplomacy. Sullivan concludes that those who can’t or won’t do nuance are missing the point—perhaps deliberately.

Image adapted from a photo by Yosi:), licensed by Creative Commons.

Moneyland, the new album by bluegrass legend Del McCoury, is a scathing indictment of the rampant corruption and greed in America today. The album features both classic bluegrass standards and newly recorded songs, with guest appearances by Merle Haggard, Tim O’Brien, Emmylou Harris, Patty Loveless, Bruce Hornsby, and Gillian Welch.

Having grown up on a farm in Pennsylvania, McCoury has witnessed the decline of traditional rural life in America, but as the consummate gentleman, he isn’t trying to influence people’s politics. He’s just calling attention to the fact that “many working folks all across America are in a tough spot.” For the latest episode of the UtneCast I spoke with McCoury about Moneyland, politics, and rural life.

You can listen to the interview below, or to subscribe to the UtneCast for free through iTunes, click here.

Listen Now:

 Interview with Del McCoury: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The 8^th annual international Bicycle Film Festival (BFF) concluded its Minneapolis leg this past weekend with a hefty roster of screenings at the Theatre de la Jeune Lune. For Twin Cities residents, Saturday served as a bittersweet goodbye to the venue, which officially shuttered operations at the end of June.

The BFF screens its first films tonight in Los Angeles, and gets rolling this Wednesday in San Francisco, before moving on to Chicago and Boston during the month of August. After that, the jet-setting festival will travel to Toyko, Austin, London, Vienna, Zurich, Paris, Sydney, Melbourne, and Milano—before finishing its run this December back in Portland, Oregon. Here are some of this past weekend’s cinematic highlights—many of which citizens of next-up cities can partake in:

Road to Roubaix , a 2008 documentary directed by a pair of Davids (Deal and Cooper), tells the story of one of the world’s most brutal road races: the 160-mile Paris-Roubaix, which, as the name suggests, winds north from the City of Lights toward the industrial town of Roubaix, traveling along unforgiving cobblestone roads. Not all riders finish the historic race, but those who do complete the course in a single, grueling day. (The bikes take so much abuse, the filmmakers note, they’ll never again be ridden professionally.) Road to Roubaix relies on the triumph-of-human-spirit trope, but fairly so—one look at the hefty chunk of stone bequeathed to the victor, and it’s clear that riding in the Paris-Roubaix at all is a Herculean feat. Watch it for: the holy crap factor.

See the Road to Roubaix trailer here:

The Six-Day Bicycle Races , directed by Mark Tyson, is a jaunty romp through the origins of track racing, the jaw-dropping endurance cycling races that drew sell-out crowds to Madison Square Garden in the1920s. This sport phenomenon of the American Jazz Age required pairs of (handsomely paid) riders, one of whom was always on the track, to zoom about in a brutal, non-stop, no-holds-barred contest to accrue the most mileage. Hollywood and gangster glitterati would sweeten the pot for impromptu sprints by offering extra cash premiums—known as “prems”—to the winners, but the real cash was in the big race, where superstar cyclists earned enormous purses and ageless glory. Watch it for: geezers’ recollections of the sort of glamorous heyday you and I will likely never know.

The Urban Bike Shorts program offers a variety of views of cycling in the city. King of Skitch ought to be mentioned if only for the awesome, unexpected ending. (Watching bike messenger Felipe Robayo hang onto the back of a sports car and fly through New York City traffic isn’t bad either.) Pterodactyl “Polio” begins with a well-worn concept—the lone bicycle wheel, bouncing down the road—but rises to deliver a creative spin on the idea. The Trunk Boiz entertain in their music video Scraper Bikes, which is pronounced scrape-er not scrap-er, and explained here. Raven and the Bicycle Angel tracks a new biker’s determination to win the heart of (or just even a minute of conversation with) his bike-riding crush. And Fast Friday—at 27 minutes the “feature” of the bunch—does a respectable job documenting the rise of Seattle’s youth bike culture. Watch the program for: more track stands than you can shake a stick at.

Image courtesy of Kelly Riordan.

The famous collage of Barack Obama looking pensively over the word “hope” is on the auction block today with a current bid of $80,000. The piece is by artist Shepard Fairey, the man behind the “André the Giant Has a Posse” stickers that later evolved into the “Obey” street art. 

The money from the action won’t go to Barack Obama’s campaign. Instead, it'll be routed to hip hop mogul Russell Simmons’ Rush Philanthropic “Art for Life” charity event. The organization is dedicated to bringing art to disadvantaged urban youth, but the auction seems to have tapped into a cultural trend that isn’t necessarily altruistic.

“It's a nice crossover between fine art and propaganda,” Alex W. Smith, an art specialist for the Phillips de Pury & Co. auction house told the Wall Street Journal. Clearly the excitement behind the Obama campaign is inflating the price. And there’s no doubt that most of the people in the Wall Street Journal article are looking at the collage as an investment, rather than art for art’s sake. But I think there’s something else that makes the collage more valuable.

I think that photo perfectly captures what the Onion calls Obama's “Looking-Off-Into-Future Pose.” According to the Onion, “advisers say this creates the illusion that Obama is looking forward to a bright future, while the downturned corners of his lips indicate that he acknowledges the problems of the present.” And that can translate into big money.

(Thanks, Kanye West.)

UPDATE: There’s about 2 days left on the auction and the bidding is up to $108,000.

As politicians and businesses in the Twin Cities rev up for the Republican National Convention this September, groups throughout the region from all points on the political spectrum are preparing to welcome the GOP to town in various unique ways.

There’s the expected mobilization of protest groups, but there are also anti-authoritarian zines, yard-sign contests, zealous corporate sponsors, and tacky-pants enthusiasts. The latest addition to this list is cartoonists, who have lent their RNC-themed drawings to the hometown alt-weekly, City Pages, for its second-annual Comix Issue.

The offerings by local artists are many and varied, especially in the unabridged online edition. Titles range from “Elephantitis” to “Michelle Bachman’s RNC Diary” to “Zubaz of Freedom,” the last an homage to the RNC's aforementioned tacky-pants mandate.

The quality varies—some of the strips falter when they load up their panels with tired jabs at easy targets; others buckle under self-seriousness—but in general it’s a fair sampling of the area’s artists and their political wit. One of my favorites is “Xcape From Xcel,” by Kevin Cannon, a single-panel strip envisioning a board game inside the convention's host arena, the Xcel Energy Center (which was also, incidentally, the venue for Barack Obama's first speech as the presumptive Democratic nominee back in June). For example, one square says, “You’re wearing a flag pin! Continue playing.”

Waffle Bike is a “fully weaponized, mobile, waffle-making machine.” It’s also the name of a short film—documenting the bike’s maiden voyage in search of chickens, naturally, to lay the eggs for the batter—that played last night as part of the Minneapolis leg of the Bicycle Film Festival. The “Fun Bike Shorts” program offered 15 films in all, most clocking in well under 10 minutes.

In Waffle Bike, a perfectly clipped narrator chirps out Waffle Bike’s features, which include a Honda Harmony en2500 generator, a 9-inch Norweigan waffle maker, a small refrigerator up front, a tape deck (which plays through three 8-inch, 25-watt, all-weather trumpet horn speakers made in China), and two 12-gauge homemade shotguns. The film is charming and disturbing and funny—and the bike is the work of Tom Sachs, an artist who is also credited as the film’s director along with the Neistat Brothers.

While I was watching the film—maybe the sight of a lingonberry-topped waffle made me hungry?—I couldn’t help but think that short film programs are like tasting menus, except better, because instead of plowing through a dozen courses all prepared by a single chef, you get an erratic and wild tour, each course crafted by a different individual. Waffle Bike was an obvious crowd pleaser, but there were other gems in the batch, such as Balorda, from directors Luca Bedini and Marco Brandoli, which chronicles a three-day, wildly costumed, bacchanal bike ride that takes place annually in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy. “We only have Lambrusco. No Gatorade. We only have pork. No energy bars,” a caped commentator declares, as the camera cuts to a gigantic cauldron of shredded meat.

Also not to be missed: My First Time, by S.C. Durkin, which splices interview footage of people recalling, well, their first time, to great comedic effect. Faster from Jeff Stark is a slick, two-minute glimpse of a biker racing against a New York City subway train, and in Jim’s Lines, Patrick Trefz documents a rider who drags a rake behind his bicycle and constructs elaborate, transient art in the sand of a beach. The only real disappointment of the bunch was the closer: Standing Start, 12 minutes of footage of Olympian track sprinter Craig MacLean, over which a narrator dramatically recounts some sort of Odysseus-based tale. It was a stunning misfire at the end of a series of films that otherwise served to surprised and delight.

The Bicycle Film Festival continues tonight and tomorrow in Minneapolis, before heading westward to Los Angeles, next up in a roster of 14 more U.S. and international locations. If you can make it to one of the festival stops, do so. Otherwise, you’ll have to be satisfied watching Waffle Bike on the not-so-silver screen:

Because the Internet inspires encyclopedic research and archiving, it’s no surprise that online repositories like Wikipedia and Usenet have rendered no nugget of knowledge too arcane to be exhaustively catalogued by geeks in every field. This is especially true of music, where mp3s and file-sharing networks have allowed songs and albums to be stored and traded by collectors and connoisseurs.

Now some enterprising music archivists have created the Whitburn Project, an astoundingly ambitious endeavor 10 years in the making whose aim is nothing less than the total documentation of every popular song since the 1890s. It’s more than just a listing of pop charts—release date, label, chart position, duration, etc.—all arrayed in a huge 22-megabyte Excel spreadsheet. It’s also a Usenet-based audio archive collecting audio files of every song. That’s several illegal terabytes of more than 37,000 mp3s.

The value of this information to music critics and scholars is limited only by their imaginations. Andy Baio, who wrote about the Whitburn Project on his blog, published a fun analysis of one-hit wonders and chart longevity based on the data, and made a graph showing how the average length of a pop song has fluctuated over the decades. Meanwhile, the video blog Grabb.it has performed the valuable service of reminding those of us in the MTV Generation what videos we were watching instead of the news when, for example, the Challenger exploded.

This isn’t the first project of its kind (though it's far and away the most audacious). There’s the fun little site that tells you what song was No. 1 on the day you were born. (I’m not sure what cosmic significance there is to mine, which happens to be “Afternoon Delight” by the Starland Vocal Band.) Incomplete release data is available on Wikipedia’s Year in Music pages. And Billboard, which owns the rights to chart data, makes it available to the public on a very limited basis, with full charts accessible for a fee.

Which raises the question of legality: The Whitburn Project is breaking copyright laws by making proprietary Billboard chart data available without permission. (This is why the aforementioned blogs, and now this one, won’t post actual links to the project.) But it’s all easily available via Usenet (the pertinent newsgroups are listed in WFMU’s blog entry), so music geeks—and I mean that in the most flattering sense possible, being one myself—should check out this staggering mass of data while it’s still available.

(Thanks, Brendan.)

Image by stevecadman, licensed by Creative Commons. 

We’ve all received them as gifts: prettily packaged cookbooks with titles proclaiming the excellence of the food you’d be able to devour if only your pantry could store all of the items on each recipe's page-long ingredient list. Finally, someone’s calling them what they are—useless tabletop decor. Writing for British current affairs weekly the New Statesman, Nicholas Clee suggests that independent publishers (specifically the UK houses Grub Street and Prospect Books) are more apt to deliver food writing and recipes "that [are] intended to be of more than ephemeral interest."

Clee's food column sits with the magazine's hefty arts and culture section, a phenomenal collection of criticism and discussion that earned the newsweekly a 2007 Utne Independent Press Awards nomination for arts coverage. Well into 2008, the New Statesman remains a breath of fresh air on both the cultural and political fronts. The June 23 issue includes commentary on master sitar-player Salil Tripathi's farewell concert, and a review of the 1988 documentary Afghantsi, lamenting the lost art of television documentaries.

In the same issue is a discussion of Barack Obama’s "first presidency," his editorship at the Harvard Law Review back in 1990. The writer digs through some back issues of the journal and speculates that perhaps his legal career never took off because “Obama, despite being a lawyer, is a really good person.”

Inspired by the elaborate competitions between color-coded teams at summer camps, Color Wars is a diverting repository of ingenious games and artistic challenges created by web developers Ze Frank and Erik Kastner. “It’s just like summer camp,” the site’s banner reads, “but not really.”

Either way, Color Wars appeals to the playful, creative preadolescent we hope isn’t buried too far inside all of us. Among other curiosities, there’s an audio library documenting a nerd rap battle, the results of a 600-person bingo game played “live inside of Twitter,” and a reverse-caption contest where contributors stage photos to accompany a predetermined caption.

The site closed the first round of games in May, but its wild success (nearly three million page views) all but ensures another round soon. My personal favorite category is Young Me Now Me, where contributors recreate childhood photos of themselves:

Even though the competition is over, this is such a good rainy-day activity that I might still do a Young Me Now Me of my own the next time I’m bored and want to indulge my inner summer camper.

Image by  Paul Downey , licensed by  Creative Commons . 

Every aesthetic movement has its rivalries, its schisms, its heated battles over who’s keeping it real and who’s already sold out. Hip-hop is, famously, no exception: East Coast vs. West Coast, Tupac vs. Biggie, old school vs. new school—we’re all too familiar with these contentions. But now some of the old-school contingent are hating on a new segment of their new-school progeny: hipster rappers (hipster-hop?).

Hipster rap, as loosely defined by the Chicago Reader, consists of the most recent crop of MCs and DJs who flout conventional hip-hop fashions, eschewing baggy clothes and gold chains for tight jeans, big sunglasses, the occasional keffiyeh, and other trappings of the hipster lifestyle. Mainstream rappers like Kanye West and Lupe Fiasco, along with smaller up-and-coming acts like Kid Sister and the Cool Kids, come under fire from the old-school hip-hop website Unkut, and Jersey City rapper Mazzi has recorded diss tracks criticizing, by name, the rappers he sees as poseurs.

The Reader argues that such criticisms don’t hold much water in a genre that has always reinvented itself, borrowing and remixing until the question of authenticity is at best a slippery one. It’s also superficial: much of the derision directed toward hipster rap barely extends beyond clothes and other accoutrements, while the actual substance of the music never really enters the discussion. Furthermore, hip-hop’s notorious homophobia still lingers; much of the backlash takes the form of overt gay panic as rappers call each other fags for copping the metrosexual appearances of hipster fashion.

Race also complicates matters: the latest crop of hipster rap—or new rap, or independent hip-hop, or whatever we’re calling it—is just as likely to be heard at a party full of white kids slamming back Sparks on the Lower East Side as it is in the black community. The Reader notes, however, that the listener base is increasingly diverse, citing multiple firsthand accounts of shows and parties around Chicago where the audience defies racial and socioeconomic categorization—a compelling rebuttal to those still hung up on racial, social, or artistic distinctions.

Image by  Nev Brown , licensed by  Creative Commons . 

I Love My Life the Way It Is presents the frustration of unrealized potential. For the project, Ali Alvarez collects lottery tickets and leaves them unscratched, causing many of the people who see the collection to go “a little crazy.” Alvarez says it’s designed to explore high hopes, “dreaming, escaping, and then usually being let down.”

Image by Eric E Yang, licensed under Creative Commons.

Film analysis, architecture, and set design converge in We Make Money Not Art’s review of The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock. Location and architecture play a crucial role in nearly all of Hitchcock’s films, and some structures have become iconic: the bell tower in Vertigo, the apartment in Rear Window, the Bates mansion in Psycho. The review highlights just a few of the ways in which the films’ architecture informs and responds to the often twisted psychology of the characters.

If skanky porta-potties, mud wallows, and $5 bottled water weren’t enough of a deterrent to attending many music festivals, there’s always the possibility that the local sheriff is setting up a “drug checkpoint” on the road to the fest, shifting your focus from My Morning Jacket to My Arrest for Marijuana Possession. Phillip S. Smith writes in Drug War Chronicle about the many techniques that cops use to snare unsuspecting music fans, and what festivalgoers should know about their rights.

The tips range from common sense to counterintuitive. Some highlights:

--Don’t smoke pot in your car, and don’t have any paraphernalia in view.

--Don’t ever consent to a police search of your car. It’s your right to refuse. “It might be couched in terms of a command, but it is a request,” Steven Silverman of the civil liberties group Flex Your Rights tells Smith. Be polite but assertive, the experts advise.

--Drug checkpoints per se are unconstitutional, but some law enforcers skirt or defy the law. They’ll call it a “safety check,” or put up a “Drug Checkpoint Ahead” sign, “then watch who turns off the highway at the next ramp or who throws something out his car window,” says Silverman. “Then they pull them over for littering or failure to signal a lane change or something.” Don’t fall for this trap to “lure the freaked out,” Smith writes.

(Thanks, Alternet.)

In a small, dimly lit auditorium, a twenty-something music artist known as Igloo Martian stands behind a table on a blackened stage. Projected on the backscreen are staticky images from a camera focused on his hands and his instruments: children’s audio toys modified with bizarre-looking switches and a tangle of wires. Igloo Martian is a circuit bender, and the noise issuing forth from his machines is reminiscent of a modem dialing up over incendiary house music.

Circuit bending is an emerging sound art in which battery-operated toys, keyboards, and other electronics are creatively short-circuited to reveal new, unexpected sounds. The sounds range from high-pitched wails to bass-drum kicks and everything in between. When layered, the various noises create an electronic, sonic cornucopia.

Earlier this spring, acts from all over the world gathered in Los Angeles, New York, and Minneapolis for the fifth annual Bent Festival, two days (at each location) of concerts and workshops aimed at promoting circuit bending, inviting newcomers into the growing community. Sponsored by The Tank, a New York-based nonprofit arts organization, the festival brought in artists from three continents and at least 10 countries.

Circuit bending falls somewhere in between mad science and performance art, and it can be as complex or as basic as you make it. The bent duo Beatrix*JAR (Bianca Pettis and Jacob Roske) have been instrumental in promoting circuit bending by teaching beginner workshops in libraries and galleries all over the country.

“One of the reasons we started the workshops was because people didn’t know what we were doing,” Pettis says.

She’s absolutely right. Though the performances are interactive (audiences are encouraged to come down to the stage before and after sets to check out an artist’s equipment), it is confusing to see a Speak & Spell spout out an alien-sounding melody over an ’80s Casio keyboard pounding out drum patterns.

The spontaneity of circuit bending is one of the art form’s major draws, explains Igloo Martian (Robert Clark), who likens circuit bending to beachcombing when he was a child. “I remember collecting tons of sharks’ teeth,” he says.

The exploration of seemingly nonmusical electronics is a romantic pursuit for the bent community. “It’s not so much about the sound, but how you find it,” says Roske. “Ten people with the same toy get ten different results.”

Along with exploration, circuit bending is attractive because of its DIY appeal. Old kids’ toys (some of the most popular are Speak & Spell, Speak & Math, and even Furbys) can be picked up at local thrift shops for peanuts and bent for just as cheap. The process is similar to DJs digging through crates looking for promising records and hot samples. The bending process is simple and can be learned in an afternoon.

Circuit bending’s future looks bright, and many of its supporters have high expectations for the nascent genre. Some popular artists like Beck and Björk have already incorporated bent techniques into their music, and the members of Beatrix*JAR, who consider their work a fusion of bent and pop music, hope to be “ambassadors to bring circuit bending to the mainstream.”

Beatrix J*A*R:

Igloo Martian:

It’s a lament we’ve long heard from cultural scolds: Entertainment these days is just too raunchy. Whatever happened to nice, decent, moral films and television? Whether the halcyon days of wholesome pop culture ever actually existed is debatable, but the CAMIE (Character And Morality In Entertainment) Awards intend to put the brakes on our culture’s collective backslide by recognizing films and shows that, according to the organization’s website, “provide positive role models for building character, overcoming adversity, correcting unwise choices, strengthening families, living moral lives, and solving life’s problems with integrity and perseverance—realizing some lessons of life come with pain and sorrow.”

The 2008 CAMIE awards were held last month, and the winners included such family-friendly films as Miss Potter and Bridge to Terabithia as well as the Hallmark Hall of Fame’s presentation of The Note. (In fact, four of the five nominees in the made-for-TV movie category were produced under the aegis of the Hallmark corporation, which has apparently cornered the wholesome TV-movie market.)

CAMIE is just one component of what Reason’s Greg Beato calls “Hollywood’s Decency Epidemic,” as the mainstream media, particularly big Hollywood studios, are dedicating unprecedented dollars to the sort of G-rated entertainment frequently advocated by religious groups and other conservative culture warriors; one example of this supposed paradigm shift is Fox’s new Christian media division, Fox Faith. But what neither Beato nor CAMIE seem to acknowledge is that money talks nowhere as loudly as in Hollywood, where the major studios collect the lion’s share of their revenue from 17-year-olds who pay to see shoot-em-up blockbusters and teen sex comedies.

All the same, after perusing the entries in CAMIE’s 2008 winners’ circle, this impressionable pop culture blogger is considering expunging the more salacious items on his Netflix queue in favor of more uplifting fare like The Ultimate Gift and Love’s Unending Legacy.

Image of A Fair Puritan by E. Percy Moran licensed under Wikimedia Commons.

Following in the footsteps of fellow UK imports like the Fratellis and the Kooks, the Rumble Strips are poised to be the next big thing in feel-good indie rock. Their horn-laden debut album Girls and Weather is set for U.S. release August 5. Prepare to have it trapped in your head.

David Berman, the singer, songwriter, and creative force behind the band Silver Jews, is not only a musician but also a respected poet. In 1999, he published a book of poems, Actual Air, that was cooed over by the New Yorker and GQ and praised by Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet James Tate and former poet laureate Billy Collins. Berman is also an accomplished cartoonist whose drawings recently appeared at a gallery event organized by Dave Eggers in New York.

It’s Berman’s musical application of his literary talents, however, that are the wellspring of his success. His Silver Jews have been a going concern since the early nineties, and they’ve released a string of albums known primarily among critics for their lyrics, which tend to be funny, clever and genuinely, oddly beautiful. A quick sampler:

I had a friend, his name was Marc, with a “c."
His sister was like the heat coming off the back of an old TV.
     —“Sleeping Is the Only Love,” from Tanglewood Numbers

I love to see a rainbow from a garden hose,
Lit up like the blood of a centerfold.
I love the city and the city rain
Suburban kids with Biblical names.
     —“People,” from American Water

The latest Silver Jews album, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, which is due out from Drag City in June, is no exception to the rule of quality Berman has established. His lyrics are poetry in a cracked, catchy, alt-country frame.

And yet the songs seem a little more straightforward this time around, less cryptic and more baldly emotional than on previous albums. Berman has spent the last few years sober, after what sounds like the proverbial drug-fueled haze. So is his work sobering up too? Utne Reader tried to answer this and other questions in a recent chat with the Silver Jews frontman.

“I’m in, let’s say, this business, and I have competitors. Instead of profit, what I’m seeking is influence,” Berman says, his voice markedly less rumbling than his Johnny-Cash-like singing voice would indicate.

For a statement of purpose, this seeking is sober enough, to be sure. As an artist, Berman seems determined to ensure the originality of the content he generates, or, if you prefer, the awesomeness of his lyrics. And when he sings (on Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea’s jaunty “Party Barge”), “Satan’s jeweled lobster has your wife in its claws,” it’s not just uniquely absurd and goofily surreal. It’s serious. The eponymous, barging-in character who sings the song is a party animal turned to 11. His demons, therefore, might be reasonably expected to take bizarre, extravagant shapes. Or maybe he’s the jeweled lobster. After all, Berman makes no disguise of the fact that he himself played the role of “party barge” for a number of years.

Then again, the Silver Jews aren’t simply a stage for autobiographical metaphors. In a world and contemporary music scene where musicians routinely dismiss their own lyrics by saying, “I don’t know what they mean,” David Berman’s current vision of his music rests solely on the idea that he’s offering intellectual objects in the form of country rock songs.

“I think people have taken advantage of the evolution in language toward postmodern pastiche and non-sequitur,” Berman offers. “People who want to be a songwriter or lead singer, but don’t have anything to say, are provided with this sort of loophole in the culture.”

Now, of course, this sounds pretentious. And it probably is—in the past, Berman himself has indulged in oblique, significant-sounding nonsense. But in an indie culture that worships the idea of music as Art, Berman’s take—and the poetry involved in his songs—seems normal, even expected. Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea was made with more than a touch of the tortured artist’s attention to detail, a fact that becomes apparent when you talk to the guy who agonized over it.

For instance, Berman proposes that the album is the most “Googly-sure” of any album—ever. What this means is that he took the time to Google such phrases as “abridged abyss,” in order to find out if they were solely his creations. No hits returned? It’s his; flag planted. A Google search now turns up 44 hits for the phrase “abridged abyss,” and the first page of results shows either Silver Jews’ lyrics or references to a Yale French Studies article on André Malraux. The Malraux reference, which Berman says he found, was sufficiently lonely and obscure that the lyric remains fixed in Lookout Mountain’s leadoff track, “What Is Not But Could Be If.”

All the album’s tracks underwent this kind of surgical construction. Using colored note-cards to write them, Berman set out to wade through “50, 60, 70 chord progressions” and numerous books he was reading at the time. “There’s an Emerson quote at the end of ‘Strange Victory, Strange Defeat,’” he points out, and “Aloysius, Bluegrass Drummer” samples Emily Dickinson.

Perhaps this makes it sound as though the songs on Lookout Mountain exercise a literary posture. But they certainly don’t scan that way. Cheeky fun is one of the first phrases that comes to mind when I think of them. A Google search, by the way, yields 21,400 hits for cheeky fun, so it’s not any stretch of the critical vocabulary. Lookout Mountain is just a good album, with a couple great songs. It won’t raise the dead, at least not for long, but how often does that happen?

“If someone buys a Silver Jews record, they get to buy some freedom from the ickiness,” Berman hopes. The craft and thought he’s put into the album probably merits the description. Berman is, after all, a lauded poet, though he says that he has “less of a claim to originality [in poetry] than I do in, for instance, lyric-writing.” In lyric-writing, actually, Berman feels “like I could be in the Olympic finals; I could be in ninth place.”

Still, he says, his music “flies under their [listeners’] standards; the music and the singing is not technically adept.” For this reason, he feels that the context for his career is very important. As a poet, artist, and musician, his multiple-hat-wearing “sticks him out,” gives him an outsider-ish edge. Which is in some ways bullshit. This is a guy who, as a writer, critics compare favorably to Bob Dylan.  

But it works for him. Feeling he’s on the aesthetic outskirts motivates him to feel justified in continuing to make albums. In some ways, the contradictory conceit of indie rock culture—idiosyncracy and the pretense of art all wrapped up as a not-quite-commodity—is realized perfectly in Berman’s approach. He says he’s not lauded, but he’s garnered considerable acclaim. Moreover, his music sounds and plays itself off as both friendly and accessible; the absurdity and weird braininess are just along for the ride.

Really this is the dream of rock and roll, since it first scandalously waggled off of Elvis’ hips or whatever: The fringe product as a rock in the mainstream. Then again, just because it’s fallen through the cracks of the industry machine doesn’t mean it didn’t roll off the conveyor belt. Pop music is pop music, right? Silver Jews melodies have straight-up hooks aplenty; the poetry involved looks more like a bonus.

But do these distinctions matter? David Berman is a serious craftsman, and seems intent on taking up the mantle of the struggling artist. And the mantle might fit: Berman certainly isn’t rich, and he was, at one time, a genuine “party barge” (he probably still has the tugboat marks to prove it). Similarly, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea has its moments of earnest, downtrodden poetry, but Berman certifies his tone with life-giving variety. He’s funny when laughter is a little relief from the model-parade of hard times.     

The Silver Jews’ last record, Tanglewood Numbers, also explored the new world of sobriety. So Lookout Mountain may be more a refinement than a definition of Berman as a recovered sage. Nevertheless, he uses his addled wisdom as a launching pad for little poetic rocket ships (on fighting: “He came at me with some fist cuisine”; on divorce: “Living in a little town with my pedigree in shards,”). And, as Berman takes pains to point out, the language is plainer on this album. He has stories to tell and ideas to convey.

In the end, it may be a little stupid to emphasize Berman’s multidisciplinary career. The guy is a writer. And maybe he can’t sing, but I love it when he does.  

Smooth jazz is dead, reports Will Layman in Popmatters, citing the format shift at a couple of major-market radio stations (in New York and D.C.) as evidence of the genre’s demise. “Dentists in the two most powerful cities in America are panicking,” he writes, seizing the chance for some easy gags before settling into a surprisingly well-rounded and illuminating look at the form, from its sonic origins in the late ’60s to its naming by a focus group participant to its “overriding aesthetic of cheesiness” and its “explicitly economic” inspiration in recent years.

I suspect it will take more than a presumptuous obituary to draw a death rattle from Kenny G’s horn. After all, the Yellowjackets have a CD coming out next week, and elevators and hotel lobbies everywhere have dead air to fill. But Layman’s treatise is fun and engaging and even a bit provocative, floating the notion that smooth jazz may have actually fulfilled a noble purpose during its pathetic life: “It likely served to bring some listeners to the real thing, giving them the courage to like Miles Davis or Sonny Rollins.”

22-year-old, Vancouver-based artist Melanie Coles has constructed a 2,300-square-foot Waldo, which is now secured on a rooftop in her hometown, waiting to be detected by Google Earth’s satellites. Coles made the Waldo—with a little help from some friends—as a graduation project for the Emily Carr University of Art and Design. The school has a knack for nurturing inventive thinking; we reported on another graduate’s clever Urban Binning Unit in our July-August 2006 issue.

Speaking recently to NPR, Coles drew a parallel between moving her generation’s hunt for Waldo from the printed page to the Internet and “what’s happening with magazines and TV and radio all going online.” She also tied the Waldo to ancient traditions of constructing earthly monuments only visible from the sky.

—Julie Hanus

Images by Carolyn Coles, licensed under Creative Commons.

Orchestral conductors are responsible for keeping two different large, often unruly groups of people in line--the orchestra and the audience. A perfect performance can be ruined by a cell phone, an unstifled cough, or ill-timed applause.

Writing in the Threepenny Review, Wendy Lesser describes observing Simon Rattle leading the Berlin Philharmonic in a rehearsal at Carnegie Hall. Along with adjusting the group's sound for an unfamiliar space, Rattle warns the players of the relative rudeness of New York audiences. During the performance, a loudly coughing audience member throws the orchestra off, and Rattle, between movements, kindly but firmly explains to the audience how important it is to avoid such disruptions. Later, Lesser admires Rattle's warmth and ease with a schoolchildren's dance ensemble and with their parents, many of them fish out of water at a classical performance. Conducting, it turns out, requires not only tremendous musicianship and leadership but also great diplomacy and grace.

- Steve Thorngate 

Image by Monika Rittershaus, licensed under Creative Commons.

If your idea of ultimate genital danger is a pair of zip-fly jeans and a burned-out light bulb, you haven’t seen the movie trailer for Teeth. The film, which is the subject of a great analysis by Nerve, tells the tale of a high school student with a unique anatomical feature and her unfortunate bedmates. Nerve contextualizes the film by exploring the history of vagina dentata mythology, from the demon Asmodeus of Judeo-Christian legend to toothed vaginas in Native American parables.

—Morgan Winters

So-called indie music loves to flash that glittery “outsider” label, but when you play the music of someone like Sufjan Stevens in the car and realize that your mom and your 5-year-old alike are tapping their toes, something seems amiss.

“Indie rock and adult contemporary have for the last few years, been publicly and happily holding each other’s hand,” writes Greg Burgett for the New York Press. “The indie kids … on their way to their 10 a.m. start times, their casual Mondays-through-Fridays, their five-dollar-a-day coffee habits … assembled a so-appropriate soundtrack … that keeps their cred intact, their superiors pacified (even at audible-over-the-cubicles volume) and their New Yorker reading appropriately soundtracked.”

While there’s always going to be someone screaming for the music to be louder, noisier and more difficult, Burgett has some fun throwing bombs at bland music and those young professionals who wear it like a leather wrist strap.

—Jason Ericson

Rotten Tomatoes is a movie review aggregator that scores films on a “freshness” scale of 0 to 100 percent. In some cases, as with the recent cinematic catastrophe Meet the Spartans (2 percent freshness), the reviews showcase more comedic ability than the film itself. I’ve compiled some review highlights into a greatest hits recap. Enjoy:

Meet the Spartans isn’t a real movie, so this isn’t a real review, either.¹

Yes, crotch-flashing celebutantes and macho gladiator epics are rife for spoofing. It’s just too bad the job has been entrusted to Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, the witless, Dumpster-diving duo who wouldn’t know satire if it puked on their faces.² When the comedy revolution comes, Friedberg and Seltzer will be the first ones shot.³ The filmmakers have one basic joke—that there’s something a little bit gay about all these buff Spartans—and they work it into the ground, trotting out every dumb homosexual panic joke in recorded history.⁴

This thing is so utterly lackluster, so without spirit or humor or energy of any kind, that the characters have to tell you what the joke is.

“Oh, look!” they say. “It’s Paris Hilton!” Like that.⁵

What’s the point of making a parody that’s dumber than the stuff it parodies?⁶ For example, the film starts with an old man examining an infant while a narrator tells us that in ancient Sparta all the babies were carefully checked for defects. This is a fine setup for a lot of potentially funny sight gags: What might this baby’s “defect” be? Then comes the reveal: It’s a baby Shrek. Why? Because Shrek the Third was recently a popular movie. The baby Shrek says something with a Scottish accent and then pukes all over the old man. Why? Because puke is funny. Aren’t you laughing just thinking about it?⁷

It’s so bad even Carmen Electra should be embarrassed.⁸ Electra proves herself a national treasure as our highest-priced whore.⁹

In their deeply ingrained tradition of something less than mediocrity, Friedberg and Seltzer make their annual locustlike descent on theaters leaving a trail of ruthlessly murdered brain cells in their wake.¹⁰

It’s not even a movie. It’s just a thing.¹¹ I’m moving to Europe.¹²

—Erik Helin

(Sources: 1. Sun Media; 2. Detroit News; 3. EricDSnider.com; 4. Mountain Xpress; 5. Sun Media; 6. Newsday; 7. EricDSnider.com; 8. Detroit News; 9. Village Voice; 10. Mountain Xpress; 11. Mountain Xpress; 12. Village Voice)

There once was a Texas prisoner named Frank Jones (1900-1969), who “as a child . . . was told that he was born with a veil over his left eye, and that this veil would enable him to see spirits,” reports Lynne Adele in the outsider art magazine Raw Vision, winner of a 2006 Utne Independent Press Award (article not available online).

Once incarcerated, Jones scavenged blue- and red-colored pencils from prison bookkeepers and embarked upon drawing “devil houses”—loose representations of the Huntsville Prison where he served a life sentence. The devil houses feature thorny compartments populated by wicked spirits that Jones called haints.

Adele writes, “Although Jones’s haints appear to be friendly and playful, their benign expressions disguise their true objectives. Jones indicated that they smile because ‘they’re happy, waiting for your soul’ . . . [they] smile ‘to get you to come closer . . . to drag you down and make you do bad things. They laugh when they do that.’”

—Jason Ericson

Ever since Brendan Benson, Jack White, and company formed a band and rescued the word “raconteur” from semantic obscurity, two ever-present companions tagged along in reviews: “supergroup” and “Jack White side project.” Notice the tension there. True, White’s star has always shined brightest, but if anything, Consolers of the Lonely, the Raconteurs’ new album released March 25, makes the band look like a Benson vehicle, a welcome extension of his long-underappreciated solo work—happy-sounding pop songs about being a lonely, misunderstood guy.

Recorded, mastered, and released in less than a month, the album received no advance promotion. Yet rather than feeling like a slacker vanity project, like all of those excessive double-disc live albums (with concert DVD!) bands are rushing out lately, Consolers of the Lonely sounds fully developed, even masterful, thanks in part to the excellent additions of Dirk Powell on fiddle and Stax favorites the Memphis Horns. The casual brilliance of it all makes you wonder if there is any way this group could fail to produce great music.

—Jason Ericson

Baby blue cowboy boots with pink hot pants. Plaid shorts worn over patterned pajama bottoms. Jet-black stretch jeans as tight as shrink wrap. John Deere caps and full untrimmed beards. The South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, is as much a fashion show as it is a music-biz gathering, and frankly it would be hard to dress weirdly enough to really turn heads in downtown Austin this weekend. (Perhaps if I donned penny loafers, pleated Dockers chinos, and a pastel polo shirt, I’d at least get some attention for being a dork.)

Walking down the main promenade, Sixth Street, I took out my camera and captured some choice examples of rock and roll style. Not one person I approached refused to have their photo taken; this is a crowd that wants to be seen. Caution: Adopt these looks at your own risk.

—Keith Goetzman

“Everyone who’s under 30 is probably sick of hearing how great the Clash was,” Billy Bragg told the crowd at the Utne Reader party at South by Southwest as he introduced his new tune “Old Clash Fan Fight Song.” It’s not just younger folks, Billy: Just last week, Utne editor in chief Dave Schimke told me he didn’t want to hear one more word about Joe Strummer, the heavily lionized subject of a recent biography and documentary.

The ghost of the Clash was everywhere at South by Southwest, however. I saw it in the black armband worn by the singer for the hard-rocking L.A. band Monte Negro. I heard it in the energetic reggae-punk of the Aggrolites, another L.A. outfit. And plenty of SXSW attendees, yes, some of them under 30, wore T-shirts that celebrated the band.

Then I saw something that was no ghost: Carbon/Silicon, the new band fronted by the Clash’s Mick Jones. Playing to an appreciative crowd at the Austin Convention Center, Jones proved that he’s not living in the past as he and his band ripped through a blazing set that left the crowd awed and sated. Their beefy, guitar-drenched tunes ran on punk energy and crafty pop hooks, with Jones and fellow guitarist Tony James clearly relishing their return to the spotlight (James was in iconic punk band Generation X).

For us old Clash fans, it was a thrill to see Jones enjoying himself so much and still delivering the goods. Carbon/Silicon isn’t just a hobby or a lame attempt at a comeback, but a real band, and a very good one at that. Jones promised that they’d be touring the U.S. soon. “We’re coming to your house—everybody’s house,” he quipped. Don’t miss them when they come knocking.

—Keith Goetzman

Image by Nikolai36, licensed under Creative Commons.

A sinking polar bear, a melting Inuit, and a deer haloed with a Mercedes-Benz logo—each made of porcelain. Cynthia Hathaway’s “Souvenirs Revisited” collection gives classic Canadian icons a startling new treatment with political overtones.

Hathaway’s figurines are part of a movement in Canadian design toward what Tim McKeough calls “lumberjack chic,” a rather self-conscious take on wilderness and outdoor life. Writing in The Walrus (subscription required), McKeough highlights several designers who employ an “aesthetic [that] doesn’t so much reflect modern Canadian culture as it does other people’s expectations of what it means to be Canadian.”

—Steve Thorngate

After watching Roger Clemens stutter through a House committee hearing regarding his alleged steroid use, one could be excused for wanting to escape the locker-room stench surrounding professional sports. The Rocket may have been sweating from the strain of dodging questions, but for those of us watching from home, bearing the tedium was like 40 minutes on the elliptical machine. Most of us would rather hear about the latest strung-out musician’s drug-induced public tirade. And that’s because nobody does drugs like musicians. Barry Bonds can stick a needle in his butt cheek and smash a baseball 600 feet. But Ozzy Osbourne can chase a line of cocaine with a line of ants. Way cooler.

In an article for Fort Worth Weekly, E.R. Bills compares the steroid craze in baseball with the drug experience in music. Bills wonders why we have such different expectations for the practitioners of the two forms of entertainment since, he suggests, musicians use recreational drugs for the same reasons athletes use steroids. The difference, of course, lies in the level and brand of competition in the two worlds. There is certainly competition in the music industry: to sell records, win awards, make the cover of the music glossies. But in sports, the competition is the art. And because performance-enhancing drugs may define the outcome of the competition, their impact is completely different than the impact illicit drugs have had on music.

—Morgan Winters

Breast-inspired craft projects aren’t just about décolletage and irony. Beryl Tsang custom-knits soft, cuddly prosthetic breasts for women who’ve had mastectomies, and a hospital in Liverpool uses “woolly breasts” to teach new mothers about breastfeeding.

The Nipple Project has joined the fray, encouraging crafters to submit “a handmade artistic interpretation of your nipple or of someone’s nipple you love.” The gallery of submissions it has received thus far is pretty cool—nipple aesthetes from far and wide have sent in quite an array of specimens (including one made from a gourd!). The project’s coordinators, Jennifer Baylis and Andrea Dominguez, were called to action after seeing an ad for a bra that emphasized “maximum nipple coverage.”

This bra epitomizes the eradication and androgenization of the nipple. We find this ironic in an era where breast augmentation is done in order to gain a “more feminine look.” So we wanted to reclaim our natural femininity and counter this strange phenomenon.

(Thanks, Women’s Health News.)

—Danielle Maestretti

Utne Reader has had a presence at the South by Southwest music festival for years, but this time around, we’re going whole hog. We’re teaming up with one of our favorite music labels, Anti-, to host a big outdoor showcase headlined by Billy Bragg and DeVotchKa, and we’re joining with other partners to throw a party headlined by Bragg and Rogue Wave. For more information on the Utne Reader/Anti- Records showcase on Thursday, March 13, and the Utne Reader party on Saturday, March 15, click here.

The March-April issue of Utne Reader has a special treat for music fans, a 10-page section called “For the Love of Music” that focuses on people and places where pure passion for music is the driving force:

• Really Fresh Air by James Diers
  A public radio station that seriously rocks
• Good Karma in Stereo by Marc Weingarten
  At the Anti- label, it’s all about the music
• Play That Funky Vinyl by Rob Harvilla
  Wax Poetics keeps obsessive record collectors obsessing
• For the Love of Music: Scenes
  Four great venues for live music

Also, read editor in chief David Schimke’s note on Billy Bragg, South by Southwest, and the enduring influence of truly great music.

Both Utne Reader events at South by Southwest are open to everyone, though you’ll need a South by Southwest music festival badge to attend the showcase.

—Keith Goetzman

The 1960s smashed the cliché of the isolated and introverted artist. Drugs, experimentation, and the search for freedom led troves of hippy artists out of urban scenes and into rural art communes. Artist Michael Fallon’s blog The Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America tells the story of one such artist, Dean Fleming. After playing a pivotal role in sparking Manhattan’s SoHo art scene, the painter turned his back on New York to make a life for himself in Colorado. Fleming found inspiration in the area’s Native American culture and mountainous scenery on a visit to Drop City, the United States’ first rural hippy commune. The unsustainable chaos he observed there led him to found a commune of his own, the Libre Community, in 1968. Fleming hoped Libre would allow artists of all kinds to escape the city and recharge. It must have worked, because the commune still exists today.

(Thanks, GalleryDriver.)

—Erik Helin

At one point in the adult entertainment industry’s sordid history, the Internet was considered the greatest thing since the videocassette. The first time some enterprising entrepreneur uploaded a risqué photo must have been like the moment when two lovers with equally shady pasts finally met and, well, fell in love. Now, some ick-flick traders are saying the Internet and DIY porn are killing the industry, according to an article in Halifax, Nova Scotia alternative weekly the Coast. And some of their claims sound eerily similar to those coming out of the print media sector. Amateur porn may be the adult biz’s version of blogging and citizen journalism, and studio-produced porn may go the way of the newspaper, some old-school porn producers fear. The fact that the newspaper hasn’t yet gone the way of the newspaper shouldn’t affect these doomsday predictions. Not in an industry where Paris Hilton can “accidentally” become one of its most successful practitioners.

—Morgan Winters

The 999 Eyes Freak Show, which is featured in the March-April Utne Reader, has caused a stir in St. Paul. Lobster Girl, Samantha X, and the rest of the human oddities in the 999 Eyes crew were supposed to perform on June 14 at a benefit for the History Theatre, but the alternative weekly City Pages reports that event organizers got cold feet when they decided the “carnie/sideshow language” used by 999 Eyes to market its act “was very offensive to people with disabilities,” says event organizer Steven Katz.

It appears that 999 Eyes recently changed its descriptor from “Carnival of the Damned” to “Freak Show,” but still, we’re confused by the confusion: The outfit is perfectly upfront about its counterculture/retro shtick, and it isn’t easily mistaken for a troupe of singing poster children. No word yet on whether A Prairie Home Companion will invite the snubbed freaks to Lake Wobegon for the weirdest episode ever. —Keith Goetzman