Does anyone have any chain mail I can borrow? Just for a week. I'm going on vacation and I'M STAYING IN A CASTLE ON MY BIRTHDAY. So the hell with y'all!

Maybe when you return to Cookie Mountain, you can see if they have some graphic designers there. What the hell happened with TV on the Radio's album cover? This looks like the cover for an early ’90s third-rate grunge metal act. At best, it's a lousy version of a Vaugh Oliver style 4AD package. The booklet is a bit better, but still. This band can self-produce its records, but it opts for slick, soulless design? It doesn't add up. Don't judge a book by its cover, Cookie Mountain is pretty decent.

Olbermann!
I kinda like this guy.

Peter, Bjorn and John
Who else is hip to these Swedes? Just heard 'em. The "Young Folks" remix is ace.

You may have noticed...
a break in the blogging. It's been a busy month but also I'm supposed to be blogging at work, which really takes the fun out of blogging from home. That said, the Spike Lee Katrina "doc" running on HBO this week will make you sad, angry and nauseous all at once.

Lollapalooza as it really happened.
I actually had a great time and that wasn't entirely due to my mixing of Sophia Coppola's new champagne with Vitamin Water, but it definitely had something to do with it. I'm not a huge RHCP fan, but Frusciante is just awesome to watch, even from 30,000 people away. {my lousy photos will not upload for some reason... just picture Perry Farrell in a white suit with a pink shirt with the Chicago skyline behind him.}

The Power of Nightmares
I highly suggest you check out this BBC doc series (from 2004) if you are interested in the history of the Neo-Con and radical Islamist movements. The first episode of the doc traces the birth and rise to power of both Straussians and Islamic Brotherhood leading up to Afghanistan which found the Neo-Con and Jihadist revolutionaries teaming up against the Soviets. The big shocker for me was about the Team B, the NeoCon group which built up the myth of the Soviet threat in order to derail dentente. Also interesting is that the CIA and the NeoCons have been battling since the ’70s. A warning: this doc makes the pragmatist Kissinger look very very good compared to the nuts we have in power right now. I'm not sure if BBC AM is broadcasting this, if not, they should be.

You can screen the entire doc here:
Part 1

Time Out Beirut
Everyone I know who's read these letters has found them pretty affecting. I actually have the complete text but I'm not really cleared to publish it. My thoughts are with my colleagues Ramsay and Amir Ben-David.

Pitchfork, in brief
I had to split the scene a few times but I don't think I missed anything amazing. Word is that Spank Rock were killing everyone who hadn't heard them before, which doesn't surprise me. Os Mutantes videos I shot came out like abstract modernist paintings, must have something to do with the zoom button.

Pre-Pitchfork Party
I'm spinning some records downstairs.

What's the matter with North Dakota?

Nothing this weekend, really... crystal blue skies, waves of bright yellow canola and blue-lavendar flax. I met some really interesting people from different walks of life that are now connected to me. These nice folks had the displeasure of seeing me with a swollen mouth and I had the joy of coming home to a two-hour date with the dentist chair. Hopefully, I'll be back to normal someday.

On the way home, I borrowed What's the Matter with Kansas? (which I had bought my Dad for Christmas when it came out) and plowed through it like a 20-ton threshing machine running on high-test ethanol. It's a great airport book for travelling lapsed-leftists. It'll get your blood boiling, make you feel sorrow for the working religious right and also scare the crap out of you... in a good way. I know this falls into my book reviews of books that are easily available on the used shelf, but my stack of new books is just too intimidating. Tom Frank's book does a lot of repeating itself, but that keeps it focused. His periodic mentions of punk rock bands, the Embarassment and his chapter on his personal political journey via college at first irked me, but end up being quite memorable. He has great knowledge of his home state and for that alone, he holds attention. While we are on the topic, I guess there is a historically inspired indie music fest coming up in Lawrence. What's up with all these music fests?

In other news, my World Cup pool standings took some serious damage because I forgot to make my second round picks in time. How do I feel about the way things have gone? Remarkably good. France has been stunning in the last couple games. The talent-heavy Brazil never found its groove and neither did England really. Portugal seemed to have some heat, but it faded and they seem to play dirtier than anyone else. Italy began as a bit of an opportunistic, dare I say, lazy team, but really hit its stride later. I love the idea of Zidane winning the world cup in his last appearance. Right now, I'm pulling for France.

Revenge of the Nerds?
Yes, it's true. Two of the world's richest men admit that free market capitalism is incapable of doing anything about poverty.

My quick Intonation festival top five:

1. Blue Cheer, not the original guitarist but I sure couldn't tell. They might have relaxed the tempo on a few tunes but were otherwise powerful, charismatic and real... which couldn't really be said of any of the other live acts.

2. Lupe Fiasco, skateboarders on stage, more paranoia about people downloading or recording his tracks, but he has a vibe and some pretty catchy tunes... okay, really just "Kick Push" but he was on.

3. Free-flowing 312.

4. the poster tent... I'm really into those skill-screened rock posters, even though I think it's hard to find one that both looks good and has good bands on it. I have a small collection that I have carefully unstapled from boarded-up walls on Division Street. There was a nice Tristeza poster but I can't even remember who that is. There was a killer screen for a Sonic Youth show in 2002 that I actually went to. But Sonic Youth?

5. The BBC fake Masterpiece Theatre tent. Guerrilla marketing can be annoying, but I really want to go in this tent and play pool, I just didn't quite drink enough to do that.

6. MSTRKRFT and Jordan spinning on Friday night at Smartbar with tons of sticky, nasty people dancing like some kind of futuristic pagan tribe.

Strummer in 20/20
I gave a certain magazine editor a hard time a few years back for publishing an inaccurate bio piece on Joe Strummer. I knew that Strummer wasn't "working-class" as he was repeatedly described in the piece. The ed's excuse was "the writer has a lot of experience" or something like that, and "we don't pay our writers." Nice. Anyway, I was recently vindicated in a big way in Mojo magazine, which really got to the heart of the Strummer land of make-believe and even gave us the lowdown on Cut the Crap, that weird Clash album with the drum machine that I bought on cassette the day it came out. Crap was crappy, but it primed me for B.A.D. whom I still really like. The magazine with the shoddy fact checking and lots of freak folk in it still exists.

A lot of stoner rock out there is bullshit, but I'm really digging on Danava, coming to Chicago in July.

Frere-Jones is the crunkest member of the Magnetic Fields
I think he's on fertile ground in this piece on why recent British pop (or indie) exports don't often connect with mass American audiences, but I'm not sure what it is. He seems to say (let's infer) that a puritanical American music biz can't handle the social realism of songs about prostitutes, certainly a stretch. He cites examples of inoffensive, upifting fluff like James Blunt that has gone into the charts. Thankfully, he doesn't mention the Spice Girls, even once. Is he saying that Americans prefer uplifting fluff? When I was living the UK (early 90s), uplifting, schmaltzy fluff was all you heard on the radio. The Brit indie scene was ace but in retreat and post-grunge dominated the music press, except for Suede who laid a lot of the groundwork for the resurgence Britpop.

What he doesn't get into wondering is why are some American bands able to go over to the UK, get big (so quickly) and use that as a launching pad for US success while others seem to fall flat in the UK. I'm not sure I have an answer. I do have some anecdotal knowledge of how the British music industry sometimes worked in the ’90s which might be a contributing factor. At least one band I know had their label pay off a British music journalist to write glowing profiles of the group before its UK tour. Voila... a cheap investment produces a five year career! Does it still work that or did it ever? I have no idea. Can anyone explain Adam Green for me?

Another thread to be explored is the government programmed radio angle. The BBC has only a few channels and manages to expose a massive amount of people to a wide variety of music and styles often programmed by experts and actual DJs rather than commericial-funded corporate monoliths. Why do British people give a shit about dance music, for instance? On the other hand, why has commercial hip-hop failed to get a foothold in the UK? Traditionally, the music press in the UK has more influence, but radio also matters more there than it does here. Man, I'm rambling...

I know a famous person
Erik Wemple is a super solid guy and ace editor who also falls into the slim category of newspaper men that actually take my calls. I congratulate him on his new gig at Village Voice.

Make-up time
So backpedaling on yesterday's post, Jay let me know that he didn't do what I suggested he did in the interview and he's correct. Thanks Jay, you've given this blog some much needed gravitas. I can't talk about sneakers, Belgian ales or drum wraps for at least a week.

In the interest of making good, I should tell you that Babcock is
appearing on AirAmericaRadio's "the Marc Moran Show" on Monday, May 29 in a 20-minute segment discussing the Arthur v Godsmack episode and also Arthur's forthcoming CD (curated by Chicago's Josephine Foster) which benefits anti-military recruiting campaigns.

Judgment day for Godsmack?
This is almost a month old but it's been a hot topic this week.
The guy from Godsmack definitely deserved to get some serious flack for this and props to (we don't do fact-checking, we just love pentagrams) Arthur magazine's Jay Babcock for going for the throat. But sometimes when music writers do politics, they forget to do so journalistically. Babcock doesn't stop to consider that the administration and the military are really two different, conflicting entities these days. He is subscribing to a Vietnam-era idea of a monolithic government/military complex. Anyone who has followed the lead-up to the Iraq invasion should know that the administration ignored the advice and dissent of top military advisors and also that many retired military officers have publicly opposed the war from the outset. I think Babcock could have done what he wanted to do without introducing unsubtle radical politics into the discussion. At the same time, I like the idea of some radical left O'Reillys out there shifting the angle of the debate. I just like it better when they are a bit more logic-bound and informed.

Also, anyone seen this doc Baghdad ER? is very well done, horrifying but not sensationalistic at all.

Be afraid, be very afraid.

Good Lordi.

The Finnish band Lordi won the Eurovision song contest with its original song 'Hard Rock Hallelujah.'

The band bears a striking resemblance to the costumed metallurgists GWAR who originally hailed from my home country of NoVa.