BELKNAP CAMPUS — On assignment, the intrepid reporter is driving through the red and black quagmire U of L students maneuver daily. Who knows why but he asks himself — as the youngest at the Seder table asks during the Jewish observance of Passover — Why is this day different from all other days?
Simple answer. It’s basketball media day, harbinger of the most sacred of seasons — college hoops. It will end April 6 with a new national champion. Which coincidentally is two days before Passover.
On Seder night it is traditional to ask Four Questions. Cardinal fanatics also have a quartet of queries as the season dawns.
The intrepid reporter intends to find answers amidst the boilerplate sound bites that plague these media show-and-tells. Read the rest of this entry »
The two of us display our Derby hats months in advance. Anna shares her vast knowledge of college pigskin. We shill for our sponsors. And I get a call from a very important Bill. Check out the wacky foolishness and shenanigans now:
So I just went for a fill up at the gas station/ convenience store/ gathering place/ donut shoppe around the corner. My new Mini Cooper, bless its thirsty little heart, takes premium.
Well, whodathunkit, I paid $264.9/ gallon.
Imagine that.
It’s no coincidence I say. Every year before a national election, prices go down in the months before the election. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
The conspiracist in me believes Big Oil wants to hoodwink us into thinking things aren’t so bad under the Republicans, so they can stay in office. Then Big Oil would get to continue getting obscene tax breaks that fuel its more than obscene profits.
So they had this big guitar jam Monday night at the Kentucky Center called “Experience Hendrix 2008 Tribute Tour.”
Essentially it’s a way for the estate of Jimi Hendrix to make some money. So too for Billy Cox, Jimi’s old Army buddy who played bass with him, and Mitch Mitchell, the drummer from the Experience who doesn’t seemed to have aged well. Hmmm.
The night also included guitar raves from Johnny Lang, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Eric Johnson, Eric Gales, Brad Whitford, Cesar Rojas and David Hidalgo from Los Lobos, Howlin’ Wolf’s old guitar player Hubert Sumlin and the ever mugging Buddy Guy. Chris Layton, drummer from Double Trouble, kept things moving all night. It was indeed Big Guitar night, a real rarity these days.
Mitchell was like an old bubbie. He padded around the stage like an alter cocker in his moo moos before bedtime. I’m surprised he wasn’t wearing a robe. Every once in awhile he’d get behind his drum kit and pretend he was playing. Several times between songs he mumbled indecipherable inanities over the mic to the crowd. Other than that he was there for the paycheck. It was sort of bizarre. Read the rest of this entry »
In a week’s time we will know the name of the next president.
Hopefully. Never underestimate the possibility of 2000 redux.
There are those vexsome Republican-leaning Diebold voting machines. And donkey and elephant lawyers with their briefcases packed. And the whole faux ACORN mess. Not to mention the pissed off hockey moms across the land.
Which is to say it might not be as cut and dried as Keith Olbermann doing the donkey dance in celebration about 2:00 a.m. next Wednesday morning. Read the rest of this entry »
I remain struck by how resonant David Byrne’s show at the Palace remains. I emailed my old compatriot, Ken Wilson, asking him what he made of Byrne’s constant references to house and home. Always one to break on through to the other side, to muse one step beyond, my pal offered these salient observations. Ken Wilson:
“Several years ago I found a tape – a ‘not-for-sale’ promotional tape intended only for dj’s – that Brian Eno made to promote a short-lived band called Hugo Largo. In the course of the tape Eno talks about what he sees as happening in rock or pop music. The texture (he’s big on ‘texture’) of the music creates a world, then a landscape, then the objects or structures in that world and landscape – and the singer tells us how to negotiate that landscape. He mentions David Byrne and Talking Heads in passing. To Eno, Byrne, or his persona, is a naïve, fresh viewer of the landscape he finds himself in. He asks questions; he tries to figure things out. There is something wide-eyed and vulnerable about that self.
“And yes, it is a landscape of buildings and homes, and focused on the quotidian, on the surroundings of home: there is curiosity and paranoia and wonder… surprise inside architecture. Remember, an early album of TH was More Songs About Buildings and Food. Even a song like ‘Life During Wartime,’ which seems spoken by an aggressive persona, is simply a man in a space trying to define that space as he stockades and stockpiles. Both Byrne and Eno, despite their hip, urbane personae, are in fact more concerned, like Andy Warhol, with finding and refining a personal, homey space, a place. Try to find Eno’s A Year with Swollen Appendices, an odd memoir that shows how much of a homebody Eno is.
“Byrne was born in Britain and moved to Baltimore, then to NYC. “How did I get here?” is a logical question. He must have always been both outsider and in-groupie, and home, well, home is heaven, and nothing ever happens there.”
While savoring David Byrne last night at the Palace, I couldn’t help but wonder what the OMFUG those punks and poseurs at CBGB thought of the Talking Heads back in the late 70s?
That scene was grunge and black leather and safety pin piercings and spit and snot and rage and three chord metal thrash. And here came these preppy artsy types from the Rhode Island School of Design playing their spare, measured, triumphantly ironic tunes for the mosh piters. I can’t imagine the questioning looks.
Byrne and his Talking Head cohorts — long since separated — survived and thrived quite nicely thank you very much. Byrne, always the ring leader, more than his brethren and sistern. He’s done art, and movie scores, introduced the music public to third world artists, soundtracks and albums, and generally spent his career engendering a cooler than cool often disengaged aesthetic.
Anna tries to take over the show, dons moose ears (as do I), wears her Sarah Palin glasses (which I do not), whiffs on the hows and whys of the BCS and generally does her best to grind the show to a screeching halt. She doesn’t succeed of course, since this is another boffo episode of rollicking ranting and raving, Culture Maven style. Check it out in its entirety NOW:
Anna goes through a whole episode without uttering the word “vagina,” but displays her vast knowlege of the Lunsford/ McConnell senate race. Plus we acknowledge the genius that is Joey Chestnut and discuss the after effects of the financial crisis. Which is to say it’s the usual fun and frivolity. Check it out:
Wholesale gasoline by the barrel is selling cheaper than it has in a long long while. Cost to refineries is about half what it was earlier this summer before the financial crisis, and before people started conserving because the per-gallon cost had gotten so high.
So, Mr. Exxon, riddle me this: If your cost is about half, how come the price at the pump isn’t half what it was?
Anna’s use of the word “vagina” is discussed yet again. Anna explains the difference between football in the stadium for the players and on the tube for fans. I mention a couple of flicks I’ve seen. The phone rings in the background. Of course, we talk about Sarah You-Know-Who, the bailout nationally and locally, and generally have a rollicking good time. Who knows, next week maybe we field dress a pigskin or something. Check it out:
It may be not apocalyptic, but it sure is fish or cut bait time for the American electorate.
We’ve heard it before, but I’ll reiterate. This is an important election. A very very important election.
Too important — hopefully — for our “American Idol” culture to fall prey to the smarmy campaign being run by the Republican ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin.
As best I recall there are tens of thousands of our boys and girls in Iraq. And we are spending billions to prop up a government there that, by all accounts, is more flush than we are because of oil profits.
Our financial system is in serious turmoil. Companies are going under. Unemployment lines are lengthy. If not panic, a certain sense of ennui is pervasive.
People need to be able to pay for health care. Hell, they need to be able to buy milk for their kids and put gas in the car so they can at least go out and look for a job to replace the one from which they’re laid off.
Our bridges are wobbly. Our roads are crumbling. Restaurants and stores are closing. The construction business is at a standstill.
And McCain and his lipsticked pit bull running pal are carping about a couple of lunch meetings Barack Obama had with a distinguished professor who happened to be a Weatherman back when Obama was just out of diapers.
So the question the American electorate must answer is this: Are we going to be so stupid, or so racist, or so loyal to these renegade elephants, that we let them get away with stealing the future with this election? Read the rest of this entry »
