Monthly Archives for December 2006

“Nearer the Heart of Things”: Erik Davis profiles JOANNA NEWSOM (Arthur, 2006)

Always Coming Home

How California harper JOANNA NEWSOM’s masterpiece album Ys grew from a time of personal turmoil, ambitious collaboration and eating hamburgers again.

BY ERIK DAVIS
Photography by Eden Batki

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN ARTHUR MAGAZINE No. 25/Winter 02006

Last February in Los Angeles, Joanna Newsom took to the stage at the ArthurBall and performed, for the first time in their entirety, the five loonnggg songs that make up her new album Ys. Many folks present were already chest-deep in the cult of Joanna, a fandom that made 2004’s The Milk-Eyed Mender a leftfield indie hit and turned Newsom herself into the sort of music-maker who inspires obsessive devotion as well as pleasure. At the time I admired Mender, but was, as of yet, no acolyte. I dug a handful of songs, but like many listeners, I found Newsom’s eccentric voice sometimes grating. I also feared that the outsider waif thing was just an underground pose stitched together with lacy thrift-store duds and an iPod stuffed with rips of the Carter Family and Shirley Collins.

My bad. The performance I saw that night was preternatural: a young artist stretching beyond her art towards something even more essential, simultaneously in command of her craft and caught in the headlights of her own onrushing brilliance. The song cycle she played was to Mender what, I dunno, Astral Weeks is to Blowin’ Your Mind, or what Smile is to The Beach Boys Today! She sang of meteorites and bears and ringing bells, of her and him and you, and she played not for us, it seemed, nor for herself exactly, but for the very presences her music conjured. Her songs were not performed so much as drawn from herself like nets dredged from the sea, heavy with kelp and flotsam and minnows that flashed before darting back into the deep. When she occasionally stumbled and lost her way, the material itself would pick her up again and carry her forward.

None of us standing there in that rapt crowd had ever heard music like this before. Newsom’s wild Child ballads seemed loosed from some location heretofore unseen in the realms of popular song, a secret garden lodged between folk and art music, or an unnamed island lying somehow equidistant from Ireland, Senegal, and California’s redwood coast. The music fluttered and leapt, and though there were few obvious refrains, the patterns she played circled round some magnetic core of return, at once familiar and strange. Yes she was genius. But genius has become such a throwaway word, a thumbtack of muso claptrap that marks the person rather than the source that lies behind the person. And this music was all source. And yet, it was she and not the source we heard—this charming young harper with the arresting voice and the awkward stage patter and the lacy thrift-store duds.

Sorry to keep the tankards of Kool-Aid raised high, my friends, but Newsom’s album is also pretty dang nifty: the cult disc of the decade, like the aforementioned Astral Weeks or In The Aeroplane Over the Sea. She is supported on the album by Van Dyke Parks, the sometimes Brian Wilson collaborator who feathered four of Newsom’s five songs with vivid and sprightly arrangements. The orchestration adds another dimension to Newsom’s already evocative ramble through memory and desire, a journey that goes in turns intimate and cryptic, like the alchemical meanderings of a deep dream.

Faced with music as singular as Ys, it seems almost churlish to try to pin the butterfly down. (Or is that a moth?) That said, there is no denying that the spirit of prog has moved across the face of its waters. The album, after all, has an allegorical Renaissance portrait for a cover, features oboes and French horns, and draws its odd, difficult-to-pronounce title from the Celtic folklore of France. (It sounds like ees, as in “Oui, Serge Gainsborough ees very heep.”) And indeed you must return to Van Der Graaf Generator or Trespass-era Genesis to find this sort of dramatic and, sorry, literary fit between highly wrought lyrics and the dynamics of long, intricate, tempo-twisting songs. However, I would urge you even farther back, to the great songs on the great Incredible String Band records, which also embroider earth visions onto patchwork tunes that combine heavy insights and bucolic play. For though the landscape of Ys is not particularly psychedelic, its peaks are very high, from “Emily”’s invocation of the cosmic void to “Cosmia”’s final ascent through the moonlight.

Happily for all, Newsom approaches such high-fallutin matters with a demotic American spirit and a folk fan’s love of homespun melody and pastoral grit—not to mention a canniness that makes her at once too young and too old for the truly pompous. Ys may be precious, but it is precious because the spirit behind it is rare. It does not rely on sentiment, nor does it make Great Statements. It is, rather, a Great Work: an organic but deeply intentional labor from start to finish, from the inspiration through the cover art, from the arrangements through the final, analog mixdown. Newsom gathered a stellar cast of characters around her, including Steve Albini, Jim O’ Rourke, and Van Dyke Parks, who contributes some of the best work in his career. But it is Newsom’s own visionary ambition that makes this record the very opposite of a sophomore slump. A lesser artist would have simply ridden the quirky crest of The Milk-Eyed Mender, but Newsom glimpsed a golden ring glittering on the far horizon, and she stretched beyond herself with pluck and hooked it good.

HOMESTEAD
The house that Joanna Newsom recently purchased is, well, rather Joanna Newsom. The building lies in the outskirts of Nevada City, an old mining town nestled in the western foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada range. It has a small circular driveway, rose bushes, and a broken fountain with two cherubs smeared with mud up to their necks. The one-acre property is fringed by sycamores and pines, and two massive ivy-swaddled conifers loom over the patio out back, dripping gobs of sap onto a weathered table. The firethorn bushes that cloak the breakfast nook and the porch haven’t been trimmed in a while, deranging the otherwise orderly air of a proper British cottage. Past their plump clusters of golden berries, you can glimpse her old, worn-out pedal harp, peeking through the window like a stage prop.

Newsom answers the door with a smile and invites me in. She is dressed in a knitted brown skirt, a low-cut sleeveless shirt, chocolate brown knee-high socks and moccasins. The wide leather belt tugged snug around her waist looks a lot the belt she wears in her portrait for the cover of Ys. The bangs are gone, and she’s cute as a vintage button.

“I’m sorry. I just moved in and I haven’t really been here much.” There is not much furniture beyond a couch and, alongside her harp, a gorgeous Craftsman wooden stool inlaid with turquoise. There is hand-written sheet music scattered on the floor and one large decoration waiting to be mounted on the wall, a nineteenth-century funereal display scavenged from a San Francisco thrift store. “It was there for years, and finally I had to have it.” Having spent the last few weeks obsessively listening to Ys, I can see why, so crisply does the thing reflect some of her major themes and images: inside the large glass case, two stuffed doves face off over clusters of dried wheat, neatly arranged over a fat and faded ribbon printed with condolences.

We settle down on the table outside, and dig into the past. Newsom grew up around Nevada City, but she lived for years in the Bay Area, where she studied composition and creative writing at Mills before dropping out, writing some songs and recording them with her first boyfriend, the musician and producer Noah Georgeson. Even then, she kept returning to the nest on weekends, but feared the phenomenon an old Austin friend of mine referred to as the velvet rut. “It’s a real easy place to get kind of stagnant in your head, to get overly comfortable and have the years pass by.” Now that her career has taken off and she is constantly traveling, she decided to return to the place that, in her words, makes her feel happiest and most at home.

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"Year of the thing" zodiac calendar print by Nat Russell


“2 color silkscreen on yellow paper. 15.5 inches wide and 23 inches tall. suitable for framing, thumbtacking, or rolling up and hiding in your closet for 20 years until your child finds it and hangs it in their dorm room with black lights shining upon it, finally releasing years of hidden mojo. Edition of 50, signed and numbered. $25 shipping included, paypal: nb_russell (at) hotmail.com. if you order today i can ship tomorrow for a new year’s delivery. i am better at shipping quicker now, having worked out some kinks from last month”

Vinyl of the year: Fat Possum's "George Mitchell Collection" seven-inch series

Each$5 7-inch in this series has two vintage recordings by one artist, culled from the George Mitchell collection.

Vol. 1 – Cecil Barfield
Vol. 2 – Buddy Moss
Vol. 3 – Leon Pinson
Vol. 4 – Houston Stackhouse
Vol. 5 – Big Joe Williams
Vol. 6 – John Lee Ziegler
Vol. 7 – Othar Turner
Vol. 8 – Lonzie Thomas
Vol. 9 – Sleepy John Estes
Vol. 10 – Teddy Williams
Vol. 11 – Green Paschal
Vol. 12 – William “Do-Boy” Diamond
Vol. 13 – Dewey Corley & Walter Miller
Vol. 15 – Bud White
Vol. 16 – George Henry Bussey
Vol. 17 – Jim Bunkley

WHO IS GEORGE MITCHELL?
‘George Mitchell doesn’t just get the blues, he has to go out and find them. Thanks to his efforts, fans of authentic country blues have been able to hear the real deal without making the kind of road trips required of a dedicated producer, editor, musicologist, and folklorist. The listener who knows the real cosmic purpose of a bottleneck, knife blade, or small metal tube should drool over an account of Mitchell’s exploits in the Deep South: “That night Mitchell returned to Burnside’s place with a case of beer and some whiskey. Ten months later, Burnside had his first release.” “George Mitchell was out roaming the South, scouting for stylistically eccentric blues musicians during the late ’60s and ’70s,” summarizes another report. The previously mentioned performer was R.L. Burnside, a bluesman of particular delight in an era when death’s scythe seemed to be severely limiting the ranks of such unique senior statesmen. Mississippi Joe Callicott and Jimmy Lee Williams are other artists who Mitchell brought to light in a big way as a result of his research trips; he is considered a specialist on the subject of Callicott. Credits for Mitchell can also be found on recordings of more famous performers in this genre, including Furry Lewis and Skip James, his involvement ranging from recording new material to, in the latter case, fine-tuning a reissue. Mitchell, who worked quite regularly with the Fat Possum label, presented an annual folk festival in Columbus, MS. He also published a book, Blow My Blues Away, which has been difficult to track down since its early-’70s release. – Eugene Chadbourne, All Music Guide‘

Go here for ordering info.

"Astoria Death Trip": Magic mushroom hunting in the Pacific Northwest

from The Stranger, Dec 14-20, 2006

Astoria Death Trip

Hunting Psychedelic Mushrooms in Astoria, Oregon, Means Risking the Elements, Arrest, and Death.
A Tale of Stupidity, History, and Survival.

BY CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE

There is plenty of time on the drive from Seattle to Astoria, Oregon, to wonder about how you’re going to die.

Will I be standing up when it happens? Will I be outside? Will I be in these clothes?

The drive is three hours, give or take. Robert drives us in his truck. He has tattoo sleeves on both arms and builds houses for a living and is learning how to build wooden ships. We take Interstate 5 to Highway 8. It’s raining. We pass fluffy dark trees, unusually bright yellow trees, rusting metal, mossy boulders, propane tanks, satellite dishes, white shacks, wet logs, a neon rooster on the roof of a restaurant, a Curves, meadows that winter rains have turned to shallow lakes, low banks of funereal mist. Twice we pull over and reassemble the busted windshield wiper so we can see the road.

Will I die on this highway, before we even get there?

Eminem, on the CD player, is rapping about meeting “a new-wave blond babe with half of her head shaved” at a rave, feeding her mushrooms (“I just wanted to make you appreciate nature”), and watching her die:

She said, “Help me, I think I’m having a seizure!”/I said, “I’m high too, bitch! Quit grabbing my T-shirt!/Would you calm down? You’re starting to scare me.”/She said, “I’m 26 years old and I’m not married!/I don’t even have any kids and I can’t cook!”/”I’m over here, Sue. You’re talking to the plant. Look,/we need to get to a hospital before it’s too late./’Cuz I never seen anyone eat as many mushrooms as you ate…”

Robert and I listened to Eminem when we were in Amsterdam with friends last year. Robert proposed to the woman he’s now married to on that trip, and I tried psychoactive mushrooms for the first time. In Amsterdam, psychoactive mushrooms are sold in “smart shops,” in clear plastic produce containers with stickers on them that tell you where they’re from and what they’re going to do to you.

I was intensely afraid of seeing things that didn’t exist. Will I jab a fireplace poker into my stomach, thinking I’m a marshmallow? I bought a mealy clump of truffles called Philosopher’s Stones (Psilocybe mexicana) that were supposed to give me a cerebral high without any visual gobbledygook. All I felt was loopy, starved, and sick. The next day, Robert and I got a different variety, Psilocybe cubensis, these ones floppy, cute, and mushroom-shaped. The container said they were from Astoria, Oregon. Practically home! I ate one or two and Robert ate a handful and we walked around after the sun went down. I was expecting butterflies in leotards or swirling fractals or whatever, but the visual effects were subtle. Everything (buildings, water, colors) looked like a better, happier version of itself. That’s it. Everything seemed as unsullied and promising as a hypothetical, as if we were walking through an architect’s drawing of the real world, rather than the real world itself. Plato would have been blown away by it—everything in its ideal state, right in front of you—and actually there’s evidence that he did love it, or something like it: The consumption of ergot, a fungus that grows on barley, was involved in ancient Greek ritualism. Plus, the mushrooms put my thoughts on shuffle, which sounds awful but is actually fascinating, not to mention useful, especially if you’re generally a stubborn thinker.

I pointed out that we’d flown halfway across the planet to eat something that grows in our backyard. Robert said he knew someone in Astoria who could show us how to find these suckers in the wild. So that’s what we’re doing, finally. We’re driving to Astoria to find these suckers in the wild.

* * *

A bunch of anxieties—dying, not finding anything, getting busted, dying—are twisting around in my stomach. And Eminem’s goofball death ballads aren’t helping. Soon we’re going to be standing in the wilderness, staring at something dirty and penis-shaped growing out of the ground, something that might kill us if we’re wrong about what it is, and then we’re going to eat it—and that’s the best-case scenario; that’s if all goes well. I decide to share my terror with Robert, because he currently seems pretty un-terrified, by reading him some articles.

On my laptop I have a few pages from a website done up in psychedelic blues and pinks called Mushroom John’s Shroom World. One page is titled “Poisonous Look-a-Likes” and has several photos of Psilocybe mushrooms (the genus we’re looking for) and Galerina mushrooms (which are deadly) side by side. They look exactly the same. There’s also a photo of a whole bunch of Psilocybe mushrooms with a Galerina growing in among them.

Fuck.

Another page reports the story of a 16-year-old girl and two teenage guys on Whidbey Island in the early 1980s who ate what they assumed were Psilocybe mushrooms but were in fact Galerina autumnalis. “Both boys survived the ordeal, yet both have permanent damage to their kidneys and liver. The girl died.”

Fuck.

The other pages contain warning after warning not to do what we’re about to do. “The author suggests that it would be dangerous for a novice mushroom hunter to consume even the most minute part of any wild mushroom without having had said mushroom properly identified by someone knowledgeable in the field of mushroom identification….” “I do want people to enjoy what they are searching for and not end up on a slab at the local coroner’s morgue….” “Many of the deadly poisonous species of mushrooms macroscopically resemble some of the hallucinogenic mushrooms in the genus Psilocybe….” “It is very easy to make a mistake….”

I also have a book I bought in a convenience store called Guide to Western Mushrooms, which says on the first page: “Don’t—under any circumstances—experiment by eating strange mushrooms.”

Robert takes a deep breath, lets out a nervous laugh, and says, “Well, Joe knows what he’s doing. We’ll make him eat one first. Then we’ll wait 20 minutes.”

Joe is going to be our guide. We’re about to pick him up.

Not a bad idea.

At a bend on a stretch of Highway 107, just before we get to the 101, there’s a cloud break. The silver car in front of us shines insanely. The highway shines like silver. The silver car’s wheels are kicking up water in a blinding spray.

We drive into the light.

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Jim Woodring's MR. BUMPER



“PRE-ORDER MR. BUMPER FOR THE TOY-LOVING MANIAC ON YOUR HOLIDAY SHOPPING LIST!

“Mr. Bumper… the very name sends shivers up the spines of renegade natural historians everywhere. For months, he has been but a handful of shimmering photons, a tiny scrim or watercolor particulate, a ghostly ideal hovering in the twilight at the hour of nameless longing.
And now, after so many false starts, so many urgent negotiations, so much clenching and unclenching of eager fingers, Mr. Bumper is about to become a reality in well-appointed homes throughout the world. Yes! Legions of freshly-cast and brilliantly painted Mr. Bumpers are marching into their boxes to get ready for the long sea voyage to these shores.

“Will they be here in time for Christmas? Heh heh… no. A few advance copies have been rushed to selected outlets (like OKOK in Seattle) but when these are gone there will be no more until January.

“However, you can give Mr. B in absentia! How? Simply PRE-ORDER MR. BUMPER NOW. You’ll receive a handsome certificate telling your chosen recipient that his or her very own Mr. Bumper is steaming his way toward them and will be mailed to them just as soon as we receive the lot.
As you can see in the pictures, Mr. Bumper is a complicated two-part entity who conceals his excruciatingly tender bodulation underneath a tough, shiny carapace. And we believe we may say without fear of contradiction that Mr.B is the ONLY toy on the market today with eight legs, three mouths, 37 eyes and a flame coming out of its fore-trunk.
We will be selling Mr. Bumper in two color schemes:
RED COWL/ GREEN BODY
GREEN COWL/YELLOW BODY
They are $60 each, plus $11.40 for Priority Mail postage and handling anywhere in the US.”

ARTHUR EMAIL BULLETIN No. 0062

“COMMAND PERFORMANCE”

The Arthur Magazine Email Bulletin

No. 0062

December 18, 02006

Website:

http://www.arthurmag.com

Comments:

editor@arthurmag.com

Glad tidings,

1. EXCERPT FROM FORMER BLACK FLAG BASSIST CHUCK DUKOWSKI INTERVIEW IN ARTHUR NO. 25:

“The people in power don’t want to have places where young people can get together easily in any numbers, to associate and trade ideas and have some community besides the schools where they’re super-segregated and super-repressed. I remember when Chief Davis, the former LAPD police chief, said in an interview, ‘What you need to do is bear down on them when they’re young. You break them like a horse and then you can ride them the rest of their lives.’

“I think it was Davis, maybe it was his predecessor, but I remember reading that in the damn paper! Motherfuck! It was something that I, on the outside of things, had been thinking was going on, and now I realized that that WAS what was going on. We’d go do our [Black Flag] concert, come outside and see the cops beating up all the people who came to hear us. They’d bust them all up, breaking legs and arms. Just beating the crap out of people. It was all about keeping people down and showing them who’s boss before they get a chance to feel like they can do something with their lives.

…

“About a year and a half ago, I went to a friend’s party where he had these Jarocho musicians playing. The music is from the Veracruz part of Mexico, it’s a kind of music that’s African and indigenous. These groups are made up of extended families. So the whole group, this extended family, is performing in different combinations and different groups, from the oldest people to the youngest: everybody’s getting their little cameos, everybody’s playing support to everybody else or taking a moment where they’re the ‘star,’ so to speak. What was interesting to me was the breakdown of the ageism. Everybody was participating in it. I started thinking that this is probably closer to where people are coming from, naturally.

“The division by age is probably on purpose. There’s always a desire to divide and pit various groups in the culture against one another, and thereby weaken any chance of people getting together and coming up with alternatives to the governmental infrastructure for holding things together, and the giant corporations and things that hire them. It’s like at school, where they line everybody up by age, and then have them line up by height, or make them learn to march in lines: all of this kind of programming and dividing people up, and ultimately pitting them against one another, is so that they’re easier to control. It’s so much easier to take advantage of somebody who is denied the insights of their forebears. It’s so much easier to take advantage of somebody if they are robbed of the energy of their offspring. I think you need to keep everybody engaged with each other, and then the culture is rich, and has the life and vitality of the whole human family that’s there.”

2. TUESDAY NIGHT DEC. 19 AT MANDRAKE IN LOS ANGELES

“Lite Storms and Cosmic Visions—Earth music and water brother vibes from the ’60s and ’70s from Flo and Erik [Bluhm]”

Tuesday 12/19/06    

9-12 PM   

no cover

Mandrake Bar

2692 S. La Cienega Blvd. Los Angeles, Calif. 90034

between Venice Blvd and Washington Blvd.

Info:

greatgodpan.com

mandrakebar.com

3. IT’S HOLY MODAL WEEKEND JAN. 5-7, 2007 IN PDX

“The Holy Modal Rounders …. Bound to Lose”: a documentary film by Sam Wainwright Douglas, Paul Lovelace, Jesse Fisher and Francis Hatch

When fiddler Peter Stampfel collided with guitarist Steve Weber during the “Great Folk Scare” of the early sixties in New York, the two musicians formed a powerful bond based on their shared fascination with American roots music and early psychedelia. Dubbing themselves The Holy Modal Rounders, these eccentric outsiders have drawn a dedicated following of luminaries and lunatics.

From their origins in New York’s Greenwich Village folk scene and their involvement in the Easy Rider soundtrack, to the lost years of constant drugging, endless touring and a final shot at redemption, The Holy Modal Rounders Bound To Lose recounts the unique forty-year history of these true American originals. With startling intimacy, the film also documents the band’s arduous, amusing, and sometimes heartbreaking struggle to capitalize on their recent resurgence in popularity, culminating in an unpredictable 40th anniversary concert in Portland, Oregon.  

More than just a chronicle of an obscure band, The Holy Modal Rounders Bound To Lose is a raucous celebration of a lost American outlaw subculture as it draws its final rebellious breaths.

Bound to Lose features endearing and hilarious  appearances by playwright (and former Rounders drummer) Sam Shepard, Dennis Hopper, John Sebastian of The Lovin’ Spoonful, Peter Tork of the Monkees, The Fugs, Loudon Wainwright III, Dave Van Ronk, Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo, Wavy Gravy and many many more.

“BOUND TO LOSE” screens  

FRIDAY JANUARY 5 AT 7:00PM

SUNDAY JANUARY 7 AT 2:00PM

WHITSELL AUDITORIUM – PORTLAND ART MUSEUM

1219 SW PARK AVENUE

www.nwfilm.org

PLUS: The Holy Modal Rounders + Freak Mountain Ramblers + Special Guests will hold a rare performance at The Crystal Ballroom on Saturday, January 6, 2007!!!!

Info and tix:

www.menamins.com/Crystal/

4. NEW SUBLIME FREQUENCIES FILM SCREENING JAN 5, 6 AND 9 ON THE EAST COAST…

“Musical Brotherhoods from the Trans-Saharan Highway”

a film by Hisham Mayet

(from the Sublime Frequencies crew)

(57 m.)

“Hisham Mayet’s latest film showcases an assortment of spectacular musical dramas presented live and unfiltered on the home turf of the world’s most dynamic string/drum specialists performing and manifesting the ecstatic truth. Ancient mystical brotherhoods have been flourishing for centuries in and around the cities of Marrakesh and Essaouira in Morocco where the trade caravans have gathered from their long journeys across the Trans-Saharan Highway. This is some of the last great street music on Earth.”

Trailer:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=wA727eYcO5E

Screening dates:

* Friday, January 5, 2007 

7&9 p.m.

Anthology Film Archives

32 Second Avenue (at Second Street)

NYC

Telephone: (212) 505-5181

* Saturday, January 6, 2007

Philadelphia International House

3701 Chestnut Street,

Philadelphia, PA  19104

Tel: 215-387-5125

* Tuesday, January 9, 2007

9:00 p.m.

the 5th floor

405 west Franklin St.

Baltimore, MD

this is being presented and sponsored by True Vine Records(1123 w. 36th st., baltimore, md 21211  located in downtown hampden, baltimore. telephone: 410 235 4500)

5. BUY YOURSELF (OR SOMEBODY DEAR TO YOU) SOME ARTHUR.

We’ve lowered out SUBSCRIPTION rates. Starting today, new subscriptions to Arthur for one year (six issues) are $20US/$25Can/$50World(airmail). We do gift subscriptions, too. Ordering info:

http://www.arthurmag.com/news/index.php

We’re also selling 50 sets of something we’re calling THE ARTHUR COLLECTION: all 25 issues of Arthur, the full-color ArthurFest 2005 poster by Arik Roper, the full-color ArthurBall 2006 poster by Ron Rege, and the full-color Arthur Nights 2006 poster by Maya Hayuk. $190US/$230Can/$275World. Ordering info:

http://www.arthurmag.com/store/bastet_other.php

And finally we’re offering the ARTHUR EVENTS POSTER SET: the legendary ArthurFest 2005 poster by Arik Roper, a hand-silkscreened South By Southwest Arthur 2006 party poster, and the Arthur Nights 2006 poster designed by Maya Hayuk. $20US/$25Can/$30World.

6. ARTHUR BLOG

Did you know? “Magpie,” the Arthur blog has been updated daily by Arthur editor Jay Babcock since January 2002. Check it at

http://www.arthurmag.com/magpie/

7. PHOTOS, FOOTAGE FROM ARTHURNIGHTS…

Check out the updated archives at

http://arthurnights.imeem.com/

8. THEY’RE STILL TRYING TO BURY ‘IDIOCRACY’

“Idiocracy,” the super-vicious feature film satire by Mike Judge (Office Space, Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill)  that we’ve been championing since we first lucked into seeing it, is finally coming to DVD after its suspiciously limited theatrical release a few months ago. (How limited? It NEVER screened in New York. Or San Francisco.) 

But the DVD’s not out until January — in other words, just after the holiday season, when nobody is paying attention and nobody has any money to spend anyways. The film is being buried a second time. Could it have something to do with the way that the film explicitly, mercilessly mocks corporations like Carl’s Jr., Starbucks, CostCo, Gatorade, H & R Block and (lest we forget) Fuddruckers? 

The Judge camp still isn’t talking about what exactly is going down with this film, but… well, seems like some high-level calls were made or something. Anyways, if you pre-order a copy through this link, Arthur earns a few Amapennies:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000K7VHOG?ie=UTF8&tag=barbelith&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B000K7VHOG

9. THE BEST THING WE HEARD ALL YEAR…(And we do mean all year.) 

Bob Dylan’s sparkling, witty “Theme Time Radio Hour” wherein he jokes, fibs and spiels between cuts all centered round a single topic (“Mom,” “Tennessee,” “Dogs,” “Jail”, etc). You probably can guess that each (weekly) show has been a true treasure box of song, history and character. But did you know that every show to date has been archived by some wonderful collector for easy download? Check it out:

http://whitemanstew.com/ttrh/viewtopic.php?t=98

Long may your egg nog,

The Ladies and Gentlemen of Arthur 

Los Angeles * Philadelphia * Wherever you are

“Change depends on people who know, live and stay in a community; it has to come from inside, and starts with an artist’s mindset.”


In Houston, Art Is Where the Home Is

December 17, 2006 New York Times

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
HOUSTON

ON a strangely balmy late autumn afternoon, while the art world busied itself in Miami with beachfront reservations and limo drivers, Rick Lowe was, as he generally is, on Holman Street in southeast Houston’s predominantly black Third Ward, greeting another out-of-towner.

In the gloaming, decrepit houses and weedy lots dotted some surrounding blocks, on the edges of which were new double-garage brick homes — signs of encroaching gentrification, an unwanted side effect of Mr. Lowe’s work.

Although it’s hard to tell at a glance, this stretch of Holman may be the most impressive and visionary public art project in the country — a project that is miles away, geographically and philosophically, from Chelsea and Art Basel and the whole money-besotted paper-thin art scene.

Mr. Lowe, a lanky, amiable, remarkably youthful-looking 45-year-old artist from Alabama, moved to Houston 21 years ago and lives here in the Third Ward, where he founded Project Row Houses. In 1990, “a group of high school students came over to my studio,” he recalled. “I was doing big, billboard-size paintings and cutout sculptures dealing with social issues, and one of the students told me that, sure, the work reflected what was going on in his community, but it wasn’t what the community needed. If I was an artist, he said, why didn’t I come up with some kind of creative solution to issues instead of just telling people like him what they already knew. That was the defining moment that pushed me out of the studio.”

He tried to think afresh what it meant to be a truly political artist, beyond devising the familiar agitprop, gallery decoration and plop-art-style public sculpture. He considered what the German artist Joseph Beuys once described as “the enlarged conception of Art,” which includes, as Beuys put it, “every human action.” Life itself might be a work of art, Mr. Lowe realized: art can be the way people live.

And the Third Ward could be his canvas. He was inspired by John Biggers, the late African-American muralist who painted black neighborhoods of shotgun houses like the ones on Holman Street and showed them to be places of pride and community, not poverty and crime. “It hit me,” Mr. Lowe recalled, “that we should find an area like the one that Biggers painted that was historically significant and bring it to life.”

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"False Premises, False Promises: A Quantitative History of Ownership Consolidation in the Radio Industry" by Peter DiCola for the Future of Music Coaltion

From the Future of Music Coalition’s Radio Study – December, 2006:

Executive Summary
This report is a quantitative history of ownership consolidation in the radio industry over the past decade, studying the impact of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and accompanying FCC regulations.

A Brief History of Radio Regulation
Since the 1930s, the federal government has limited the number of radio stations that one entity could own or control. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) began gradually to relax these limits. Finally, in the Telecommuni-cations Act of 1996 (Telecom Act), Congress eliminated the national cap on station ownership, allowing unlimited national consolidation. With the same law, Congress also raised the local caps on station ownership. In addition, as this study describes in detail, the FCC regulations implementing the Telecom Act allowed more consolidation to occur than alternative regulations would have allowed.

Methodology and Data Sources
To keep the quantitative analysis as simple and transparent as possible, we have not included technical statistical analysis. Instead, we have filled this report with standard, antitrust-style measures of concentration; our own new methodologies for measuring localism and diversity; and many time-series analyses that simply track who owned what when. The study covers thirty years of historical data wherever possible; in other places, the study focuses on the last ten to twelve years—the main period of interest for examining the impact of the Telecom Act.

The FCC’s own efforts at collecting data on the radio industry are inadequate, as we emphasize throughout the study. Just as the FCC does, we have relied on industry-collected data to measure changes in radio consolidation and programming. These proprietary sources include: Media Access Pro (Radio Version) from industry consultants BIA Financial Networks, Duncan’s American Radio, and Radio and Records magazine.

Major Findings of the Study
Highlights from the study are organized here in similar fashion to its three chapters. The first chapter focuses on national radio consolidation, the second on local radio consolidation, and the third on radio programming.

Emergence of Nationwide Radio Companies
Fewer radio companies: The number of companies that own radio stations peaked in 1995 and has declined dramatically over the past decade. This has occurred largely because of industry consolidation but partly because many of the hundreds of new licenses issued since 1995 have gone to a handful of companies and organizations.

Larger radio companies: Radio-station holdings of the ten largest companies in the industry increased by almost fifteen times from 1985 to 2005. Over that same period, holdings of the fifty largest companies increased almost sevenfold.

Increasing revenue concentration: National concentration of advertising revenue increased from 12 percent market share for the top four companies in 1993 to 50 percent market share for the top four companies in 2004.
Increasing ratings concentration: National concentration of listenership continued in 2005—the top four firms have 48 percent of the listeners, and the top ten firms have almost two-thirds of listeners.

Declining listenership: Across 155 markets, radio listenership has declined over the past fourteen years for which data are available, a 22 percent drop since its peak in 1989.

Consolidation in Local Radio Markets
The Largest Local Owners Got Larger: The number of stations owned by the largest radio entity in the market has increased in every local market since 1992 and has increased considerably since 1996.

More Markets with Owners Over the Local Cap: The FCC’s signal-contour market definition allowed companies to exceed local ownership caps in 104 markets.

Increasing Local Concentration: Concentration of ownership in the vast majority of local markets has increased dramatically.

How Lower Caps Can Be Justified: The FCC’s local caps—in fact, even lower caps than the current caps—can be justified by analyzing how the caps prevent excessive concentration of market share.

Declining Local Ownership: The Local Ownership Index, created by Future of Music Coalition, shows that the localness of radio ownership has declined from an average of 97.1 to an average of 69.9, a 28 percent drop.

Restoration of Local Ownership is Possible: To restore the Local Ownership Index to even 90 percent of its pre-1996 level, the FCC would have to license dozens of new full power and low-power radio licenses to new local entrants and re-allocate spectrum to new local entrants during the digital audio broadcast transition.

Radio Programming in the Wake of Consolidation
Homogenized Programming: Just fifteen formats make up 76% of commercial programming.

Large Station Groups Program Narrowly: Owners who exceed or exactly meet the local ownership cap tend to program heavily in just eight formats.

Only Small Station Groups Offer Niche Formats: Niche musical formats like Classical, Jazz, Americana, Bluegrass, New Rock, and Folk, where they exist, are provided almost exclusively by smaller station groups.

Small Station Groups Sustain Public-Interest Programming: Children’s programming, religious programming, foreign-language and ethnic-community programming, are also predominantly provided by smaller station groups.

Format Overlap Remains Extensive: Radio formats with different names can overlap up to 80% in terms of the songs played on them.

Individual Stations Use Highly Similar Playlists: Playlists for commonly owned stations in the same format can overlap up to 97%. For large companies, even the average pairwise overlap usually exceeds 50%

Network Ownership Is Also Concentrated: The three largest radio companies in terms of station ownership are also the three largest companies in terms of programming-network ownership.

Conclusion
Radio consolidation has no demonstrated benefits for the public. Nor does it have any demonstrated benefits for the working people of the music and media industries, including DJs, programmers—and musicians. The Telecom Act unleashed an unprecedented wave of radio mergers that left a highly consolidated national radio market and extremely consolidated local radio markets. Radio programming from the largest station groups remains focused on just a few formats—many of which overlap with each other, enhancing the homogenization of the airwaves.

From the recent new-payola scandal to the even more recent acknowledgements that giant media conglomerates have begun to fail as business models, we can see that government and business are catching up to the reality that radio consolidation did not work. Instead, the Telecom Act worked to reduce competition, diversity, and localism, doing precisely the opposite of Congress’s stated goals for the FCC’s media policy. Future debates about how to regulate information industries should look to the radio consolidation story for a warning about the dangers of consolidated control of a media platform.

About Future of Music Coalition
Future of Music Coalition (FMC) is a national non-profit education, research and advocacy organization that identifies, examines, interprets and translates the challenging issues at the intersection of music, law, technology and policy. FMC achieves this through continuous interaction with its primary constituency—musicians—and in collaboration with other creator/citizen groups.

About the Primary Author
Peter DiCola is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He received his J.D. magna cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School in May 2005, and was awarded the Henry M. Bates Memorial Scholarship. Currently, he serves as the Research Director of the Future of Music Coalition while he works on his dissertation. He has research interests in the fields of telecommunications law, intellectual property law, law and economics, labor economics, and industrial organization. He is the co-author, with Kristin Thomson, of Radio Deregulation: Has It Served Citizens and Musicians? (2002), which was cited by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Prometheus Radio Project v. FCC. He has also written a chapter, “Employment and Wage Effects of Radio Consolidation,” for the scholarly collection Media Diversity and Localism (Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates, 2006).

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