If you’re stuck at work today, keep focused by pulling on those headphones and listening to KEXP Seattle right now. They’re running down the best of 2003, and it’s a very solid selection so far. (As I type, they’re around No. 60; the last few songs have included faves Clem Snide, the Rapture, Mojave 3, and Beulah.)
If I don’t see you before then, have a glorious new year, peoples.
Hope you all had a delicious holiday. A few links dredged up in the last week or so (some in the last 72 hours of oft-bedridden intestinal distress — praise be for wireless networking and a new Powerbook):
- Don’t worry: Your cell phone won’t blow up any gas stations.
- The political impact of Plan B going OTC.
- Diary of a Dean-o-Phobe, an ongoing critique of Howard Dean by the frightened Jon Chait.
- Um, $3.5 million for DailyCandy.com?!? Now, I have a special place in my heart for DailyCandy, since they gave me a nice writeup last year for the CD Mix of the Month Club. But I repeat: um, $3.5 million?!? (That said, that web site has some serious power. The day I got mentioned in their email newsletter, I got over 18,000 hits. When this site was mentioned in the lead story of the New York Times’ Circuits section, I got barely 2,000.)
- Not sure how I missed this one during the California recall, but Nao Bustamante, sister to Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, is a San Fran performance artist whose most controversial work (“Indigurrito”) featured her fastening a “burrito to her loins and call[ing] for white men to come up on stage, take a bite out of the burrito and absolve themselves of 500 years of the white man’s guilt.”
- A panel discussion on the year in books, featuring valued crabwalk.com readers Maud Newton and Jessa Crispin.
- Great Forbes piece on how the Wright brothers managed to screw up inventing a little ol’ thing we like to call flight.
- If you’ve ever thought about having your own web site, 1and1 is offering three free years of hosting if you sign up before Jan. 21. Yes, three free years — no catches that I can see. While it’s not the absolute most full-featured account possible (only one MySQL database allowed, fr’instance), it’s certainly good enough for the vast majority of people. Plus, with their cut rate on domain registry, you can have www.yournamehere.com for a total annual cost of $6. It’s hard to beat that. I’ve grabbed an account and moved a couple of my domains to 1and1’s servers — no complaints yet.
Great story by the WaPo reporter who’s been chasing the story about Strom Thurmond’s black daughter for 23 years. Quite a tale of devotion. Please shoot me if I’m still chasing the same stories in 2026 I am today.
Want some fine MP3s of recent indie rock shows? How about:
- Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, March 28 in Rotterdam
- Calexico, October 19 in Denver
- The Dismemberment Plan, June 12 in Seattle
- My Morning Jacket, October 3 in Denver
Sound quality’s quite good on all of them — grab them quick before they’re gone. If there’s even a small corner of your brain that considers 1971-era Allman Brothers a triumph of rock history, be sure to get the My Morning Jacket. I’ve been grooving quite regularly to their last album, which is pretty tremendous southern space rock. The D-Plan’s also worth grabbing, if only for the trad set closer (“OK Joke’s Over”), which in this performance turns into a 15-minute medley of Seattle rock’s greatest hits (Nirvana and Pearl Jam, sure, but also Postal Service, Elliott Smith, Screaming Trees, Alice in Chains, Soundgarten, and Temple of the damned Dog), with disorienting guest yelling from white-boy rappers Gold Chains and Cex.
By the way, if you haven’t seen it, Gold Chains’ public-transit-themed video for “I Come From San Francisco” is strangely…compelling.
In case you needed proof that I am in fact back at work, here’s my story from Saturday’s front page, about four dead kids. I hate stories about dead kids, but at least this was the best kind of dead-kids story — the kind where my co-bylines (Matt and Jason) do all the reporting and I do all the writing. No need to talk to grieving relatives that way.
Had some busy evenings of late. Had dinner with Erica Wednesday, then went to the DFWblogs holiday party. Thursday hung out with some coworkers. Friday went to the Polyphonic Spree holiday spectacular at the Lakewood with Leia, Gary, and Tina. Finally, went to see Shattered Glass and have sushi with a coworker Saturday. Whew.
About Friday: The Spree was (were?) tremendous, even better than the last time I saw them. Truly, an experience not to be missed when they come to your town. Of particular note was the 6- or 7-months pregnant young lady in the chorus, who shook her moneymaker like she was mixing paint. (Leia: “That poor kid’s going to have shaken baby syndrome before it’s even born.”)
Unfortunately, the Trachtenberg Family Slideshow Players were off their game. Papa Jason seemed to lose his grasp of reality at one point (throwing down his guitar in a rage that seemed more Travis Bickle than Pete Townshend), and the slideshows were kinda sketchy. I think that they’re teetering close to Behind the Music territory.
In other news, it’s 70 degrees in Dallas. Take that, northerners.
Great story in today’s NYT about the 91-year-old who writes the alumni notes column for Princeton’s class of 1933.
For those who miss the CD Mix of the Month Club:
Où avez-vous trouvé cette belle idée? Les projets d’échange de compilations sur Internet n’ont pas manqués ces dernières années, mais celui-ci est particulièrement redevable à Josh Benton de crabwalk.com, bloggeur américain qui fit le bonheur de nombreux amateurs avec ses “CD Mix of the Month” mensuels, jusqu’au printemps 2003.
Meanwhile, Pitchfork is running down their favorite singles of the year, with a pretty solid top 10. I really like the fact that their choices aren’t all white indie bands and that they give some love to hip-hop/R&B radio staples (Beyonce! Kelis! 50 Cent!). Catholic musical tastes — that’s where the action’s at! I think that welcome wisdom is reflected in the introduction:
For the first time this year, the effects of file-sharing on personal taste became unmistakably clear: the indie community’s palettes — and everyone else’s — have broadly diversified. Freed from the careful decision-making that comes with $12 purchases, we can now easily branch out beyond the genres we’ve always loved and discover the inherent worth in all of them…
The great thing about music right now is that listeners don’t have to be “staunch” anymore. In an age when all music is free, dedicating yourself to just one specific genre or type only denies you the hedonistic musical bliss that is rightfully yours…in 2003, there were more than enough brilliant tracks from both sides, and friends, coming from a reformed tightass, there’s just no reason to deny it.
I have a vision of a world of reformed musical tightasses.
On a final music-related note, ex-D-Plan leader Travis Morrison has posted a new song from his upcoming album. The music’s great — sounds like it would fit on a cross between Schoolhouse Rock and A Charlie Brown Christmas. (Definite Vince Guaraldi influence there.) The lyrics…well, they’re amusing (the second chorus is priceless), but they stoke my longstanding fears that Travis may be falling off that tightrope between fun and novelty. Only time will tell.
I took my last malaria pill today. (The doc said I needed to take them for four weeks after returning from the malarial region — in my case, Zambia.)
So I can finally say: Good riddance!
I was taking mefloquine (brand name Larium), which is the same stuff I took when I went to rural China in 1999. It didn’t bother me then, but this time I really saw what they mean about it causing “neuropsychiatric adverse events.” According to one study (Overbosch et al., 2001), 42 percent of people studied reported “adverse events” after taking mefloquine. Those were “neuropsychiatric adverse events” for 29 percent of patients, and 19 percent rated those NAEs as either moderate or severe.
In other words, mefloquine makes you crazy.
It certainly messed with my head. I took the pill once a week, on Wednesdays. Every Thursday I was slightly insane: depressed, angry, bitter, snippy, and on a hair trigger. You didn’t want to meet me on a Thursday. I could never sleep on a Thursday night. Then every Friday I was fine again — for another week.
The effects lessened as the pill-popping went on, so don’t be afraid to talk to me tomorrow — I won’t bite! But still, it’s good to get all that evil out of my system.
Yo Dallasites: DFWblogs holiday party tonight. You should, like, totally go.
After his foreign policy address, Howard Dean was asked about his inexperience in dealing with international issues. His answer: He’s well prepared because he studied “under what I consider to be the best history department in the United States, at Yale University.”
While, as a Yale history major myself, I applaud his Eli loyalty, that may just be the weakest response imaginable. (Particularly since George W. Bush was his Yale classmate at the time and a history major himself.)
While we’re discussing Yale and people affilated with the word “dean,” I was sad to learn that Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead is leaving New Haven to become president of Duke. Brodhead is a truly great guy; I interviewed him a few times for the college paper and got to know him a bit when I was on his student advisory committee.
Unfortunately, now that he’s a Dookie, I will have to root vociferously against his athletic teams, since I’ve been a Carolina fan for almost 20 years. Of course, that’s primarily because of yet another “dean”-affiliated person, Dean Smith.
Fun jailhouse interview with confessed teen killer Dustin Lynch.
I didn’t think her dad would go in her room, but just in case he did I dumped a basket of laundry on her. When he first came in, he actually didn’t see her. Then he went around the bed and saw her foot. I just have bad luck!…Some people call me “Jinx” because of my luck.
There’s this education researcher I’ve always admired — he seemed like a really smart guy who was doing very interesting work. But he never returned my calls.
Turns out he died earlier this year. I suppose that’s a good excuse for not returning my calls.
Reason No. 6,430 to always trust crabwalk.com: Remember a few months ago, when I mentioned that Dead White Male Strom Thurmond had fathered a black daughter? I told you so!
I’m back in Dallas, still unpacking. No one [choose one: broke into/torched/filled with packing foam] my apartment while I was gone. I did, however, return to a freezer holding a single link of boudin. (I thought I’d thrown it out. I can’t imagine pork products bought in July would still be edible in December, no matter how frozen solid they may be.)
Mickey Kaus has defined an admirable goal for Internet journalists (although I think it can apply just as well to all us journos): “Leibling Optimality,” named in honor of the late New Yorkerist A.J. Leibling. Its definition, based on a famous Leibling quote: “being better than everyone who’s faster than you are and faster than everyone who’s better.”
I finally got a copy of Panther and installed it on my laptop. First negative reactions: that left column in the Finder is annoying as hell on a small screen; there appears to be no way to override the absurdly large white space Panther puts between icons in icon view; the new x-height settings for Lucida Grande and other typefaces makes everything in Safari just a touch harder to read. On the plus side, it did make my iBook/G3 500 faster, as promised. We’ll see how this all works out — I’ll wait a little while longer before upgrading my desktop.
Have I mentioned how nice it is to have a desktop with a big monitor again, after 15 weeks of living on a 12-inch screen? It’s nice.
Finally, Sen. John Breaux, The most powerful Cajun in American history, is retiring. A sad day for us Cajuns — whatever you think of his politics, he’s a good guy. Breaux’s from Crowley, about five miles from my house. It’s strange to think that when he was my age (28), he was already a congressman.
At least it appears there’ll be three strong candidates in the race to succeed him: Republicans David Vitter (a Rhodes Scholar I interviewed a couple years back) and Bobby Jindal (another Rhodes Scholar and 32-year-old wunderkind who almost got elected governor last month) and Democrat Chris John (who’s also from Crowley and has a good reputation around my neck of the woods).
My friend Jeremy is a fellow Pew Fellow and just got back from six weeks the Ivory Coast. Until now, you’ve been able to read about it on his blog.
But now you can read about it in his five-day series of “Dispatches” on Slate. From a blog I host to a legitimate, respected publication! Sniff — I’m tearing up with pride!
Jeremy and I did some drinking this weekend, and he showed me some admirable techniques for crashing parties where you know no one. We stumbled out of one house party near Capitol Hill Saturday night and wandered down F Street until we heard Outkast blaring from a random apartment. Jeremy took it upon himself to invite us both in. After equipping ourselves with some mulled wine, he decided it was time to set up our defenses with his patented two-step method:
- Introduce yourself to someone who looks like he won’t be too inquisitive. Preferably someone involved in an activity (in our case, closely watching a game of beer pong), so he’s likely to be too distracted to ask what your connection is to the party’s hosts.
- Then move away from that guy to another room. That way, if someone does later ask why you’re at the party, you can say, “Oh! I’m a friend of [insert name here]!” and hope you’re out of his earshot.
Worked well. Too bad they were almost out of mulled wine by the time we got there. We left after 20 minutes or so. Jeremy did make sure to say goodbye to our new friend, who was very sad to see us go.
An alert for Washington, D.C., area readers: tomorrow (Monday) I’ll be one of three Pew Fellows giving a brief presentation on my recent reporting in Zambia. (For those of you who haven’t been close crabwalk.com readers of late, you can read all about that over here.) All are invited.
The details: It’s from 12:15 to 2:00 p.m., and you even get a free lunch. It’s in room 806 of the Rome Building at Johns Hopkins/SAIS, which is at 1619 Massachusetts Ave., N.W.
(And you might want to bring a coupla Prozac, since you’ll be hearing about mass AIDS death in Zambia, the fume-choked streets of urban Iran, and the mass murder of artists in Cambodia. It’s a feel-good affair!)
If you do show, please come say hello.
Saw Kill Bill yesterday. I’m not quite a full-fledged Tarantinista, but I’ve enjoyed his work enough in the past to be somewhat amazed at the visceral, intense rage in some of the movie’s reviews. I mean, this was the SF Chronicle:
It boggles the mind that after six years of silence, all Tarantino has to offer is this garbage…Let’s just call it pornography. And let’s just admit it’s indefensible.
And this was the New Yorker’s David Denby (he of the crippling Internet porn addiction!):
Coming out of this dazzling, whirling movie, I felt nothing—not anger, not dismay, not amusement. Nothing.
I loved this movie. Sure, it’s empty — no deep lessons here (with the possible exception of “Don’t mess with a pissed-off woman, particularly one with Uma Thurman’s legs”). But it is so much damned fun! I had a permagrin on my face for the whole 90 minutes. Don’t let any moralizing critics keep you away. I don’t always agree with David Edelstein, but I think his review is the most reflective of my view of Kill Bill (and I love the way he digs at pornhound Denby):
The movie will not be to everyone’s taste; I’ve already read some tut-tut reviews, like the one by David Denby in The New Yorker that ends, “I felt nothing. Not despair. Not dismay. Not amusement. Nothing.” (Like many of my friend Denby’s weary plaints, this sounds better when you read it with a French accent: “Ah felt … nossing. Not ze despair … Not ze dismay … Not z’amuse-mon. Nossing.”) For my part, I felt glee. I felt the way I sometimes do at a Mark Morris dance piece that reshuffles familiar, showbizzy moves into something new and funny and unexpectedly lyrical. Kill Bill literally becomes a dance movie in the course of the final battle. The lights go out and the Bride and a horde of masked assassins are suddenly blue silhouettes gyrating against a great grid: It’s like An American in Paris with arterial spray.
So Bush wants to go back to the moon. Interesting. (Although I’m not sure it’ll have the nation-uniting-in-common-purpose effect he expects — I think you’ve got to go to Mars to get that sort of reaction.)
Here’s what I don’t get: “Sources tell CNN the target for returning to the moon is about 15 years from now.” 15 years?! Honestly, why couldn’t we be back there in 12 months if we wanted to? Are you telling me it’ll take 15 years just to bring space technology back to the point it was at in 1969? I mean, have you ever seen these Apollo vehicles? They’re glorified tin cans, run by computers less powerful than a modern electric toothbrush. Have we forgotten how jet propulsion works? Did we misplace all our lunar maps and have to start over from scratch? I don’t get it — it just doesn’t seem like it’d be that hard any more.
And I’m feeling better, thanks.
Sick, sick, sick. That’s me. Head about to implode, mouth perpetually agape, sinuses making new enemies. Must return to bed. I’ve been running a lot since I got back to D.C. (well, a lot by my piddly standards — 10 miles in the last five days). Hope the illness isn’t related to that — my body was probably pretty worn out already after all my travel of late.
A few links of note:
Great piece on Larry King. I’ve never read a piece that ends up with ol’ Larry standing as a symbol and defender of solid journalism. Bravo to Joe Hagan for getting those juicy quotes.
The pool report from Bush’s Thanksgiving Iraq visit.
Colin Meloy, leader of crabwalk.com favorites the Decemberists, follows Joe Pernice’s lead and writes a book for the 33 1/3 series. Colin’s is on the Replacements’ Let It Be.
Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools, for those with Christmas shopping lists left to fill. Kelly’s got quite a background — very polymath. (Although it is a little strange to have Wired News writing a piece about how great ex-Wired editor Kelly is.)
Jack Shafer on newspaper’s traditional reluctance to defend themselves. Tell it, brother — it’s such a pain when people attack your stories for clearly illogical, self-interest-motivated reasons and you can’t defend your journalistic honor. It’s not The Newspaper Way (as opposed to The Magazine Way, which typically allows reporters the chance to respond to attacks). Bonus points (I think, at least) for Shafer’s use of the phrase “splitting more hairs than a palsied barber.”
Speaking of which, I need a haircut.
Happy World AIDS Day, everybody! I bet restaurants everywhere are totally booked solid.
Went to my third (if memory serves) professional football game yesterday: the New Orleans Saints, a force for good in the universe, versus the Washington Redskins, a race-baiting conglomeration of hatred and evil. (Aren’t the clear black-white lines of sport ethics wonderful? No silly shades of gray.) Fellow Pewtron Noel and I managed to scalp front-row seats (!) for $35 each — quite a deal. It proved even more of a deal when the Saints pulled out a 24-20 win.
I’ve got to admit, though, I was a bit disappointed in the ‘Skins fans. I mean, I was the only Saints fan around. Whenever anything pro-Saint happened, I was yellin’ and hootin’ and hollerin’ — the sort of vigorous fandom that is de rigeur in a home stadium but potentially risky on the road. I fully expected a few catcalls, or perhaps some popcorn thrown my way.
I got nothing! Even when Boo Williams caught his 15-yard touchdown in the fourth quarter — ripping away a seemingly secure Redskins win — there was no reaction to my pro-Boo yelps. I expected better.
By the way, I was back in Dallas yesterday — if only for an hour, in Terminal E at DFW. Sorry I didn’t call. I’ll be back to Dallas for good (or at least a few days) in two weeks.
Joshua Benton is the director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, among other things. Before that, he was a staff writer and columnist for The Dallas Morning News. (More.)
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