Speaking of assholes, the commenters here make me concerned about the future of civilization — not to mention the American educational system that presumably prepared them for such an adulthood of callous ignorance.
Since I am a journalist, I’d like to point out I don’t think the commenters are assholes because of their political point of view. They’re just stupid, heartless assholes.
Another stupid journalist fired for his blog. The blog in question is here. I’m all for bloggers’ rights and such, but this guy looks like an asshole with a 13-year-old’s sense of humor. I love how he claims anyone who doesn’t like this is part of the “political correctness” that “is killing society, slowly but surely.” Aw, poor widdle victim!
The phantom time hypothesis, the claim, held primarily by drunk German “scientists,” that the early Middle Ages (c. 614-911) were just a dream and never happened. Related: Fomenko’s New Chronology. Also related: The 1985-86 season of TV’s “Dallas.”
I’ve heard the story for years, but here’s the video to prove the Tale of the Famous Exploding Whale of 1970.
I continue to be amazed — although by this point I shouldn’t be — by the innovative methods the brokerage industry comes up with to take money from investors.
Today’s DMN features a Pam Yip story on separately managed accounts (SMAs), the latest financial vehicle brokerages are pushing. It’s generally for those with $100,000 or more to invest.
Starting an SMA means hiring someone from a brokerage firm to take the investor’s money and run it as if it were a little one-person mutual fund. The investors gets to set certain guidelines on how the money will be invested — say, “I want to be aggressive” or “I want a lot of international exposure” or “I don’t want to invest in icky tobacco companies.” But beyond that, the investor essentially cedes control of his money to the manager, who invests it as he sees fit to maximize return.
The major selling points: Managers can personalize the investments based on the investor’s goals. They can also give personal attention to investors and tailor transactions to investors’ tax needs.
What a load of bullshit.
In the story, Pam points out the major reason brokerages are pushing SMAs: It’s a response to their shrinking market share in money management. An increasing number of people have realized that brokerages are, at their core, a scam designed to maximize returns to the money managers at the expense of the actual investor. As a result, more people have been hiring fee-based financial advisors — the ones who charge a flat fee for advice instead of taking a cut of all your assets — and firing brokerages who have 1,000 different incentives to give investors bad advice.
But SMAs don’t fix any of the problems with brokerages. In some ways, they make the worse.
- First of all, they’re hella expensive. Fees for SMAs average 2 to 3 percent a year. In other words, if you have $100,000 to invest, you’re paying your broker, say $2,500 a year to manage it. That’s outrageous. Even mutual funds on the expensive end should never cost more than 2 percent, and you shouldn’t be on the expensive end. You can buy a very good index fund that buys the entire domestic stock market for a cost ratio of 0.09%. In other words, your investing costs can be cut from $2,500 a year to $90 and your money will be invested with lower risk and, most likely, produce higher returns.
And if your SMA manager chooses to buy any mutual funds with your money — and with only $100,000 invested, he almost certainly should to reduce risk — those mutual funds’ expenses are on top of the SMA’s. And I doubt he’ll be buying cheap index funds, since that would illustrate how unnecessary he is to the operation. He’ll be buying expensive crap, bringing your expense ratio up to an unconscionable 4-5%.
Maybe 4-5% doesn’t seem like a lot. But if your $100,000 is invested for 30 years at an annual return of 6%, it’ll become $574,000. At 10%, it becomes $1.7 million. The expenses brokerages add to your costs are a major, major drag on returns.
- You’re highly unlikely to get market-beating returns. Research going back decades show active managing of stock funds reduces performance, not increases. Index funds that just buy the entire market beat an average of between 70% and 80% of all stock funds each year. In other words, the “smart guys” you hire to invest your money, on average, take your money and lower your returns. It’s efficient market theory at work, Econ 101.
And while it is certainly possible for a given stock fund to beat the market in any given year, over the long term, indexes win. In the 1990s, despite a slew of funds throwing money at tech stocks (and we’re talking before the crash in 2000), the S&P 500 index beat 90% of all domestic managed funds, often by wide margins. As the great Burton Malkiel has written, if you’d put $10,000 in an average domestic managed fund in 1969, 30 years later, it would have turned into $171,950. But if you’d just bought an S&P 500 index fund — just bought the entire market and leave the stock picking to the fools — you’d have had $311,000.
And let’s assume for a moment that a brokerage really does have a money manager who can consistently beat the market — an extremely rare creature like Bill Miller at Legg Mason. Do you really think they’re going to be pulling the strings for some schlub’s $100,000 SMA? No, he’s going to be put on the biggest mutual fund the firm offers, like the $12 billion fund Miller runs. SMAs are going to be run by either the low fish on the food chain or as a part-time, no-attention job for more experienced types — which would put the lie to the “personalization” SMAs are supposed to be good for.
SMAs try to get around this underperformance by reporting their returns without taking into account expenses. That’s atrocious and unethical. To cite the example Pam does in her story, large-cap growth SMAs reported 13.7% returns through Q3 2005, versus 13.4% for mutual funds in the same sector. Sounds nice, doesn’t? Well, that 13.7% doesn’t include the 2-3% shaved off the top for the brokerage’s pockets. So what looks like overperformance is actually underperformance.
That’s fundamentally dishonest, and a symbol of the rank dishonesty that fills the whole business. The excuse an SMA-industry rep gives in Pam’s story — that some brokerage firms don’t know math well enough to be able to figure out real returns with expenses! — is the biggest load of crap I’ve heard in weeks.
- SMAs give brokerages incentives to be evil. If they’re given a free hand to do whatever they want with your money, that means they have a free hand to buy a bunch of crap. They can buy their own brokerage’s overpriced funds instead of others with lower expense ratios. Don’t like it? Too bad!
Brokerages have gotten into SEC trouble again and again for sketchy financial deals with mutual fund companies. The fund companies pay the brokerages — through marketing fees, i-banking arrangements, or other nefarious plans — to push their lame funds on customers. It happens all the time: Brokerages are given financial incentives to sell you bad product.
At least with a normal brokerage account, you’re free to ignore your broker’s crappy advice. But with an SMA, it’s not your call any more, and plenty of brokers will make decisions that feather their beds at the expense of yours.
Anyway, I get mad about this sort of stuff because this is a clear-cut case of big companies exploiting the ignorance of consumers to take their money. SMAs add precisely zero value to the world, and we’d all be in a better place if we could collectively fire the brokerage industry, buy a bunch of cheap index funds from Vanguard, and stop funding summer homes in the Hamptons with the savings of individual investors.
(As an aside: I’m considering starting a web site that would codify, in a user-friendly way, how to invest your money to maximize your returns, avoid the profit-rapists of the brokerage industry, and not have to concern yourself with stock picking. If any of you are interested in the subject — which I know falls outside the bounds of normal crabwalk.com content — I’d love any suggestions or thoughts you might have.)
When I was a big Pink Floyd fan (c. 1987 to 1995 or so), I was more into the bloated later Floyd, after Roger Waters took control and started making rock operas and concept albums about the Falklands War and George Orwell. But, like many indie types, I’ve evolved a much greater appreciation for the strangeness of early Floyd — basically from the earliest Syd Barrett days through to Dark Side of the Moon’s steps toward the mainstream.
And now, thanks to the recent increase in the ease of posting videos online, a budding early Floyd videography is budding. They were a visual band from the beginning, and here are some of the video highlights I’ve found online.
Arnold Layne, their first single, featuring fun with mannequins, masks, and sand.
See Emily Play, the gloriously amateur video for their second single, complete with Nick Mason’s rubberlimb drumming. (Apparently taken from Chinese state-run TV, if the logo in the top left is to be believed.)
Scarecrow, an ode to primitivist, hippie-back-to-nature culture.
Jugband Blues, one of those man-Syd-probably-does-hear-voices songs. Listen to those lyrics (“It’s awfully considerate of you to think of me here / And I’m much obliged to you for making it clear that I’m not here… / And I’m wondering who could be writing this song”) and it’s not to imagine him turning out to be nuts.
Flaming, a nifty bit of psychedelia, sort of a Doors-for-children.
Careful With That Axe, Eugene. Now that’s early Pink Floyd, the sort of spacy song that demanded drug use. Featuring some quality tire-squeal shrieking from Roger. (It wakes up around five minutes in.) Here’s a visually better version from the Live in Pompeii video. For the lava fans out there. And another, from Australia.
Let There Be More Light, a structurally awkward early Waters composition, featuring David Gilmour (Syd’s replacement) on guitar and complete with groovy chicks in the audience.
Astronomy Domine, also featuring early Dave. A reminder that Nick’s drumming wasn’t always so limp. Maybe my favorite early Floyd song, although this performance is truncated and not that great. Another version, slightly fuller sound, and looking in spots like it was lit by D.W. Griffith.
Set the Controls For the Heart of the Sun, another classic. I imagine heroin feels a little bit like this song.
Point Me At The Sky, an early single (“And if you survive till 2005 / I hope you’re exceedingly thin / For if you are stout you will have to breathe out / While the people around you breathe in”).
One of These Days (I’m Going To Cut You Into Little Pieces), off Meddle, featuring growly guitar and one of the all-time great monotone bass lines. An instrumental classic.
Bike, an early Barrett song, set to some Cartoon Network visuals.
Best of all: A great video of Syd and Co. playing Interstellar Overdrive, the band’s first great epic. (And one of the first songs I ever learned to play on guitar. That opening bass line is great.) Taken from 1967’s Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London, an idea I can endorse. (Warning: Hippie nudity.)
Paul Graham on how to do what you love.
Paul, for those unfamiliar, is an unusually thoughtful geek who, among other things, seems to have a strong philosophical understanding of work issues and childhood. “If you think something’s supposed to hurt, you’re less likely to notice if you’re doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school.”
He also writes too long. Then again, that might be my newspaper background talking. His book, Hackers & Painters, has been on my wish list for a while, but the thought of Graham stretched to book length keeps me from clicking Add to Shopping Cart.
Also recommended, for capable people who fear they’re not meeting their potential: Good and Bad Procrastination (“What’s the best thing you could be working on, and why aren’t you?”), the related Richard Hamming talk You and Your Research, and Graham’s What You’ll Wish You’d Known.
For the Matt Murphy fans out there in crabwalk.com readerdom — and I know I’ve converted at least a couple of you — his band City Field has two songs up on their new myspace.com page. I remain disappointed that City Field isn’t putting Matt front and center, which is where a man of his frontman greatness belongs.
(He shares vox with at least two other members. The female lead sounds a little too early Linda McCartney, if you know what I mean, and the other male lead sounds like a self-conscious Mark Mothersbaugh. As if there’s a non-self-conscious Mark Mothersbaugh.)
Anyway, Matt doesn’t sing on either of the posted tracks, but they remain nonetheless candidates for continued improvement.
Today would have been my grandmother’s 74th birthday. Hard to think it’s been four years since the Mazie Project and a year and a half since she died.
Another chapter in America’s quest to de-sex its teenagers: Georgia is set to approve a law that would make a 14-year-old who has consensual sex with a 13-year-old — a freshman and an 8th-grader, in other words — guilty of an aggravated sexual offense and would require a mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years in prison. Geez.
Yet another entry in the People Who Share My Name But Most Certainly Are Not Me Dept.: “Josh Benton is truely the *BEST* experience in my life… But yet the worst at the same tyme.”
Here’s my story from page 1 today. It’s my small contribution to the big Abramoff/lobbying story in Washington. Featuring organized crime at racetracks, a Syrian nicknamed “The Fat Man,” the Iranian government, and a near-death Elvis Presley.
A music video for Grandaddy’s “Jed’s Other Poem,” made entirely on an Apple II with 48k of RAM.
Does any one in the Dallas area have a digital camcorder I could borrow? Would be much appreciative!
Best school bus crash ever. (Don’t worry, no one seriously hurt.)
Did you know: When some punk stole some of Sonic Youth’s equipment in 1999, it meant that the band could never play the song “Eric’s Trip” again, since live performance required a special old Drifter guitar that was part of the heist. In related “Daydream Nation” trivia (and man, what a good album that is): The final part of the final track, “Eliminator Jr.,” is meant as a tribute (or something) to ZZ Top’s guitar sound.
A 1989 prediction of what computers would be like in the year 2001. Some pretty good calls, actually, although it’s funny to think back to a time when people thought the fax machine would the center of our distributed lives. Notice no use of the word “Internet,” although “ISDN” is essentially a placeholder for the term.
My column ran in today’s paper.
For some reason, though, my name was nowhere attached. It ran under the name, email address and mugshot of my colleague Holly Hacker, temporarily rendering me significantly more attractive. (And less bearded.) Hmm…perhaps the paper is trying to tell me something?
(The name thing has been corrected online. The column’s about sleep. Zzzzzzzzzz.)
This is awesome: MP3s of Janet Greene, the right-wing answer to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan in the 1960s. She was hired by the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade to, you know, get the kids excited about fighting Big Red.
The songs are terrific in their awfulness. Take Poor Left Winger (lyrics here): “I’m just a poor left-winger / Befuddled, bewildered, forlorn / Duped by a bearded singer / Peddling his Communist corn / In the Café Expresso / Sounds of guitars could be heard / Twanging a plaintive folk song / Spreading the Communist word / Hair hung around his shoulders / And sandals were on his feet / His shirttail was ragged and dirty/ Making the picture complete.”
Plus other golden hits like “Comrade’s Lament” and “Commie Lies”!
The best part is the guys paying Greene thought she was playing ’60s folk — this is mainline ’60s Nashville country.
The new Miles Davis box set, The Cellar Door Sessions 1970, is very good. It’s a six-CD set of the live sessions from which were drawn Live/Evil, in my mind easily the best electric Miles album.
As the Amazon review (written by Dallas’ own Robert Wilonsky) puts it: “This is where Miles Davis turned funk into jazz, rock into soul, and chaos into Beauty…He rocked harder than Sly, got funkier than J.B., and turned jazz inside out, slicing the music open till blood spilled on to the floor.”
I got turned onto that album around 1994, when I was roommates with L. — probably the smartest guy I’ve ever met, despite his copious appetite for illegal substances. He’s now a big-time physicist who studies things like “injection and transport of interstellar pickup ions in the solar wind” and “space plasma particle instrumentation including time-of-flight spectrometers and ion optics.” He’s the mac-daddy.
How to install The Complete New Yorker on a hard drive. (Instead of forever swapping DVDs.)
You know who’s due for a critical revival? Caravan, the obscurist early ’70s wuss-prog band from the U.K. They mixed up elements of jazz and folk, but really, they ended up sounding like early Yes performed by a team of earnest hobbits.
(I make a strong mental connection between Caravan and little people. And not just because their songs feature lyrics like “As wandering minstrels play tunes of yesterday / When dragons roamed the land, knights in armour gold / Charged on horseback bold / The maids were saved, the dragons slayed.” I mean, come on! Does late-period psychedelic music get any cuter than that?)
I found their album In The Land Of Grey And Pink online somewhere, and it’s just plain charming. It’s like Jethro Tull without the fatal self-importance. I’m not sure I’d want to invite the band members to dinner — they’d probably stink of incense and slip some psilocybin in my iced tea — but their music is smile-inducing. (An MP3 of the title track is available in the Flash widget here.)
Some song and album titles: “Nine Feet Underground / Nigel Blows a Tune / Love’s a Friend / Make It 76 / Dan” (a 22-minute epic), “For Girls Who Grow Plump in the Night,” “Dabsong Conshirto (Part 1: The Mad Dabsong; Part 2: Ben Karratt Rides Again),” and “The Fear and Loathing in Tollington Park.”
I nominate them for the soundtrack of the next Wes Anderson movie, assuming it features meadows, sun-dappled maidens, and little people.
What are you doing on Friday, February 10?
You won’t be watching the stupid Olympics opening ceremony from stupid Torino in stupid Italy. (Speaking of which: Since when did good ol’ Turin become Torino? If the games were a few hundred miles southeast, would we say it was taking place in Roma, not Rome? Were the last games in Athina instead of Athens? Who do these foreigners think they are, determining their own names for their cities? And do we have to rename the Shroud now?)
You will be sitting in front of a TV, tuned in to your local Fox affiliate, watching the final four episodes of Arrested Development, the best show on television.
When the two glorious hours are complete, you will go to your computer, fire up your email program of choice, and email me: “Dear Josh, Thank you very much for allowing me to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Arrested Development. All the best, [your name here].”
Having spent much of the last weekend in various states of intestinal distress, I feel confident about making the following proclamation:
Cherry-flavored Pepto-Bismol tastes like ass.
I mean, ewwww. Regular Pepto may not be something you’d want for breakfast every morning, but at least that chalky taste is associated with relief in our collective subconscious. But add some chemical-tasting alleged cherryness and man, that taste never leaves your mouth. Yecccch.
There’s a new Built to Spill song up on their Myspace.com site. It’s good — a little more propulsive and rockish than their poppier last album. Me likes. It’s been over a year since I complained about society’s need for a new Built to Spill album, and it’s good to see crabwalk.com finally getting some results.
As a song title, it ranks among the worst in modern musical history, but Jism by Tindersticks is one of the Best Songs Of All Time. Yes, capital letters. That moment about five minutes in when the violins start to shriek and pluck and the drummer lets go is almost, well, orgasmic. Dark, symphonic chamber pop that demands to be heard with the lights low and a whiskey in hand — a very English sort of repression, bursting out.
The original version on the first Tindersticks album is great. (Both their first and second albums are, confusingly, self-titled. And both are essential — I might even give the second a slight edge.)
But there’s an even better version on The Bloomsbury Theatre 12.3.95, a live album the band released in small numbers at their creative peak, just after the first two albums, complete with a 24-piece string section. Man, does that thing cook — I could listen to it all day, and have been, lately.
Here’s an MP3 of the track. And just for kicks, here’s another track El Diablo En El Ojo, where the vocals are a bit subpar, but the sense of theatricality and impending doom is great. (Dig that chaotic string swell at 1:45.) And here’s another, City Sickness, perhaps a bit more mainstreamy.
(The live album is not, to my knowledge, available in the U.S. any more. Best deal: Buy it from one of Amazon’s zShops as part of the remastered second album, which includes Bloomsbury as a bonus disc. Available for as low as $19.)
I should point out I’ve been told Tindersticks are an acquired taste. There are some bands I love that I try to turn on other people to with a near 100-percent success rate. Then there are bands like Tindersticks. I don’t get it, personally; unlike much of the music I loved in the mid-1990s, I’ve never tired of them. If it’s an acquired taste, go acquire it! But to each his/her own.
James Frey, asshole liar author, is on a different kind of rehab course — this time, he’s trying to rehab his image after being outed as a fraud whose “memoirs” are a tissue-thin (and abysmally written) pack of falsehoods.
He was on Larry King last night and spinning his talking points. I’m sure the PR consultants he has working for him are doing their best, but he’s still full of shit.
Frey: “I never expected the book to come under the type of scrutiny that it has.”
Bullshit. If he hadn’t expected scrutiny, why did he go to the law-enforcement agencies that had arrested him and ask them to expunge the records, right when the book was hitting bookstore shelves? He very clearly knew the scrutiny was coming, and he tried to cover his ass.
Frey: “A memoir literally means my story, a memoir is a subjective retelling of events.”
Bullshit. Here’s where Frey is dangerous: He’s trying to conflate a subjective retelling of events with making shit up. Let’s say I had a birthday party when I was 12. Twenty years later, I might think back to that day and remember it differently than it really happened. Perhaps I’d forgotten key details and remember chocolate cake instead of coconut. Perhaps I’ll forget that little Suzie Jenkins was mean to me, or that I really wanted a G.I. Joe action figure but only got socks. That’s a subjective retelling of events — acknowledging that our memories might not be perfect, but trying our best to tell it like it was.
Inventing a three-month stint in jail — that’s not an accidental mistake. That’s making shit up.
(And, for the record, memoir literally means “memory,” not “my story.”)
Frey: “I don’t think it’s necessarily appropriate to say I’ve conned anyone. The book is 432 pages long. The total page count of disputed events is 18, which is less than five percent of the total book. You know, that falls comfortably within the realm of what’s appropriate for a memoir.”
Bullshit. Assuming for a moment his page counts are correct, the reason they’re the ones in dispute is because they’re the only ones that would have a paper trail to back them up. Did Frey really board a transatlantic flight high and soaking in his own blood, with a gory hole through his cheek? It sure seems doubtful that an airline would let such a character on, but there’s no way to check. He doesn’t say what airline it was, the number of the flight, or any of the other details that might let one confirm or refute his story. The only things that are checkable by publicly accessible records are his run-ins with law enforcement agencies, and it seems like he made up just about everything there.
As the Smoking Gun story points out, most of the juicy unbelievable stuff in the book happens only when he’s in the company of people who die during the book’s course. Were his stories about the addict Lilly correct? Did Lilly even exist? We’ll never know, because “Lilly” is dead.
One part of the Smoking Gun piece I found particularly damning is that Frey had clearly moved to a new level of coverup by convincing a professor friend to agree to be his emergency backup. This professor shows up as his felon-in-arms in Frey’s new book, and when the Smoking Gun started asking questions about the central arrest of the book, Frey suddenly remembered — contrary to even his book’s lies — that this professor buddy was in the car with him at the time and could vouch for him. That was before Frey knew TSG had a copy of the police report in question, which clearly said Frey was alone in the car. Suddenly the professor friend disappeared from the story.
Frey: “I mean, I’ve acknowledged that there were embellishments in the book, that I’ve changed things, that in certain cases things were toned up, in certain cases things were toned down, that names were changed, that identifying characteristics were changed.”
Bullshit. See, this is another part of the strategy: make it appear that the criticisms of the book are all about nitpicking things, like an incorrect name. It even makes him look like a hero — he was just changing someone’s name to protect them from prying eyes!
But again, he’s not accused of that. He’s accused of inventing his story wholecloth. He invents FBI investigations targeted on him, he invents brawls with police, he invents jail terms, he invents train wrecks that kill his friends. These are all made up. They are not toning things up or down.
Frey, on why he shopped the book to publishers as a novel: “I think of the book as working in sort of a tradition — a long tradition of what American writers have done in the past, people like Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Kerouac and Charles Bukowski.”
Bullshit. Just because Jimmy Frey putting himself in the tradition of Hemingway and Fitzgerald is bullshit.
Frey, on why those heavyweights called their books novels instead of memoirs: “[A]t the time of their books being published, the genre of memoir didn’t exist. I mean, the genre of memoir is one that’s very new and the boundaries of it had not been established yet.”
Bullshit. Memoirs date back centuries. Hell, Ulysses S. Grant’s book — entitled “Memoirs,” published in 1885 — was one of the publishing phenomenons of the 19th century. Hemingway and Co. never wrote a truthful memoir and labeled it a novel. Their fiction has autobiographical elements, sure, but it’s tweaked to the needs of the story and labeled fiction.
Asshole. See, those of us in the business of writing facts hate guys like this. Every time someone like Frey comes along and says “Oh, I changed a little bit here and there, everybody does it,” it makes the rest of us look like Frey-level frauds. Once he gets exposed as a gutter rat, he tries to drag the rest of the profession down to his level. Well, there are plenty of people out there who manage to write nonfiction that isn’t based on lies, and Frey should be ashamed. His book would have gone nowhere as a novel — which is why 17 publishers rejected it as such and why 99.9% of the promotion at publication was on how this was A True Story.
Addendum: Seth Mnookin has a good take, based in part on his own rehab experiences. “[T]hese stock characters…are typical of the kind of cliché-ridden portraits that populate Frey’s book…If a novelist wrote a book run through with these kind of straight-from-Central-Casting chestnuts, he’d be politely told to try again…as Frey says he was, by 17 different publishers, before, Frey says, Doubleday’s Nan Talese said she’d publish his novel if he recast it as a memoir.” As I said earlier, I was amazed at how bad the writing is; it really reads like the third-best piece in an undistinguished high school literary magazine.
Does anyone have recommendations of a good RSS reader for Windows? I need to install something on my work computer and my Windows knowledge lags far behind my Mac knowledge. I have a strong bias in favor of free products, if that helps any.
(On the Mac, NetNewsWire is the way to go. I spend more time in NNW than I do in Safari.)
Here are some (mostly import) compilation CDs I’ve been listening to recently that may be worth your time. You’ll probably find several more cheaply at amazon.co.uk, even with international shipping. (Man, the Brits get all the best comps.)
- Come to the Sunshine, a smile-inducing collection of early ’70s psychedelic soft rock rarities.
- Somewhat related: Meridian 1970, a compilation of mellow sounds from the titular year.
- Love’s a Real Thing, a terrific Luaka Bop-issued bunch of West African soul numbers from the same era. (An era with which I’ve been musically obsessed lately.)
- The Now Sound Redesigned, a remix album of songs by The Free Design, a cotton-candy-sweet family act from the late ’60s that had some amazing harmonies and a great square-jawed groove. They went nowhere commercially the first time around, but (a la the David Axelrod records I posted about last week) they’ve been reclaimed by the cratediggers. This CD features remixes by members of Belle & Sebastian and Stereolab, Caribou, Danger Mouse, and a host of Stones Throw types like Koushik, Dudley Perkins, Peanut Butter Wolf, and Madlib.
- Le Beat Bespoke, maybe the best of the bunch. It’s a comp inspired by the mod revivalist movement in the U.K., which attempts to bring back the swinging-London vibe of the first few Who albums, with a smidge of northern soul. Lots of freakbeat and blue-eyed soul, but with a little more variety than you might imagine. Highly danceable.
- Gilles Peterson Digs America, Gilles Peterson in Brazil, and Gilles Peterson in Africa, three wonderful compilations by the terrific BBC DJ. (I’ll let you guess his name.) Peterson has terrific taste, the sort of catholic taste I aspire to. This isn’t Starbucks world music: This has groove, a sort of global funk/soul melange that I can assure will make you happy. (The America CD is a bunch of rare early ’70s R&B.)
- Sounds of Monsterism Island, a slightly weirder variant on the same period, focusing more of exotic sounds and general strangeness (“A Child’s Guide To Good And Evil” by the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, for instance, and a track by crabwalk.com Official Strange Dude Eden Ahbez). Plus some more contemporary stuff like Dead Meadow.
- The “Girls in the Garage” compilations, all of which feature rare girl-group tracks from the 1960s. These aren’t the doo-wop bands of Motown; these are mostly suburban girls with guitars, amateurish in the best sense, playing with a mix of innocence, toughness, and naive ambition. No link to Amazon because these are clearly illegal bootlegs, issued only on vinyl and impossible to find. The track listings are haphazard, but the variety’s terrific — there are multiple albums in the series of just French go-go groups, and one (Vol. 9) of Singapore female-fronted hotel bands of the 1960s. As I said, you won’t find this in stores, but — while I would never be one to advocate the unauthorized download of music — you might find something of interest here.
Good for The Smoking Gun for outing as a liar that asshole James Frey, the author of A Million Little Pieces. He’s made many millions of dollars trading on his supposedly felonious past — a past that, it turns out, was almost 100 percent fiction.
I remember thinking he was a bullshit artist when I learned (NY Observer, 2/3/03, now offline) that he first shopped his “memoir” as fiction, only to see it rejected 17 times. And, if the excerpts in the Smoking Gun article are any judge, he’s a miserably bad writer. Should be interesting to see if he gets the public asskicking he should.
Lou Rawls, the great baritone, died today. Very sad — Lou Rawls was the king of that buttery-smooth soul style.
I’m a fan of the great ’60s/’70s producer David Axelrod. This site sums up his sound well: “They sound like some funky symphonic soundtrack music with butter breakbeats galore.” (He’s become a favorite of cratedigger/hip-hop types in the last decade or so because those drum-heavy beats sample so damned well.) But a lot of Axelrod’s best work was done producing Lou Rawls records in the 1960s.
On Axelrod’s 2001 comeback album, Rawls sang on the closing track, “Loved Boy,” which was dedicated to Axelrod’s dead son. Man, Lou’s voice on that track will just rip your heart out — beaten and weary, a man staring up from the bottom of a well.
Here you can stream three songs from the recent Axelrod compilation The Edge, compiled by crabwalk.com fave Egon (who runs Stones Throw Records). The second track is Lou Rawls’ “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy” and is lovely.
Anyone watching last night’s Rose Bowl probably saw the listing of the greatest winning streaks in college football history. (USC’s had been the sixth longest of all time until Texas ended it last night.) The third- and fourth-longest streaks of all time belong to my alma mater, Yale.
Which may seem strange today, when the Ivy League plays football like a moderately strong high-school conference. But as color man Dan Fouts said last night: “No one wanted to play Yale back then.”
By back then, I mean in the 1880s.
Yale had two streaks of 37 straight wins from 1887 to 1889 and 1890 to 1893. They were dominant: In the 1888 season, they outscored opponents 694-zip.
That was back in the day of Amos Alonzo Stagg, the Yalie who basically invented modern sports. He’s a hall of famer in both football (he invented the reverse, the fake punt, the huddle, the lateral, numbers on jerseys, and the freakin’ Statue of Liberty play!) and basketball (played in the first public basketball game ever, invented the five-man team, cofounded the Big 10). And he invented the batting cage.
And the football coach back in those days was Walter Camp, who did a few little things like invent the line of scrimmage, the 11-man team, and the forward pass.
I’d also like to point out that that list of the longest streaks proves a point. Note that the fifth-longest streak of all time belongs to the University of Toledo, a school I used to write about professionally. And that the fifth-longest active streak belongs to the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, my local university growing up. In other words, I’m very good luck for football teams.
The Texas Association of School Boards and the Dallas school board have decided that January is…School Board Recognition Month. That’s right: The people who run the schools have decided it’s time for everyone to pat themselves on the back.
In related news, I have decided that January is also Cajun Journalist Recognition Month — an occasion traditionally celebrated with the granting of large sums to the Cajun journalist of your choice. Checks accepted.
Went to the bank this morning to cash an expense check I’ve had sitting around for a while. I walked up to the teller to gave her my deposit slip, and she asked me for ID.
I reached for my wallet, but she saw I had my work badge on. “That badge would be enough,” she said.
So I showed it to her. “The Dallas Morning News” is on the top, with my (five-year-old) photo and my name underneath.
“Oh, do you deliver the newspaper?” she asked.
The Daily Howler says nice things about me. “We say this: All hail education writers like [me], writers who know how to double-check facts. Not all scribes are inclined to be bothered, as we’ll see in the months ahead.”
But I must say: It’s Benton, not Benson.
Deal of the century: You can now legally and ethically download all of American Music Club’s classic 1991 album Everclear.
Just go here and download all the MP3s from “Why Won’t You Stay” to “Jesus’ Hands.” (The other MP3 there, “Another Morning,” is from their last album.)
It’s an important album to me for a number of reasons:
1. It was the first “cool,” “indie” album I ever bought. It was 1993, and I’d heard AMC play a radio in-studio on World Cafe that summer, while setting schedules for students at my old high school. I’d liked their music enough for it to penetrate my Jethro-Tull-loving skull, so when I got to New Haven that fall, I bought three CDs: this one, their then-new release Mercury, and — in a strange change of tone — Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s Extra Width.
Not sure why, exactly. I think I’d found a copy of Gerard Cosloy’s zine Conflict that had an AMC article; Cosloy was the head of Matador, which was JSBX’s label at the time. (I remember mailing off for Matador’s Xeroxed mail-order catalog to get more CDs. Ah, those innocent pre-web days.) Also, I think I thought the album cover was kinda cool.
2. I listened to Everclear endlessly in college. Which was probably not a mentally healthy thing to do. (Nor was it appreciated by my then-girlfriend, who thought me a bit mopey.) But it just seemed so beautifully sad, and that seemed like a suitably adult emotion to be having in college.
3. This site is, of course, named for track 5 on the album, “Crabwalk.” Now, you can have a soundtrack to accompany your crabwalk.com reading!
Now, almost 13 years after first hearing it, the album seems a bit weaker than I’d remembered. That everpresent wash of reverb suffocates a few songs. But the best tracks — “Ex-Girlfriend,” “Sick of Food,” “What the Pillar of Salt Held Up,” for starters — are still champs.
The world’s strangest commercial of all time, from 1980s Estonia. Sounds like a message from the devil, wrapped inside a nightmare. Here’s a bunch more ’80s Estonian advertising.
Also from the Disturbing European TV Commercials Dept.: a 1968 commercial, for Afri-Cola, a German concern. Actually, pretty much all their ads were kinda freaky.
Joshua Benton is the director of the Nieman Digital Journalism Project 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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