I spent six weeks in fall 2003 in Zambia as part of a Pew Fellowship. I kept a blog while I was there, but it was taken down by a server crash some time ago.
Anyway, last weekend, I went through the bother of rebuilding it (on a modified version of the new crabwalk.com design). So zambiastories.com is back online and ready for your reading enjoyment.
Here’s my story from today’s paper, on the final closing of the Wilmer-Hutchins Independent School District. Long-time readers know that I’ve written roughly three gazillion stories on Wilmer-Hutchins; because of its many problems, it is shutting down forever at midnight tonight. You might find this story worth your time.
The earthly remains of Wilmer-Hutchins were, in the end, few.
A few broken buildings. Some debts, some indictments. A few thousand kids who learned less than they should have.
Everything that could be put in boxes was Thursday, as the Wilmer-Hutchins Independent School District slipped into the past tense. After decades of mismanagement and crisis, Wilmer-Hutchins will legally cease to exist when the clock strikes midnight tonight. Under orders from the state of Texas, it will be absorbed into the Dallas school district.
“It’s a sad day for the district, but it’s also a new day,” said Donnie Foxx, one of the state-appointed managers who have shepherded the district through its declining days.
The district’s skeleton staff – down to 10 from more than 400 two years ago – went out for a nice lunch at Truluck’s and said their goodbyes Thursday afternoon.
They would have locked the doors one last time. But Dallas staffers were too busy carting off the district’s remaining items of value.
“I think in the long run, kids will have a better chance to get a good education – that’s the important part,” said Ron Rowell, the Texas Education Agency employee who has spent the past few months as acting superintendent.
For decades, his agency was criticized for not doing enough to stop corruption and mismanagement in Wilmer-Hutchins. The district was sick, residents said, and needed immediate attention from TEA.
They got their wish. But most residents hoped the patient could be saved. Instead, state officials chose a mercy killing.
And if you want to stroll down Hutch memory lane, the paper has posted some of the high points of my stories on the district since 2004.
Did you know: Every nation has to have its own tripartite motto, apparently. Ours, of course, is “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The French: “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.” And what could be more Canadian than “Peace, order, and good government.” (Alternately “paix, ordre et bon gouvernement.”) The Nazis: “Kirche, kinder, küche” (church, kids, kitchen). The Russian revolutionaries: “Peace, land, and bread.” (An echo of “panis et circenses.”)
I take no stance on the Ashkenazi IQ research presented here, but I did find this stretch interesting:
The possibility that Jewish mothers produce smarter children is unlikely in light of abundant evidence that families have no lasting effect on intelligence. Siblings reared together are no more correlated in IQ than siblings who were separated at birth, and adopted siblings are not correlated at all. Growing up in a given home within a culture seems to leave no lasting stamp on intelligence.
Really? “No lasting effect on intelligence”? In other words, drop a given newborn in a crackhouse or in the lap of luxury and it has no lasting effect on IQ? Unless the “within a culture” caveat means that one particular crackhouse has no greater or lesser impact on IQ than any other crackhouse.
In any event, since a given parent can have an enormous impact on a child’s academic performance in school, I suppose this points to the yawning gap between intellectual potential and intellectual performance. In its parents-don’t-matter approach, it reminds me a bit of this Gladwell piece from 1998 on the comparative importance of peers over parents in child development.
A Year Following The Breakup — first linked here back in March — has come to a close. A year’s a year, apparently. Still, if you want to kill a few hours, there are worse ways than to start at the beginning, read in chronological order, and watch Arnie slowly get over his ladyfriend.
Why did no one tell me that Maury Povich had become a Dada artist on the order of Tristan Tzara or Max Ernst? I mean: Pickles?
Go watch this five-second video: What sound is he making?
Then listen to it again, this time with your eyes closed. What sound is he making?
The answers to this very cool optical/aural illusion here.
Attention crossword-puzzle fans: Take a moment out from your intense loathing of sudoku to go see Wordplay, the documentary film about your craft. And keep an eye out for no fewer than three appearances by my college buddy Ken. (He’s in the trailer on the web site, too — the bearded fellow posing for a picture, oh, about 35 percent in.)
Welcome to another MP3 Monday. I’d previously threatened to theme one of these things around the World Cup, but was daunted by the sheer labor required for a 32-team field. Well, thanks to competitive balance and the passage of time, we’re down to 12 teams. Much more manageable.
First, the four teams that, thanks to this weekend’s play, are on to the quarterfinals.
ARGENTINA: “Azúcar Amarga” by Vox Dei. From the album Mandioca Underground (1969).
Mandioca (whose name means cassava in English) was the first Spanish-language rock label in Argentina, and this compilation was their first release. The humbly named Vox Dei (“Voice of God”) was one of the bands featured, and they went on to a healthy career as one of Argentina’s biggest bands in the 1970s (including a rock interpretation of the Bible).
ENGLAND: “Acquiesce” by Oasis. From the album The Masterplan (1998).
Of course there are a thousand possibilities for a song to represent the Jolly Ol’. I opted for this one because (a) Oasis is about as English as they come, annoyingly so, and (b) the song is apparently about Noel Gallagher’s support for his favorite football club, Manchester City.
GERMANY: “Reality Check” by Schneider TM. From the album Zoomer (2002).
The Germans have contributed relatively little to the history of rock and roll. Well, I guess they hang pretty well with the rest of Continental Europe — Kraftwerk, Neu!, Can, Tangerine Dream, and of course Scorpions — but the rise of German techno in the 2000s has brought about as much prominence to the country as anything outside David Hasselhoff. I can’t stand most of it, to be honest — it all sounds soulless and cold to me — but this Schneider TM track at least seems human.
PORTUGAL: “Gaivota” by Amália Rodrigues. From the album Com Que Voz (1970).
Amália Rodrigues was the Elvis and the Beatles (combined!) of fado, the fatalistic, sorrowful ballad style of Portuguese music. Quoth Wikipedia: “The music is usually linked to the Portuguese word saudade, a word with no accurate English translation. (It is a kind of longing, and conveys a complex mixture of mainly nostalgia, but also sadness, pain, happiness and love.)”
Now, on to the 12 teams who’ll play in the remaining Round of 16 games this week:
AUSTRALIA: “Under the Milky Way” by The Church. From the album Starfish (1988).
Australia has given us many fine bands, including many more recent than The Church, but this was one of the first songs I ever liked that, in retrospect, made me kind of cool. (To be clear, I was not very cool in eighth grade, when I first heard this. But compared to the other stuff I was listening too — Jethro Tull, mostly — The Church had indie cred out the proverbial wazoo.)
BRAZIL: “Solidão Gasolina” by Curumin. From the album Achados e Perdidos (2005).
I love Brazilian music. (iTunes tells me I’ve got 376 Brazilian songs.) I was making the argument to someone the other day that Brazil is probably the most undercovered country in the world in the Western press. South America is completely ignored in comparison to the eastern hemisphere, and it’s easy to forget Brazil is the fifth-largest country in the world. (Not to mention one of the most culturally significant. Brazil feels like the future to me.) Anyway, Curumin is a terrific young samba-funk musician who specializes in a laid-back, soul-soaked groove.
FRANCE: “Puzzle” by Tahiti 80. From the album Puzzle (2000).
Tahiti 80 was, for a window of time, as good a summery pop band as existed on either side of the Atlantic. Xavier Boyer’s vocals had the breathy naivete of a 14-year-old virgin, and the band had a nice bounce that got your knees moving. Sadly, the wheels came off a bit with their last album (the still-unreleased-stateside Fosbury), which made an ill-advised play for the discotheque crowd, but their first few albums are divine.
GHANA: “Bukom Mashie” by Oscar Sulley & the Uhuru Dance Band. From the album Gilles Peterson in Africa (2005).
As I’ve mentioned before, the name Gilles Peterson is gold here at crabwalk.com HQ; the man’s musical tastes match up 1:1 with my own, and I love his eclecticism and his musical generosity. His Africa album is as good as you’d expect (as are his Brazil and U.S. R&B albums), including this track of early ’70s big-band Afrobeat. Sounds like Fela Kuti backed by Tommy Dorsey’s horn section.
ITALY: “Talk About the Passion” by Samson and the Philistines. From the album Surprise Your Pig: A Tribute to R.E.M. (1992).
This is from an almost hilariously bad R.E.M. tribute album. (Although I’ll make minor exceptions for the Jawbox version of “Low” and, for sheer humor value, the hardcore version of “Losing My Religion” by Tesco Vee’s Hate Police.) For some reason, it included this remarkably faithful version of “Talk About the Passion” (roughly the 2,474,237th-best R.E.M. song) sung in Italian. I can’t find anything else about the band.
SPAIN: “La Nina de Puerta Oscura” by Paco de Lucia. From the soundtrack to The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004).
I was a little stuck finding a song for Spain. I considered going with the band Spain instead of the country, or maybe some appropriate Miles Davis. But I found this Paco de Lucia track (from the Wes Anderson vehicle) to save you from a flamenco-less MP3 Monday.
SWITZERLAND: “Eat the Rich” by Krokus. From the album Headhunter (1983).
Switzerland: Pride of neutrality and producer of lame music. I considered cheating here again (by including Les McCann & Eddie Harris’ Swiss Movement, which was recorded at Montreaux in 1969). But instead, I tracked down the one Swiss band to dent the American charts: Krokus, purveyors of bad pop-metal in the early 1980s. Eat the rich, indeed!
UKRAINE: “Tsilkom Vakantnyy (Pretty Vacant)” by The Ukrainians. From the album Respublika (2002).
I was going to be forced to use Ukraine’s Eurovision 2006 entry (a bland English-language trifle entitled “Show Me Your Love”) until I stumbled on The Ukrainians. They were originally a side project of the British band The Wedding Present, in particular bassist (and ethnic Ukrainian) Peter Solowka. The idea is to play high-energy rock versions of traditional Ukrainian folk songs — or, alternately, to add some Ukrainian flavor (and language) to punk rock. This track is a cover of the Sex Pistols’ classic “Pretty Vacant.”
Here’s my story from today’s front page. Foot fetishists, note that this story sets my new personal record for toe mentions:
If you own stock in a company that makes No. 2 pencils, now might be a good time to sell.
After a few years of tiptoeing, Texas is preparing to take its first big step into online testing. School districts have the option to administer next spring’s TAKS test by computer.
“Students have become more and more accustomed to a computer environment,” said Susan Barnes, associate commissioner for standards and programs at the Texas Education Agency. “That has become the mode of how they interact.”
Some worry that the shift, designed to eventually save money and time, could have substantial implications for the tests’ fairness. Not every school has access to the same quality or quantity of computers.
It could also be a solution to Texas’ cheating problems – or make them worse, depending on who’s talking.
I also never linked to my column from Monday:
Why do some parents make such stupid decisions?
That was the question that kept popping into my mind last week as I walked around the KIPP TRUTH Academy in South Dallas. (For the moment, please forgive their over-commitment to capital letters.)
Here was a middle school, in a poor part of town, that put academics first. A free charter school with a demonstrated record of taking struggling neighborhood kids and putting them on a path to college. A school whose graduates will get scholarships to Dallas’ most elite private high schools and who will eventually be successful in life.
And it opened school this month with 20 empty seats in its fifth-grade class.
Pitchfork has posted a list of 100 awesome music videos, all linked via Youtube. In other words, an excellent way to kill two hours. But not all awesome music videos are created of equal awesomeness, so here’s the crabwalk.com guide to which videos are most worth your time:
Page 1: A-Ha, Air, The Avalanches, Blur.
Page 2: Busta Rhymes, Cee-Lo, Cyndi Lauper, Daft Punk.
Page 3: The Decemberists, DJ Shadow, Dr. Dre, Duran Duran.
Page 4: Elton John, The Eurythmics, Frankie Goes to Hollywood.
Page 5: The Jacksons, Jason Forrest, Journey, Junior Senior, Kate Bush.
Page 6: KMD, Kraftwerk, Lionel Richie, M.I.A., Madvillain, Missy Elliott.
Page 7: My Bloody Valentine, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, The Postal Service.
Page 8: R. Kelly, Radiohead, The Replacements.
Page 9: Sinead O’Connor, Talking Heads.
Page 10: Toni Basil, Twisted Sister, Village People, Wu-Tang Clan, Yo La Tengo, ZZ Top.
No MP3 Monday this week, as I was up in Seattle this weekend for a wedding. But an update on an old one.
On May 15 I posted about The Trend, a terrific Missouri power-pop band active in the early 1980s. Today, I got an email from its leader-turned-lawyer, John McMullan.
“We have been very fortunate to have been given a tremendous ‘reminder’ by our inclusion in the newest Yellow Pills, and the feedback has been uniformly positive,” he says.
On to my write-up. For starters, I’d assumed an early R.E.M. connection (“You can tell they listened to Chronic Town, but the burbling bass and speed-freak drums say they were up to something of their own”). Not so, apparently:
[T]o my knowledge, none of us had ever heard Chronic Town prior to the recording of the album. I know that I became familiar with R.E.M. during the summer of ‘83. (Our album was recorded in July, 1982.) Later demos of ours included guitar sounds derived directly from Peter Buck, but our album was mined from an odd Monkees/Records/Shoes/Fools Face combination. We weren’t sophisticated enough for R.E.M. at that moment!
And as to my in-retrospect-not-particularly-generous comment on his later work:
I happen to agree with your truism that power pop artists do not age well. In fact, none of them, including myself, retain the urgency required to play true power pop well. Maybe it’s a metabolism thing, or a domesticity thing, but it’s true. In fact, most of my favorite power pop acts never even made a 2nd album that I really liked!
For kicks, I’m reposting the Trend song that initially grabbed my attention, “(I Feel Like A) Dictionary.”
Today I make a nomination for Worst Mayor of Dallas Ever: John Henry Brown. I actually don’t know much about his term as mayor (1885-1889), but he’d already had a long and storied evil career by then.
“[A]malgamation of the white with the black race, inevitably leads to disease, decline and death,” he wrote in 1857, when he was a state legislator from Galveston. At the time he chaired the House Committee on Slaves and Slavery, and he was making a proposal that proved too radical for even that committee. Arguing that Africans had been “indisputably adapted by nature to the condition of servitude,” Brown proposed a legislative resolution calling for the rebirth of the African slave trade. (It had been banned in 1808, even though slavery was still legal.) The committee rejected the notion.
In 1860, with abolitionist fervor rising (particularly in parts of North Texas that didn’t grow as much cotton), Brown told Texans to “whip no abolitionist, drive off no abolitionist — hang them, or let them alone.” And after the Civil War, rather than stay in a Union-controlled Texas, he ran away to Mexico like a little punk.
John Henry Brown: A little punk.
There used to be an elementary school in Dallas named for him. In the segregation era, it was a whites-only school; when the children of Elmer Hurdle — a black man who lived half a block from John Henry Brown Elementary — were told they couldn’t attend there, they became plaintiffs in the first Dallas school-desegregation lawsuit. (It was dismissed four days later, in 1955; Dallas didn’t really desegregate for many years after that.)
As time moved on, the school’s student body shifted to being 98 percent minority, which created a bit of dissonance with Brown’s little punk past. But in 1999, the Dallas school board changed its namesake to Dr. Billy E. Dade, a Dallas teacher, principal, and college professor.
One of the best parts of the New Deal — at least from the perspective of a historically-minded journalist — was the Federal Writers’ Project, which paid writers to collect oral histories, pen travel guides, and otherwise keep busy. (Among the later-to-be-big names on the payroll were Studs Terkel, Nelson Algren, John Cheever, and Richard Wright.)
One of the works produced by the FWP was Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, a massive 17-volume compilation of just what it sounds like. Between 1936 and 1938, writers fanned out across America, searching out ex-slaves (by then quite old) and asking them about their lives. Their prose is marked by the time, with its exaggerated black dialogue, but it’s an invaluable window into the lives turned by slavery.
The Library of Congress has put more than 2,300 slave narratives online, and they’re worth reading. I picked out one to post here: the story of Lulu Wilson, aged around 97, and a resident of 1108 Good Street, Dallas, Texas. (Good Street is now called Good-Latimer; my guess is that her house was roughly where I-30 and I-45 meet on the southeast side of downtown Dallas.)
The images below are the entire five-page narrative (click on them to zoom to a readable size), but here are a few excerpts:
My paw warn’t no slave. He was a free man, ‘cause his mammy was a full blood Creek Indian. But my maw was born in slavery, down on [her owner] Wash Hodges’ paw’s place, and he give her to Wash when he married. That was the only woman slave what he had and one man slave, a young buck. My maw say she took with my paw and I’s born, but a long time passed and didn’t no more young’uns come, so they say my paw am too old and wore out for breedin’ and wants her to take with this here young buck. So the Hodges sot the n——r hounds on my paw and run him away from the place and maw allus say he went to the free state. So she took with my step-paw and they must of pleased the white folks what wanted n——-s to breed like livestock, ‘cause she birthed nineteen chillen.
On her brothers and sisters:
I gits to thinkin’ now how [her owner] Wash Hodges sold off maw’s chillun. He’d sell ‘em and have the folks come for ‘em when my maw was in the fields. When she’d come back, she’d raise a ruckus. Then many the time I seed her plop right down to a settin’ and cry ‘bout it. But she ‘lowed they warn’t nothin’ could be done, ‘cause it’s the slavery law. She said, “O, Lawd, let me see the end of it ‘fore I die, and I’ll quit my cussin’ and fightin’ and rarin’.’
On the Civil War
Wash Hodges was gone away four years and Missus Hodges was meaner’n the devil all the time. Seems like she jus’ hated us worser than over. She said blobber-mouth n——-s done cause a war.
And on her grandson and the then-new Social Security program:
He’s got four chillun and he makes fifty dollars a month. I’m crazy ‘bout that boy and he comes to see me, but he can’t help me none in a money way. So I’m right grateful to the president for gittin’ my li’l pension. I done study it out in my mind for three years and tell him, Lulu says if he will see they ain’t mo more slavery, and if they’ll pay folks liveable wages, they’ll be less stealin and slummerin’ and goin’s on. I worked so hard. For more’n fifty years I waited as a nurse on sick folks. I been through the hackles if any mortal soul has, but it seems like the president thinks right kindly of me, and I want him to know Lulu Wilson thinks right kindly of him.
I was looking through the DMN’s archives to see the first time we ever mentioned Shaquille O’Neal. Shaq went to high school in San Antonio, after all, and we’ve historically paid a fair amount of attention to recruiting.
Turns out that our first reference was in an article from Sept. 30, 1988, at the start of his senior year:
Basketball recruiting experts are touting four Texas big men as among the best in the nation — San Antonio Cole’s 7-0 Shaquille O’Neal, 7-0 Matt Wenstrom of Katy Mayde Creek and Kingwood’s pair of 6-10 posts, Todd Schoettelkotte and Rodney Odom. Schoettelkotte, who signed early with Purdue, is the only one of the four who has committed to a college.
We all know Shaq turned out to be pretty good. How about the rest?
I know all about Matt Wenstrom because he played for North Carolina, my college team of choice. He was — and I say this respectfully — a nobody. A big body, but no skills; he scored a grand total of 194 points in four years, mostly riding the pine behind Eric Montross and the immortal Kevin Salvadori. Because of that big body, he actually had a cup of coffee in the NBA, adding all of 18 more points to his life total.
Rodney Odom went to UCLA, redshirted, transferred to UNC-Charlotte and had a nice college career there. He played for a while in Poland, and now you can hire him to come train your AAU team.
As for Todd Schoettelkotte, he apparently didn’t stick around long at Purdue, since it appears he finished his playing career back in Houston at Rice. Now, it seems he’s “a Director in the FTI Forensic and Litigation Consulting practice,” with “significant experience assisting companies with complex financial accounting and litigation issues in a variety of industries.”
I’d imagine that that being mentioned alongside Shaq was, in retrospect, the peak of each of their athletic careers.
Monday is Juneteenth, the Texas-centric (‘though not Texas-exclusive) holiday commemorating the end of slavery. The American South after the Civil War was as close as I ever came to an academic specialization, so expect some 1860s/Reconstruction links in the coming days.
First off, did you know about the Knights of the Golden Circle?
The Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC) was a secret society originally founded to promote Southern interests and prepare the way for annexation of a “golden circle” of territories in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean which would be included into the United States as southern or slave states. During the American Civil War, Southern sympathizers in the North, known as Copperheads, were accused of belonging to the Knights of the Golden Circle…
[Founder George] Bickley’s main goal was the annexation of Mexico. Hounded by creditors, he left Cincinnati in the late 1850s and traveled through the East and South promoting an expedition to seize Mexico and establish a new territory for slavery. He found his greatest support in Texas and managed within a short time to organize thirty-two chapters there. In the spring of 1860 the group made the first of two attempts to invade Mexico from Texas. A small band reached the Rio Grande, but Bickley failed to show up with a large force he claimed he was assembling in New Orleans, and the campaign dissolved…
During the 1863 Gettysburg Campaign, scam artists in south-central Pennsylvania sold fearful Pennsylvania Dutch farmers paper tickets purported to be from the Knights of the Golden Circle for a dollar. Along with a series of secret hand gestures, these tickets were supposed to protect the possessions and horses of the ticket holders from seizure by invading Confederate soldiers. When Jubal Early’s infantry division passed through York County, Pennsylvania, they scoffed at these ticket holders and took what they wanted anyway, often paying with Confederate currency or drafts on the Confederate government.
A trailer for the upcoming Os Mutantes documentary. Not sure how the doc will turn out, but Brazilian 1960s culture has been a mid-level obsession of mine for about a year now.
“Imagine a 1960’s Brazilian rock band on a weekly television program disguised as aliens, witches, or conquistadors, performing surreal hymns to such bizarre figures as Don Quixote (or at other times Genghis Khan and Lucifer) while tossing massive nets and giant rubber caterpillars across their audience…[Os Mutantes] provoked even further outrage by fashioning their own outrageous musical instruments, often constructed out of such common household objects as rubber hoses, cans of hot chocolate, or bottles of bug spray. Finally, they did all of this under the watchful eyes of a brutally repressive right-wing military dictatorship, as they were regularly censored by the government…”
The name of the doc comes from their song “Panis et Circenses,” which means “bread and circuses” — “a derogatory phrase which can describe either government policies to pacify the citizenry, or the shallow, decadent desires of that same citizenry. In both cases, it refers to low-cost, low-quality, high-availability food and entertainment, and to the exclusion of things which the speaker considers more important, such as art, public works projects, democracy, or human rights.” Pretty ballsy to play that under a military dictatorship. Here’s a (so-so quality) video of the band playing the song:
The rather poetic lyrics are here (“I demanded that a dagger of pure shining steel be made / To kill my love, and I did it / At five o’clock on Central Avenue / But the people in the dining room / Are occupied with being born and with dying”).
Finally, here’s Os Mutantes playing with another great musical hero of ’60s Brazil, Gilberto Gil — currently the country’s Minister of Culture (!) in the Lula government. It’s astonishing how much joy they played with, considering the political situation and the sort of songs they’re singing:
And since it’s illegal to mention Gilberto Gil without mentioning Caetano Veloso — both were famously jailed by the government — here he is playing in 1998:
Finally, here’s a video of Brazilian songstress Cibelle covering Veloso’s 1971 “London, London,” written while he and Gil were in exile there. Both song and video feature American New Weird America singer Devendra Banhart (who I initially thought was too weird for his own good, but who I’ve come to enjoy quite a bit):
Cleaning out the “to blog” emails to myself:
I’ve returned a bit to the cheating beat at work, which has produced a couple of front-page stories over the last few days. The better one ran Sunday:
An alarming number of students who graduated from Texas high schools last month probably cheated to get there – and state education officials are in no hurry to catch them.
A state-sponsored analysis found thousands of suspicious scores on the 11th-grade TAKS, the test students must pass to graduate.
The study found 96 Texas high schools where groups of last year’s 11th-graders turned in unusually similar answer sheets – suggesting they may have been copying each other’s answers. Scores in almost every Dallas neighborhood high school raised red flags.
Eleventh-grade classrooms were more than eight times more likely to have suspicious scores than those in other grades, researchers found.
The study’s results don’t surprise experts. “Levels of cheating in high school are at astronomical levels,” said Tim Dodd, executive director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University.
But in Texas, state and local officials say that these unusual patterns in data – even those that researchers say are millions of times less likely to occur than your being struck by lightning tomorrow – are not enough to trigger scrutiny.
The result is that many of the most egregious cases of likely cheating will go uninvestigated.
A state-sponsored analysis has flagged 114 North Texas schools as having suspicious scores on the 2005 TAKS test – scores that could suggest cheating by students or teachers.
Dallas, the area’s largest district, led the way with 39 schools. Plano ISD, with nine schools on the list, had the area’s second-highest total. Fort Worth ISD had seven, the Lewisville and Richardson school districts each had six, and McKinney ISD had five. Five charter schools also made the list.
It’s a big week in sports. The world is enthralled by the the FIFA World Cup, which began Friday. I had big plans for a World Cup-themed MP3 Monday, but bailed out when I realized I didn’t have any songs from Costa Rica, Cote d’Ivoire, or Angola. (Although one presumes that Gal Costa’s “Não Identificado,” Sound Directions’ “Theme for Ivory Black,” and the Weary Boys’ version of “It Takes A Worried Man” performed live at Angola Prison could have subbed in.)
Aw, hell, here’s that Weary Boys track anyway.
But instead this week’s MP3 Monday focuses on the mania du jour here at crabwalk.com HQ: the NBA Finals, which pit the Dallas Mavericks — force for all that is good, wholesome, and German in the world — against the bloated, retrograde Miami Heat, a team so awful it can’t even afford a plural noun for a name. This week’s schtick-to-match: Dallas songs vs. Miami songs.
First off, the Big D.
“Southside Funk” by The Soul Seven. From the album The Funky 16 Corners (2001).
The Soul Seven were a funk band formed in 1969 at Bishop College, the since-closed historically black college on Dallas’ south side. (Its campus is now Paul Quinn College.) The band didn’t last long and would have been forgotten long ago were it not for Eothen Alapatt (a.k.a. Egon), the soul-collector genius who compiled The Funky 16 Corners, a great amalgam of old funk 45s for Stones Throw Records. (The Soul Seven also appears on the Egon-produced South Dallas Pop Festival 1970 live album.)
(For the non-locals, South Dallas is the traditionally black part of the city — hence the name of the song.)
Check out Egon’s narrative of roaming the country, tracking down old funk tracks and bowling every night.
“Felo de Se” by Bedhead. From the album Beheaded (2001).
Bedhead were probably the biggest indie band to come out of Dallas in the 1990s. I saw them live twice. The first time was in a small space in Cleveland, on Fourth of July weekend 1996. I was visiting my buddy I-Huei, who was interning in Cleveland while I was interning in Toledo. Bedhead was great. The second time was with then-girlfriend Kelly in Detroit, at The Magic Stick. They were horrrrrrible. Lead singer Matt Kadane was sick, and his brother Bubba sang everything in his place. There was a reason Bubba was not the regular lead singer. The energy drained out of the place, and I ended up apologizing to Kelly for submitting her to the show.
“Felo de Se” is one of their later songs, and one of their peppier ones. The title means suicide. Having song titles in Latin makes perfect sense for a smartypants like Matt Kadane, who got his Ph.D. from Brown last year (dissertation: “The Watchful Clothier: The Diary of an 18th-Century Protestant-Capitalist”) and is now a lecturer at Harvard.
“Shake For Me” by Stevie Ray Vaughan. From the album In the Beginning (1992).
People think of Stevie Ray as an Austin product, but he was born and raised in Dallas (Oak Cliff, more specifically, also on the south side), and that’s where he’s buried. I haven’t yet been to the SRV Museum, but that’s a field trip for some upcoming weekend. This is from a radio broadcast of a Stevie Ray show on April Fool’s Day 1980, when he was still just an Austin club rat, three years before his first album. (It’s also my favorite SRV album, if you’re looking to pick one up.)
“Dallas, Airports, Bodybags” by American Music Club. From the album Mercury (1993).
AMC wasn’t from Dallas, but how could I pass up this song title? The surprisingly upbeat shuffle doesn’t give any clues what the title refers to, but my best guess is Delta Flight 191, which crashed at DFW on landing in 1985.
The last time AMC lead singer Mark Eitzel played a show in Dallas, I yelled out a request for this song. It was ignored.
“The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton” by The Mountain Goats. From the album All Hail West Texas (2002).
The Mountain Goats aren’t from Dallas, either. And I didn’t even choose their one Dallas-based song, the Casio-fueled “Blues in Dallas” (“Down in Dealey Plaza / The tourists mill about”). But Denton’s just outside town, and I have a special love for this song. Any song that ends with a rousing call to “Hail Satan!” gets the crabwalk.com seal of approval.
And I love this lyric: “The best ever death metal band out of Denton never settled on a name / But the top three contenders, after weeks of debate / Were Satan’s Fingers, and The Killers, and The Hospital Bombers.”
“Worst Case Scenario” by Cottonmouth, Texas. From the album Anti-Social Butterfly (1997).
Cottonmouth, Texas was (is?) the spoken-word project of Deep Ellum denizen Jeff Liles. This particular tracks tells the tale of an ill-timed acid trip.
I actually reviewed this album in my past life as a Professional Rock Critic™ and got a nice email from Jeff himself: “Thanks for buying my album. It’s the lowest selling record in the history of Virgin Records. You are a part of a small family of people who actually own it. I hope that you found it entertaining, and feel free to make cassette dubs for your friends. Peace to you and yours.”
So that’s Dallas. What about Miami? I have to say, Miami has not produced a big part of my music collection. I love Latin music, but the Miami stuff that’s reached any sort of national scale has been more poppy (Gloria Estefan, Jon Secada, etc.) than grimy. (The one great songstress I assumed was from Miami, the Cubana Celia Cruz, was actually based in New Jersey most of her career.) And I love hip-hop, but Miami bass has never struck me as one of the more positive influences on the genre. And as for guitar music…geez, south Florida’s just a black hole. Hell, even the panhandle has lapped it a thousand times over. (Seriously, look at this list. And the gall of claiming Debbie Harry as a Miamian when she moved to New Jersey at three months old!)
So I’m forced to rely, in large part, on songs others have written about Miami. I was tempted to include “Florida (Is Shaped Like A Big Droopy Dick For a Reason),” the post-2000-election plaint by Cex, but sadly the song’s just not that great.
“(Your Mama’s On) Crack Rock” by Disco Rick & The Dogs. From the album The Dogs (1990).
Probably the most socially transgressive song in the short-lived history of MP3 Monday, but in many ways the ne plus ultra of Miami bass. Be sure to gather the kids around the computer speakers for this one — it’ll encourage them to ask all sorts of interesting questions.
“Boogie Shoes” by K.C. & The Sunshine Band. From the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever (1977).
At least K.C. (nee Harry Wayne Casey) was from Miami. He got his start working in a record store: “He noticed often that customers would come in not remembering the titles of the records they wanted, and the store would lose the sale — this is the reason so many of his songs repeat their titles over and over.” Something to contemplate while listening.
“Florida’s On Fire” by Superchunk. From the album Here’s To Shutting Up (2001).
Superchunk’s from North Carolina, not Florida, but they can watch the news like anyone else (“Don’t you know that the dirt’s on fire down here?”). It’s a shame that it’s been five years since this record; I count the ‘chunk among the great underrated ’90s indie bands and Here’s To Shutting Up was strong.
Trivia: Superchunk drummer Jon Wurster is half of the Scharpling & Wurster comedy team familiar to WFMU listeners.
Trivia that’s well known enough it doesn’t really count as trivia any more: Mac and Laura from Superchunk are the forces behind Merge Records, which would be on any sentient person’s short list for Best Record Label Alive (Spoon, American Music Club, Neutral Milk Hotel, Richard Buckner, the Arcade Fire, Destroyer, Dinosaur Jr., Imperial Teen, etc.).
“Miami Skyline” by Girls Against Boys. From the album You Can’t Fight What You Can’t See (2002).
I remember getting a promo of the previous Girls Against Boys album in 1998. The press materials had an entire section telling critics how to refer to the band’s name. You had two options, if I remember: either write out the entire Girls Against Boys or use the shorter GVSB. Other variants, like Girls vs. Boys or Females In Direct Opposition To Males, were verboten. Anyway, I’d thought they were dead, but apparently they still tour every so often.
Trivia: New Wet Kojak, a GVSB side project, was even better than the original, in this reporter’s opinion. A little lounge-y, a little whispery.
Further trivia: GVSB bassist Johnny Temple runs a small publishing house off the money he made from that 1998 album, Akashic Books. Yet another man living the crabwalk.com lifestyle of choice, literary lion by day, rocker by night. And, to close the loop, here’s an article on Akashic written by none other than Jessica Winter, my old college newspaper buddy.
Movie ads for Chiquita bananas, circa 1947. Of note: the deeply-unacceptable-today portrayal of cannibals, the intense promotion of brown-flecked bananas, and imagery that echo the nastiest-looking 20th-century dishes.
Since there was no MP3 Monday this week, I humbly offer you a new track from the great Dangerdoom: a version of “Space Hos” remixed by crabwalk.com favorite Madlib. Please look past the not-particularly-feminist use of “hos” and groove to the bizarre Judy-Jetson-inspired lyrics and the great bouncy flute that sounds straight outta Saturday-morning television circa 1978.
The rest of the Dangerdoom remix EP is available online, but it’s nothing special — the beats are flat and spare, not the funhouse vibe of the original album.
Speaking of Madlib, here’s a pretty good article on him and the rest of the Stones Throw empire, which provides roughly 20 percent of my total music listening these days. Also, a good-looking Stones Throw compilation hits stores in a couple weeks.
Updates on two recent crabwalk.com posts:
May 24, The woman who confuses blindness with homosexuality: Here’s a different version of the video that includes the blind-not-gay mountain climber’s reaction.
May 15, fuzzy writing on the new West Texas speed limit: A later AP story clarifies what the original story fudged: “Agency studies found 85 percent of drivers on those highways are already cruising between 76-79 mph, said Carol Ranson, deputy director for traffic operations.”
The latest installment of People Named Joshua Benton Who Are Not, For The Record, Me:
I finally broke up with Josh today and told him that I was interested in someone else. I cant be with him as long as he is in jail. He cant take care of us as long as he is a dope head.
Here’s my story — a global exclusive! — from today’s front page:
Texas officials have tried to artificially boost test scores by eliminating 10 percent of the state’s students from the No Child Left Behind accountability system – including many of the state’s most disadvantaged children.
But federal authorities quietly blocked the attempt last month – along with three other proposed changes that would have improved the appearance, if not the reality, of Texas schools’ performance.
It’s the latest step in the continuing dance between the U.S. Department of Education and states seeking to make life easier for their schools.
“We have this race-to-the-bottom problem,” said Kevin Carey, a researcher at the Education Sector think tank who has studied how states negotiate with the federal government. “One state comes up with a particular wrinkle that has the effect of reducing pressure on schools to achieve. Other states notice it and say, ‘Oh, yeah, can we do that too?’ “
Our Food and Drug Administration, fighting to protect the nation from rogue Jordan almonds:
Administration Information Letter (AIL) No. 173, October 20, 1941, stated that the term “Jordan” almonds was not considered misleading solely because almonds were not of Palestinian origin. This AIL read as follows:
“We have your letter of September 28 inquiring as to the use of the term ‘Jordan Almonds’ on labels for sugar-coated almonds in which almonds other than ‘genuine Spanish Jordan Almonds’ are used.
“Upon receipt of a similar inquiry as to the present-day consumer understanding of the term ‘Jordan Almonds” in connection with the confection you have in mind we undertook a little research as to the origin and evolution of the term. As far as we can determine the term ‘Jordan Almonds’ according to one source of information came from the French word ‘jardin,’ meaning ‘garden,’ ‘hence, a cultivated almond’ (Webster’s New International Dictionary). Another source of information indicated that at one time the term referred to a variety of almonds originally grown along the Jordan River in Palestine characterized by long, thin, slender, rather smooth kernels in thick, heavy shells…”
Always a bridesmaid, never a bride. My third time as a finalist for the Livingston Award has ended just like the last two: with me not winning. Alas.
How to make an iPod charger out of an Altoids tin and 2 AA batteries. Build it yourself or buy a kit.
An update on Tom Stoppard, my favorite playwright. His new play is his first to be about his native Czechoslovakia. Which seems strange, since I’ve always thought of his work as having a Central European flavor — although maybe that’s just me misremembering Travesties. (I was briefly into Czech theater around the time the Berlin Wall came down; I remember trying (unsuccessfully) to convince my high school drama teacher to put on Havel’s The Memorandum.)
Stoppard’s new one, Rock ‘n’ Roll, apparently features Syd Barrett as an off-screen character, making it at least the third work of his to feature Pink Floyd prominently. (Joining the film version of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead and the great play The Real Thing.)
Update: Here’s another Stoppard piece from the British newspapers.
You know, making fun of William Shatner lost its appeal some years ago — around the time when the ersatz Kirk began to understand the jokes and embrace his own absurdity. When did that happen, exactly? 1973? 1985? 1992?
I am no shatnerologist, but I believe the video below is strong evidence that his date of self-realization came after 1978, when he performed this (apparently irony-free) version of Elton John’s “Rocket Man.” (Introduction by Bernie Taupin!) Trust me — it rewards an extended listen, particularly around the 2:00 and 3:50 marks.
Apologies for the lack of posting lately (and the absence of MP3 Monday). I was in New Orleans for an education writers convention and have been running around. Regular posting to resume shortly.
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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06 Aug: COLUMN: A year’s wait can make all the difference for your child
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