An amazing animation of helper T-cell activation. Whatever that is. (Biology wasn’t my best subject.)
Apparently “[t]he lymphocyte crawling along the arteriole wall at the beginning has picked up a foreign signal, and has latched onto a macrophage through the T-cell receptors and major histocompatibility receptors. Then we dive into the cell, and the majority of the video shows the synthesis, sorting, and delivery of T-cell receptors, cytokines, and other proteins, and we finish with the now-alerted and activated lymphocyte slipping in-between the capillary wall cells on its way to trouble.
Interesting piece in TNR: Idi Amin’s path to stardom. (Although Amin’s name recognition would be waay below Mandela’s, no matter what the author says. Maybe in 1986 it’d be a fairer match, but not in 2006. He left office 27 years ago, after all.)
<cryptic>For reasons I may one day share, I’ve been particularly interested in African dictators lately.</cryptic>
A perfect day: Adam Roberts roams around Manhattan, grazing on ethnic food with Calvin Trillin. Notice the mention of the Chinatown tic-tac-toe-playing chicken, who plays a prominent role in one of the all-time great New Yorker stories.
The best American work of fiction of the past 25 years, according to a New York Times survey of authors and critics. The winner: Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Runners-up include DeLillo, McCarthy, Updike, Roth, Toole, Carver, O’Brien, Johnson, and Ford. (Lots of Roth, actually.)
The best British/Commonwealth work of fiction of the past 25 years, according to a Guardian survey of authors and critics. The winner: J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. Runners-up include Amis (Martin and Kingsley), Burgess, McEwan, Ishiguro, Rushdie, Atwood, Beckett, Byatt, and Naipaul.
Partial transcript here. Journalistically, it’s interesting how Murrow uses restraint as a tease. At one point: “I saw it, but will not describe it.” And: “I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it, I have no words.”
And finally: “If I have offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I’m not in the least sorry.”
Here’s an interesting analysis of the piece. “Murrow was so upset by what he saw at Buchenwald that he waited three days to make his broadcast while his contemporaries who had been there too filed their stories right away. Murrow wanted some time to gather himself, to carefully find the words and phrases that would convey to listeners how terrible the experience was. Those who watched him make the broadcast said they had never seen Murrow so grave, so tightly wound. They said that at the end of the broadcast, his anger was so great that he was trembling.”
For anyone considering a diamond purchase, this amazing article from the February 1982 Atlantic should be required reading. (Yes, it’s 24 years old. It hasn’t gone bad yet.) It’s a detailed history of the De Beers cartel and how — through market manipulations and genius marketing — they’ve been able to turn the purchase of compressed carbon into a statement of love. (Not to mention make roughly a gajillion dollars along the way.)
The article’s long, but absolutely worth it. Take this excerpt on how De Beers pushed engagement diamonds into Japan:
Until the mid-1960s, Japanese parents arranged marriages for their children through trusted intermediaries. The ceremony was consummated, according to Shinto law, by the bride and groom drinking rice wine from the same wooden bowl. There was no tradition of romance, courtship, seduction, or prenuptial love in Japan; and none that required the gift of a diamond engagement ring. Even the fact that millions of American soldiers had been assigned to military duty in Japan for a decade had not created any substantial Japanese interest in giving diamonds as a token of love.
J. Walter Thompson began its campaign by suggesting that diamonds were a visible sign of modern Western values. It created a series of color advertisements in Japanese magazines showing beautiful women displaying their diamond rings. All the women had Western facial features and wore European clothes. Moreover, the women in most of the advertisements were involved in some activity — such as bicycling, camping, yachting, ocean swimming, or mountain climbing — that defied Japanese traditions. In the background, there usually stood a Japanese man, also attired in fashionable European clothes. In addition, almost all of the automobiles, sporting equipment, and other artifacts in the picture were conspicuous foreign imports. The message was clear: diamonds represent a sharp break with the Oriental past and a sign of entry into modern life.
The campaign was remarkably successful. Until1959, the importation of diamonds had not even been permitted by the postwar Japanese government. When the campaign began, in 1967, not quite 5 percent of engaged Japanese women received a diamond engagement ring. By 1972, the proportion had risen to 27 percent. By 1978, half of all Japanese women who were married wore a diamond; by 1981, some 60 percent of Japanese brides wore diamonds. In a mere fourteen years, the 1,500-year Japanese tradition had been radically revised. Diamonds became a staple of the Japanese marriage. Japan became the second largest market, after the United States, for the sale of diamond engagement rings.
It will be very interesting in the coming decade to see how De Beers responds to the threat of synthetic diamonds — which are made in a lab but visually indistinguishable from the stuff that’s dug out of African mines. (We’re not taking cubic zirconium here — these are real diamonds.)
Anyway, popular culture may be catching up to the diamond debate. First there was Kanye. Then there’s Blood Diamond, the Leonardo DiCaprio/Jennifer Connelly/Djimon Hounsou movie coming out this Christmas. Apparently, De Beers is worried that the film might win hearts and minds.
For what it’s worth, I saw the trailer last week and ohmygoodness did it look bad. DiCaprio, whom I normally have no problem with, has an awful South African accent and acts with the broadest of broad strokes. Maybe De Beers doesn’t have anything to worry about after all.
This week’s MP3 Monday is about the great James Ramey — better known to soul cratediggers as the 400-pound Baby Huey. As always, MP3s will be online for one week.
James Ramey was raised in small-town Indiana and moved to Chicago at age 19. A glandular disorder made him a huge man — over 350 pounds for most of his adult life. He took the nickname Baby Huey from the giant duckling cartoon of the same name.
He called his band the Babysitters and played a very Curtis Mayfield-inspired brand of soul and funk — burbling, aggressive bass, rock-steady drums, and punchy horns. Over time, a little Sly & the Family Stone snuck in, too. In 1969, Baby Huey signed to Curtom, Mayfield’s label, and began recording his debut album.
Sadly, Baby Huey was by that point a big fan of heroin. In October 1970, he died of a drug-induced heart attack in a hotel bathroom. His album, The Baby Huey Story: The Living Legend, was released posthumously.
“Mama Get Yourself Together” is a fine example of the Baby Huey style — clearly a lot of Mayfield, some great percussion, and joyful blasts of brass.
It’s hard to criticize Baby Huey as a songwriter, considering he died at age 26. But a lot of the best songs on his album were covers. Take this version of the Sam Cooke civil-rights classic (and the original, also linked above). There’s no doubting Cooke’s version wins — the overdone strings and mix of bombast and restraint pack in the emotions.
But don’t sleep on Huey — he’s got a raw, gritty take on Cooke’s essentially polite song. It’s not quite Malcolm X to Cooke’s MLK, but it’s in that ballpark. Plus Huey stretches things out to nine and a half minutes — and gives you a great spoken-word breakdown around six minutes in. Among the topics: popsicle trucks, childhood, “space odyssey” drug trips, outhouses, pointy-toed shoes, “taking care of business at the drive-in movies,” and his thoughts on race relations: “There’s three kinds of people in this world — that’s how I know a change is gonna come. I said, there’s white people, there’s black people, and then there’s my people.”
Ironically, Cooke’s version wasn’t issued until after his death, either.
Three of the eight tracks on Baby Huey’s album are Curtis Mayfield songs, including this one by Mayfield’s band The Impressions. Both versions are just excellent, even though the lyrics are almost completely different outside the “Mighty Mighty.” But I think I prefer Baby Huey’s, which sounds like a Southside block party — complete with singing eight-year-olds, the street Lou Rawls grew up on, and turkey dinners at Walgreen’s.
Trivia: The Babysitters initially tried to carry on without Baby Huey. Their new lead singer: an 18-year-old Chaka Khan. But that didn’t last long.
Also, sadly, there’s apparently another band calling itself Baby Huey and The Babysitters, available for your private party or bar mitzvah. This seems wrong. I mean, if there’s an ex-Babysitter who wants to carry on, fine. But you can’t use Baby Huey’s name! The man’s dead! Also, on the handy list of every song the band knows, there’s not a single Baby Huey track — nor Curtis Mayfield, nor Sam Cooke. And, not to put too fine a point on it, the band seems awfully white — I doubt there’s a single true Babysitter among them. Harrumph.
I’ve never been particularly committed to an NBA team. My rooting interests were typically based on which team had the most North Carolina grads on its roster. But beyond the hometown Mavericks, the Wizards may be my second favorite team. That’s partly because of two Carolina grads on its roster (the childlike bull Brendan Haywood and the quick-release genius Antawn Jamison). But it’s also because of Gilbert Arenas, the most gloriously crazy player in the NBA.
On second thought, Gilbert is rich, so I guess the word is “eccentric,” not “crazy.” But charmingly eccentric.
Nobody expected Gilbert to be much of a player; he chose the jersey number 0 because that’s how many minutes he was expected to play for his college team. He wasn’t even drafted in the first round. Yet he’s the fourth-leading scorer in the NBA, dropping 29 points a night, largely because he works really hard on the court.
Among the Gilbert facts mentioned in the article:
- He never leaves his hotel room on the road. Never. The better to watch infomercials. “The last thing I bought was this colon cleanser. I just got talked into it. I’m like, Man, he makes it sound so good.”
- He plans to build a basketball court made entirely out of glass.
- He spent the last three years sleeping on his own couch every night.
- He wrestles his teammates before games to get out his energy. “No punching in the face. No chest and no ribs.”
Among the weird Gilbert facts the article doesn’t go into:
- He has modified his house to artificially reduce the amount of oxygen so that he can emulate playing at high altitude.
- He has been known to take a shower at halftime while wearing his full uniform.
- Before games, he hides a random teammate’s jersey in the locker room and makes him hunt it down.
- He once tried to shoot a free throw in a game by bouncing it off the floor.
By far the best Gilbert talk comes from FreeDarko. (Which is also the best NBA blog, treating the league as a sort of dense semiotic text.) FreeDarko loves Gilbert as all humans should and has attempted on numerous occasions to analyze his psyche:
- On the Wizards’ playoff loss this spring to the LeBron James-led Cavaliers: “But look back on what I said barely one hour ago: ‘I can’t stand to see Arenas suffer.’ Uh, isn’t that part of his appeal? That he bounces back against impossible odds more often than not, and that even his blunders leave you wondering exactly what they meant? I guess I’m only showing here that I do have such a strong affinity for the perennially under-respected Arenas that I don’t want to see him razed by Team LeBron. The point of Gilbert, though, is that he’ll go down dying before he lets the inevitable happen. If LeBron is a walking foregone conclusion whose shown he can indeed falter, Arenas is, and always will be, the unlikeliest of all the elite, even over the course of a single game. Having something invested in him is an uneasy, hair-raising pact tinged with a certain anxiety; being Gilbert, though, is probably the complete and total opposite of this.”
- “We’ve rhapsodized about LeBron as some sort of first principle of basketball, but I’ll take the wilderness of Gilbert’s soul any day over LeBron’s techtonic empircism.”
Interesting story in the NYT about a voting-rights dispute in Mississippi. But what I found interesting, newspaperman that I am, was this line:
When [local political boss Ike Brown] drove off to federal prison to serve a sentence for tax fraud in 1995, he received a grand farewell from his political supporters and friends, including local elected officials; whites, on the other hand, for years have seen him as a kind of occult force in determining the affairs of the county.
“Occult force.” I have a very strong suspicion that the reporter, Adam Nossiter, was trying to gain admission to the Order of the Occult Hand, a secret society of journalists who have all managed to work the vaguely non-sensical phrase “occult hand” into their stories. (The preferred form would be something like “It was as if an occult hand…”)
But the key to membership is actually slipping “occult hand” past your copy editors — who, as time has passed, have become more aware of the gambit. So Mr. Nossiter remains, alas, a non-member. An auxiliary member, perhaps.
According to our archives, no staff writer of The Dallas Morning News has never entered the Order of the Occult Hand. But on April 26, 1976, we did run an Associated Press story on the actress Louise Lasser — check the first paragraph:
Quick anecdote from Saturday. As I sat in the press box at the Texas-Oklahoma game Saturday, I caught up with a bunch of sportswriters I hadn’t seen in forever: Kevin Sherrington, Brad Townshend, Barry Horn. We all work for the same newspaper, but the sports-reporting world and the education-reporting world rarely intersect. (Except for high school sports, but that’s not these gentlemen’s area of labor.)
The last time I’d spent much time with these guys was back in 2002, when I covered the Salt Lake City Olympics with all three. But I was writing news/culture/terrorism/non-sports stories, so our paths only intersected tangentially. Anyway, I went up to Barry Saturday and reintroduced myself with a “I’m not sure you remember me, but…”
“Of course I remember you,” Barry said. “I’ll always remember you. You were the guy who introduced me to Google.”
(Ah, for the days of Altavista and Hotbot and Lycos and all the other sub-Googles.)
After a brief vacation, it’s the return of MP3 Monday. And it returns with a vengeance, as this week’s theme is Sloan, almighty kings of ’90s Canadian indie rock. Sloan has been one of my favorite bands for over a decade now, so it shall be honored with what I estimate to be the longest MP3 Mondayin history — running you through the band’s history and all the way up to their excellent new album.
I first heard Sloan a little over a decade ago — the summer of 1996, when I was an intern working for the daily newspaper in Toledo, Ohio. As I tooled around the Glass City in my junker summer car (an aged green Buick with sketchy A/C, if memory serves), the only radio station to catch my attention was 89X, the “alternative” station in Windsor, Ontario, right across the river from Detroit.
Because of its location, 89X was subject to Cancon rules — government regulations that require radio (and TV) stations to fill a certain portion of their airtime playing Canadian content. (It may seem seem oddly nationalist to regulate culture that way, but Cancon has done wonders to build support for Canadian music. Hell, the great Carl Newman recorded his solo album and funded a tour with government grants. O, Canada!)
Anyway, by ‘96 Sloan was already established as tops in the indie scene of Halifax, Nova Scotia — one of a half dozen cities labeled “the next Seattle” by A&R folks hunting for what would follow grunge. The four members of Sloan (Chris, Patrick, Andrew, and Jay) each wrote and sang songs, and they had a moptop charm that made Beatles comparisons de rigueur. Their so-so first album had heavy overtones of My Bloody Valentine and the more melodic end of Sonic Youth, which piqued industry interests and got them signed to Geffen.
But their second album, Twice Removed, was more tuneful and poppy, and it got them the quick boot from their label.
Which is a shame, because it’s awesome. Chart (the Canadian analog to Spin) has twice rated it the best album in Canadian history. Take that, Gordon Lightfoot! Every song is catchy without being saccharine, and the various Sloaners all seem so damn smart and funny and charming. I wanted to be their friend! Chris’ “Coax Me” was a big radio hit, and Jay’s “Snowsuit Sound” is a uniquely cold-weather take on unrequited teenage love.
Here’s the video for another song off the album, Andrew’s “People Of The Sky.” Enjoy tracking Patrick’s series of ill-advised haircuts through this and the videos that follow:
And here’s one of my favorites from their first album, Patrick’s “500 Up”:
Sloan’s third album, One Chord To Another, debuted in the summer in 1996 and would have been what was playing on 89X my first summer in Toledo — particularly the punky first single, “The Good In Everyone.” As good as Twice Removed was, OCTA was better — the songs are more spare and their writers take more risks. The sound is broader — more piano and horns, more varied grooves.
Quoth Stephen Thomas Erlewine: “Filled with catchy, jangling riffs and memorable melodies, the record is a tour de force of hooks and harmonies, filled with exceptionally strong songs and forceful performances, which give the record a firm, rocking foundation. Few power pop records of the ’90s are as infectious and memorable as One Chord to Another.”
Take the head-bopping “Everything You’ve Done Wrong,” which could be a mid-1970s single by Chicago, if Peter Cetera were 30 times cooler. Or the stripped-down “G Turns To D,” the sad tale of a man who taught his girlfriend how to play guitar — only to have her becomes a coffeehouse boho singing nasty songs about him. Or Jay’s puckish “The Lines You Amend,” without a doubt the poppiest song about suicide ever.
Sloan had two more excellent albums in a row — the hard-edged Navy Blues and 1999’s Between the Bridges, a common nominee for Best Sloan Album. Just last week, The Onion AV Club announced the creation of its musical Hall of Fame, honoring the greatest rock records of all time. The first inductee? Between the Bridges.
During this period, Andrew (“Delivering Maybes”) and Jay were making some great songs, but the singles (and thus the videos) were invariably from Patrick (“Friendship”) or Chris. Some examples:
“Money City Maniacs” (Patrick/Chris, with the famous chorus “And the joke is / When he awoke his / body was covered with Coke fizz”):
“She Says What She Means” (Chris):
“Losing California” (Patrick):
Unfortunately, the next two albums (Pretty Together and Action Pact) were kinda crap. Well, Pretty Together had its moments, but on the whole, the albums were dominated by Patrick’s too-strong love for AC/DC and KISS and Chris’ devolution into a writer of sappy ballads. Action Pact was particularly offensive, not featuring a single Andrew song. (Andrew songs are the creamy nougat of any good Sloan album.)
“If It Feels Good Do It” (Patrick’s single from PT; not awful, just boring):
“The Other Man” (Chris’ sap):
“The Rest of My Life” (Chris):
I hate to say it, but I’d just about given up on Sloan. Those last couple of records were uninspiring and predictable, and there wasn’t much reason for optimism.
So it is with quite a bit of joy that I can report that Sloan’s brand new album, Never Hear The End Of It, is kinda awesome. Every review I’ve seen has had some variant of “it’s their best since Between the Bridges,” and BTB is also the album it’s most similar to. Both albums flow from song to song with no gaps between, and both manage to juggle a variety of styles but feel like a unitary document. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, dontchaknow.
The strangest thing about NHTEOI is the track listing — it has 30 songs. The result is a 76-minute album that feels like a stretched-out Side 2 of Abbey Road — a symphony of little two-minute movements. And they all work well together; I’m normally the kind of guy who leaves iTunes on permanent shuffle, but NHTEOI works best as a start-to-finish listen.
(The album does start to lag around minute 60, but hey, so do I.)
The best tracks are Jay’s and Andrew’s — Patrick gets only four songs, and Chris has only a couple ballad clunkers. The songs links above: Andrew’s smoooove “Love Is All Around,” Chris’ choogling “Someone I Can Be True With,” Jay’s Steely Danny “Can’t You Figure It Out,” and Patrick’s obligatory big-rawk “Ill Placed Trust.”
No videos yet for the album’s singles (Jay’s T-Rexy “Who Taught You To Live Like That” and Chris’ opus “Fading Into Obscurity” — available for download here and here). But the band has been posting a series of short videos on their web site — here’s a six-minute behind-the-scenes:
Unfortunately, the new album isn’t out in the U.S. yet, and it’s unclear whether it will be. I ordered mine via Maple Music; it’s also at Amazon.ca. (It’s available at the American Amazon too, but at silly high import prices.)
If you’re interested in the back catalog, the certified classics are Twice Removed, One Chord To Another, and Between the Bridges, with Navy Blues only a half-step behind. The best-of A Sides Win is pretty good, too, although it’s too heavy on the late-period crap too. Their live album Four Nights At The Palais Royale is terrific. You can get nearly their entire collection at eMusic. And you should.
And just because there’s a .0000003 percent chance you’re not sick of Sloan by this point, a few live videos:
Here’s “Penpals,” from Twice Removed, on Halifax TV show called “Rita & Friends” — check out the bizarro early-’90s clothes:
An awkward morning-show interview followed by “Nothing Left To Make Me Want To Stay” from OCTA:
Chris’ “Try To Make It” (one of the better late-period songs) and, as a bonus, a cover of the Ramones’ “Judy Is A Punk”:
I spent Saturday afternoon in an unfamiliar journalistic environment: the press box at the Cotton Bowl, watching the Texas-Oklahoma game. The reason was this story in today’s paper, which features my first published use of the word “ratty.”
Fans of adventurous beats should already be subscribed to the Stones Throw podcast, the most delicious mish-mash of hip-hop, funk, and soul available in byte form.
(Recent episodes have included a Madlib mix of ’60s soul 45s, a collection of ’70s funk played by black high school bands, live video of the gods in Madvillain, and hip-hop reimaginings of the work of the guy who wrote Hair.)
Anyway, the current episode taps into my personal zeitgeist — it’s a 30-minute mix (by Egon) of Turkish funk. (Funk from the developing world is a minor obsession of mine. Bordering on major.) It’s awesome — laid-back and chock full of groove, with great sexy horns that sound a lot like Ethiopian jazz to these ears. Go download, friend.
(Apparently, the mix has a lot of Baris Manço in it. More on Anatolian rock here.)
Had another story in today’s paper. Probably of interest only to the hardcore cheating junkie:
State investigators are having some success finding evidence of TAKS cheating in their first wave of on-site investigations. But it may be another two months before those investigations – of less than 1 percent of schools flagged as suspicious – are completed.
While I was on blog vacation, a story of mine ran on the front page Sunday:
On May 12, 2005, Texas education commissioner Shirley Neeley stood in the Wilmer-Hutchins school board chambers and announced the results of her agency’s investigation into cheating on the TAKS test.
“Twenty-two WHISD teachers were found guilty of cheating,” she said. “The investigation found inexcusable, illegal, unprofessional and unacceptable behavior on the part of these 22 individuals.”
Shortly after, the Wilmer-Hutchins schools were all shut down. But the careers of the teachers lived on.
At least 10 of the 22 Wilmer-Hutchins educators are now working in other North Texas public schools, a Dallas Morning News investigation found. None has faced official sanction, more than 2 ½ years after the cheating took place.
Most were able to find new jobs weeks after Dr. Neeley’s statements.
They were able to do so in part because the body responsible for disciplinary actions against teachers, the State Board for Educator Certification, has been slow to act on the cases. The agency has a notorious backlog and a reputation for letting cases lie dormant, sometimes for more than two years.
In addition, state officials chose not to use their normal method to inform school districts of the findings of their investigation. Several of the school districts that now employ the teachers said they were unaware of the findings until informed by The News.
Johnny Apple has died. (That’s R.W. Apple Jr. to the byline readers in the audience.) He was for many years perhaps the most famous name in The New York Times, covering politics, war zones, and (in his advanced years) the glories of high-cholesterol foods.
Some folks dumped on Johnny for his news analysis pieces. (As the excellent obit notes: “His best were 1,200-word tapestries of history, erudition and style; the worst were clear and concise, but reflected conventional wisdom that sometimes proved wrong.”) But he may have had the last of the great correspondent careers — a bon vivant roaming the globe, floating on a boundless expense account and the layer of fat born of eating in the world’s finest restaurants. It’s the sort of life newspapers don’t fund as much any more, alas.
Quoth the obit: “But he was a natural role model, and his colleagues and competitors all watched what he asked, and what he wrote, and what and where and when he ate and drank, and they did their best to follow suit, albeit with much less apparent ease, capacity or zest. When, in an Indian restaurant in Uganda, he warned his dining companions, ‘No prawns at this altitude!,’ they listened up.”
That’s my new life motto: No prawns at this altitude!
As a Louisianian, I had a special affection for Apple’s byline, since he had an appropriate appreciation for boudin. Note the reference to Nook Bonin’s boudin emporium in New Iberia, a (tragically since-closed) place of wonder, where I have proudly dined with Johnny’s friend (and Friend-of-Crabwalk) James Edmunds.
I can’t find Calvin Trillin’s 2003 profile of Apple (in The New Yorker) online anywhere, but it’s worth hunting down.
Update: Here it is. “Apple stories often portray R. W. Apple, Jr., checking into a hotel so staggeringly expensive that no other reporter would dare mention it on his expense account, or confidently knocking out a complicated lead story at a political convention as the deadline or the dinner hour approaches, or telling a sommelier that the wine won’t do (even if the sommelier has brought out the most distinguished bottle in that part of Alabama), or pontificating on architecture or history or opera or soccer or horticulture. He still travels grandly and eats prodigiously. In Apple stories that take place in restaurants or hotels or even newsrooms, the verb used to describe his manner of entry is normally ‘swept in.’”
Updated update: Turns out that my friend Mary had a semi-run-in with Apple based on the aforementioned boudin link.
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.)
