Apologies for the gap between posts. It’s been a busy last week or so, primarily because my grandfather, Howard Paul Benton, died last Tuesday. He was Mazie’s husband from 1956 on, although they separated when I was in high school. He was a very good man, and the closest approximation of a father I had.
One of the concepts newspaper readers sometimes have trouble with is the divide between the editorial staff and the news staff.
The folks who write our editorials, on the fourth floor here at The Dallas Morning News, are good people. But they don’t have any say in what I write, and I don’t have any say in what they write.
It won’t surprise you that we sometimes disagree. So excuse me while I get out my bone-picking tools.
For fifth-graders having trouble with the TAKS test, everything comes down to a familiar factor: Location, location, location.
Texas’ law against social promotion is supposed to set uniform standards, requiring students to pass both the math and reading TAKS to be promoted to the sixth grade. But districts are given wide leeway in deciding who actually gets held back, and – according to newly released data from 2005, the most recent available – they use it in vastly different ways.
For instance, the Klein school district in suburban Houston promoted 98.5 percent of its fifth-graders who had failed the TAKS reading test repeatedly. Wichita Falls schools, in contrast, promoted just 4.8 percent.
(One thing the article doesn’t make clear, in this reporter’s opinion: MF Doom is roughly 30 times more talented than MF Grimm. Keep that in mind while reading.)
He said his writing has changed since his wife, Alice Stewart Trillin, died five years ago. A writer herself, she would read drafts of all his work, he said. Now that she’s gone, “the pieces aren’t as good.”
Stones Throw Records, the greatest label of them all, put out a compilation last month called Chrome Children. It was only okay, but it had moments. Perhaps the most impressive part of the release was the trio of videos for songs on the album, all of them directed by Daniel Garcia.
Let’s start with the best song (and best video): “Monkey Suite” by Madvillain. Madlib’s layered a rambling electro keyboard loop over a laid-back hard-bop bass line, and the genius MF Doom is his usual genius self. “Won’t be in the club in a muscle tank shirt / You could find ‘em in the pub with the grub stain / Chuggin’ on a small tub of pain to his bugged brain.” And the video’s gorgeous, with a great post-Orwellian feel — as if Brazil had been about hip-hop.
I, along with the rest of western civilization, anxiously await Madvillain’s second album, due sometime in 2007.
Next is Madlib on his own, “Take It Back.” Not his best work, but Madlib’s mediocrities beat out a lot of people’s masterpieces.
Finally, “Nothing Like This” by J Dilla. J Dilla died earlier this year (of lupus and a rare blood disease), and he’s proving to be a much bigger star in death than he ever was in life; it seems like there have been about a dozen posthumous releases already, with more to come. (For what it’s worth, one of those, The Shining, is really good.) This isn’t Dilla’s best beat or anything, but it’s solid and the underwater-themed video is great.
Bonus footage: a good seven-minute TV news piece on Madlib and Stones Throw from the Netherlands, featuring a look inside Madlib’s studio and an interview with Peanut Butter Wolf.
Double bonus footage: Here’s a fan remix of the Madvillain video, by this guy (who I apparently went to college with):
I’ve posted before about France Gall, the French yé-yé singer who, in the late 1960s, was a strong contender for the title of Cutest Woman Alive. Gallic cuteness + the ugly genius of Serge Gainsbourg = pop heaven.
Perhaps Gall’s most famous song is the Serge-penned “Laisse Tomber Les Filles.” It’s been covered by a bunch of acts over the years. Herewith, as many versions as I could find in 10 concentrated minutes of Googling:
Fifth, “Chick Habit,” the English-language version by April March, the delicious Francophile-animator-turned-chanteuse. Oh, April March, you temptress! Most of her catalog (which is well worth seeking out) is in French, but this translates Serge’s words in to “Hang up the chick habit / Hang it up, daddy / A girl’s not a tonic or a pill.”
Sixth — and bringing us to two ukulele references in this post — is this live version (Dec. 19, 2002) by The Kelele Brothers. It’s actually a cover of the April March version. Quoth their web site: “The Kelele Brothers, by day, are a mild-mannered group of world-travelling superstars who, at night, armed with ukeleles and beer, turn into a ridiculous bunch of yahoos.” They’re actually Canadian songwriter Ron Sexsmith and his touring band.
To recap the ongoing New Orleans restaurant battle:
1. National magazine writer Alan Richman writes a hit piece on New Orleans cuisine that can only be described as startling in its ignorance. HIs basic argument: “Contrary to the testimony of millions, New Orleans food has always sucked. And it still sucks.” He has apparently decided that New Orleans was having too easy a time of it lately and needed to be taken down a notch.
2. Brett Anderson, restaurant critic at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, responds by pointing out a number of errors in the article and calling Richman a big fat dummyhead. (I paraphrase.)
4. Richman, given the chance to defend himself, instead charges on, saying Anderson’s comments don’t matter because the T-P is “a third-rate newspaper that rose to the occasion after Katrina and has subsequently returned to being a third-rate newspaper.” To which a T-P backer rightly takes issue.
Poor, stupid Alan Richman. He commits the grave sin of calling bullshit on a culture he seems proud not to understand.
Listen, I’m not from New Orleans. But I grew up in Louisiana and can tell you that New Orleans is a strange, wonderful place, unlike any other. Sure, it has any number of problems, all well catalogued. But to dismiss the city’s culture as bland and useless, as Richman does, is just silly.
There is a certain school of commentator that takes a special pride in advancing counterintuitive arguments. Those arguments may be completely and totally false, contrary to accepted facts — but writing the boring truth doesn’t build the same pride of cleverness as going against the grain. You see these guys in various fields. In technology writing, John Dvorak is famous for it; in political writing, The New Republic has long been noted for being self-consciously clever and counterintuitive. (Although it’s gotten better about that in the last few years.)
Richman is the food-writing equivalent. At a time when there’s tons of sympathy for New Orleans — when people are pointing out that the city is a unique treasure that must be saved — where’s the buzz in writing a piece echoing those thoughts? Instead, he writes an ill-informed attack — and gets roughly 10 times the attention a more sane article would have. It’s a silly and predictable feedback loop, and it’s a shame people like Richman benefit from it.
In my past life as a rock critic, I remember getting an album by Sparks. (It was Plagiarism in 1998.) I assumed the band was a joke — a one-off parody of something. (The emaciated-Hitler looks of creepy Ron Mael helped promote that assumption.) Only later did I learn that, well, yes, it is sort of a joke — but only sort of. And it’s a joke they’ve been telling for 36 years. Quoth the wiki: “In contrast to the esteem in which they are held by such peers as Depeche Mode, New Order and the Pet Shop Boys, who all cite the Sparks as a major influence, their almost constantly changing styles and unique visual presentations have sometimes seen them dismissed as a novelty act.”
Gee, I can’t imagine why:
And here’s “The Number One Song In Heaven” from 1979 (I rather like this one):
A new volcanic island is born in the South Pacific, near Tonga. Folks on a yacht spotted telltale “pumice rafts” — floating seas of lighter-than-water igneous rock — and then spotted the new island, which appears to be at least a mile across. A separate group of fishermen also spotted the newcomer.
In a trend more maddening with time, CNN.com does not include links to the blog posts it references. (It’s particularly maddening because the story is from AP, and AP is pretty good about including links in their wire stories; CNN likely stripped them out for posting.) So, to save you labor:
Here’s the post from the yacht’s blog with photos of the pumice and the new island. Here’s the post detailing their finding.
Joe Theismann: “I think you have to take a look at the New Orleans Saints as the favorite in the NFC.”
Whoa. While I can’t much stand Theismann as an analyst — and I certainly will have no truck with a man who changed the pronunciation of his last name to make it rhyme with “Heisman” — still, Saints in the Super Bowl?!
Fun fact: Theismann spent three years playing for the Toronto Argonauts in the Canadian Football League. Also, watch his leg get snapped in half here.
You probably didn’t notice, but Texas schools just celebrated a big holiday.
I doubt anyone brought cupcakes to class, but Oct. 27 looms large in principals’ offices and the halls of administration buildings.
That’s because the last Friday in October is New Kids Stop Mattering Day — the day after which any new students enrolling at your school won’t be counted in next spring’s TAKS scores.
It’s a holiday that makes life easier for teachers and principals wishing for higher test scores. But it also hurts thousands of Texas kids.
I’m about to undergo a monthlong experiment. For the next 30 days, I will not use NetNewsWire.
NetNewsWire is an RSS reader for Macs. For those who haven’t yet had the woozy warmth of RSS shot into their veins, RSS is the way that web sites (like crabwalk.com) atomize their content into individual chunks — like, say, this post — and make them readable en masse. RSS makes it much easier to track many more web sites than one could by visiting them individually.
RSS is awesome.
But it’s also addictive. I currently track 338 web sites through NetNewsWire. And I check them all (with very rare exceptions) every morning and every night. Out of all those sites I probably skim 400 posts and actually read roughly 150 of them. Every day.
This is crazy. It’s good for you, The Reader, because the best of what I find often ends up on crabwalk.com. But man, it’s a time suck. I figure it’s roughly equivalent to reading the full text of The New York Times and The Washington Post every day. Not a bad thing, of course — just time-consuming.
So for the next month, no NetNewsWire. I promise I will be less knowledgable about a thousand different subjects come December 1. I will likely be less entertaining to talk to at parties. Posting here may slow. But I’ll have many more hours available for other things.
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.)
