A Slight Delay

The following is an honest-to-god email received from Amazon some days back. It’s too good not to share. I haven’t changed a word, since you don’t mess with perfection. Apologies for the sloppy formatting…

Dear Amazon.com Customer,We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased or rated Video Anthology, Vol. 1: 2000s have also purchased Eyes Wide Open on DVD. For this reason, you might like to know that Eyes Wide Open will be released on May 19, 2009.  You can pre-order yours by following the link below. Eyes Wide Open King Crimson List Price: $24.97 Price: $22.49 You Save: $2.48 (10%) Release Date: May 19, 2009 Eyes Wide Open is a fantastic eye cream that lifts and highlights the temples and is uniquely applied OVER your mineral makeup to give you that just jumped-out-of-the-shower fresh look! For breathtaking results, use in combination with ColoreScience’s Eye Serum, and ColoreScience’s My Favorite Eyes cream. The trio of eye products are available individually, or as a group (ColoreScience’s Eye Candy Kit). When used together, they rejuvinates the eye area and take the years off just by hydrating, highlighting and concealing problem eye areas.

Apologies for the slight Slight Delay delay. After a semi-hiatus spent starting to get my sorry ass into shape, I’ll be back over the next few days with some music, some books, and–surprise of surprises–some diet food that doesn’t suck (I know, I couldn’t believe it either).

If you believe NewsBusters (and I, for one, have difficulty putting stock in anything calling itself a news organization when its name conjures images of the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man), not only is “liberal bias” killing newspapers, but this is, somehow, a good thing. Leaving aside for a moment the fact that one should choose one’s news based on accuracy and thoroughness in reporting rather than on ideological grounds, the mass die-offs in our print media are cause for concern, not rejoicing.

I’ve written about this previously (you can read the original piece here, if you’d like), and rather than reiterate what I’ve said–to say nothing of what others have stated better, and at more length–I’d like to quote a bit from a study published by the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. It’s titled Do Newspapers Matter? Evidence from the Closure of The Cincinnati Post. While anecdotal evidence (and recent surveys like this one from Pew) suggest that newspapers have become an increasingly marginal means of getting the news, study authors Sam Schulhofer-Wohl and Miguel Garrido argue that even with diminished circulation, newspapers have an impact far beyond their sales figures:
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It certainly sounds like a great idea: bring together two DJ’s, one from North America and one from South America, along with about forty guests. Simmer for four years, and then unleash upon an eager public. In practice… well, that’s something else again. The Spirit of Apollo sounds, and feels, like a frustrating relic of what might have been, but wasn’t quite.

For the most part, the results smolder, but never fully come alight. It’s not for lack of talent. Producers/DJ’s Squeak E. Clean and Zegon are competent, and on those occasions that things click, it’s because of collaborations that work precisely because they’re counterintuitive; if putting David Byrne and Seu Jorge alongside Gift of Gab and Chali 2na (as on “The People Tree” and “Money”) is cool, pairing Tom Waits with Kool Keith on “Spacious Thoughts” is downright inspired. However, some of the disc’s other combinations come off as a form of musical stunt casting, as with the ubiquitous Kanye West and Wu Tang cameos (the fact that O.D.B. appears here gives you an idea of about how long this disc has been in the works). There are some gems here, but you’ve got to pan through an awful lot of averageness to find them. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve never suffered from a dearth of books on Christianity. Even leaving aside the Bible, books on all things Christian–apologetics, fiction, inspirational tracts, and even books that take on Christianity from an atheistic viewpoint–have never been in short supply. The Christian publishing industry takes in revenues in excess of billions of dollars per year, much of it spent preaching to the converted, and much of the rest attempting to convert the rest.

What we don’t see nearly as often are books that unearth the other Christianities, those that have existed side-by-side with orthodox Christianity, or that show us the Christianities that might have been. Sure, The DaVinci Code created a flurry of interest in all things Gnostic, but there are a plethora of other possibilities that blossomed in the early years of the religion, many of them never to come to full flower. One such “alternate” Christianity is outlined in Martin Palmer’s The Jesus Sutras.

As we’re still reminded on a nearly daily basis, cultures and religions seem more likely to clash than collaborate. Palmer’s great gift in this book is to show us that it wasn’t always, and need not always, be so. Read the rest of this entry »

Ozomatli in a nutshell: in 2007, the Bush State Department sent the L.A.-based combo on the road to locations as diverse as Jordan, Peru, and Nepal as cultural ambassadors. Yes, that Ozomatli, with its soundclash aesthetic, liberal politics, and antiwar stance; they followed in the footsteps of Ellington and Armstrong, acting for a short time as America’s musical ambassadors to the world. Even the guy who first said that politics made for strange bedfellows probably never saw that one coming.

But it’s appropriate that it should have happened. For nearly fifteen years, this L.A.-based crew has refined a style that’s embraced rap, reggae, rock, rai, bhangra, and anything else it’s come across. Unlike many of their contemporaries who can be found clogging Putamayo compilations and Starbucks counters, it’s not timid stuff and the blending is seamless, unlike much of the rest of what’s routinely described as “fusion.” Indeed, their closest kin would be the off-kilter ethnopunk of Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros or Manu Chao, cross-bred with a Los Lobos party vibe. They’ve managed to blend an almost bewildering diversity of personalities and styles into a pretty cohesive and formidable whole.

While their studio albums have been well-written, well-performed affairs that’ve earned them Grammy nods, critical acclaim, decent sales and a small but devoted following, their live shows are the stuff of legend. So, naturally, having listened to the band since the first album dropped, I was pretty excited (to put it mildly) to put the rumors to the test. Since even the best bands have off nights, and I’m naturally suspicious when anybody–even a band that I love–is the subject of that much hype, I was also maybe a bit apprehensive.
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My wardrobe–outside work, anyway–consists mostly of blue jeans and black t-shirts. If I’m feeling particularly flashy (the nights I want to go out and paint the town beige), I might wear a shade of dark grey. The closest I’ll ever get to a runway is white-knuckling it in an idling jet plane. I like nice clothes just fine, but on my list of priorities, they generally appear several pages back.

So what in God’s name am I doing writing about fashion?

A little while back I came across Ugly NY, the website for the New York office of Ugly Talent. I think I might’ve finally found a modeling agency for the rest of us. Well, alright, maybe your burning ambition isn’t to be a model (mine’s not–great face for radio, and all that), but Ugly Talent (originating in London, with offices opened not long ago in New York) features models that look like real people. Imagine that. Read the rest of this entry »

I happen to like Thai food, and tried to replicate a particularly good soup that I’d had at a particularly good Thai restaurant not long ago. I packed some of the leftovers for lunch, and when a coworker asked what I was eating, I rattled off the ingredients. “Oh. So you made Callalou,” he tells me.

Huh?

Well, I had to Google it, but as it turned out, I’d accidentally made a halfway serviceable batch of Callalou. Via Bangkok. It’s not authentic, but it’s tasty (if I may be so humble). It goes something like this:

1 32-ounce container of chicken broth*
1 15-ounce can of unsweetened coconut milk*
2-3 stalks of lemon grass
1 package frozen spinach, thawed and thoroughly drained**
Two decent-sized chicken breast filets, cut into chunks***
A clove or two of garlic, crushed
Half a tablespoon of red curry
A splash of sesame oil
Small onion, diced
A handful of diced scallions
A handful of diced mushrooms, if you like them Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been told by a handful of people that I have to read Michael Chabon. Given the sources–thankfully not the same people who told me I had to read Dan Brown–I kept it in the back of my mind. I still haven’t gotten to the book generally regarded to be Chabon’s masterwork (thus far), The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier And Klay, but my gut tells me that The Yiddish Policemen’s Union would likely give its predecessor a run for the money. I mean, this is a book you’d get for the title alone, if you’re of a certain cast of mind. If you’re a browser of other cultures, if you’re inexplicably drawn to things Yiddish to begin with, and you generally like the better class of detective fiction (the kind that doesn’t prominently feature crime-solving cats), it’s a bit of a no-brainer.

Chabon follows the rules of noir–there are nods to Hammett and Chandler in a few places–but makes up most of the rest as he goes along. All the familiar tropes are on display: the drunken, disillusioned detective, his long-suffering and more level-headed partner, the ex-wife–I could go on. But Chabon isn’t content to stop there. In prose that’s alternately hard-boiled and incandescent, he unravels Jewish religious and social strata, examines family ties and obligation, and puts identity politics and fundamentalism through a meat grinder. Best of all, he does all of this in a cadence readily familiar to anybody who’s watched the earlier films of the Marx Brothers. Even the story’s red herrings–and they are legion–are served pickled, in sour cream.  Read the rest of this entry »

Or, Why I Predict the War On Drugs Will Not End in My Lifetime.

A few days ago in this space, I took up the issue of the “Drug War” as it’s currently being waged, and one of the solutions–namely, legalization–that’s been offered as a means to end it. While I think that there’s tremendous public benefit in solving the drug problem, I have reason–call it my cynical side tempering my idealism–to think that it won’t happen any time soon.

It’s not that the means don’t exist, or that they’re some kind of state secret. Tightening legal loopholes, making better use of existing laws, and going–for once–after the right targets all have the potential to radically alter not only the discussion of this problem, but also (more importantly) its ultimate solubility.

The present methods don’t work. There’s evidence enough on the news, and in any number of cities and suburbs. Multimillion dollar seizures of guns and dope, and the arrest of a handful of hapless small-time dealers make for magnificent theater. But at the end of the day, that theater is about as important–if as expensive and elaborately staged–as a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. The seizures that take place are more theraputic in nature than practical, allowing politicians and law enforcement to congratulate themselves on how wisely they’ve spent your money. They have not, in the meantime, stopped the flow of drugs, nor have they made our neighborhoods one iota safer. They’ve driven a black-market economy that much further underground, and driven prices just that much higher, with all the attendant mayhem. Read the rest of this entry »