Here's some press release:
FIRST EP AVAILABLE TODAY FOR FREE
Following the success of this year's critically adored album Lust Lust Lust, Danish noir-rock duo The Raveonettes today announce plans to release a series of digital only EPs on Vice Music. Not content to let time lapse between releases, the group is breaking the mold by dropping a series of four short form releases over the course of the next three months, leading off with a free remix EP today.
Though known primarily for their signature blend of lush melodies and over-the-top guitar noise, the EPs show off new, heretofore unknown creative angles of the group. Following today's remix EP will be Sometimes They Drop By on September 23, with electronics that indulge a deeper investment into the sampled beats and textures that have always lurked underneath their sound.
Two more EPs will follow on October 21 and November 25, the first further twisting the familiar Raveonettes' sound, and the last being an EP of Christmas songs done in a modern nostalgic way.
Today's free Remixed EP centers around three standout tracks from Lust Lust Lust, presented in radically different new versions. Hypnotic Japanese electro producer 80KIDZ, Alec Empire-conspirator Nic Endo, and Danish DJ superstar Trentemøeller reconstruct these now familiar songs into new shapes.
I'm amused by these, all of which do what they can to take the Jesus and Mary Chain out of the band. One reduces them Sharin Foo's coo to chopped stutters, one focuses on her deeply echoed voice, and one is all about Sune Rose Wagner's guitar. Now if only one track were beats and feedback. Then we'd be getting somewhere.
Tracklisting for today's three song free remix EP:
1. Dead Sound (80KIDZ remix)
2. Aly, Walk With Me (Nic Endo remix)
3. Lust (Trentemøeller Remix)
Monday, September 8, 2008
Friday, September 5, 2008
Dylanology
My feature on Bob Dylan as America's leading Dylanologist ran yesterday in the San Diego Union-Tribune. Here's the story, and here are two sidebars - a downloader's guide to I'm Not There and a list of necessary reading - lumped together into one list.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Hurricane Gustav Notes
Some semi-organized thoughts now that I'm home:
-Prince gouging is illegal, but that didn't stop a Tobacco Road-like family gas station from charging $4.84 a gallon in Hammond, LA Tuesday with a cop helping to make sure the line of cars didn't get too restless. Pappy walked around with a pistol in his belt, sis pumped gas in a tight T-shirt, two older African-American men pumped gas and a backwoods Elizabeth Ashley sat in a resin lawn chair fanning herself with a file folder and overseeing the cage of chicks for sale.
-At one point, Mayor Nagin announced that Gustav was "the mother of all storms." At a literal level, what does that mean? It sounded like more of the same faux-hip nonsense that Nagin seems to think is one of his strengths, as if New Orleanians like being led by a guy who doesn't think before he speaks, then speaks in slang at its most banal.
-This time, the story was the evacuation and re-vacuation (if such a word exists). We tracked a friend's 10-plus hour trip from New Orleans to Tuscaloosa in a crawl across I-59. Others reported similarly hellish stories:
I am livid with the information we are receiving from the authorities and the media about traffic on I-59. We left our home at 3:45am and didn’t get to Hattiesburg until 1:00pm. The contraflow, which we took, was a joke. It only lasted about 10 miles or so, and was bumper-to-bumper from start to finish.
And authorities and media keep saying how wonderful contraflow is and keep downplaying the reports by drivers that there is serious traffic problems on I-59. It is irresponsible and potentially fatal to families to continue to tell them to evacuate at this time and to tell them that it is safe to go down I-59. People will run out of gas. People will not even be able to outrun the storm at this point.
It is a travesty. They are lying. And I’m tired and angry.
Mississippi also closed I-10 traffic eastbound into Alabama:
The Mississippi Department of Transportation (MDOT) has announced that hurricane evacuees will be unable to enter Alabama on I-10 eastbound due to major delays from the Biloxi-Ocean Springs area to the Mobile Tunnel. Drivers will be diverted north on Mississippi 63 at exit 69.
Evidently, Mississippi was more concerned with preserving traffic in Mobile, Alabama than getting people safely out of Louisiana.
Here's a contraflow evacuation story, and here's its official rebuttal. You'll notice nobody in that story can account for why contraflow efforts - both lanes of the freeway going away from the Gulf - ended just 10 miles into Mississippi, when four lanes had to merge back to two before cars reached points when they could disperse.
-After the storm, someone in rural Louisiana slashed my wife's tires. Country folk can complain about how lawless we city folk are - this sort of talk really goes on in Louisiana - but mean people in New Orleans have reasons for their meanness. Usually bad reasons, but reasons.
-Nagin's obstinacy when it came to re-vacuation really sounded needlessly imperial, doing things his way regardless of what other parish presidents were doing. When everybody opened around Orleans Parish, he had no choice but to let people come into the city because they couldn't be kept out if they could get into Metairie, but he shouldn't have wanted to. The underlying premise of keeping them out was to save the city from its people - that they'd come home and be pissed off at the lack of power or food and go nuts. The fact is, people help each other. They can do more to bring about the reopening of the city because they can open their stores and restaurants, they can help each other clean up, and by occupying their houses, they deter crime. Punishing people who followed the plan and left by not letting them return as quickly as is safely possible makes it less likely that they'll evacuate next time, and it treats everybody who evacuated as under suspicion, someone who'd most likely act out if allowed back in the city.
-Prince gouging is illegal, but that didn't stop a Tobacco Road-like family gas station from charging $4.84 a gallon in Hammond, LA Tuesday with a cop helping to make sure the line of cars didn't get too restless. Pappy walked around with a pistol in his belt, sis pumped gas in a tight T-shirt, two older African-American men pumped gas and a backwoods Elizabeth Ashley sat in a resin lawn chair fanning herself with a file folder and overseeing the cage of chicks for sale.
-At one point, Mayor Nagin announced that Gustav was "the mother of all storms." At a literal level, what does that mean? It sounded like more of the same faux-hip nonsense that Nagin seems to think is one of his strengths, as if New Orleanians like being led by a guy who doesn't think before he speaks, then speaks in slang at its most banal.
-This time, the story was the evacuation and re-vacuation (if such a word exists). We tracked a friend's 10-plus hour trip from New Orleans to Tuscaloosa in a crawl across I-59. Others reported similarly hellish stories:
I am livid with the information we are receiving from the authorities and the media about traffic on I-59. We left our home at 3:45am and didn’t get to Hattiesburg until 1:00pm. The contraflow, which we took, was a joke. It only lasted about 10 miles or so, and was bumper-to-bumper from start to finish.
And authorities and media keep saying how wonderful contraflow is and keep downplaying the reports by drivers that there is serious traffic problems on I-59. It is irresponsible and potentially fatal to families to continue to tell them to evacuate at this time and to tell them that it is safe to go down I-59. People will run out of gas. People will not even be able to outrun the storm at this point.
It is a travesty. They are lying. And I’m tired and angry.
Mississippi also closed I-10 traffic eastbound into Alabama:
The Mississippi Department of Transportation (MDOT) has announced that hurricane evacuees will be unable to enter Alabama on I-10 eastbound due to major delays from the Biloxi-Ocean Springs area to the Mobile Tunnel. Drivers will be diverted north on Mississippi 63 at exit 69.
Evidently, Mississippi was more concerned with preserving traffic in Mobile, Alabama than getting people safely out of Louisiana.
Here's a contraflow evacuation story, and here's its official rebuttal. You'll notice nobody in that story can account for why contraflow efforts - both lanes of the freeway going away from the Gulf - ended just 10 miles into Mississippi, when four lanes had to merge back to two before cars reached points when they could disperse.
-After the storm, someone in rural Louisiana slashed my wife's tires. Country folk can complain about how lawless we city folk are - this sort of talk really goes on in Louisiana - but mean people in New Orleans have reasons for their meanness. Usually bad reasons, but reasons.
-Nagin's obstinacy when it came to re-vacuation really sounded needlessly imperial, doing things his way regardless of what other parish presidents were doing. When everybody opened around Orleans Parish, he had no choice but to let people come into the city because they couldn't be kept out if they could get into Metairie, but he shouldn't have wanted to. The underlying premise of keeping them out was to save the city from its people - that they'd come home and be pissed off at the lack of power or food and go nuts. The fact is, people help each other. They can do more to bring about the reopening of the city because they can open their stores and restaurants, they can help each other clean up, and by occupying their houses, they deter crime. Punishing people who followed the plan and left by not letting them return as quickly as is safely possible makes it less likely that they'll evacuate next time, and it treats everybody who evacuated as under suspicion, someone who'd most likely act out if allowed back in the city.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Friday, August 29, 2008
With Gustav Approaching
Here's an editorial from today's New York Times about FEMA's revised plan for dealing with hurricanes:
In July — a full year after Congress’s mandated deadline — the Federal Emergency Management Agency produced a skimpy draft proposal. Most of its required topic specialties — including how to house the poor and the disabled, how to house victims close to their jobs and how to manage large camps for evacuees — were left blank. Instead, the proposal called for handing those plans off to a task force of experts. And, oh yes, that task force has yet to be formed.
In July — a full year after Congress’s mandated deadline — the Federal Emergency Management Agency produced a skimpy draft proposal. Most of its required topic specialties — including how to house the poor and the disabled, how to house victims close to their jobs and how to manage large camps for evacuees — were left blank. Instead, the proposal called for handing those plans off to a task force of experts. And, oh yes, that task force has yet to be formed.
What it Isn't
I've watched most of the Democratic National Convention on C-Span because the talking heads are simply too frustrating. The glut of still-active and/or still-connected party insiders with dogs in the hunt made everything that came out of anybody's mouth suspect.
One of the primary places where we'd see this is the post-speech analysis, where Republican pundits would criticize the speech for what it wasn't. At Huffington Post, Marty Kaplan wrote about Peggy Noonan's analysis of the speech this morning on MSNBC:
I'm paraphrasing here, writing while she's still on the air, but this is the gist: At least the speech wasn't all about all those miserable unemployed people that Democrats always talk about. It wasn't full of whining about all those unhappy sick people they only seem to see. It wasn't about a woman who had a two-headed child who was used as a bowling ball.
A number of times, critics complained that speeches lacked details, as if all speeches should or could spell out a complete, detailed policy program. As if a foreign affairs speech should also include a complete laundry list of the domestic agenda complete with the details on how things will be paid for, and vice versa. Unfortunately, that sort of criticism - what it isn't - has become a part of the way convention speeches are discussed. Keith Olbermann went off on the AP's Charles Babington for writing:
Mostly, however, he touched on major issues quickly and lightly. It's an approach that may intrigue and satisfy millions of viewers just starting to tune in to the campaign seriously. The crowd at Invesco Field cheered deliriously, but Republicans almost surely will decry the lack of specifics.
For instance, Obama said it's time "to protect Social Security for future generations." But he didn't mention his main proposal, which is to add a new Social Security payroll tax to incomes above $250,000 a year.
He said he would "cut taxes for 95 percent of all working families," but did not say how.
He briefly mentioned abortion, gun rights, gay rights and other hot-button issues without delving into their sticky details. "Passions fly on immigration," Obama said, "but I don't know anyone who benefits when a mother is separated from her infant child or an employer undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers."
Marty Kaplan sees an upside in such coverage, though, at least from pundits:
I hope everyone who watched that speech has a chance to hear her say that. For the right-wing commentariat, it was a Katrina moment. It was a benchmark for how out of it and, well, disgusting, that crowd is. It established a baseline for magisterial condescension, for blindness, for night-is-day, for the gulf between Republican dead-enders and the rest of the country. Even though she's dared criticize George W. Bush, presumably to fashion a life preserver for her credibility, Peggy was more than willing to tell the speech's morning-after audience that they should believe her, and not their lying eyes.
One of the primary places where we'd see this is the post-speech analysis, where Republican pundits would criticize the speech for what it wasn't. At Huffington Post, Marty Kaplan wrote about Peggy Noonan's analysis of the speech this morning on MSNBC:
I'm paraphrasing here, writing while she's still on the air, but this is the gist: At least the speech wasn't all about all those miserable unemployed people that Democrats always talk about. It wasn't full of whining about all those unhappy sick people they only seem to see. It wasn't about a woman who had a two-headed child who was used as a bowling ball.
A number of times, critics complained that speeches lacked details, as if all speeches should or could spell out a complete, detailed policy program. As if a foreign affairs speech should also include a complete laundry list of the domestic agenda complete with the details on how things will be paid for, and vice versa. Unfortunately, that sort of criticism - what it isn't - has become a part of the way convention speeches are discussed. Keith Olbermann went off on the AP's Charles Babington for writing:
Mostly, however, he touched on major issues quickly and lightly. It's an approach that may intrigue and satisfy millions of viewers just starting to tune in to the campaign seriously. The crowd at Invesco Field cheered deliriously, but Republicans almost surely will decry the lack of specifics.
For instance, Obama said it's time "to protect Social Security for future generations." But he didn't mention his main proposal, which is to add a new Social Security payroll tax to incomes above $250,000 a year.
He said he would "cut taxes for 95 percent of all working families," but did not say how.
He briefly mentioned abortion, gun rights, gay rights and other hot-button issues without delving into their sticky details. "Passions fly on immigration," Obama said, "but I don't know anyone who benefits when a mother is separated from her infant child or an employer undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers."
Marty Kaplan sees an upside in such coverage, though, at least from pundits:
I hope everyone who watched that speech has a chance to hear her say that. For the right-wing commentariat, it was a Katrina moment. It was a benchmark for how out of it and, well, disgusting, that crowd is. It established a baseline for magisterial condescension, for blindness, for night-is-day, for the gulf between Republican dead-enders and the rest of the country. Even though she's dared criticize George W. Bush, presumably to fashion a life preserver for her credibility, Peggy was more than willing to tell the speech's morning-after audience that they should believe her, and not their lying eyes.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
In the Shadow of Gustav
I boiled "The First Rule of Hurricanes," the 20-minute talk on Katrina songs that I presented at this year's EMP Conference, to 800 or so words for this week's Village Voice. You can find it here.
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