Mina Turns 5
March 12th, 2010R.I.P. Mark Linkous
March 7th, 2010
(from the NYT….March 7, 2010, 3:14 pm)
Mark Linkous, a singer-songwriter whose music, released under the name Sparklehorse, was renowned in the indie-rock and alt-country worlds for its dark, allusive themes and fragile beauty, committed suicide on Saturday in Knoxville, Tenn. He was 47.
He shot himself in the heart in an alley outside a friend’s home, said his manager, Shelby Meade. Lt. Greg Hoskins of the Knoxville Police Department confirmed that the police responded to a call at 1:20 p.m., and that Mr. Linkous was pronounced dead at the scene. According to his family, Mr. Linkous owned the gun that he used.
On four Sparklehorse albums released between 1995 and 2006, and in numerous collaborations, Mr. Linkous developed a style that sent sunny, Beatles-esque melodies through a filter of crackling, damaged folk-rock, and his songs were filled with entropic imagery. “Everything that’s made is made to decay,” he sang on Sparkehorse’s debut album, “Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot” (Capitol) in a whispery tenor that had echoes of coal-country folk.
Born and raised in Virginia, Mr. Linkous began his musical career in punk bands, and in the 1980s he lived in New York and Los Angeles in pursuit of mainstream rock success as part of the band the Dancing Hoods. Disillusioned with the music business, he returned to Virginia and reinvented his sound as Sparklehorse, a name that applied to himself as well as the band he led.
Although never a commercial success, Sparklehorse’s music found respect among critics and other musicians. Rolling Stone called its 1998 album “Good Morning Spider” “a homemade tour de force of psychedelic Appalachian folk slop,” and the third Sparklehorse album, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” released in 2001, featured guest appearances by Tom Waits and PJ Harvey.
Mr. Linkous was also in demand as a producer, working with Daniel Johnston and Nina Persson, among others. He collaborated with Danger Mouse and the film director David Lynch on “Dark Night of the Soul,” an album and photo book that was scheduled to come out last year but was delayed by legal entanglements; last week Danger Mouse announced that those problems had been worked out and that the album would be released soon.
Mr. Linkous had recently completed most of the work for a new Sparklehorse album and was in the process of moving to Knoxville and setting up a new studio to complete the album, said Ms. Meade, his manager.
His survivors include his wife, Teresa Linkous; his mother, Gloria Hughes Thacker; his father, Frederick Linkous; and three brothers, Matt, Paul and Daniel Linkous.
Ark-cane Knowledge
March 6th, 2010
Lost Jewish tribe ‘found in Zimbabwe’
(by Steve Vickers, BBC News, Harare)
In many ways, the Lemba tribe of Zimbabwe and South Africa are just like their neighbours.
But in other ways their customs are remarkably similar to Jewish ones.
They do not eat pork, they practise male circumcision, they ritually slaughter their animals, some of their men wear skull caps and they put the Star of David on their gravestones.
Their oral traditions claim that their ancestors were Jews who fled the Holy Land about 2,500 years ago.
It may sound like another myth of a lost tribe of Israel, but British scientists have carried out DNA tests which confirm their Semitic origin.
These tests back up the group’s belief that a group of perhaps seven men married African women and settled on the continent. The Lemba, who number perhaps 80,000, live in central Zimbabwe and the north of South Africa.
And they also have a prized religious artefact that they say connects them to their Jewish ancestry – a replica of the Biblical Ark of the Covenant known as the ngoma lungundu, meaning “the drum that thunders”.
The object went on display recently at a Harare museum to much fanfare, and instilled pride in many of the Lemba.
“For me it’s the starting point,” says religious singer Fungisai Zvakavapano-Mashavave.
“Very few people knew about us and this is the time to come out. I’m very proud to realise that we have a rich culture and I’m proud to be a Lemba.
“We have been a very secretive people, because we believe we are a special people.”
Religion vs culture
The Lemba have many customs and regulations that tally with Jewish tradition.
They wear skull caps, practise circumcision, which is not a tradition for most Zimbabweans, avoid eating pork and food with animal blood, and have 12 tribes.
They slaughter animals in the same way as Jewish people, and they put the Jewish Star of David on their tombstones.
Members of the priestly clan of the Lemba, known as the Buba, were even discovered to have a genetic element also found among the Jewish priestly line.
“This was amazing,” said Prof Tudor Parfitt, from the University of London.
“It looks as if the Jewish priesthood continued in the West by people called Cohen, and in same way it was continued by the priestly clan of the Lemba.
“They have a common ancestor who geneticists say lived about 3,000 years ago somewhere in north Arabia, which is the time of Moses and Aaron when the Jewish priesthood started.”
Prof Parfitt is a world-renowned expert, having spent 20 years researching the Lemba, and living with them for six months.
The Lemba have a sacred prayer language which is a mixture of Hebrew and Arabic, pointing to their roots in Israel and Yemen.
Despite their ties to Judaism, many of the Lemba in Zimbabwe are Christians, while some are Muslims.
“Christianity is my religion, and Judaism is my culture,” explains Perez Hamandishe, a pastor and member of parliament from the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
Despite their centuries-old traditions, some younger Lemba are taking a more liberal view.
“In the old days you didn’t marry a non-Lemba, but these days we interact with others,” says Alex Makotore, son of the late Chief Mposi from the Lemba “headquarters” in Mberengwa.
“I feel special in my heart but not in front of others such that I’m separated from them. Culture is dynamic.”
Crowds
The oral traditions of the Lemba say that the ngoma lungundu is the Biblical wooden Ark made by Moses, and that centuries ago a small group of men began a long journey carrying it from Yemen to southern Africa.
The object went missing during the 1970s and was eventually rediscovered in Harare in 2007 by Prof Parfitt.
“Many people say that the story is far-fetched, but the oral traditions of the Lemba have been backed up by science,” he says.
Carbon dating shows the ngoma to be nearly 700 years old – pretty ancient, if not as old as Bible stories would suggest.
But Prof Parfitt says this is because the ngoma was used in battles, and would explode and be rebuilt.
The ngoma now on display was a replica, he says, possibly built from the remains of the original.
“So it’s the closest descendant of the Ark that we know of,” Prof Parfitt says.
Large crowds came to see the unveiling of the ngoma and to attend lectures on the identity of the Lemba.
For David Maramwidze, an elder in his village, the discovery of the ngoma has been a defining moment.
“Hearing from those professors in Harare and seeing the ngoma makes it clear that we are a great people and I’m very proud,” he says.
“I heard about it all my life and it was hard for me to believe, because I had no idea of what it really is.
“I’m still seeing the picture of the ngoma in my mind and it will never come out from my brain. Now we want it to be given back to the Lemba people.”
Aural Pleasures (vol. 15)
March 2nd, 2010
This installment starts with the scronk-rock of God Is My Co-Pilot, moving into a track from the new Blood Red Shoes cd. We slow it down with the new Loscil disc, then moving to Japanese drumming with OOIOO and finally end on the dancefloor with a hypnotic song from Vitalic. I rather like this edition of Aural Pleasures.
GOD IS MY CO-PILOT "I Hate My Friends" (1995): Play Now | Play in Popup | Download BLOOD RED SHOES "It Is Happening Again" (2010): Play Now | Play in Popup | Download LOSCIL "Dub For Cascadia" (2010): Play Now | Play in Popup | Download OOIOO "Umo" (2009): Play Now | Play in Popup | Download VITALIC "Second Lives" (2009): Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadHow Reagan Ruined Conservatism
March 2nd, 2010(from the Financial Times)
by Gideon Rachman
Battling my way through Sarah Palin’s book, Going Rogue, last weekend, I began to wonder how American conservatism had come to this. Ms Palin’s book is smug, lightweight, nationalistic, entirely free of original ideas. How has this woman become the darling of the American right? How has she become so popular that some bookmakers make her the favourite to win the Republican party nomination in 2012?
And then I realised – the rot set in with Ronald Reagan.
This might seem an odd conclusion, since President Reagan is a conservative hero who won two presidential elections. But the ideas that are now known as “Reaganism” are, in fact, profoundly subversive of some of the most important conservative values. Traditional conservatives disdain populism and respect knowledge. They believe in balancing the government’s books. And they are pragmatists who are suspicious of ideology. Reagan debased all these ideas – and modern American conservatism is still suffering the consequences.
Gideon Rachman blog
Gideon Rachman
Across the globe: Read the FT’s international affairs columnist’s authoritative and lively commentary
The most damaging idea propagated by the Reagan myth is the cult of the idiot-savant (the wise fool). You can see it in the very first line of Dinesh D’Souza’s admiring biography of Reagan, which proclaims: “Sometimes it really helps to be a dummy.” Mr D’Souza recounts numerous stories in which intellectuals – even conservative intellectuals – disdained Reagan. They scorned his tendency to spend cabinet meetings sorting jelly beans into different colours, and his taste for flaky anecdotes. But, Mr D’Souza concludes, the “dummy” was right and the pointy-heads were wrong.
A dangerous chain of reasoning flows from this popular version of history. Reagan was apparently stupid and often startlingly ignorant – but he was vindicated by history. Therefore, goes the theory, ignorance and stupidity are good signs. They show that a politician is in tune with the deeper wisdom of the people. Once you start thinking like that, it is but a short step to Sarah Palin.
If it is ignorance you are after, then Ms Palin is definitely your woman. Game Change, a recent book on the 2008 presidential election campaign, recounts how desperate advisers to the McCain-Palin campaign decided that they had to give her a crash-course in modern history, before the vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden.
“They sat Palin down at a table in the suite, spread out a map of the world, and proceeded to give her a potted history of foreign policy. They started with the Spanish civil war, then moved on to world war one, world war two, the cold war. When the teachers suggested breaking for lunch or dinner, the student resisted. ‘No, no, no, let’s keep going,’ Ms Palin said. ‘This is awesome’.”
The history of the 20th century? I suppose it is pretty awesome.
In fact, Ms Palin is much, much less qualified to be president than Reagan ever was. She is Ronald Reagan lite – and Reagan was pretty lite to begin with. But he had, at least, been governor of California, not Alaska, and had read widely.
The damage Reaganism did to conservatism extends well beyond the Palin effect. The late president also became associated with a couple of bad ideas that helped make the administration of George W. Bush such a disaster. The first was fiscal incontinence; the second is the view that the key to a successful foreign policy is a rigid distinction between good and evil, and a strong military.
The Republican party – with Ms Palin to the fore – is currently decrying the huge deficits being run by the Obama administration. But this is a recent conversion. Ever since the Reagan years, the Republicans have been the party of deficit spending.
Conservatives once believed both in lower taxes and in balancing the budget. Under Reagan, they simply became the party of tax cuts, without any commitment to fiscal responsibility. Dick Cheney, George W.?Bush’s vice-president, admitted as much when he told a cabinet colleague: “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” A mystical belief took hold that if you just cut taxes, the economy would grow fast enough to cover the shortfall – or government would shrink, almost by magic. Somehow it would all come right. This drift in Republican thinking was actually profoundly anti-conservative – because it elevated ideology (cut taxes at any cost) over a pragmatic commitment to good governance.
It is the same with foreign policy. Reagan’s insistence that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire” caused many liberals to wince – but was basically accurate. However, when George W. Bush attempted to emulate Reagan’s “moral clarity”, he came up with the “Axis of Evil” – a silly concept that led America into a costly and unnecessary war in Iraq. President Bush also missed the fact that while Reagan had built up the US military, he had avoided any big wars. Invading Grenada under Reagan was one thing; invading Iraq under Mr Bush turned out to be quite another.
The real Reagan was, in fact, rather more pragmatic than the “Reagan myth” that sprang up after he left office. Real Reagan was willing to raise taxes in extremis, and became a firm believer in arms-reduction talks. Today’s American conservatives, who claim the mantle of Reagan, would regard these ideas as treachery and weakness. Reagan was ultimately a successful president. But he left behind a poisonous legacy for the conservative movement.
Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi arrested (again)
March 2nd, 2010(from Onion’s AV Club)
by Scott Tobias March 2, 2010
If you read this site closely, you’ll know that there are few filmmakers we admire more than Iranian director Jafar Panahi, whose work has consistently challenged the country’s social strictures, especially as they pertain to women. (To name a few: The Mirror, The Circle, Offside, and Crimson Gold, the latter of which made our collective Top 50 Of The Decade list.) Panahi’s views have gotten him in trouble with the authorities before—last summer, we reported that he, his wife, and his daughter were arrested during a public mourning for slain election protestors—and now he’s been scooped up in the latest government crackdown on dissidents. According to the website of Mir Hossein Mousavi, the opposition candidate he strongly supported in the dubious election that kept Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in office, Panahi, his wife, and his daughter, along with 15 dinner guests, were arrested at his home on Monday night and are currently being detained in an undisclosed location.
Here’s the scene at last September’s Montreal World Film Festival, where “Green Revolution” supporters greeted Panahi (who was jury president) on the red carpet. The relevant action starts around minute two:
The Value Of The Gold Standard
February 28th, 2010A couple of camera phone shots from the 2nd Annual Gold Standard. Jonathan Gold (Pulitzer Prize winning food critic) asked his favorite 35 LA restaurants to provide his favorite dishes all in one place all at one time and we can eat as much as we want from all of them.
It was hard to hold a camera and eat simultaneously so I only have a few pics but never have I put so many good things in my mouth in so short a time.
To say nothing of 64 wineries or champagne producers, 4 breweries, I mean you can get the picture. Overwhelmed but happy.
Overwhelmed By Technology
February 28th, 2010
February Photos
February 28th, 2010
Aural Pleasures (vol. 14)
February 27th, 2010
So much new stuff has been pouring out via leaks that I literally have a backlog of 15 “Aural Pleasures” posts just to get caught up. So let me start putting up stuff without delay.
So this week we have songs from two great compilations (Afro-Rock Vol. 1 and Brazilian Guitar Fuzz Bananas) as well as an old song from Pitchfork (the band that inspired the current music website), a song from the latest Beck “record club” offering (which is an entire remake of Skip Spence’s classic OAR) with help from Feist and Wilco. And lastly the Norwegian band Serena-Maneesh, who while offering nothing really new….still sound pretty darn good.
JINGO "Fever" (1975): Play Now | Play in Popup | Download FABIO "Lindo Sonho Delirante": Play Now | Play in Popup | Download PITCHFORK "Rana" (1989): Play Now | Play in Popup | Download SERENA-MANEESH "I Just Want To See Your Face" (2010): Play Now | Play in Popup | Download BECK/WILCO/JAMIE LIDELL "Books Of Moses" [Skip Spence cover] (2010): Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadJack’s First Screen Test
February 27th, 2010
Mina’s First Screen Test
February 27th, 2010