Nothin' much to report at present, but I thought I'd pass off a couple of truly scary things. For the strong-stomached among you, The 6 Most Terrifying Foods in the World. For the, uh, equally strong-stomached, there's also this. I cannot freakin' believe my ugly mug now graces the (Web) pages of SPIN. That's disturbing, people. Nighty-night.

Labels: Cool Web Junk, Musical Crap, Random Rambling

gaijin || Link || E-mail || 0 comments

Dammit. I was all set to slap a just-in-time post up about this afternoon's Radio Session with the very cool Laura Veirs & the Saltbreakers on KPFT (90.1FM) when, right as I was about to click "Post," the network connection died. Completely. For nearly two freakin' hours. As in, "I got zero done this afternoon, how nice." Argh. The Internet, it seems, is currently not my friend.

So, unless you are more fortunate than I and knew about this deal beforehand, I'm sorry to say that you've missed Ms. Veirs & co. on the ray-dee-oh. It was "live," so to speak, recorded over at SugarHill back when Veirs & her band came through town a short while back, and I was really looking forward to hearing it via the station's Internet stream, 'cause they make some excellent music.

If you haven't heard Veirs' work, you're seriously missing out (and now, even more so). While I haven't heard anything yet off her most recent album, Saltbreakers, I like her earlier stuff quite a bit -- "Galaxies," in particular (off 2005's Year of Meteors), is a gorgeous, sparkling little song, and all her songs have this bleak, beautifully distant quality to 'em, with lots of nicely done strings and desperate-yet-sweet melodies. Oh, and she's also a geologist & one'a them ridiculously smart people with which I'm generally enamored and hangs with The Decemberists, and backing band the Saltbreakers includes NW musical luminaries Karl Blau (D+/The Microphones) & Tucker Martine (The Decemberists/Mount Analog/MS Vista's bleeps & bloops). In case you were wondering.

Give her a listen; no MP3 links today, unfortunately, but you can listen to a few tracks on the ol' Myspace.

While I'm at it, I've gotta say how cool this whole Radio Sessions thing is. I've been meaning to post about it for a while now, but (naturally) haven't gotten my shit together. In past months they've had a bunch of really great people up at SugarHill, including Son Volt & M. Ward, and they've got Danny and the Nightmares slated for 11/30 and Aussie garage-rockers Radio Birdman on 12/28. Check here for the full schedule, and hopefully you'll be more on-the-ball/blessed by Lady Luck than yours truly...

Labels: Musical Crap, Pseudo-Reviews, Things To Hear

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I have to say that one of the best, most wonderful things about this crazy Interwebs tube thing is the ease with which you can find music. Sometimes I think fondly back to the days of my youth, when I'd comb the racks of tapes at the local music store -- which seemed like the coolest place in the universe at the time, but probably didn't hold a candle to places like SoundEx or (R.I.P.?) Cactus (ah, the innocence of youth...). The reality, though, is that while I was able to find some things (like Warrior's Fighting for the Earth; woo, yeah!), most days I ended up frustrated & wishing I lived in some bigger city with at least a Tower Records or something. (It was a small town.)

Flash-forward to now, and holy shit, I am loving the ability to say, "hey, what the heck was that song I heard a little blip of the other day?" and -- poof! -- it's on my iPod (cough -- legally, of course). Beyond that, there's a wealth of free MP3s and such floating around out there for those who're curious or open to checking out new stuff. I sift through a ton of links to stuff like that each week, both sent by labels & PR folk or posted on MP3 sites, so here's some of what I've received/stumbled over lately that's been good:

A Wilhelm Scream -- "Die While We're Young"

This one's a limited-timer, apparently, so grab it soon -- it's a sample of AWS's new album, Career Suicide, which I haven't heard yet, and it's good, if slightly less hardcore-sounding than Ruiner (see "Killing It", off that album). Of course, that's what I love about this band: they mash up the best of yell-along hc, pop-punk, and guitar metal and cover the whole thing in emo-boy backing vocals, and against all odds, it works.

The Octopus Project - "Bees Bein' Strugglin'"

Nice...we here at SCR love the Octoproj, have for many moons now, and are pleased as heck that they're still putting out albums. Everything they do is good, but this track just flows so beautifully along it's like the soundtrack to a hazy summer's day; gorgeous.

Peter Bjorn and John - "Far Away, By My Side"

Holy crap, do I love this song. Seriously. I've liked what I've heard of PB&J before now, but that guitar/vocal riff is so familiar, yet insanely catchy at the same time. I could listen to it all day. (And yes, I do know it ain't a new song, but it's new to me; oh, and they're playing Warehouse Live on 11/23. Thanks to Both Sides of the Mouth for the link.)

Yea Big + Kid Static - "Duck, Mother Fuckers!"

I've gotten a lot of hip-hop of late, and sadly, most of it's left me "eh." Not so with Yea Big & partner Kid Static, though -- this track marries thumping, insistent beats with defiant rhymes reminiscent of The Roots at their best.

The Dreadful Yawns - "Candles"

Mojave 3, meet The New You. Cleveland's The Dreadful Yawns pick up where the Mojave crew left off, circa Puzzles Like You, with sweet, poignant strings, gentle drumming, and honestly beautiful male/female vocals soaring off down that long, lonesome road.

Miracle Fortress - "Have You Seen In Your Dreams"

This one's like The Arcade Fire, if that bad were fronted by Wayne Coyne; the vocals are seriously Lips-esque, but the music aims towards a more epic kind of indie-psych. (Thanks to Brooklyn Vegan for the link.)

Emma Pollock - "Adrenaline"

Found this one when I saw that Ms. Pollock (formerly of the excellent Delgados) would be opening for Spoon & The New Pornographers 11/1. Sadly, I won't be there -- already got tickets for Johnette Napolitano @ the Duck -- but this little gem of a pop song makes me even more bummed that I can't be in two places at once... (Thanks to The Yellow Stereo for the link.)

The Drones - "Shark Fin Blues"

Roots-rock from the Land Down Under, but it sounds more like Son Volt, especially in the awesomely rough-edged Jay Farrar-esque guitars, and owes a serious debt to Neil Young, too. Noisy but listenable and warm.

Throw Me The Statue - "About to Walk"

This one's from a few months back, but I only recently got it on the iPod & gave it a listen. And man, is it good -- fractured, vulnerable-sounding pop with cool, crunchy synths and driving-like-a-crazy-person drums. When it's over, I just want to hit Play again, and again, and again...

Labels: Cool Web Junk, Pseudo-Reviews, Things To Download, Things To Hear

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Props to Lomax over at HouStoned for this one -- it turns out this year's Peak Oil conference hit Houston last week, and author/anti-petroleum/anti-car guy James Howard Kunstler was there to finally sample all that Helltown has to offer.

Now, I should state up front that I do agree with a heck of a lot of what Kunstler says: I hate our dependence on oil to keep our lives running, I try to work as close as possible to where I live, and hell, part of the reason we're moving is so we can attempt to grow our own veggies for when The Apockyclipse comes. (No, I'm serious. Well, kinda; I do like growing my own strawberries & peppers.) My wife and I are big fans of The End of Suburbia, which is one heck of a wakeup call of a film, and Kunstler figures prominently into that.

Unfortunately for him, he also comes off in the film like a strident Chicken Little, proclaiming that we're all going down, big-time, without offering a whole lot of constructive criticism. Maybe there wasn't time for that in the flick, sure, or it got edited out; whatever. Either way, though, of all the Peak Oil experts in Suburbia, Kunstler ends up looking like a loon. (Houstonian Matt Simmons, on the other hand, a guy who Kunstler praises, comes off looking like the Sanest Man in Texas, and good on him for that.) Which is sad, because he is a smart guy with a lot of good ideas.

At least, that's what I thought before reading his post about our not-so-fair city. I'll grant that Houston's a pretty good poster child for The Bad That Petrochemical Addiction Can Do To You, but Kunstler didn't really get into that in his post. He didn't talk about, say:

• how the average Houstonian (and yes, I'm totally SWAG-ing, here, but it sure seems true based on people I've worked with over the years; I currently work near the Galleria with people who live in Fulshear, Greatwood, Copperfield, & Spring, among other areas) commutes upwards of 30 min. each way to where they work, with many people commuting an hour-plus from places like Kingwood, Clear Lake, or Sugar Land

• how housing prices in inner-loop Houston have skyrocketed in recent years, with rich folks doing the reverse-white-flight thing and moving into neighborhoods that had been considered dangerous since at least the '80s, and the fact that that's partly due to gas prices being so insanely high

• how chemical and petroleum companies have thoroughly poisoned the environment just about everywhere south and east of 610

• how Pearland's currently planning to build a landfill that's as tall as a large office building

• how overbuilding and the preponderance of cement as turned each moderate rainfall into a potentially disastrous flood that could (and has, more than once) cripple the whole damn city before sluicing out to drown the reclaimed-rice-paddy suburbs

Nope, none of those. What did he go after, instead? Um, how ugly and soulless our downtown is. Wha?

Actually, he didn't even really do that, because he only saw the area right around George R. Brown and Toyota Center, which is an urban wasteland even by Houston standards -- I mean, seriously, there's nothing there for tourists but the convention center or basketball arena, or maybe Old Chinatown if you're brave enough to walk east a block or two. And while I'm not the biggest fan of our downtown, I have to say it: that's not fucking fair. Mr. Kunstler, you barely got a glimpse of the city, only a few blocks around the convention center (and is George R. Brown really that big a convention center? I thought it was pretty much the norm for that kind of building...), and yet you're going to tar-and-feather the whole city with that brush? Shame on you.

That's just as silly as someone flying into IAH, looking around, and declaring that, gee, Houston must obviously be a rinkydink little town with lots of pine trees. Hell, if you were to judge a lot of major cities just based on what's right around the convention center, I'm guessing a lot of 'em would come up wanting. Houston's far from the prettiest place on earth, it's true, and parts of the city are butt-ugly, but it's a very large, decentralized city. If you want lots of greenery, if you want quirky art shops & kids with tattoos, if you want local activists working for change, if you want lofts built over restaurants and shops, it does all exist, just not all in one central area and certainly not in our downtown, which is still struggling back to its feet after both the '80s recession and the Main St. shutdown to build the Light Rail.

In answer to your complaints about there being nothing open after 7PM in downtown -- which you didn't see for yourself, because you apparently didn't leave George R. Brown, but instead talked to other people -- yep, you're right, there isn't. Downtown is primarily the home of business, and that's it; even the part that's more lively, the Main St. area, largely shuts down at night. And why? Because very few Houstonians (relatively) live there. Mr. Kunstler, part of your mantra for living in a post-petroleum age is that people need to live near where they work and shop and eat, right? Well, we're not all so good at living where we work, true, but almost everybody lives near where they shop and eat; Houstonians don't need to commute far to get food or buy clothes. It's one of the few benefits of our sprawl.

So, given the reality that a small, small percentage of our population lives in or near downtown, who would it benefit to have tons of shops there open all night? Our nonexistent tourists? People who commute in from Katy to go shopping? If so, wouldn't that be absolutely counter to what you're trying to bring about, with smaller, more all-in-one communities? In that respect, Houston, weirdly enough, almost works. We may look like a gigantic megalopolis, but we're actually a network of smaller communities -- nobody just lives "in Houston," but in Bellaire, or West U., or Cy-Fair, or Pasadena, or Aldine, or Garden Oaks, or Montrose. Each neighborhood (even the further-flung suburban ones I've been to), by and large, has its own restaurants, grocery stores, shops, doctors, even police.

Some of it you can even walk to, if you can brave the summer heat -- I can walk to the grocery store nearest to me, and often do when I don't need to stock up with several weeks' worth of food. Of course, we don't live anywhere near where our food comes from, which is still a huge problem, but the past five years or so have seen a crop of promising local-food co-ops and farmers markets spring up in various places around the city. It's nothing like what they have up in, say, Portland, but it's growing as more and more Houstonians become disgusted with factory-farmed meat and vegetables.

As for the crime reportage, well, I can't deny that. Houston can be a violent, dangerous place, true. Again, though, in a city this huge the violence is distributed across a very large area, and the few truly dangerous 'hoods aren't places you'll just randomly end up in (unless, of course, you're my dad, who managed to get lost in the Nickel while helping my wife & I move out of our old house in the Fourth Ward). Even now, downtown's hardly Baghdad -- since no actual people hang out there much, why would the criminals? In my experience, you're more likely to have your car broken into in front of your nice suburban home than parking in downtown. The one time somebody smashed in one of my windows was when I was parked right in front of the house I was renting just north of Rice, which is one of the highest-priced residential areas in town.

Beyond that, Mr. Kunstler, you yourself point out that it's the media who're obsessed with death and violence and the sexcapades of Senators -- doesn't it follow, then, that Houston's media skews that way, too? As somebody who tries to avoid local TV as much as possible, I can attest to the fact. If you were to watch our nightly news, you'd probably think (as you already seem to) that Houston's nothing but an orgy of pointless, sickening murder and brutal crime, and yet the majority of Houstonians go about their days without being shot or stabbed or robbed. It happens, unfortunately, but not nearly as frequently as the media would have you believe. Violence sells, remember? Don't believe everything you hear on TV or read in the papers.

At any rate, there's my meager defense of my adopted hometown. I don't know if Kunstler himself will ever read this (hrm...maybe I should mail it to him?), and the odds of him returning to H-town seem unlikely, but what the heck, here's my invitation: Mr. Kunstler, if you ever do decide to come back to Houston, drop me a line, and I'll happily show you some of the rest of the city. You don't need to bring your quinine, mind you; we got rid of malaria some time ago, although we do see other mosquito-borne diseases from time to time. And maybe we can talk about the actual real problems Houston has, like the ones I listed above, and visit some of the good and bad areas around town. (Be warned, however, that it'll probably involve some driving. Sorry 'bout that.)

Labels: H-Town News, Political Stuff, Random Rambling

gaijin || Link || E-mail || 0 comments

Why do I always start these freakin' things in the late-lateness of the afternoon? I don't have a clue, but I seem to, nonetheless. Argh. I figure I'd better get this out & up, though, because the postings may slow down a bit (ha!) in the next few days. By the by, if you ever get the urge to, say, sell your house as quickly as possible (like in under 2 weeks), my advice would be this: plan ahead for the looming nervous breakdown with large amounts of pills and caffeine. Anyway...

Wed., October 24:
Paolo Nutini/Sara Bareilles @ Warehouse Live
Dammit, I just can't help it; I really like this guy. Sure, he'd probably appeal just as nicely to my mom (although she's not a good yardstick; she listens to Metallica...), but fuck it -- Nutini's got an awesome, awesome voice, the kind Rod Stewart used to have before he lost it in a cigarette-smoke fog of rock star debauchery. Plus, he writes some heartbreakingly beautiful songs. (Review of his initial EP is up here, by the way, from waaaay back in Dec. of last year.)

The Draft/Dead to Me/The Gaslight Anthem/A Death in the Family @ The White Swan
Dunno most of these bands, but I really like what I've heard of ex-Hot Water Music guys The Draft; good, solid, slightly countryish post-emo, to my ears. Plus, now that HWM is officially not broken up anymore, there's a rumor going 'round that an onstage reunion of sorts with Chuck Ragan could happen while The Draft are touring. You won't know if you're not up at the Swan...

matt pond PA/Jesca Hoop @ The Meridian
matt pond PA are one of those bands that I "like" in a weirdly nonspecific way. The songs I've heard have made me smile, but they're kinda gone in the next ten minutes. And yet, I still like 'em. Some kind of musical brainwashing, maybe?

Say Hi To Your Mom/The Velvet Teen/The A-Sides @ The Proletariat
A good, good, good one. See here for the full deal.

Thurs., October 25:
Sabra Laval/Austin Lucas and the Pressmen/Black Black Gold @ Notsuoh
Austin Lucas and the Pressmen, I've been told, are really amazing -- their Myspace page claims they're from Prague, but I don't know that I buy it; they sound a heck of a lot more like they've been hanging out in Ryan Adams backyard, getting drunk with William Elliott Whitmore. Either way, the teeny bit I've heard ain't bad, and Sabra Laval is always cool by me, too, in that beautifully melancholy Azure Ray kind of way. (Black Black Gold I dunno, sorry.)

An Angle/Fletch/A Trafic Fall/Science Monsters Galore!/Glory Automatic/The Alsace Lorraine @ Javajazz Coffee House (Spring)
This show's Part 1 of "Damn, Suburban Kids Have It Good" Week -- An Angle are a freakin' great band, like Bright Eyes (very like Bright Eyes, I should say) but with more rock and less pretense. Plus, I'm told locals The Alsace Lorraine are good, and Science Monsters Galore! have an awesome band name.

Fri., October 26:
Jucifer/Kairos @ Super Happy Fun Land
I'm a little befuddled as to why Jucifer are at SHFL, but what the hey -- I hope folks come out anyway (every time I go to SHFL, attendance seems pretty light...sigh), even though Jucifer are considerably more "loud rawk" than most of the Land's crew. A two-person band hasn't sounded this heavy/cool since Earth, seriously (but don't worry: Jucifer are way more listenable, thankfully).

Maroon 5/The Hives/Kevin Michaels @ Toyota Center
Yeah, yeah; I don't care, honest. Haven't heard The Hives' latest, but I'm still soaring on Veni, Vidi, Vicious (which I finally found recently; how the heck did it go out of print so fast?), and I'm as surprised as you are that I actually like Maroon 5. I think it's partly their backstory -- band nears the Big Time, doesn't quite make it, band shrugs and meanders off to various colleges, band stays friends & starts playing again & doing new stuff, thereby blowing the earlier incarnation out of the water. How often do you see a real-live second shot at stardom work out? Personally, I think it's kinda cool.

Before there was Rosalyn/The Last Starfighter/Virus/Hydrolux/Hematidrosis @ Fitzgerald's
No, I don't know much at all about most of these folks, but I do like The Last Starfighter quite a bit, despite my general dislike of screamo-ish stuff. They don't seem to play all that often within the city limits, so check 'em out while you can.

Indian Jewelry/A Pink Cloud/The Wiggins/Vaarg/Balaclavas/Cop Warmth/Satannabis @ The White Swan
Wow, a big pile of my favorite local strange-rockers in one place on the same night; quite a catch. Indian Jewelry are excellent, making noisy, murky rock that probably comes closer to vintage Sonic Youth than anything else, while The Wiggins are just plain odd. I like what I've heard of Cop Warmth & Balaclavas, and Vaarg apparently includes Mlee Marie of Hearts of Animals, so that's a good sign...

Saves The Day (acoustic show)/Single File/Doctor Manhattan/Barely Blind @ Javajazz Coffee House (Spring)
Yep, Part 2 of "Damn, Suburban Kids Have It Good" Week -- I'll admit that the bulk of the one Saves The Day album I own is pretty bad, but dang it, I just can't help but love "At Your Funeral." (Incidentally, "Funeral" is one of the few songs I've actually heard because of MTV2, back when they used to show nothing but videos.)

Sat., October 27:
M.O.D./Will to Live/Pride Kills/El Desmadre @ Walter's on Washington
How the hell are the M.O.D. guys still alive at this point? However it happened, I'm glad to see it (and that the band's got a new album out now, Red, White, & Screwed) -- I've sorely missed Billy Milano's smart-assed, snarky thrashcore...

Fastball/duneTX @ The Continental Club
I've always been up-and-down on Fastball, I have to say. When they first hit the radio big-time, I was underwhelmed, partly because I'd heard them compared favorably to Superdrag, who were a freakin' ball of fire of a power-pop band. Fastball, unfortunately, always seem to slow down & get mellow right when the song felt like it should be building, y'know? Anyway. Despite that, I am happy they're still around (damn, that feels familiar), and am somewhat curious what they sound like now...

Wicked Poseur/The Cockerspaniels/Over Sea Under Stone (CD release)/Ill Advisory @ The Proletariat
Damn. Three out of the four bands playing are bands I've been really, really meaning to see/hear for a while now. Unfortunately, I've gotta do the Halloween Party thing on Sat., so...

Crocktober Fest, featuring Basses Loaded & HiFi @ 1109 Crocker St.
I swear, Basses Loaded must be the most-hyped local band in town right now, and I can't find a damn clue as to what the music's like. Weird.

Hellbound Hoedown, featuring The Ghost Storys, The Flamin' Hellcats, The DollyRockers, & Wide Open Throttle @ FBI Rocks
Flamin' Hellcats, yeah! Do these guys still get in brawls & hauled off to the pokey, or are they all growed up now?

Lick Lick/Cat Scientists/Three Fantastic @ Rudyard's
Three Fantastic are interesting, to say the least -- and they've got H-town scene cred a mile long -- but the one I'm more curious about is Austin's Lick Lick, since I've been told recently that Matt Kelley, ex-Sprawl/Middlefinger, is in the band.

The Bravery/Dremnt the End/The Critics Hall of Fame/Another Day/The Mechanical Boy @ The Scout Bar (Clear Lake)
Not a recommendation, really -- although The Mechanical Boy were good at the Westheimer Block Party & I liked Critics Hall of Fame when they went by Morningside Drive -- but how is it that a band as big as The Bravery are playing in Clear Lake? No disrespect to the good people at the Scout Bar, mind you; it just seems odd.

Sun., October 28:
Buzzfest XX, featuring Smashing Pumpkins, Finger Eleven, Chris Cornell, Earshot, Evanescence, The Bravery, Evans Blue, The Starting Line, Alter Bridge, Sick Puppies, Sum 41, Fuel, & more @ Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion
C'mon, you know you're curious to see how Billy Corgan's going to try to pull this off. (And hey, Chris Cornell...)

Mon., October 29:
HEALTH/Crime Novels/The Factory Party/Cop Warmth/The Always Already @ The Proletariat
I keep meaning to check out HEALTH, but keep running out of hours in the day, unfortunately. Heard good things, though, and The Factory Party and Cop Warmth are both well worth the trek all by themselves.

Tues., October 30:
Jay Reatard/Something Fierce/The Wax Museums/The Takes @ The Proletariat
The Lawrence Arms/American Steel/The Falcon/Sundowner @ Walter's on Washington
Argh. This one hurts -- I love-love-love Something Fierce, probably more than 99% of the bands in Houston right now, but at the same time, I've been unable to get American Steel's Destroy Their Future out of my car stereo for the past 2 weeks (really, it's that good; it's like Billy Bragg fronting a Gilman St. punk band). If I can make it out next Tuesday, this one might call for a coin toss...

That's it for now. Oh, and if you ever need to fix cracks in your walls, I would highly recommend patching the crack with criss-crossing strips of patching tape (y'know, the sticky mesh stuff), then plastering heavily over it and sanding it, rather than just smushing spackle into the cracks themselves. The tape keeps the walls from re-cracking as soon as you're done, and that can be very nice when your house is built on a reclaimed swamp (like mine is).

Labels: Things To Do, Things To See

gaijin || Link || E-mail || 0 comments

Crap. I really wish my Wednesday nights weren't pretty much already spoken for, especially after finally checking out the tracks up on Say Hi's Myspace page... The Prolo's got a good one tomorrow evening (10/24, for the chronologically-impaired), one I'd highly recommend checking out. I was totally unfamiliar with Seattle-bred headliners Say Hi (formerly known as "Say Hi to Your Mom," which I kinda think is a better band moniker, but hey) 'til today, but I'm now officially blown away -- the stuff they've got online for their not-yet-released new full-length, The Wishes and the Glitch, is freakin' great, a cool pile of chilly-but-not-coldhearted electro-indie that brings to mind The Postal Service with a touch of Doves' grandiose vision. Seriously, I can't stop listening to the half-jaded kiss-off of "Northwestern Girls."

It's also worth mentioning that while Wishes doesn't "officially" come out 'til Feb. of 2008, the band is, um, already done with it & all that and is offering the album to pre-ordering fans in either immediately-downloadable MP3 format or wait-'til-early-November CD format. (Go here to order; I bought the "early-November" version, but it comes w/the digital download, too, so I'll hopefully be downloading & listening to it all after I get home tonight...)

Then there's The Velvet Teen, who I really liked for a brief period back in 2002, when they released Out of the Fierce Parade, and who seemed to vanish into the ether not long after -- which, it turns out, was totally not the case, as the band's been releasing EPs and LPs steadily since then, even while coping with the death of founding member Logan Whitehurst of brain cancer. Man...

At any rate, they've slipped back onto my personal radar, at least, and now I find myself smacking myself on the head for not paying attention in the meantime. I'm still a sucker for the band's older stuff, especially "Counting Backwards" (off 2001's The Great Beast EP) and "The Prize Fighter" (off Out of the Fierce Parade), but I'm now finding that I also enjoy the stuff off of their "middle" albums, like "A Captive Audience" (off Elysium), which swoops and swoons nicely like Coldplay at their least arena-sappy, and "Tokyoto" and "Building a Whale" (off Cum Laude), both of which bury everything in a thick layer of Parts and Labor-esque electro-fuzz but still feature some awesomely frantic drums.

So, there you go -- I'm afraid I haven't yet checked out openers The A-Sides (sorry, guys), but what the fuck; two damn good bands is more than enough reason to check out a weeknight show, I'd say.

Labels: H-Town News, Musical Crap, Things To Do

gaijin || Link || E-mail || 0 comments

And now, ladies & gents, for what's rapidly becoming my weekly dose of political bile. My in-laws happened to have the TV on this past Sunday night when we were over there, and I walked into the living room just in time to see Katie Couric interviewing Valerie Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson and now ex-CIA operative. Whose identity as a CIA agent was leaked to the press by the White House and who, it turns out, has finally been given clearance by her former employer (she left not long after the leak, being effectively "burned" for other intelligence work) to give her side of the story.

The ever-insightful David Corn does a nice write-up here, if you want the details, but I'll sum it up quick: despite what all the idiot talking-heads (Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, Coulter, Novak, Goldberg; the list goes on) have declared over and over again, it seems that yes, Plame really was an undercover operative. That's "undercover," as in "not traveling under her true identity/job description in order to do secret stuff." She said it right there on TV, straight to Katie Couric, and y'know, Ms. Plame's the one who best knows what she did for a living for the past two decades, isn't she? I'm sure there'll be some out there who still doubt the reality of it, who'll smugly declare, "she's just a pencil-pusher, a desk jockey," but they're wrong. Absolutely, completely wrong. Period.

Oh, and some out there might know this -- the information's been floating around for a while now in the wake of the leak and the mess that's ensued -- but any guesses as to what Ms. Plame was working on in her undercover capacity? How about being operations chief for the Joint Task Force on Iraq of the CIA's covert Counterproliferation Division? Yes, that's right; not only did the White House and their media-scumbag pals burn a spook, but they burned one who just happened to be working on finding the same fucking Weapons of Mass Destruction we supposedly went to war to find. On top of that, it's come out recently that she was working on efforts to keep Iran from getting their own nukes, too. It'd be ironic, if it weren't so goddamn horrifying.

Here we are, threatened on all sides by terrorists who're trying -- if you buy the Bush crew's assertions -- to build or buy nukes any which way they can, but they chose to "out" a spy whose job it was to keep those nukes from falling into bad-guy hands. Valerie Plame wasn't a "desk jockey," she was fucking Jack Bauer, folks. And the White House blew her cover, thereby flushing any cloak-and-dagger operations she'd been a part of down the drain and endangering the lives of anybody who had A) worked with her or B) helped her as an intelligence asset. In one fell swoop, Colonel X's meeting with that nice young woman from that American consulting company changed from, say, innocent trade talks to a reason for a surprise visit from the secret police, followed by a long stay in a very dark place.

So, there it is, out in the public eye once and for all. The Bush administration outed a bona-fide spy to take a cheap shot at a guy (Joe Wilson) who refused to keep his mouth shut on the bullshit "evidence" they cooked up to start a war. They chose petty politics over national security, not to mention maybe, just maybe, saving lives. And that's a big-time, treason-level crime. Now that Plame's broken her silence, somebody needs to be nailed to the wall for this, and the higher up, the better (and no, Scooter Libby doesn't count; you haven't been punished for a damn thing if you get convicted & then immediately pardoned for the crime you committed, sorry).

The saddest part of all of this is that no one ever will. America, Land of the Kinda-Free, Home of the Blameless-for-Everything, hooray.

Labels: Political Stuff, Random Rambling

gaijin || Link || E-mail || 0 comments

Ah, man. You may've already heard, but Lance Hahn, longtime fixture on the pop-punk scene both in Austin and San Francisco, passed away this past Sunday after a long string of health problems. Hahn was one of those people who always made/make me feel inadequate just by the sheer amount of cool stuff they managed to fit into their day -- he was best known for the excellent J Church, but he also fronted Cringer and played solo as Cilantro, ran the Honey Bear Records label, wrote a ton of stuff for various zines, published his own zine, and was reportedly working on a book about anarchist punk bands when he died. phew. I can barely review a fuckin' CD a day, seriously; I feel like a big ol' loser by comparison.

I never met the guy, unfortunately, but he'd become something of a fixture in my life over the past few years. I've listened to J Church off and on since college ("Imaginary Friends," in particular, off One Mississippi, is a fine, fine track, and one that I've even subjected my wife to via a mix CD), and they are/were a great, smart band -- Hahn was one of the most genuinely bright punk songwriters I've ever run across, peppering his songs with literary references and cogent introspective bits -- but I have to admit that Honey Bear's why I'll remember him most.

We get a lot of CDs here at SCR HQ. Not as many as you might think, no, but enough to cover my desk and then some. We get about ten times that many emails from PR people, record labels, bands, and random weirdos; apologies if you've written & we didn't respond, but dangit, sometimes the Inbox just swallows us whole. So, given that, we end up just glancing at & then shuffling aside about 70% of the emails we get -- we have to do that, honestly, because there's just not enough space or time to cover everybody people tell us about. And after a while, we've gotten to know some of the label/PR folks, in particular, mostly in a strictly-online way and often just by reading what they send us. (Brian from Guerilla PR, for one, writes these long, involved emails that make me wonder how he gets anything else done in his day; keep 'em coming, yo...)

The emails we'd get in from Honey Bear, though (all penned by Lance), were something else. The first time I read through one, I distinctly remember thinking, "okay, who the fuck is this guy, and why do I give a shit about all this crap?" Unlike most label folk, Lance wasn't content just to say, "hey, here's our new records -- buy them! review them!" Instead, he'd briefly mention what was going on in the myriad worlds of J Church, Honey Bear, and then he'd go on to talk about movies he'd seen, books he'd read, and CDs/bands he'd heard, or ramble about Rolling Stones comps or assholes on airplanes. And it was pretty much always entertaining.

It got to the point, believe it or not, where I'd look forward to getting the next installment of what was essentially Lance's life. Despite never having met the guy, I've followed his life & the downward spiral of illness to which he's finally succumbed for the better part of five years. And damn, he had a lot to cope with -- in addition to all the band stuff and health stuff and whatnot, the label took what could've been a K.O. when Lance's apartment burned, wiping out tons of Honey Bear/J Church/etc. releases, vaporizing all his masters, and destroying most of his personal stuff, besides.

Anyway, I'm getting off the point (yeah, like that never happens), which is that it's a horrible, tragic thing that Lance is gone. More than that, it's a tragedy that he'll never know the impact his life and music and writing had on all the distant observers like yours truly, the people who weren't friends or anything but who loved what he was doing nonetheless. I'm not posting to say, "dude, I frickin' knew that guy!," 'cause I didn't. I'm just trying to say that even never having met Lance in person, I feel like a chunk's missing from at least the "digital" side of my life.

My heart goes out to all the folks who were close to Lance; I'm not big on the religion thing, but I think being friends with somebody like him is definitely a blessing. Maybe people who burn that brightly can't help but burn out sooner than the rest of us.

END NOTE: While Lance is gone, there's still a large pile of medical bills left to pay. If you're so inclined, you can donate $$$ to help with the bills and/or pay for a memorial service at the Website of his old day job, Vulcan Video.

(Big "thanks," by the way, to the Hands Up board for breaking the news...)

Labels: Musical Crap, Random Rambling

gaijin || Link || E-mail || 0 comments

Damn, this is gonna have to be quick. We've got a bunch of new stuff up, two weeks' worth (sorry, missed last week's post), and there's a ton of awesome, awesome shows this weekend, to boot, that I'm not really gonna have time to talk about...

First of all, writer Peter (aka "Pedro") did us a fine-fine-fine review of the Axiom 20th Reunion Show, one that makes me very sad I was at home with a sick kid all weekend, and then Andrew waxed eloquent about William Elliott Whitmore's show recently over at Walter's. Check 'em out -- links on the homepage. Oh, and there's a ton of new reviews, so be sure to scroll on down...

As for shows, Qui are playing tonight (Fri., 10/19) at Walter's with Dizzy Pilot (sorry, Rustler fans, but the band apparently had to cancel...), and Chicago correspondent Henry reviewed the disc, caught the band's Chi-town show, and was blown away. We'd really be recommending this show if Rustler were still playing, but it'll be good either way.

Also playing are local boys The Goods, a live-together-play-together collective that's put out a damn fine album that gathers up all that I loved about '90s music into one tight little bundle. They're at The Engine Room tonight (10/19), Fuel in Humble tomorrow night (10/20), and Super Happy Fun Land this coming Tuesday (10/23). Wow.

A little further off, we've got American Steel playing Walter's on 10/30 with The Lawrence Arms, The Falcon, & Sundowner, and I'm here to tell you that their new album is in-fucking-credible. There's also The Monocles, who were kind enough to send a copy of their soon-to-be-released new 7", which is great, and who're playing 11/21 at Rudz with Born Liars, Welfare Mothers, & Black Black Gold.

Beyond that, umm... Check out the Magic Markers show tonight The Mink, The Phlegmatics tonight at Fitz, this cool-sounding marching band thing called March Fourth tonight at Notsuoh, and the Disaro showcase tonight at Super Happy Fun Land w/Wicked Poseur. Then you can head over to the Fallcore festival tomorrow (see here), followed by the Unusual Animals show with Cryptacize, The Wiggins, and the very cool Hearts of Animals (among others) over at DiverseWorks. Oh, and new local show booking crew Waste No Buffalo is putting on their inaugural gig tomorrow up at Walter's, with Wolf Explosion, The Mayapples, wood & felt, & several other people I like.

And, with that, I gotta go. Sorry for the lack of detailed review listings here...

Labels: Live Reviews, Pseudo-Reviews, Reviews, Things To Do

gaijin || Link || E-mail || 0 comments

Time to interject some (more) non-musical stuff here... As a relatively-recent dad, I'm utterly terrified to talk to friends with high-school-aged (and even middle-school-aged) kids these days. Maybe it's an incorrect perception, but it sure sounds like the lives kid lead are ridiculously, insanely complicated and busy. How can it be fun, to be continually bouncing from one extra-curricular deal to another with no break except to eat & do homework? Whatever happened to the days when you'd get out of school, get home, maybe do some chores, and then run outside with your friends 'til the sun went down? I know that's what I did, most days, and that's how I remember my childhood, as a happy, relatively carefree time (interspersed with occasional trips to the emergency room, of course; thank God I've got a girl & not a boy...).

Anyway, the reason for my rambling is an event this weekend at The Real School, this sorta free-form community school that's also known as "Dragon Valley" for reasons that aren't totally clear to me. Author Chris Mercogliano will be speaking on Saturday, October 20th at 2PM at the School (5020 Dickson, near Shepherd & Memorial) about his book In Defense of Childhood, which sounds like it pretty much encapsulates the horror I feel when people tell me about their kids' crazy-busy little lives. More details on the event here, if you're interested.

Labels: Random Rambling, Things To Do, Things To Hear

gaijin || Link || E-mail || 0 comments

Hey, don't laugh -- I may be a big over-thirty dork with a kid & house & all that crap, but I, too, have known the wonders of the pit. I've gotten stomped into the mud (Fishbone @ Lollapalooza), come close to getting my jaw broken by arm-swinging gorillas (Helmet in San Antonio; that show was also the start of my tinnitus, dammit...), and been miraculously cured after Marky(?) Ramone spat on me (Ramones @ the I-Ball).

I'm no hardcore devotee, mind you -- as with any type of music, I think about 90% of it is crap and only 10% genius, and I seem to be hearing more of the former than the latter lately. For a lot of modern hc, I tend to just shrug and say "eh." That said, stuff like this makes me very, very happy:

Sat., October 20 -- Fallcore Fest @ The Meridian
I honestly don't know much about the history of this particular festival; it just seemed like it magically appeared one year, and against all odds, the folks running the show just soldiered on and on. Hardcore-heavy festivals like this don't seem to do real well in Houston, although I dunno why, given the size of the hardcore scene -- I've seen several "annual" festivals like Fallcore just die out after a year or two of existence, while this one's now on it's seventh year. Hoo-ah. The folks over at Hate Tank deserve a lot of thanks, I think, for keeping this one alive & promoting the shit out of it...

In case you haven't already guessed, Fallcore's a ridiculously heavy lineup of local (mostly?) hardcore-ish bands; some are more on the trad-hc end of things, some are more metalcore, some are basically screamo bands, and some are just, well, metal (Iron Age, for one; I swear they sound like late-'80s thrash to me). There's a ton of great, great people playing, including oh-my-God-they'll-never-die legends Will to Live (ex-Refuse to Fall, for those who remember such things), The Jonbenet, Die Young, I Am Wolf, Your Mistake (it's their last show, reportedly, along with Ten Crowns last show), and even Tanari, who I could've sworn were dead & buried. Expect to get your head and eardrums pummeled.

At any rate, the whole deal takes place at The Meridian this time out, taking up both their main "Blue Room" stage and the smaller "Red Room" side stage you have to walk past to get to the big one. Tickets are $15, which may sound steep but is actually pretty good considering the lineup (see below), and the show starts at 2PM (doors at 1PM) and runs 'til midnight or so. Oh, and Freebirds will be on hand to serve big-ass burritos ("wraps," to you citified folk) to mean-looking, tattooed, bloody, and very hungry hardcore kids. (Not for free, sadly; there's a menu w/prices on the Fallcore Website.)

TIME	BAND	ROOM
2:00-2:15	DTD	Blue Room
2:20-2:35	Sacred Shock	Red Room
2:40-2:55	Indisgust	Blue Room
3:00-3:15	On My Side	Red Room
3:20-3:35	Hands of the Few	Blue Room
3:40-3:55	I Am Wolf	Red Room
4-4:20	Sudden Death	Blue Room
4:25-4:45	Fight Pretty	Red Room
4:50-5:10	Grave Robbers	Blue Room
5:15-5:35	The Golden Age	Red Room
5:40-6:00	Flawless Victory	Blue Room
6:05-6:25	A.N.S.	Red Room
6:30-6:50	As Eden Burns	Blue Room
6:55-7:15	Lie and Wait	Red Room
7:20-7:40	Full Contact	Blue Room
7:45-8:05	World Burns to Death	Red Room
8:10-8:39	Ten Crowns	Blue Room
8:35-8:55	PLF	Red Room
9:00-9:20	Tanari	Blue Room
9:25-9:45	Your Mistake	Red Room
9:50-10:10	Will to Live	Blue Room
10:15-10:35	Die Young	Red Room
10:40-11:00	The Jonbenet	Blue Room
11:05-11:30	Bitter End	Red Room
11:35-12:00AM	Iron Age	Blue Room

Interestingly, the Fallcore organizers seem to be doing the one thing I really liked about the Warped Tour in the past, which is that they're running bands back-to-back on 2 stages with no annoying waits in-between. That way you finish watching, say, Will to Live in the Blue Room and then walk over to the Red Room just as Die Young are starting up. Damn good idea. You'd better run, though, 'cause it looks like the longest any band gets onstage is about 25 minutes. Yeowch...

Labels: Public Service Announcements, Things To See

gaijin || Link || E-mail || 0 comments

Yes, it's true. Scenester/erst-and-again booking guy Bucky has decided that dangit, he just hasn't done enough music-related crap in this here city, so now he's opening his own record store, to boot, called On The Mouth. Not only is the new enterprise named after one of the best.damn.Superchunk.songs.EVER (okay, yeah, I love the OtM album, too), but it's also carrying some very cool, somewhat hard-to-find stuff. Lots of local (Papermoons, By the End of Tonight, O Pioneers!!!, Sore Loser, etc.), but also stuff like Shotbaker, Monikers (ex-Discount), Deadline, Coalesce, Strikeforce Diablo, & that ever-awesome First Crush emo comp that came out a long damn time ago. More will apparently be forthcoming in the near future.

Oh, but here's The Twist -- 'cause y'know, we live in the Age of the Police Procedural, where there's always got to be a Twist ("But wait...the nanny and Mrs. Schrodinger are the same person! She murdered herself and got away with it!"). On The Mouth is not yet its own separate bricks-and-mortar entity, no, but instead resides in the back portion of the existing (and absolutely awesome, I should add, since I don't know that I've ever given 'em their props here) music emporium Sig's Lagoon, over at 3710 Main next to The Continental Club & Tacos-A-Go-Go.

The store will carry Bucky's stock, and Bucky will be there to sell it from 11AM-9PM Monday-Wednesday and 11AM-12AM Thursday-Saturday (he goes home to sleep on Sundays, apparently). You can also call the meta-store at 713-533-9525, if you either can't make the slog over to Midtown or just fear the evil Light Rail that has claimed so many lives, er, fenders. Go. Buy things. We need more places like both On The Mouth and Sig's Lagoon (and Domy, and SoundEx, and Vinal Edge...) in this city. It's fucking criminal that a city this size can count the cool record stores on one of its sweaty, pimpled hands. Get out there, people.

Labels: H-Town News, Public Service Announcements, Things To Get

gaijin || Link || E-mail || 0 comments

Time for Pt. 3 of our upcoming-festivality coverage, again for this coming weekend (er, tomorrow, that is):

Sat., October 13 -- Free Press Westheimer Block Party @ 300-500 block of Westheimer (Numbers/Avante Garden/La Strada/Mangos)
Man, that crazy Free Press Houston crew just won't quit; gotta love 'em for it. They're bound and determined to resurrect the much-missed Westheimer Street Festival from the H-town musical/cultural boneyard, and they've done it by giving the finger to all the ridiculous politics surrounding the "real" Westfest and creating their own thing, the Westheimer Block Party (oh, it's not a "street festival," no; of course not, Mr. Officer, sir...). Rather than taking the whole damn street like Westfest used to, these days they just book the venues on either side of the 300-500 block of the street -- namely, Numbers, Avante Garden (née The Mausoleum/Helios), and Mangos.

I was able to drag the midget down to the last Block Party they threw, and yep, I did indeed enjoy it, even though I couldn't stay long (the wee one gets hot/tired quicker than I do). Caught Guns of August, Suspenderman(!), and part of what I think -- if my addled memory's not playing tricks -- was John Evans' set inside Numbers. I also ran into my old boss Cliff, who now does the MyCityRocks thing & somehow manages to take pictures of every freakin' show that comes through town, which is cool...

The one real downer to the last BP was, honestly, the turnout. The crowd was pretty big over at Mangos, but across the road next to Numbers, it was sparse (and inside Numbers was even worse; is there, uh, any way to turn the house lights up a little bit this time? Walking from a bright & sunny afternoon into a pitch-black, mostly-empty club was a little disconcerting...). Which is a shame, because there were a ton of really good local folks playing. Maybe it was because it was supposed to rain all weekend? Fuckin' Weather Channel.

At any rate, the Party's back again, so if you missed the last one, you're one lucky bastard & get a second chance, eh? It runs from noon 'til 9PM, there're something like 50 bands playing, and it's absolutely-frickin' free. And while I can't guarantee it for this go-round, I was pleasantly surprised that I didn't have to walk five miles with my daughter on my back to get from where I parked up to Westheimer.

By the way, if you (like me) happened to pick up a printed copy of the schedule for the Block Party recently, you might want to double-check it against the updated schedule on the FPH site. I noticed a couple of changes to the lineups -- The Gold Sounds playing the Avante Garden instead of Dirtyberd, for one, and The Hates added to the inside-Numbers lineup -- and I'm not looking real closely at the actual times & whatnot.

So, after looking at the revised schedule, here're my picks for the day:

TIME	BAND	VENUE
12:00-12:30	The Gold Sounds	Avante Garden
12:45-1:15	Rustler	Numbers-Inside
1:30-2:00	Hearts of Animals	Numbers-Inside
3:00-3:30	Sabra Laval Peekaboo Theory	Avante Garden Numbers-Outside
3:45-4:15	Balaclavas	Avante Garden
4:30-5:00	The Takes	Mangos
5:15-5:45	Prodigal Sons Cop Warmth	Avante Garden Numbers-Inside
6:00-6:30	Spain Colored Orange Basses Loaded	Numbers-Outside Mangos
6:45-7:15	Golden Axe The Rudyments	Numbers-Outside Mangos
7:30-8:00	Tha Fucking Transmissions	Numbers-Outside

Hrm. Looking back over that, it occurs to me that that's, um, a pretty full day. Damn -- unfortunately, I just can't do the whole "stay at a festival 'til it ends" thing these days; my weekends are for doing yard work, repainting things, and playing with the midget. Ah, the joys of being a homeowner/dad...

I am hoping to head over there for a little while in the early afternoon, though; I'd really like to check out The Gold Sounds at noon, and I've got to catch Rustler at the 12:45 slot. I have yet to see them live, but on disc they sound absolutely incredible. And then, naturally, I can't miss Hearts of Animals, right after. I'm prob'ly gonna have to skip out on the mid-afternoon-or-later stuff, which sucks, because I've been curious to hear Prodigal Sons for a while now (ex-John Sparrow/Sore Loser/etc.), would really like to see what Balaclavas and Golden Axe are like, and love what I've heard of The Takes to death. Guess I'll just have to see how it goes...

Labels: Pseudo-Reviews, Public Service Announcements, Things To Do

gaijin || Link || E-mail || 2 comments

Nice, all you right-wing whackjob guys (and gals -- no, I'm not forgetting about you, Michelle Malkin), real nice. In order to combat Democratic PR about how the Prez is giving the finger to poor kids, what do you do? You smack down a twelve-year-old and his family, setting off a firestorm of hatred and vitriol that has people calling their home and declaring that they should be publicly hanged. Beautiful.

Of course, what can I really expect from a party that'll happily savage their own when it serves their needs (Senator McCain, has your amnesia about the 2000 elections worn off yet?) and even throw a working officer in our intelligence services under the wheels of the train when their husband does something they don't like? Still, this is low even for these assholes. You guys got all up in arms because MoveOn put out an ad about the top general in Iraq -- a guy who, frankly, is old enough to be able to stand up for himself and probably thinks the whole thing is laughable -- but you've got no problem attacking a kid? Pathetic.

To top it all off, the Frost family has it right when they point out that it's a technique meant to distract from the real issue, which is that the State Children's Health Insurance Program helps people when they're in need -- and the Frosts are in need, believe it. These folks are only sporadically employed -- the husband's a woodworker and the wife works part-time at a medical publishing company. They may not be dirt-poor and living in boxes, but they make little enough between 'em that they qualify for the Maryland program, no matter how much that irks all the bad-tempered Red Staters out there.

And so the hell what if their house is worth money? Does that mean all conservatives think that if you get into financial trouble, heck, you'd better up and move? That's idiotic. I'll tell you right now that if I were to lose my job and something catastrophic were to happen to my daughter, I'd sell our home as an absolute last resort; instead, I would use any and all programs I could find to help her get better. Anybody would; if somebody tells you they'd rather sell off their house to pay medical bills than accept the state's help in footing the bill, they're either a big fat liar or they've got enough cash to not have to worry about it to begin with. Period.

Y'know, it's funny, but the comment from the National Review Online guy, Mark Steyn, is actually kinda telling:

"Bad things happen to good people, and they cause financial problems and touch choices. ... But, if this is the face of the 'needy' in America, then no-one is not needy." (emphasis mine)

ding! Mr. Steyn, you win the prize; here's your free toaster. Welcome to the New Republican-Led America, folks (and yes, it is still the Repub-Led America, since the Dems apparently either don't have the spine to fight tooth-and-nail and demonstrate that they're actually in charge of Congress), where even outwardly middle-class people like you, me, and your parents are often about a paycheck away from total financial ruin. Seen the average hospital bill for a major injury or illness lately? If you don't have insurance -- and sometimes even if you do -- then you can kiss it goodbye.

Without programs like SCHIP, people like the Frosts would be paupers. Hell, people like me would be paupers. Here's a case that's a little close to home for me, just to give an example of how bad it can get and just how quick it can happen. My wife's an oilfield brat, and she grew up overseas with one particular family where the kids were her age & the parents were her parents' age; over the years, working the standard oilfield-circle jobs (North Sea, Texas, Norway), they've run into one another regularly and have remained friends. They've had a succession of jobs, and a while back the dad of the family got laid off. He's a skilled guy, so he was able to find a contract position with no problem, but there's was no health insurance.

Knowing that, they figure, "well, we've got to have health insurance," so the wife of the family goes to work part-time at a Barnes & Noble, just so they can get on a health plan there. These folks don't really need the income from both jobs -- they do okay on the dad's paycheck -- but they need the benefits.

Now, the contracting company finds the dad a new job, with one catch: it's in China. He agrees, he flies out there, he's working for a few months, everything's going okay, and then wham, it all falls apart. While he's in China, he's eating junkier food than he would at home -- lots of snacks, lots of candy, that sort of thing -- and it turns out that he's become a full-blown diabetic. The next phone call we get, he's in the hospital in some backwater town in China, and while the Chinese doctors are taking care of him the best they can (for free, I might add), they don't have the equipment or the skills necessary to keep him alive for very long. We're told that they're going to have to amputate his foot, maybe his leg, and that he might well die anyway.

Naturally, as soon as this mess explodes, the contracting company carefully washes their hands of our friend and his family and walks away. So he's left in China on the verge of, at best, losing a limb, and at worst, dying thousands of miles away from his home and his family. Back here in Houston, of course, his wife is at her wits' end -- her husband is in critical condition in a foreign country with nobody there to help him, and what the hell can she do? Luckily, the family was very, very smart to go for the second job at Barnes & Noble, because as luck would have it, B&N and their insurance company handle everything.

Seriously; this episode's made me actually like B&N for the first time in years. They fly a doctor out to China and he accompanies the husband back to the States and takes him straight to a hospital where they get him back to the world. In the end, he loses a toe and that's it; he was extremely fortunate. Of course, emergency medical care like this isn't free, so the bills come rolling in, eventually totaling more than a million dollars. Which, incidentally, these people do not have; who the hell does? These folks are hard-working, mid-to-upper middle class, but even people like that don't tend to have $1 million plus laying around, not even when you add up all their assets.

Happily for them, the insurance company paid for nearly all of it. I don't know exactly how much they ended up having to pay, but it was a relatively small fraction of the total bill. What the heck would've happened, though, if the wife of this family hadn't taken that second job? This New Republican-Led America is also the Land of the Freelance, these days -- there're a lot of people out there right now who don't have any insurance, zip, and who basically spend their days hoping against hope that nothing bad happens to them medically. So it's conceivable that the husband might've just had his job & they could've lived off that. And then he might've died on an operating table somewhere in rural China.

Granted, my little illustration's a bit extreme -- not all of us work overseas, obviously -- but the risk's still there. In the case of the Frosts, they were in a terrible car wreck that left their two children essentially crippled for life. Any idea how much a lifetime of physical therapy costs? How about a couple months in intensive care? It's a hell of a lot more than you can pay when you make $50K a year. That's where programs like SCHIP come in, and it's why they're necessary.

So, to the people who've attacked the Frost family, called them names, threatened their lives, and used them as general whipping-boys: until you've been there, how 'bout shutting the fuck up? Until you've had to sell off your house to pay for the operations your son or daughter needs to function like a human being or take out insane loans to pay for specialized education for your kid because they can no longer read or write, how 'bout you rein in your hatred and self-important rage? I hope you never have to deal with what these folks have dealt with -- no, I wouldn't wish somebody's child got horribly injured like Graeme and Gemma Frost have, not even Limbaugh's, Malkin's, or those wretched Freepers' -- but if you do, maybe then you'll get what SCHIP is for. Welcome to the country where everyone's "needy," folks.

Labels: Political Stuff, Random Rambling

gaijin || Link || E-mail || 0 comments

This is too freakin' cool. (Either that, or I'm a big, big dork.) It takes some practice, but now I can switch directions pretty easily -- at one point I had to multiply 5 x 5 in my head to get it to go from counter-clockwise to clockwise...

Labels: Cool Web Junk, Random Rambling

gaijin || Link || E-mail || 0 comments

Okay, so this one's Pt. 2, but it's technically Pt. 1 of this coming weekend, which is gonna be absolutely insane:

Fri.-Sat., October 12-13 -- The Axiom 20th Anniversary Party/Reunion @ Fitzgerald's
Yep, posted about this one before, but now's the time, folks, so brace yourselves: The Axiom is officially lurching back to life for two nights, albeit in a fairly different location. The kind folks at Fitzgerald's are giving over both floors of the place to a host of old-school Axiom alumni for both nights, and the lineup's pretty damn incredible.

Let's see... on Friday night they've got one of the best damn bands ever to come out of Houston (and, sadly, one that never managed to break beyond the city's boundaries), Sprawl, headlining the show, along with fellow local icons de Schmog, Blunt, & Fleshmop. I can remember seeing all those folks back in the day when I was a wee shrub of a college student (Sprawl were all or mostly Rice kids; even after graduating, they played somewhere on campus every once in a while), and I vividly recall being either blown away by how great they were or by how freakin' bizarre they were (and sometimes both).

I'm less familiar with the other folks on the bill -- never caught Toho Ehio, U.Y.U.S., Bad Samaritans, or Grindin' Teeth when they were around the first time, and I know nada about Cave Reverend, Anarchitex, or David Von Ohlerking and The Awful Truth except as names somebody (Justin, maybe?) scribbled on the great Houston band family tree once upon a time.

Saturday, Night #2, is equally cool, with the ever-badass Joint Chiefs, Sad Pygmy (whose Sometimes Nightmares 7", incidentally, was the first locally-released bit of music I ever bought, & the start of many long afternoons spent sifting through SoundEx's 7" bins), & Turmoil in the Toybox as the ones I know fairly well. I've heard of the rest, though, including Academy Black (which will include Michael Haaga of dead horse/Plus and Minus Show fame for the evening), Cinco Dudes, Bayou Pigs, Uncle Charlie of Dresden 45, the aforementioned Cave Reverend, Backyard Epics, & Jimmy Bradshaw of Squat Thrust.

Oof. Scanning back over the list, it's apparent that this is gonna be quite a (noisy/raggedy/wild/dangerous) party. And hey, it's pretty damn cheap, considering that a large chunk of these bands/people had to be flown in from elsewhere -- $12 for a one-day pass, $20 for both days. To make things even better, the whole shindig's a benefit for the Musicians Benevolent Society of Houston, which is an extremely worthy cause, at least to me.

A Side Note: I got sent a very cool link last week, for a blog called Chronological Snobbery, where Ransom, a self-described "thirty-something suffering from nostalgia," drags us all back kicking and shrieking to 1992 and the Infected: The Twelve From Texas comp on Sound Virus. Immediate reaction? "Holy shit, I'd completely forgotten about that damn album!" Secondary reaction? "Where the hell did all these people go?"

Seriously, that disc came out right when I was making my own tentative inroads into music in H-town, dragging skeptical college friends out to Emo's or Goat's Head Soup or The Abyss/Vatican or The Axiom to check out some band or another, always afraid I'd come back out & find my crappy little Toyota Tercel stripped to the frame. Montrose and Shepherd were rough places, downright scary to a relative kid like me, and Houston as a whole seemed like this grimy, dark, sorta illicit place to live. No one with money wanted to live in the city itself -- a far cry from today -- so things were ridiculously cheap. Nobody liked Houston, and that in itself was part of the city's charm.

And Infected served pretty well as the soundtrack to all that. Being broke 95% of the time, I had to settle for listening to/cringing at the copy we had at KTRU at the time, in the mysterious "Local" bin. All the bands on there were weird as shit, but they honest-to-God didn't care. They weren't playing to make it on the radio, but because they just wanted to make music, which is something I love about the Houston scene to this day. It's a damn shame they never got the recognition they deserved, but what the hey -- at least people love these bands enough to bring some of 'em back to town for one last(?) hurrah...

(Hey, Ransom -- thanks for the link, eh? Good shit...)

Labels: Cool Web Junk, Things To Do, Things To Read

gaijin || Link || E-mail || 0 comments

Here's my damn-near-perfect evening, as of this past Saturday, after dropping the munchkin off at Grandma's for a little spoilage (I love the midget, but y'know...):

• Dinner with the love of my life at Spaghetti Western. Sweet-ass Italian margaritas, vintage memorabilia for Westerns you've never heard of (call me a Philistine if you will, but I had no idea Dean Martin & Frank Sinatra were ever in movies where they didn't wear suits & carry martinis around), darn good garlic bread, and the best chicken parmigiana I've ever had, bar none (sorry, Mom).

• A quick run to the Domy Store before it closes. Got there just in time to snag a copy of last week's Grey Ghost release by Mlee Marie of Hearts of Animals (see here for info; and yes, it's good, delicate and quiet, and will hopefully get reviewed soon), gawk at all the cute/cool toys, and reach longingly for the one Joe Sacco book I still need to get only to have the wife smack my hand and say, "Wait for Christmas!" Made her week by buying her the latest issue of Found, which she's already planning to send off to a friend & fellow junk-store connoisseur who's stuck in rural North Carolina.

  The place makes me feel 12 years old again, and in a good way, not a dammit-those-guys-gave-me-a-wedgie-again way. (Um. Not that that ever happened to me, of course. Just, ah, some of my friends, y'know...) I've got to get there during daylight hours sometime soon, I swear.

• Hitting The Chocolate Bar for some dessert. I was just about full to exploding after S.W., but I fought it down in order to devour a couple of those fucking incredible truffles they make -- they nearly dissolve in your mouth, honest -- and half a peanut butter cup (screw Reese's, this is the real deal). The sweet lady had her favorite, fresh orange slices dipped in chocolate. Wanted to make a stop by the Empire Cafe, too, but my stomach wouldn't let me...

• A sold-out Okkervil River show at Walter's. Great, great, great songs, a freakishly enthusiastic crowd (thank God for will-call tickets), and damn, do my legs still ache, two days later. Felt like a clueless doof with all the new stuff -- haven't picked up the latest album yet, and Black Sheep Boy felt over-long, so I don't know it real well -- but was over the moon the hear "Westfall" again, not to mention "Okkervil River Song."

  So good not even the two obnoxious SuperFans^TM who shoved in front of us -- one of whom looked like Ike Barenholtz from Mad TV in his Kevin Federline costume and the other of whom appeared to be attached to his girlfriend somehow by the baby-blue headphones hung around both their necks -- could fuck it up. That Will Sheff is something else, even if my wife thinks his eyes look like a newborn gerbil's (she loves OR, too, mind you)... The band's come a long way from the first time we caught 'em at Rudz, with only Sheff & their old mandolin player playing to about eight people. They deserve all the success they get.

  Beyond Okkervil, Damien Jurado was absolutely spectacular, despite not looking a thing like I thought he would (turns out he's from here, weirdly enough; he went to elementary school & juvie in H-town). I need some of his albums, seriously. And I liked what I caught of the Colour Revolt; Aaron from The Church of Philadelphia declared they were his favorite band ever (heck, he made the drive down from The Woodlands just to see 'em), and I can definitely understand why. Oh, and the show was over before midnight. No shit. That and the blessedly smoke-free environment made it feel like we were in a whole other city for a while, one where clubs routinely finish up early for the kids & old-a