Boston Phoenix - thePhoenix.com

Ice ice baby

GREG COOK — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:15:02 GMT

Polar landscapes at the Peabody Essex, plus monsters at the Museum of Science
In July 1860, Captain Isaac Israel Hayes's schooner, the United States, left Boston and sailed to the Arctic.

AURORA BOREALIS: Frederick Edwin Church’s seven-foot-wide painting is just one of the showstoppers at the Peabody Essex.

“To the Ends of the Earth” | Peabody Essex Museum, East India Square, Salem | Through March 1

“Mythic Creatures” | Museum of Science, 1 Science Park, Boston | Through March 22

In July 1860, Captain Isaac Israel Hayes's schooner, the United States, left Boston and sailed to the Arctic. He was in search of the legendary open polar sea, a hoped-for water passage to the North Pole or between Europe and the Pacific. But it was also the kind of voyage one made in order to test oneself against Earth's final forbidding untamed frontier.

By October, the ship was frozen in, and the men continued north by dogsled. When conditions finally stymied Hayes's progress, he scaled an icy hill and scanned the horizon.

Recounting his experiences of May 1861 in his book The Open Polar Sea, Hayes wrote, "All the evidences showed that I stood upon the shores of the Polar Basin, and that the broad [frozen] ocean lay at my feet . . . and within a month, the whole sea would be as free from ice as I had seen the northern water of Baffin Bay." He added, "I have shown that the open sea exists." He turned out to be wrong, but it was a thrilling tale.

Hayes named one of the icy mountains Church Peak, after his artist friend Frederick Edwin Church, who had given him some drawing lessons. And he gave Church his sketch of it after sailing back into Boston Harbor in October 1861. Drawing on Hayes's tales and that chalk drawing and his own experience sketching icebergs on Newfoundland and Labrador in 1859 and the aurora borealis on Mount Desert Island in Maine in 1860, Church invented an astonishing seven-foot-wide canvas, Aurora Borealis (1865).

The painting is one of the showstoppers of the excellent exhibit "To the Ends of the Earth: Painting the Polar Landscape" at Salem's Peabody Essex Museum. The sky glows with green and red ribbons, like the contrails of dragons. Below, Hayes's tiny schooner lays trapped in a world of ice. A speck of a man dogsleds toward the warm orange glow of the ship's cabin window. It's an eerie scene that echoes Hayes's description of the Northern Lights: "Upon the mountain tops, along the white surface of the frozen waters, upon the lofty cliffs, the light glowed and grew dim and glowed again, as if the air was filled with charnel meteors, pulsating with wild inconstancy over some vast illimitable city of the dead."

Photos: Fire near Fenway

PHOENIX STAFF — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:41:56 GMT

Charred grilled on Peterborough Street
Photos of the Fenway fire aftermath

A flair for the drama

WILL SPITZ — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:11:06 GMT

Great Scott, January 4, 2009
"There's not enough hype in the world for Glasvegas," old reliable hypemonger NME recently proclaimed. But that doesn't mean the magazine and the rest of the British music press aren't trying.

Wu-Tang Clan's essential flavor

CHRIS FARAONE — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:48:29 GMT

Lupo's, January 2, 2009
Fortune magazine once estimated that Michael Jordan has fueled our economy to the tune of $10 billion. Wu-Tang Clan are responsible for the careers of about that many MCs.

Review: Have Nots, Serf City U.S.A.

BARRY THOMPSON — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 23:06:40 GMT

Bankshot
Poverty sucks, but buying stuff is awesome, so I have mixed feelings about capitalism.

Review: Mallu Magalhães

GUSTAVO TURNER — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 22:54:29 GMT

Vivo (2009)
Mallu Magalhães is a teenage girl from São Paulo who was raised on a steady diet of old Beatles, Dylan, and Johnny Cash records.

Review: Animal Collective, Merriweather Post Pavilion

MICHAEL PATRICK BRADY — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 23:18:06 GMT

Domino (2009)
Animal Collective began as a band of fringe weirdos, but over time they've dropped the freak from their folk.

Factory Records: Communications 1978-92

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 22:42:42 GMT

Rhino (2009)
The whole Factory Records stereotype of thin, earnest men in long raincoats complaining about the cold and the damp to absolutely no chicks whatsoever over frenetic machine-made beats is with us for a reason.

Review: Gilfema + 2

JON GARELICK — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 23:10:13 GMT

ObliqSound (2009)
With rising jazz-guitar star Lionel Loueke in the mix, Gilfema are shaping up to be a jazz supergroup.

Holding firm

TOM MEEK — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 16:32:54 GMT

Bill Duke's Not Easily Broken
It's an uneven yet affecting effort, clotted with cliché and stereotype early on but becoming confluent and even provocative as it places a salient spin on responsibility, race, and going the distance.

VIDEO: The trailer for Not Easily Broken

Bill Duke, whom you may recall as the strung-out mercenary carving a hole in his head with a Bic razor in the 1987 Predator, or as the director of the edgy 1992 crime drama Deep Cover, gets behind the camera again for this melodrama about a 10-year marriage ripped apart by lack of sex and a brutal car accident. It's an uneven yet affecting effort, clotted with cliché and stereotype early on but becoming confluent and even provocative as it places a salient spin on responsibility, race, and going the distance.

At the heart of the urban malaise, the conflicted Dave (Morris Chestnut) is struggling to get a small construction business off the ground. His once promising baseball future was cut short by injury, and he now lingers in the shadow of his wife, Clarice (Taraji P. Henson), a real-estate broker to affluent clientele whose career is just taking off. She's compassionate and encouraging enough, but she's also impatient and too focused on her career to nurture the relationship. His solace comes from coaching inner-city kids and drinking beer with his man posse. That doesn't sit well with Clarice or her mother, Mary (Jenifer Lewis), a shrew who never thought inner-city Dave (the baseball scholarship was his way out) was good enough for her daughter.

That might be enough to break any marriage, but the two try to sort it out. Then an automobile collision puts Clarice in a cast. She can't work, and one of her office mates (Niecy Nash) tries to horn in on her business. Saddling it all on Dave, Mary moves in and takes control of the house. Dave finds Clarice a physical therapist, but even that good deed backfires when he finds himself getting interested in Julie (Maeve Quinlan) and her son (Cannon Jay). Dave's pal Brock (a hunky Eddie Cibrian) has his own designs on Julie; meanwhile Clarice and her folks decide to have it out with the "skinny white" interloper.

Interview: Ari Folman on Waltz with Bashir

PETER KEOUGH — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:40:10 GMT

Song and dance
Not long after I spoke with Ari Folman about Waltz with Bashir , a harrowing and black-comic animated memoir of his experience as an IDF soldier in the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Israeli bombs fell on Gaza, in seeming anticipation of a ground offensive.

“I think any kind of filmmaking is subjective, including documentary.”

Not long after I spoke with Ari Folman about Waltz with Bashir, a harrowing and black-comic animated memoir of his experience as an IDF soldier in the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Israeli bombs fell on Gaza, in seeming anticipation of a ground offensive. So much for film's capacity to change history or remind us of the errors of the past.

As a means of uncovering repressed traumatic memories, however, Folman found cinema an effective tool. And film has the power to confront audiences with harsh realities and transform horror into art. Since its triumphant screening at Cannes, Bashir has gotten received kudos from critics as well as a Golden Globe nomination, and it's an early favorite for the Best Foreign Language Oscar. Less thrilling for Folman have been the hundreds of interviews he's had to conduct promoting the film, among them this one over the phone from Israel, where it was already the following day.

They've got you working late tonight.
Yeah, but I hope it won't take long. It's quarter to one here.

Are you surprised by the response to the film?
After Cannes, I figured that some good things were going to happen. But I was surprised by its appeal in so many places. Different countries and different cultures. In Israel it also did very well. But it's been out more than six months there now, so it's not playing much any more.

Why do you think it has done better than the Iraq-War movies released recently here in America?
Well, I didn't see any good films [on the subject], honestly, at least in terms of fiction. But I think it's hard to deal with those matters when they just appear. You don't have any perspective of time, of history. It takes a long time for such things to sink in so that it's artistic and not that political. I think it took time for the Vietnam War. Not so many years [as for the war in Lebanon], but it took a few years before the big wave of the good movies came out. And it will take time for the Iraq war as well.

This film started out when you saw a psychiatrist and realized that you had blanks in your memory of your war experience, since then you've said that psychotherapy is good for making a film but not much good for making someone feel better. Can you explain?
Filmmaking is dynamic therapy. It's a process. It's a job in which you meet people, interview them, write it, read it, rewrite it, shoot it. And psychotherapy is something that is totally passive compared to making a film or writing.

Sweet smell of skill

STEVE VINEBERG — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:30:32 GMT

Alexander Mackendrick at the HFA
Alexander Mackendrick, who's the subject of a tribute at the Harvard Film Archive this weekend, is a somewhat mysterious figure in movie history.

THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT: Alec Guinness stars in the most inspired of Mackendrick’s Ealing films.

“Alexander Mackendrick and the Anarchy of Innocence” | Harvard Film Archive: January 9-12

Alexander Mackendrick, who's the subject of a tribute at the Harvard Film Archive this weekend, is a somewhat mysterious figure in movie history. Over the course of a nearly 20-year career, he made only nine pictures (all of which are being screened), though he stepped in, uncredited, to direct scenes in several others. The son of Scottish parents, he rose in the industry through a series of delightful comedies he turned out for Britain's famed Ealing Studios, but he was actually born in Boston, his most celebrated movie was the Hollywood film noir Sweet Smell of Success, and he wound up as dean of the film department at the California Institute for the Arts. His stint as an academic lasted longer than his film career; he died in 1993, two and a half decades after releasing his last picture, Don't Make Waves.

The Ealing comedies of the '40s and '50s were famously script-driven, so it's not a surprise to find that Sandy Mackendrick wrote movies before he began directing them. The screenplays of his four Ealing pictures were written by others; yet it would be unfair to say that as a filmmaker he simply served the material he was handed. He has a distinctive, if muted, visual style. He's splendid at evoking atmosphere, whether of scruffy forgotten wharfs (THE MAGGIE; 1954; January 12) and tiny, intimate coastal towns (WHISKY GALORE!; 1949; January 12) or big cities: a fairy-tale-like, latter-day-Dickensian London in THE LADYKILLERS (1955; January 9), a bustling, night-blooming Manhattan, ripe with the rot of moral corruption, in SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS (1957; January 10), both marvelously stylized.

He often makes his points through skillful layered staging and canny camera placement. His preference for medium and long shots to allow the action within the frame to tell the story also tends to underscore the wry tone of the comedies — in the lackadaisical movement of the dilapidated boat in The Maggie, the ancient "puffer" whose third-generation Scots captain (Alex Mackenzie) talks his way into ferrying cargo for an American airline millionaire (Paul Douglas), or in the hilariously grotesque deaths of the thieves in The Ladykillers who are bested by a blissfully unaware landlady (Katie Johnson), a survivor of the Edwardian age they unwisely figure in their scheme to move their stolen money. And because Mackendrick picks and chooses his close-ups, they're often eloquent, like the shot of Mackenzie's face when the skipper learns that the American, fed up with the slow, tortuous journey and with his own unexcitable willfulness and wiliness, has decided to buy the boat out from under him.

Review: Prince of Persia

MITCH KRPATA — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 19:56:57 GMT

Run, jump, die, repeat
Pauline Kael titled one of her review compilations Kiss Kiss Bang Bang , saying that those four words (from a Japanese movie poster) captured the basic appeal of movies.

VIDEO: The trailer for Prince of Persia

Prince Of Persia | For Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 | Rated T for Teen | Developed by Ubisoft Montreal | Published by Ubisoft

Pauline Kael titled one of her review compilations Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, saying that those four words (from a Japanese movie poster) captured the basic appeal of movies. In Ubisoft's new Prince of Persia, the hero grouses about a similar formulation, one that could be said to encapsulate all that we love about video games: "Run, jump, die, repeat." It's hard to imagine a more succinct description.

Like its predecessors, this Prince finds an acrobatic warrior navigating a dangerous world. His repertoire of nifty moves includes your standard-issue running, jumping, and climbing, but he can also run atop a wall for a short period, and he executes an upside-down maneuver to cross ceilings that you have to see to believe. The lush, colorful environments are constructed to take full advantage of his physical abilities. It's not unusual to experience a long, unbroken stretch of free running that requires all of them.

Where this edition differs from previous games bearing the Prince of Persia stamp is in its ease of use. The Prince is accompanied on his adventures by an enchanted woman named Elika who rescues him from certain death each and every time and then deposits him gently back where he started. What's more, all those acrobatics of his are context sensitive and don't depend on precise timing. There's a deliberate feeling of separation between you and the actions on screen — your button pressing matters, sure, but there's a sense that the game is taking care of the heavy lifting for you.

Is that good or bad? If your objective when playing video games is to participate in a story and travel through new worlds, this Prince of Persia makes it easy for you to experience its breathtaking, painterly environments. The relationship between Prince and Elika gradually deepens, in part because you can have them stop and talk at any time. They're likable characters both, the Prince a charming rogue, Elika a troubled soul who finds herself beguiled by his irreverence. This is a game that almost anyone could start up and play through without much trouble, from the most skilled elite to the newest newbie.

Faking it

SHARON STEEL — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:37:47 GMT

MTV's The City never gets real
if you were Whitney Port, the colt-legged, honey-haired, cow-eyed star of The City , you might not think that what Herman Rosenblat did was so terrible.

JUST PRETEND: Whitney Port can’t seem to decide whether she’s real or scripted.

The day before MTV premiered The City (Mondays at 10 pm), a new spinoff of its successful semi-scripted reality series The Hills, Herman Rosenblat was exposed for perpetrating an elaborate literary fraud. Rosenblat, whose memoir would have been published in February, claimed that he and his wife had first met as children during the Holocaust, while he was in a concentration camp. Of late, the publishing industry has made a shoddy habit of signing authors whose memoirs are crammed with a charismatic mix of fact and fiction massaged in all the right places to make things look better, super-epic, somehow more triumphant. But if you were Whitney Port, the colt-legged, honey-haired, cow-eyed star of The City, you might not think that what Rosenblat did was so terrible.

The City, like The Hills, bears MTV's tramp stamp: immediately recognizable and exceedingly easy to judge ahead of time. Both shows were created by Adam Divello, and they're marked by the same constants: lush, cinematic, sweeping camera shots; a grandiose emo soundtrack that tells you what to feel; a cast of characters who aren't quite actors but aren't quite living out their own lives.

The City's conceit sees Port ditch LA, home base of The Hills, for New York, after landing a gig as a publicist for iconic designer Diane von Furstenberg. Her co-worker is vixen/socialite Olivia Palermo, who immediately confronts her with the choice that, surely, every recent transplant to NYC must contend with: dirty downtown or society uptown? (Leave Brooklyn to The Real World; on The City, it doesn't stand a chance.) Oh, and there's also a boy, Jay Lyon, a New Yorker by way of Australia whom Port met at a bar where his band were playing. As it happens, this entire set-up took place in last season's Hills finale, so nobody's missed a beat when Port pushes open the door to the polished DVF offices, or falls into a charged embrace with Lyon within the first five minutes.

Ol' Dirty's dirty side

CHRIS FARAONE — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:19:45 GMT

Jaime Lowe's Life and Death of ODB
Sometimes it takes an outsider to understand the inside.

Digging for Dirt: The Life and Death of ODB | By Jaime Lowe | Faber and Faber | 288 pages | $25

Sometimes it takes an outsider to understand the inside. And when it comes to East Coast hip-hop, Bay Area–born former Sports Illustrated staffer Jaime Lowe is a relative foreigner — not just to the Wu-Tang Clan but to the culture surrounding New York's premier rap dynasty. Lowe is as passionate about Ol' Dirty Bastard's life and music as most Wu devotees, and more knowledgeable, but she's not hypnotized by the group's brilliance. For this biography, that distance serves her well; few Clan fanatics could have shone such objective light on a life as equally tragic and triumphant as ODB's.

Digging for Dirt is a spinoff of an article that Lowe began for Rolling Stone in late 2003. When Dirty overdosed in November 2004 and the magazine ran a standard obit instead of her long-shelved feature, she brought the profile to the Village Voice, which published it soon after. She was inspired to cover Dirty by a 2003 Knitting Factory show at which he appeared to have been lobotomized, so she never intended to produce a joyous picture. But when he died halfway through her research, she was compelled to address his struggles with addiction and insanity. Like most cats who watched Dirty closely, Lowe was fascinated by his perpetual disruption of both musical and social conventions, and by how those contrarian compulsions landed him in prisons, institutions, and ultimately a graveyard.

When matters stray from Dirty's mental illness, however, Lowe offers anecdotes that show how he was incomparably "willful and spontaneous and gifted" in a society where most of us "sit behind gray cubicle walls, refreshing our computer screens hoping for manufactured excitement." There's the story about his barging on stage at the 1998 Grammy Awards during adult contemporary star Shawn Colvin's acceptance speech, and a gem from Pras about how he jumped on the Billboard topper "Ghetto Superstar" by "accident." The list uncurls: his high-school days with Phife and Q-Tip, his stint working maintenance at Universal Studios in Florida.

Lowe is a crack researcher (especially when you consider how notoriously impossible Wu members are to get in touch with) and a tremendous writer — qualities that distinguish Digging from a field of overwritten, over-analytic, under-thought hip-hop books. Whereas many of her contemporaries — out of arrogance or to pacify rap-ignorant editors — assume a posture of omniscience, she acknowledges that hers should be merely one of many Dirty tributes.

Big dig

CLEA SIMON — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:35:07 GMT

Unsworth and oil in Mesopotamia
Unsworth and oil in Mesopotamia

FUTURES PAST: The fall of empires hangs over Unsworth’s novel — Assyria’s, the Ottoman, Britain’s, and, ultimately, America’s.

Land of Marvels | By Barry Unsworth | Nan A. Talese/Doubleday | 288 pages | $26

If Barry Unsworth shares some traits with the protagonist of his Land of Marvels, so too does he seem to sympathize with his antagonist. Like his hero, John Somerville, a naive British archæologist, the Booker winner has chosen to dig into history, painstakingly unearthing a mound of Mesopotamian soil for clues about lives long gone. But whereas Somerville looks to the past to make his name, his nemesis, Alex Elliott, is peering into the future. Geologist Elliott is American, a natural forward-thinker, and, rather like the mischievous author, he has managed to insert himself into Somerville's dig, as well as the man's marriage, disrupting both as he scouts for oil.

"Oil is a commodity," says Elliott, acknowledging a slight from his host, who has denigrated Elliott's interest in things rather than people. "But it is the future of humanity, it will change the lives of millions. Millions of people, sir." The year is 1914, and as he goes on to describe how this relatively new fuel will affect the world, he is both prophetic and horribly, horribly wrong.

Predicting the future from nearly 100 years past would seem an easy task, but perspective is never simple for Unsworth as his characters look back not only to the Assyrian Empire, which has so entranced Somerville, but to the glory days of the British Empire. As war clouds gather over Europe, the assembled Brits sense that their time is coming to an end. They are casting their lots for a future none can foresee, making plans to divvy up the unstable Ottoman Empire and worrying about supply routes to still-British India. The fall of empires hangs over this book: Assyrian, Ottoman, British. And its underlying premise — the emergence of oil — suggests the fall of America's empire as well.

Not that Unsworth, a masterful storyteller, would ever spell this out. With his usual light hand, he keeps the story snapping along, setting up plot twists galore in an atmosphere that approaches a drawing-room comedy, complete with intrigues among the ruins. Yet Land of Marvels, his 16th novel, is surprisingly plot-heavy. He's no stranger to historical fiction, whether using its built-in stories first-hand (boarding a slave ship in his Booker-winning 1992 masterpiece Sacred Hunger) or through a character's obsession (as in 1999's Losing Nelson), and he's a master at inhabiting the types of the times, at making their moment come alive. But his characters typically take center stage. The times may be dramatic, but it's the people — their moral choices and frequent failings — that bring these worlds to life.

Review: Let Freedom Sing! Music of the Civil Rights Movement

JEFF TAMARKIN — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 23:39:41 GMT

Time/Life (2009)
In any given Black History Month, the three-disc Let Freedom Sing: The Music of the Civil Rights Movement would be a powerful anthology.

Slideshow: Succe$$

KARL STEVENS AND GUSTAVO TURNER — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:10:27 GMT

Succe$$ Finale
"Succe$$" was a challenge from the get-go.

Writing "Succe$$"

by Gustavo Turner

"Succe$$" was a challenge from the get-go. It was meant to be a weekly strip, one that had a long-term story arc with continuity but also could be enjoyed week by week by people who did not follow the overarching narrative. I had often been puzzled by those strange strips on daily papers (like the perverse "Gil Thorpe" or "Rex Morgan, MD") that only seem to make full sense to those who religiously follow them for decades. "Succe$$" needed to avoid that hermeticism, while still retaining the perennial "Serial" quality of making readers wonder what was going to happen next week.

The original pitch for "Succe$$" (from last April) described it as "a post-9-11 story about a new breed of young capitalists. They're eco-friendly, gadget-obsessed and they scorn the gaucheness and vanity of the Gordon Gekko yuppies. They're Reagan babies, programmed to "Just Say No" and "Just Do It" at the same time. If you looked at the back seat of their Priuses, you'd find well-thumbed copies of "Atlas Shrugged."" This was the overall idea at the start and I think, 35 episodes down the line, that the complete work fleshed out that world and also reflected many interesting paradoxes of the troublesome first decade of the 21st century.

"Succe$$" found itself talking about the recession in May (months before the government fessed up to it, but well after it had actually started) and about deadly taser brutality weeks before reality in New York imitated the plot of the story. Some of its predictions might still shock future readers ("Little Baghdads" soon appearing in many American cities? It's more likely than you think.).

The whole story can now be read from beginning to end. Paraphrasing Amazon.com, if you like J.G. Ballard and MAD magazine you might like "Succe$$."

Thanks for your time.

Note: Succe$$ was chosen as one of the "Best Webcomics of 2008" by Derik Badman at The Webcomic List.

Southern exposure

BARRY THOMPSON — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:55:45 GMT

Beat Circus's Brian Carpenter returns to his roots
Multi-instrumentalist and Beat Circus patriarch Brian Carpenter has made his share of escapist music, but he's also written dozens of songs that confront real life.

BLOOD LINES: “Your family and everything related to your family affects everything you see, and eventually ends up in your art,” says Carpenter (left).

Among countless other — and potentially more constructive — applications for music, escapism is a favorite. But that's not just for listeners. Multi-instrumentalist and Beat Circus patriarch Brian Carpenter has made his share of escapist music, but he's also written dozens of songs that confront real life, from an estranged cultural heritage to his own role as a musician to the trauma of his son's brush with a brain-development disorder.

"I remember coming home from work and my wife told me the news really gently," says Carpenter, explaining a sequence of events that helped shape Boy from Black Mountain, the next Beat Circus record. "We just went into the kitchen and cried for hours. It wasn't a big surprise. We had started seeing behavior patterns during the months prior, but we never wanted to believe it was autism."

This was a little more than two years ago, when Beat Circus were polishing Dreamland (Cuneiform), the first installment of Carpenter's Weird American Gothic Trilogy. The prospective trio of concept albums is couched in American folk traditions and mythos, with a sordid atmosphere drawn from works of Southern Gothic lit — think the America of William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Harry Crews. Dreamland is a fantastical, extravagant, largely instrumental circus/folk-song cycle about the infamous 1900s Coney Island theme park of the same name. Its aura was darkly antithetical to Carpenter's own state of affairs. In 2007, Beat Circus would perform live only once.

"I spent that time writing songs about my son, trying to see things through his eyes, and about the phases of what we went through as parents," he says over the phone from a friend's apartment in New York City during a break from mixing Boy from Black Mountain. "Seeing the signs, getting the diagnosis, him being in a constant rage all night long, getting the treatment, and really seeing him almost come out of that spectrum, entering into our world, and finally making eye contact and speaking to us. Now, no one would be able to tell." Autism isn't generally thought to be curable, but Carpenter's son, who was three years old at the time of his diagnosis, no longer exhibits any obvious symptoms and seems set for a more or less normal life.

Fleecing, stealing, shilling, and sucking with impunity

DAVID THORPE — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 16:26:32 GMT

The Big Hurt: Music news in brief
Over the busy holiday season, a tremendous wealth of worthless music-news tidbits slipped through the cracks, unnoticed by a lethargic, goose-sated America.

Over the busy holiday season, a tremendous wealth of worthless music-news tidbits slipped through the cracks, unnoticed by a lethargic, goose-sated America. Don't worry! I haven't once pulled my watery eyes from the noxious miasma of trivia and horror that surrounds pop music, so you won't miss a thing. Go ahead, call me a hero. I deserve it.

That reminds me: I've been hearing all these self-congratulatory narratives from war correspondents on the radio saying, "Ooh, I got shot at, ooh, I saw people die, boo-hoo." Give me a goddamned break, guys — you don't have any idea what I go through every week as a fake music journalist. I have to read things about Mariah Carey. Today I opened an issue of Alternative Press, and I'm not gonna say I read it, but I looked at every page, which I think we can all agree is a lot worse than living under the lingering threat of violent death. But you don't hear me asking to be called a hero (except when I just did it a minute ago).

Here's one they tried to slip by us unnoticed: the RIAA, loathsome boogeyman of the music industry (not to be confused with the dude from KC and the Sunshine Band, the loathsome Boogie Man of the music industry), will no longer be suing people for illegally downloading music. After several years and tens of thousands of ridiculous lawsuits — which included claims against children, the elderly, and people who didn't even own computers — the implacable legal Sisyphus is shifting its futile toil toward Internet service providers and away from individual downloaders.

What does this mean for you, the unrepentant pirate, and me, the really handsome guy? It means we can download tons of MP3s (the way we do already) without the nagging fear of having to pay a thousand-dollar settlement to the RIAA legal Ponzi scheme to fund further frivolous lawsuits. This time, the unlikely consequence of our lawbreaking is a nasty letter from our ISP, or maybe a cessation of Internet service if our ISP is being a dick. My iPod feels heavier already.

Headline of the week, via NME.com: "FOO FIGHTERS and COLDPLAY to honor NEIL DIAMOND." Really gets the blood pumping, doesn't it?

If you're wondering why all the BETTER THAN EZRA videos just vanished from your YouTube favorites, it's because Warner Music Group yanked all its music from YouTube as a result of being a big baby about royalties or something.