perfidy

John Hawkins serves up an interview with John O'Neill of the Swifties. Interesting article, in that for the first time I've gotten to hear O'Neill's whole story uninterrupted by, say, a screaming Chris Matthews. We report, you decide.

Via Cold Fury, this gem from an unlikely source - Something Awful:

Anti-Republican protestors - I cringe whenever hearing that the Republicans are planning some upcoming meeting, convention, or fundraiser to earn more money for the "Buy Jesus Christ a New Diamond Beard Foundation," not because I hate Republicans, but because I hate anti-Republican protestors even more. These loudmouthed, braindead raving cliches make me want to start voting Republican just to spite them, but naturally I avoid doing so because that would only ensure four more years of unwashed horse-like creatures parading down busy intersections while waving "BU$H IS EVIL" signs they drew with their parents' Magic Markers. The general idea here seems to be that if you are too fucking stupid to intelligently explain your position on a few political issues because you often break down into tears when losing arguments to eight-year olds regarding the quality of Willie Wonkie candy in the Hy-Vee parking lot, you can compensate for your lack of debate skills by being as loud and belligerent as possible. I mean, hell, that tactic works all the time, doesn't it? Do you know how many women have been converted to the ranks of Christianity thanks to the ceaseless efforts of the anti-abortion lobby and their rock-solid tactic of "standing outside abortion clinics in the middle of the rain and shrieking like the Pod People from 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' whenever they spot a pregnant woman walking within a 20-mile radius of the clinic? I'm guessing somewhere between nine and ten hundred million billion thousand. Maybe even more if you count fat women as two people each. The insane liberals, despite how much they claim to loathe insane conservatives, seem to have absolutely no qualms with adopting their awesome policy of forming large groups waving crudely misspelled signs, stomping around public places to disrupt the daily routines of normal non-insane folks, and screaming at everybody they see with the ultimate goal of annoying them into submitting to their wills. If people have to choose between George Bush and a crowd of furious bicyclists whose biggest claim to fame is that one of their blogs was mentioned in passing by Al Franken on that one AM radio station nobody turns on because it's about as exciting as listening to NPR at 50% speed, they'll either choose George Bush or they'll choose to look away when the riot police start caving in skulls with their nightclubs.

 

Wow! Suddenly I hate George Bush and think America is just like Nazi Germany, all thanks to a fucking posterboard sign held by some fat unemployed shithead! The power of advertising in action!

Here's a newsflash you guys and gals who believe George Bush is going to physically break into your bathroom and steal the awesome weed you have hidden in that prescription gout medication bottle next to the Drano: most people might actually listen to you if you present your facts clearly and act confident enough in what you believe in to know that these facts will speak for themselves. Most people will NOT listen to you if you're stomping around and blocking traffic while shouting tremendously catchy slogans like "two, four, six, eight, George Bush is a fucking liar and is Hitler and Satan and fuck you George Bush you cocksucking father of whores." Whenever chucklefucks like you begin blocking up traffic and causing me to be delayed, my first two priorities instantly switch to running you down with my car and voting Republican across the boards, not necessarily in that order.

Allah has a roundup of links to various speculations that recent documents regarding Bush's Guard service might have been, well, not exactly authentic.

[wik] The Weekly Standard talked to a few of its own document specialists, and reached a similar conclusion. If this all proves out, CBS and 60 Minutes are going to have some serious egg on the face. It seems that a desire to make the president look bad might have overcome any lingering sense of journalistic integrity at CBS.

[alsø wik] In a space of hours, several blogs (Powerline, Allahpundit, LGF, Command Post and others) have taken a suspicion, tracked it down, analysed it, and have begun to reach conclusions.

We hear a lot about new media lately, and naturally, within the blog world many are quick to dislocate a shoulder patting themselves on the collective back for the growing influence of the blogosphere. But occasional egomania should not distract us from the very real, and fast growing power of blogging on the media. This story is a perfect example. In a space of literally hours, bloggers have pushed a suspicion into informed speculation, and driven the story into the traditional media outlets. Fox news has mentioned it, and several papers are likely to put it on the front page tomorrow. UPI has picked up the story as well.

The beauty of all this is not so much that CBS and Dan Rather will be deeply embarrassed, or that lame attempts to make Bush look bad are exposed. (Though these are good things in their own right.) The beauty lies in the way that this happened. Private citizens, in their spare time, have cracked a story that the entire news department at a major broadcast network completely missed. Information bouncing back and forth between Powerline blog, Allahpundit, Command Post, LGF and all their commenters and email correspondants was sifted, processed and error checked almost instantaneously. Savvy professional newscritters picked up the thread, and used their own resources to further develop the consensus.

We are seeing an open source news media in action. This is not a new idea, to be sure, but one of the most powerful instances of the idea since the fall of Trent Lott. As this phenomenon grows, the major media will be ever more unable to ignore the findings of the blog consensus. And the benefit to the media consumer will be immense, when legions of the obsessed are fact checking everything the media produces.

[alsø alsø wik] CBS is launching an internal investigation, anf the Washington Post is covering it as well. One day turn around. Let's see what we can do about Kerry's trips to Paris.

Murdoc has a fantastic video that gives us some great insight into the situation in Northern Iraq.

A group of British scientists have added themselves to Perfidy's ever growing list of traitors to the human race. They are developing a robot capable of devouring flies to support its inhuman activities. Granted, flies are easy to kill and devour; but given the accelerating rate of technlogical change, how long will it be before vampiric robots are using super sensitive chemical detectors to find and consume their creators? The end is nigh.

Thus sayeth the Acts of Gord, chapter seven:

"Do you sell mod chips?"

"Go ahead, ask me what I sell."

"What do you sell?"

"I sell video games. What a stupid question."

"What does a mod chip cost?"

"Apparently one of us isn't keeping up."

"What do you mean?"

"If I sold you a mod chip, then you would never buy a game from me ever again. And that would be very much in opposition to my being able to run a profitable business."

"I just want one to play copied games."

"What? Do I look like an idiot? What the hell did you think I thought you wanted it for?"

"err..."

"Exactly. Now look, if I were to sell you a mod chip I would lose you as a customer. Now, if I were going to lose you as a customer I'd rather do it on a high note like setting you on fire. At least then I would have some satisfaction of a job well done."

"I'm leaving!"

"But I haven't set you on fire yet!"

If you are interested, you can read Kerry's book The New Soldier online here. The book was written in the seventies with the group Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The page also has a link to Kerry's 1971 congressional testimony that has been the center of some controversy lately, or so I hear. The site is sponsored by the Federalist, which is a partisan but so far as I am aware honest group.

When Dick Cheney says...

"It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States."

... is he really saying "vote for us or I give some jihadist fanatics the keys to the cabinet with the big red button?"

Because that interpretation is no more stupid than what I think he really means. Honestly... crap like this is enough to drive a sane man to vote Kerry.

My parents make their own sauerkraut. Every year they grow a special patch of cabbage, and each fall about a hundred pounds of that hearty Ohio goodness gets loaded into a crock my grandparents brought over from Germany, salted, and weighted with boards. For a few weeks the basement is a difficult place to be without goggles and a rebreather, but once put in jars for long term storage, the final result is breathtaking. My parents’ sauerkraut is a monument to the incomprehensible miracle of friendly bacteria; sweet, pungent, salty, and subtle in equal measure and as different from the metallic harshness of the canned or bagged supermarket versions as the finest homebrew ale is from 40 ounces of Lazer Malt Liquor (Kestrel, for our UK friends). It might not be for everybody, but many a nonbeliever has come away from the table with a new understanding for what good kraut really is.

Jazz-funk is kind of like that.
Jazz purists scorn the genre for being too one-dimensional, for being crassly devoted to the simple pleasures of one key and an endless groove, and there is certainly something to that. More sins have been committed with a Fender Rhodes piano and a drum machine than were ever dreamed of by medieval catalogers of the myriad varieties of human perfidy. But to dismiss jazz-funk as more noodling over a repetitive beat is to deny the undeniable allure of solid grooves and burning solos. Yes, when it’s bad it’s bad like sauerkraut from a can. But when it’s good-- when the band is on and taking you higher-- it can make a believer out of the squarest soul.

However, there is a catch. Have you ever eaten too much sauerkraut?

Soulive are a soul-jazz-funk-fusion trio who for nearly ten years have been building a reputation for themselves on the strength of their muscular, grooving live shows (their albums have been pretty good too). Composed of Eric Krasnow (guitar) and brothers Neil (organ) and Alan Evans (drums), the New England group have split their time between jazzhead and deadhead audiences, balancing much like Medeski Martin & Wood between pure jazz excursions and dirty groovefests. But where MM&W never fully embraced their inner hippie and have been turning out increasingly cerebral music, Soulive seem determined to go where only Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley have gone before in making a career out of chasing the Great White Groove.

This one-groove strategy is both their greatest weapon and greatest weakness. To enjoy their live shows, you have to be totally on board for 75 minutes of uptempo funk blowing or you’re just not going to get it. On any given night Soulive can either blow your mind or bore you to tears. Even so, their sometimes outstanding live shows are a better setting than their solid but somewhat insubstantial studio recordings to get what they mean by “So Live.” The only question is, how much is enough?

The band recently teamed with Pirate Entertainment and DiscLive to produce a series of live insta-albums recorded over three nights at Tribeca Rock Club in New York. Each show was recorded live and made available for download immediately, and preorders were cut, packaged and shipped in one week. For a band like Soulive whose entire reason for being is to play transcendent live shows, this seems, on paper at least, to be a brilliant move. I recently obtained the double-disc sets of the first and third nights (July 29 and July 31), and in general they confirm what I already know: sauerkraut is delicious until it’s time to be ill.

Soulive owe a great debt to the giants of what is now called “soul jazz.” Their sound invokes Jimmy Smith, Grant Green, Herbie Hancock and John Scofield, as well as funk icons like the Family Stone, Maceo Parker, and the JBs. Krasnow in particular is a sometimes brilliant player, weaving driving single-note lines that recall Green and Sco in and around the deep rhythms held down by the brothers Evans. Over the course of ten years their sound hasn’t changed very much, mainly involving subtle variations on a groove that recalls early-JBs James Brown smoothed with a little Wes Montgomery.

The July 29 show stars with a steaming version of “El Ron” featuring a slippery solo from Krasnow but derails quickly into a sub- Maceo fatback version of “Hurry Up… And Wait” that recalls the tepid album version from 2001’s Doin’ Somethin’. However, the rest of disc one is solid, featuring the band doing what they do best—burning between 120 and 140 BPM. Each track burns intensely, taking the tightly-packed crowd higher, and disc 2 continues the ride with six tight, long grooves. Unfortunately, the energy ebbs about ten minutes before the finale, “Do It Again” ends, leaving the show to peter out rather than end with a bang.

Since this is a single live show beginning to end, it comes complete with high points, stage patter, and watch-checking moments. In general, Live in NYC July 29 2004 is good but too uneven to recommend for the casual fan. The band are still chasing the groove, but sometimes it just won’t be found.

Live…. July 31st is a different story. On this third night of the band’s stand at Tribeca, the grooves are tighter, the sound is more consistent, the solos are generally more fluid, and what some tracks lack in meltdown-grade groove explosions is made up in general quality and interest, including an encore rundown of Herbie Hancock’s chestnut “Chameleon.” The original recording of this song is so iconic and powerful that most bands struggle to find a way to play it without merely rehashing and paying tribute to the power of the HeadHunters. Soulive succeed in making the song theirs, in their sound, without losing the furious swing and grit everyone remembers.

Although I don’t have night two, Live… July 30th, it looks interesting too, featuring covers of “Jesus Children of America “and “Crosstown Traffic” along with band standards “One in Seven” and “Uncle Junior.”

One strange aspect of the live-to-legit-bootleg recording process is revealed in the pothead laxity brought to the setlists and liner notes. PirateBootlegs’ website claims that the second disc from July 31st starts with a cover of Stevie Ray Vaughn’s “Lenny,” but in reality is something I don’t quite recognize as “Solid” from Doin’ Something. ("Lenny" actually appears on disc one, in a version that at points approaches the pathos and beauty of the original-- not an easy thing to do.) This kind of error, combined with the lack of liner notes in the albums (at least in the stickered full-art promo I received) is a real disappointment, especially for a band whose Phishlike following trade live shows and legendary setlists. I expect more for a full $20. I remain old-school enough to expect the full treatment, even though all signs point toward the assumption that these albums will be IPodified by most interested parties.

In any case, Soulive’s double live offerings prove it is hard to stay interested over the course of two discs of material by a band who are still learning how to deliver the goods every night. If you are looking for an introduction into Soulive’s music, you can do much, much worse than Live… July 31st, but I’d still recommend picking up 2002’s single-disc live album, Soulive or their 1999 studio Turn It Out. Since the band already have a live album under their belt, and since they are not yet prone to stretch out and transform their songs night to night, it’s hard to see why this trio of discs are strictly necessary. Like my parents, Soulive are chasing perfection. But that is how jazz-funk is like sauerkraut: it’s delicious, even amazing, but if you overdo it by too much you’re probably not going to want any more for a long, long time.

More information Soulive's Live in NYC albums here:
Soulive: Live In NYC July 29 2004
Soulive: Live In NYC July 30 2004
Soulive: Live In NYC July 31 2004

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I take a quick break from being beaten with sticks at my place of work to observe that Fafblog!'s political bloggering have nailed it again (nailed what? "it." What's "it?" I dunno but I know "it" when I see it."QED).

"Well we agree to disagree," says me. "Like we do whenever we talk about Coke™ versus Poison™."
"It may taste bad an curdle my blood an kill me," says Giblets. "But at least I know where Poison™ stands."