Jaxvillain's Jacksonville Journey

2009-07-06T08:35:00.000-07:00

Schizophrenic Gender Confusion over Jenny Lewis at Freebird Live
by Jon Bosworth

My dude side said: I didn't think there'd be so many guys here. But then a lesbian friend told me she skipped the womens room line by using the mens room, and my chick side was all "you go grrl." I realize my girl side is pretty dorky, but wait until my dude side has a few more whiskeys. Then everyone at the Jenny Lewis show will know who the real ass is. I didn't know much about Jenny. I know she often reminds me of Loretta Lynn. I also know she did some stuff with Postal Service (Ben Gibbard from Death Cab is Barsuk labelmates with her former band). And I've heard a couple of songs by some band called Riley Cairo or something (I love making up new misnomers for Rilo Kiley). The truth is: I've tried to avoid alt country ever since Jason Trachtenburg told me his then 13-year old daughter (and drummer for the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow) could do anything she put her mind to, except be in an alt country band.
"Let's hope we never have to have that conversation," he said, dreading it more than any birds and bees conversation.
But when you're at Freebird Live in Jacksonville and some girl flies, guitar and hair engaged, into a honky tonk jam, both my dude and chick sides were like "oh damn."
My dude side said we should've gotten there early enough to catch the opener and the highly celebrated Heartless Bastards, but my chick side said drinks would be cheaper at the new pizza place up the street. My chick side always wins the alcohol argument. I arrived just in time for Jenny's set.
Although it escaped my Loretta Lynn archetype almost immediately, it went on to sound like a young woman with an uncanny grasp of the fundamentals of blues-oriented southern rock. Could this be right? Could the child actor who starred opposite Fred Savage in the 80s video game movie The Wizard really be capable of authenticity in her music? Is it possible that a 30-year old woman that was born and raised out west could grasp the fundamentals of southern music? People thought my skepticism was unfounded, after all she has played with many of my favorites, including Cursive and the aforementioned Postal Service, but those were West Coast types of bands. And sure, she did some stuff with Conor Oberst, whose music often borders on brilliance and his country western efforts are especially compelling, but authenticity is hardly Conor's strong suit, so that gave me no reason to expect anything real. I mean this is Freebird Live. Charlie Daniels plays this stage. The Skynyrd family OWNS the damn stage, if you're fake on that stage, it shows. I've seen plenty of alt country and folk rock bands get up there and immediately their true colors showed. They may not have been ashamed, but I left embarrassed to tell people what I did that weekend. Mason Jennings? No, you didn't see me at that gay show, I'd never go to that hackneyed loser's city hippy jam? It must have been my dorky dorky doppleganger. Or my chick side without my dude side in tow.
But just like that Jenny turned from cheeseball alt country to something genuine. Right before my eyes. Did you see that happen, Trachtenburg? Take note: alt country can get you that quick. While my chick side was really starting to get into it, trying to hang my hair in my face and swing my hips, my dude side recuperated by remembering Allison Kraus and realizing: Jenny Lewis isn't really blazing new ground. She has plenty of precedent she could spend time studying until she was able to present a really compelling facsimile of authenticity. My chick side countered with: you're rocking your head (the dude version of dancing). Her music has an indie feel that you can't help but dig. It even makes me want to forgive the alt country aspects, because the ripping southern rock style guitar solos ring true at The Freebird, that hallowed hall of Jacksonville's rock legacy. My dude side did point out that it isn't really girl rock, her band is loaded with dudes. To which my chick side pointed out that the drummer was a girl. THE FUCKING DRUMMER! And I was sold. Jenny Lewis played with balls, and that made me respect all things ovarian. Mars and Venus were aligned at the close of Jenny Lewis' set.

2008-10-01T10:41:00.000-07:00

GodDARTit!

Pop culture will not eat itself in Jacksonville, because there seem to be forces at work preventing there to be any culture left for the eating. In this strange and fearful era of business breakdowns and presidential quests, it is hard to pull the aperture back in and stay focused on local. But what we let happen here will only inflate into bigger intrusions and worse situations. That said, we cannot ignore the actions the city takes.

Granted, we all want to see crime reduced, but I am not the only one that sees the misdirection of the DART program causing more harm than healing to this problem. If you are not aware of the DART closings, please read Gwennod Stuart's great article in the last issue of Folio Weekly (if you can still find one laying around, unfortunately they don't publish online) or check out some of these very articulate reports:
http://theouterbox.com/2008/09/12/the-pearl-shut-down/
http://jaxscene.blogspot.com/2008/09/pearl-closed-till.html

These focus largely on the closing of The Pearl and a little about TSI (both clubs are focused on the 18 - 34 set - wildly reminiscent of the "scorched earth" closings by the Fire Marshal back in the 90s) but the agency claims to have closed nearly 20 clubs in the last 90 days.

Now whether or not minor permit violations should have such dire consequences is one question. Another is whether or not there ought to be a less police-oriented agency that can help small business owners jump through all of the required hoops to prevent being raided and closed by police. But there also seem to be personal rights being violated (since when can police raid a business and search everyone in the place, where is their probable cause?) as well as the rights of business owners.

The stated mission according to the city's website is:
"The Jacksonville Drug Abatement Response Team (DART) was established in January 1996 to combat illegal drugs in Jacksonville by focusing on the property where drug activity flourishes. Working with landlords/property owners, the team develops strategies and marshals resources to reduce drug activity."

Well they were not working with the owners of Pearl or TSI when they raided their businesses and shut them down. I know the owners of these clubs and they would have gladly allowed any inspector to enter their premises and inspect it. They would also comply with whatever recommendations the inspectors made. None of the citations were for major incidents (an extension chord and some christmas lights) and no drug arrests were made, as far as anyone seems to be able to tell - so what is the real and present threat?

Even more important - how do these reduce crime and promote business, two things that should be at the front end of every city effort in these hard times. As the economy gets worse, crime will increase. How does discouraging poeple from going downtown help reduce crime downtown? Any business owner in the core will tell you that more good people downtown means less crime. It is simply a matter of more witnesses and less dark, empty streets.

So when Charlie Crist sent down the budget cuts that have and will continue to reduce the quality of life in a city already being soffocated in crime and poverty, we didn't raise enough of a stink to do anything about it. Hell - we're all working really hard to make ends meet, who has time for voluntary political action, I understand that. But this is a Duval-centric problem that needs to be addressed by Duvalites like us.

Who changed the direction of this agency from shutting down and condemning crack houses (good idea) to shutting down and condemning legitimate businesses (bad idea). Add this misguided effort to the new rule that drinking in the usually barren streets of downtown during Art Walk is now officially against the rules, it just seems like someone is either trying to start up a new prohibition or they are simply afraid of Jacksonville growing into a town with any real indigenous culture.

What You Can Do
I don't know what sort of political action makes sense. I don't know who you should write to. We keep voting assholes into the offices they either have failed in or are very likely to proceed to fail in in the near future. So I'm putting the political stick down and picking up my performance art stick.

I suggest that we make some official looking uniforms that have the DART logo on them and raid bars that don't fit the usual hit list criteria and videotape the responses, the reactions, and the effects of the raid. We'll hit Twisted Martini and Mavericks, Mark's, Dive Bar, and then head to San Marco and Riverside. We will raid and evacuate the most upstanding of clubs until every bar owner understands how frustrating it is to work against a China-like police force with arbitrary direction and secret agendas. Perhaps if we harness enough people with money toward this problem, something effective can actually be done.

If someone has a more reasonable solution, please advise, because I'm pretty sure my Ghetto DART Impersonation Posse will eventually be arrested and we'll have no friends left to bail us out.

2008-08-10T18:29:00.000-07:00

Kuwait and Drop Sonic at Burrito Gallery on August 14th

If you know me, you know that I love a good live rock show. I miss playing in local bands, but watching local bands almost makes up for it.

I like the bands that are still full of piss and vinegar. The ones that haven't burned out or faded away. But nothing compares to an articulate and ferocious band playing in a downtown courtyard.

There aren't many local bands lately that have been worth getting all excited about. Don't get me wrong, Antartic is phenomenal. Buffalo Tears are wicked cool. Black Kids are fucking famous. There are plenty of bands I dig. But have you seen Kuwait?

Kuwait's first show at Eclipse, not long ago, was anticipated by the local rockers to be a pretty good grouping. Scott Madgett of Goalie on drums, Paul Paxton of Crash the Satellites on bass and computer (yes - computer) and Richard Dudley, former bass player for Tracy Shedd and a tertiary guitarist with Crash a few years ago, on guitar. This trio was pretty much a guarantee, but at their freshman performance they proved their consummate musicianship was matched by their ability to compose songs that rock. Songs that are alternately filled with agression and serenity. Songs that have no vocals, and yet manage to never feel absent of them. This is post rock at its best.

Drop Sonic has been playing Jacksonville fairly regularly over the past eight or nine years. Their riff rock is a little bit of led zeppelin and a little bit of blues explosion, but they do it like they're mad at you. In fact, I would describe their set like that person you meet at a bar that you think is trying to start a fight with you, and right when you think the fight is going to break out, they burst into smile and tell you they were just fucking with you all along. Then you start to like them, and not just because they seem really nice after that, but also because they told you they were kidding before you threw a punch and made an ass of yourself. I realize that is an obtuse example, but they rock in some really gutteral, almost unsettling way.

These two bands are nothing alike in many ways, but in creating articulate and intoxicating rock songs that will carry on in your head most of the night, they are the same. And there is a rumor that Locust Grove may even get things started for people that show up early. If you want to see a good rock show in an unusual setting, watching rock bands at Burrito Gallery is always an incredible experience.

This has been a convoluted post, I know, but this show will kill and it will be effin' worth the scratch to see it. There's gonna be some cheap beer and other drink specials. But if yer totally broke, still come downtown and listen to the rock from outside of the gate. It won't be as fun and you can't drink, but the music will still be worth your while for sure. If you're looking for a great time on Thursday, come to the show. I think you need this.

2008-07-06T13:42:00.000-07:00

Jaxvillain's Jacksonville Journey

Making Murder Work for Us Instead of Against Us

Stop feeling so sorry for yourself, Jacksonville. I know. We screwed up. We re-elected a sheriff that made our city nationally ranked! In gun violence. And now that the guns are spreading out of their normal Northside streets and into our ArtWalks (shooting in Hemming Plaza 7/2) and First Fridays (shooting in 5 Points 7/4) it is apparent that re-electing the guy that ushered in this era of violence was not a well conceived strategy.

Even the mayor’s crack team of NFL celebrities haven’t managed to come up with a good solution. We were all confident that if you got enough millionaires that live in gated communities on the Southside together, they would surely be able to come up with a solid solution to the issues of poverty and violence coming from Jacksonville’s Northside, but even that seemingly fool-proof plan has not ebbed the trend.

The fact is lots of Jacksonvillians love to shoot guns. Many of them like to shoot those guns at people. And as much as the Times-Union says that they are pressuring authorities to do something, the truth is that we still have gun shows, we still book gangster rap shows at the Five Points Theatre, and we still send police into poor neighborhoods to brutalize and arrest any black people they find. We’re not really trying all that hard.

So lets turn this lemon into lemonade! Sure, many lives are ended at the barrels of Jacksonville guns, but we’re still Where Florida Begins! Plenty of towns have garnered a healthy tourist market from their natural tendency to kill people. Dodge City and many of the other towns that earned a reputation during the days of the Wild West have turned their murder rates into cash cows. And their murder rates aren’t even in the top fifty anymore!

The Real Jacksonville Journey is a new tourist attraction that makes the most of murder! We here at Jack’d are investing all of our time and energies into making this guided tour of Jacksonville murder sites a part of everyone's Florida vacation. While many city officials have been reluctant to get on the bandwagon, we are sure that this optimistic solution will be a hit. And the best part is, the more people that get murdered, the better! All it does is make The Jacksonville Journey even more popular!

Get on board our convertible bus at Shanty Town in Springfield. We have not finalized contracts, but we are hoping that when Boston Tom, the Shanty Town regular that was gunned down by a teenager in front of the bar about a month ago, will be able to be our celebrity tour guide when he has fully recovered from his gunshot wounds. He’ll tell you the tragic tale of some dimwitted teenagers on a mission to rob the city’s poor little punk rock bar and how the night ended as so many nights in the River City do: in a haze of bullets and blood.

Then climb onto the bus as Boston Tom takes you on a grand tour of the most recent crime scenes, updated daily! Hold onto your hats when you pass Confederate Park, because sometimes random bullets hit passengers of the convertible bus. You should be so lucky to witness a real Jacksonville murder first-hand. While that is not altogether unlikely during your visit to the Bold New City, it isn’t guaranteed to happen on our Jacksonville Journey tour. But just to enhance the tourist experience, we will employ several people to hide in popular high-crime areas and leap out at our bus brandishing one of Jacksonville murderers’ favorite firearms to fire on the tourist. Name the gun that is fired or the victim from that location and you win a free night in an Arlington motel!

On the few scouting missions we’ve done in our bus, we’ve taken along a few groups of tourists to test out the experience. Here are their rave reviews:

“It was terrifying! I felt like I really lived in Jacksonville!” –Beth Hollaway, Columbus Ohio

“I think some of last night’s whisky fell out of my ass in Brentwood!” –Brian MacDougal, Troy, North Carolina

“I’m afraid the kids will be disappointed with Disney’s Hounted Mansion when we get down to Orlando now that we’ve been on the Jacksonville Journey.” Meredith Swanson, Providence, Rhode Island

“I’ve never been so scared in all my life.” Brent Johnson, Detroit, Michigan

Don't miss Jaxvillain's Jacksonville Journey this murder season!

2008-04-30T08:35:00.000-07:00

The Winds of Langerado
camping in a cow pasture and rocking the shit out of the port-o-lets
By Jon Bosworth

The Beastie Boys are gracious headliners.
Just before I-95 hits Miami, Langerado festival goers from Eastern Florida were diverted through “The Glades” (Mike D made the Everglades sound street). We aimed to arrive at Big Cypress Seminole Reservation at 8 pm on Friday, the second night of the event.

As we came closer to the 6th annual four day live music festival, Langerado, we caught up on some of the bands we weren’t familiar with on our iPod and indulged especially in some of the favorites we hoped to catch live. We knew we were going to miss the grass-roots live hip-hop band, Roots, and suspected getting through the gate and setting up our tent would mean we would also miss indie rock stalwarts Built to Spill, but those were unavoidable so we tried not to think on it (although we did pour a little beer on the ground when The Seed by Roots came on the iPod).

From 8 until 9:30 pm we were waiting in an unending line of cars along the dirt road entrance to Big Cypress Seminole reservation. Attendees who arrived on the first day waited twice as long, reports varied from 3 hours to 4 ½ hours (make sure you have plenty of gas). After a superficial search of our car (my Volvo doesn’t look nearly as drug-addled as most of the vehicles pouring into the reservation this weekend) and rigorous interrogation (“did you bring any glass?”) we were moved on into the facilities. Throughout the long line to get in, I complained fiercely about the hippies that organize these jamband festivals, but once inside I realized that it was facilitated brilliantly and smoothly and the long line had nothing to do with the efficiency of the management, it was a matter of sheer numbers.

As we broke clear of the entrance gate, our eyes widened to take in the landscape of tents. It was like a post-apocalyptic city constructed of nylon and lit by enormous sodium lights on towers. There were tents set up next to cars for as far as I could see, and the shirtless people stumbling through the evening paths remained oblivious to new arrivals driving on these paths to get to their campsites. Campsite is an overstatement. Don’t assume you can handle a festival like this just because you “like camping.”

Camping at Langerado is more reminiscent of being stranded somewhere and forced to create a makeshift home for yourself by the light of your open trunk. Except for instead of being alone and stranded, you are in a sea of hippies and you are probably already experiencing a contact high.

As we pitched our tent in the dark we could hear, booming from the glowing light on the horizon, the Beastie Boys playing Shake Your Rump. We scrambled to peg the tent into the swampy ground and lock all of our camping supplies into our vehicle. Then we forged out into the unknown, following the In Sounds from the Way Out through the gypsy-like rucksack village.

The scene was surreal. A fierce wind ripped at all of the nylon tents and canopies and all sorts of hippies, from committed, white, VW bus-driving dreadies to weekend dead heads with their good boy haircuts and hemp jewelry to obviously well-off white middle-aged dudes that landed themselves good jobs that allowed them to keep their wild beards. All factors were well-represented, except one. Where were the panhandling, sad-eyed breed of dirty, devil-stick-juggling hippies? Well, they were there, but there weren’t many of them. A $250 ticket is a pretty effective filtration system, and so only the most solvent of hippies could afford to attend. Many, obviously, came as part of their business model, because drugs and paraphernalia (glass) were being hocked at every corner tent.

Although the usual jam band hippy may have been kept from this particular festival by the lofty pricetag, the dregs of the earth always gravitate toward hippy music festivals. And they are drunk and high and they are camping three feet from your tent.

The Beastie Boys are gracious headliners because we heard them start as we drove onto the complex, but here we were another hour later, coming into the festival grounds, where the stages were, nearly a mile away from our “campsite,” and they were still playing. Playing and jumping and rhyming. I was disappointed that we had missed the songs they played their instruments on (I’ve only seen the Beastie Boys on their License to Ill tour, so they didn’t play any instruments), but was thrilled to see the only single band that forever influenced rock and hip-hop music equally. Not only did we get to see them play for an hour, but we also got to enjoy an encore. They picked up their instruments and played Saboutage. Gracious indeed.

Jamband heroes Umphrey’s McGee and STS9 kept the rock going nearly the entire night, until those fierce winds started to carry in some considerable thunderstorms. At 3 am the remnants of festers still in the festival grounds started their hurried march back to their tents, with us caught in the flow. Knowing we were a mile away from our tent, we all but jogged back, beating the deluge of rain by mere minutes. When it finally stopped, our hastily pitched tent and our clothes were drenched, but our sleeping bag managed to stay dry. We slept fitfully for a few hours.

After the morning hunt for a port-a-let that wasn’t overflowing with feces and an unsuccessful attempt at finding free running water, we were ready to take on a full day of festing and the weather couldn’t have been better (even if our clothes were wet).

The fears surrounding a springtime festival in the Everglades are many. Unbearable humidity, mosquitos the size of hummingbirds, and torrential downpours top the list. The daunting storms that passed over Florida the first days of this year’s festival promised to realize many of those fears, but actually turned into a Saturday godsend. Well, perhaps not for the poor saps whose tents and canopies rolled like tumbleweeds through the rucksack villages at the hands of the ferocious winds, but for most of us the wind kept the sun from feeling as hot as it was and kept the bugs at bay. And the trial-by-rain of the first two days weeded out the weaker music fans, which must have been few in number since there was still in excess of 10,000 attendees.

A popular pastime during the festival seemed to be sleeping in the sun to the tunes of bands such as Railroad Earth, but music wasn’t all there was to do. Members of the Seminole tribe were providing airboat tours of the Everglades. On Saturday afternoon I participated in Shabbat with Hasidic Jew and reggae artist Matisyahu. During this traditional Jewish Sabbath performed in a tent, men and women were separated by a curtain. A Rabbi said a prayer of healing over the names of specific participants that were suffering from illness. Then they read sanctimoniously from the Torah. Seeing Rabbis in traditional dress is odd, but even stranger was seeing the faithful while they were celebrating Shabbat, and then seeing the same guy sans his Yameka dancing to jambands and looking stoned in his tie-dye and cargo shorts.

Headliners such as Beastie Boys and REM are of course also very memorable. For a festival only in its second year of international celebrity headliners (last year was Flaming Lips), Langerado has quickly gained stature as a festival that rivals the biggies, including Bonaroo, Coachella and Lollapalooza.

The festival grounds featured a full sized Ferris Wheel as a centerpiece (rides were $5, but from the peak you could spy the vast landscape of tents in the rucksack village surrounding the grounds) and four of the five stages faced the center, creating a perimeter. The largest stage was the Everglades Stage, which was also the first you came to after passing the Ferris Wheel. The secondary stages included the Swamp Stage and the Sunset Stage. The smallest stages included the Chickee Hut Stage (referred to affectionately as the “Pussy Ranch”) and the Greening Stage.

There was plenty of room between the stages, so there was little to no bleed-over between the bands, but sound is always an issue at outdoor festivals and this one was no exception. What was exceptional, though, was the impressive video work done for the headliners on the Everglades Stage. It was edited together live to bring an experience to viewers that could not get close enough to distinguish the famous members of the bands on stage. Even if you couldn’t get in close enough to see Michael Stipe, the camera work transmitted onto the enormous screens on either side of the stage got you up close and personal with the performance. Even if MCA was too short for you to make out from your distant vantage point during Beastie Boys’ set, the cameras put you into the middle of the party with him.

Far and away the best show of my Langerado was Ghostland Observatory. Admittedly, the bands I was excited about included The Shout Out Louds, Minus the Bear, Thievery Corporation and Pelican. My wife was anticipating Ben Folds, G-Love, of Montreal and Ghostland Observatory. Of my hopefuls, I got to see Pelican. Of her hopefuls she got to see Ghostland Observatory. Ghostland Observatory stole the show out from under every other performance I witnessed that weekend.

Rising from the opaque smoke that spilled from the stage into the audience (which then collided with the pot smoke from the crowd) lasers shot off into space and an electronic dance music took over the night air. In spite of my general cynicism about the return of 70s and 80s pop with bands such as Vampire Weekend and Black Kids (sic), Ghostland Observatory brought a fresh energy to their spectacle of a two man show. They also brought a laser, so, yeah, they win.

The singer of this Austin, Texas duo made a reference to the sacred ground, and when he spoke of it, it dawned on me that his dark, earthy complexion looked like it could be Native American. Also, he’s from Texas. Also, he had his hair in symmetrical braids on either side of his head.

Dressed in tight jeans, a vest, and sunglasses, he alternately strutted and danced to the music piping out of his cohert’s stack of samplers and synthesizers. Oh yeah, and his cohert was dressed like a white warlock in a floor-length cape with a dramatic upturned collar. An odd couple indeed. Also helping push them above the throngs of new 80s throwbacks was the fact that the singer also played guitar, and was actually quite good at it. He was better at guitar when he took it on than his white warlock stagemate was at drums when he sat behind those, although it did provide a nice perspective of where there musical collaboration must have started.

Ranging from Prince to Asia to Dire Straits, Ghostland Observatory brought not just an 80s schtick back, but they made the entire playlist on the 80s radio station sound redeemable. And the ladies wanted to eat the singer whole. I guess it’s been a while since a singer was a good musician and sex symbol, so Ghostland kept us all happy.

Rumors had it that the other exceptional performances were by Backyard Tire Fire, Matisyahu, Ben Folds, Built to Spill and the Walkmen.

Langerado can’t be described by any single account, for each attendee the festival was different. Depending on the time of your arrival, the space you are assigned to camp in, and the bands you choose to see, every account is likely to be unique, but there are some unifying conditions that will help hippies in the future distinguish the 2008 festival from other concerts and other years. First, of course, are the relentless winds that will be sure to live on in the folklore spread throughout Volkswagens all across this great land. That is the sort of phenomenon that helps people remember this particular festival for years to come. Helping festers forget is what we came to refer to as the “Injun’ Rules” of the Seminole reservation. They never stopped selling alcohol, making this drunken fiasco the kind of experience you will always remember forgetting all about.

2008-01-14T10:53:00.000-08:00

this is the funniest thing I have seen yet this year.

2008-01-09T21:01:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted in months. Anyone that did try to keep up with this blog during the six or seven months when I posted regularly, Im sure have given up hope.
One of my flaws is that I always post when I'm drunk.
Another is that i don't regard the first as a flaw.
Example:
I said: "Galt - This is Isaiah Brock from The Cadets in a band in the late 90s that is named after an Ayn Rand character."
My friend Denny gently noted: "Hey JB...Isaac Brock was in Modest Mouse...Isaac Bear was(is?) in the Cadets."

and i know this. but drunken posts lead to retarded statements.

Something else that has disturbed me so fiercely it has me key-shy from posting is my frustration that no one seems to know about Inertia and Hip Hop Hell record stores in Springfield. Somehow EU's own columnist Hilary Johnson has publicly complained about a lack of record stores in town and i have recently received a query from a Jacksonville newcomer:

"My husband and I moved to Jacksonville a year ago from Lexington, Ky. I'm missing my favorite vinyl warehouse of goodness back in Ken-tuck, and I'm googling about trying to find a place here in Jax to buy records. And I don't mean boxes upon boxes of bad easy listening garbage. I mean obscure 1950s rock and roll, dreamy frech pop and jamaican ska. Where can I find such a magical place here?? You seem to be the kind of guy who might know. I've been scouring Riverside and Avondale, as we live just on the other side of Cassat and loooove that area, but so far have stumbled upon lots of fun antique stores and nothing dedicated solely to vinyl musical goodness. Can you help? Thanks in advance."

Well Jen, Springfield has what you are looking for. Josh Jubinsky and Ian Ranne own two conjoined record stores in Springfield (just North of Downtown)
1520 N Main Street
check out http://www.myspace.com/inertiajax for more ladies.

I have a lot of other stuff that I was thinking about Blogging about tonight, but I'll just leave it at these retractions for now.

let me know what i messed up later.
thanks.
selah
-jon

2007-09-01T07:34:00.000-07:00

Einstein's Box of Tapes

Just before Theory Shop/Einstein's Kitsch Inn closed I wandered in to chat with Tammy Faircloth about what she was planning to do.
"Get a job, I guess," was her depressing answer.
This woman was responsible for introducing me to the counter-culture. I bought my first Mudhoney and Pixies cassettes from her. The first time I ever heard a Primus song was at Einstein A-Go-Go, her club at the beach. The best live shows I ever saw in my high school and college years, I saw there. Nirvana, Mercury Rev, Archers of Loaf, Superchunk. The best local shows - Lysergic Garage Party, Dampading, Gizzard. It was a place that I thought would last forever. Both the record stores and the club were the lone bastion of cool things happening in Jacksonville.
My assumption was that this cutting-edge placement in Jacksonville culture would eventually evolve into Einstein's being Jacksonville's CBGBs or Criminal Records. I figured once all of us grew up and got money, we'd send the next generations there to rebel against us. The Faircloths would be living fat and happy in retirement with a slough of punks to run their registers and new kids buying cool new shit like hair dye and CDs and band Ts would keep it alive forever and ever amen.
That didn't happen.
I went to see Tammy and she was sorting through the last couple of things that had not sold yet. There was a crate of cassette tapes in there with a sign that read: 10 Tapes for $1.

Allow me to digress for a moment.
My wife and I recently purchased a new car. We spent a long time shopping for just the right Volvo wagon. It sounds really soccer mom, but we have no interest in an SUV and we have two kids that play music, do gymnastics, play basketball, and Tae Kwon Do, so we needed a big vehicle and Volvo's get the best gas mileage. We ended up getting a 2001 from CarMax (of all places, the Blockbuster video of car buying) and they had it brought down from North Carolina. Why the hell am I telling you all of this? Well it just so happens that, much to our surprise because it had not even dawned on us that it would be a possibility, the steroeo did not have a CD player. Our last car was a 1995 Volvo and it had the factory CD player in it still. This 2001 Volvo had AM/FM Stereo Cassette.
I didn't even own any tapes anymore. I take that back. I have one Robert Johnson tape, a mix tape of bootlegged Bob Marley that one of my wife's hippie friends gave her, and an old, stretched-out Nirvana Nevermind tape (which I actually purchased at Theory Shop back in 1993). But even after only owning the car for a week, I was totally sick of these tapes. In fact, the Robert Johnson tape was the only one I played and those eight songs got really tired.

Anyway - Tammy had a crate of tapes and I started looking through them, since I suddenly have a use for cassette tapes. There weren't many I'd heard of. This crate had obviously been searched through by hundreds of people after my last visit to it (for that Nirvana tape in 1993) and then probably sat dormant for ten years after people stopped buying tapes, and then was searched through again a few dozen times during this whole "Going out of Business" nightmare, so all the real gems had been seen by thousands of eyeballs already. As I plucked through the tapes, discovering various local recordings by bands that have long since disappeared, I realized there was a wealth of undiscovered music in this crate representing several time capsules. Generations of bands in Jacksonville's music scene that would never be heard. Never be documented. Never be remembered.
"I'll give you both of those crates of tapes for $5," Tammy said like a vendor at the Flea Market. What had this Bush economy reduced her to?
"Sold."
My wife was going to kill me for bringing home two dusty crates of music that she has no desire to hear, but to me, it was important. Someone has to listen to these and report on them. For the good of all of mankind! This was Jacksonville's origins, Einstein's A-Go-Go and Theory Shop. This was once the future of Jacksonville, and now, this old crate, this is Jacksonville's history. As much as the great fire, as much as the movie-making years, as much as Isaiah Hart giving Hemming Plaza to the city, this is Jacksonville's creative core dating back fifteen years. The invisible, underground Jacksonville that will remain invisible if someone doesn't do something about it. So my wife would just have to understand.

Some of the tapes I look forward to reviewing in the next couple of posts:

Dampading - Perhaps the most avant-garde rock band of the late nineties. They were far ahead of their time then and since Dave This died, there will never be a reunion.

Galt - This is Isaiah Brock from The Cadets in a band in the late 90s that is named after an Ayn Rand character. Yikes!

Bowie, Sight & Sound III - This is the Thin White Bowie album. It's as "experimental" as the man himself.

Hank Marlee - I wonder if I should have just left some of these tapes with Tammy. Not EVERYTHING has to be remembered.

Mudoney, Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge - It was inside of a Piece of Cake tape cover. There was also a Five Dollar Bob's Mock Cooter Stew tape with no cover.

Neil Young, Harvest - I can't believe no one took this.

Cowboy Junkies, Black Eyed Man - This follows under the Scholastic Rock category. There are some albums you have to listen to, no matter how much you hate them, because they are referenced so much. For some people, Lou Reed is scholastic, for others, Peter Gabriel, but you still have to know these musicians to have a well-rounded musical perspective. Otherwise you become one of those dudes that just listens to radio rock all of the time and thinks he "is really into music."

The Pogues, Yeah Yeah Yeah - I would normally not call The Pogues scholastic, but this album definitely is.

Bob Dylan, Blonde on Blonde - Are you serious? There should not be an un-owned copy of this album in the world. This is how low tape cassettes have sunk.

REM, Automatic for the People and Green - Get ready, 1994, because I'll be flashing back.

MC Hammer, Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em - Oh snap! What would my counter-culture experience have been if not juxtaposed by MC Hammer. I woish I could tell what kid turned this tape in and what tape they left with in return. Hell that might have been me with Pixies Doolittle.

MK Ultra, Original Motion Picture Soundtrack - John Vanderslice's first band? As a Jacksonville Native I wonder if he gave thoes to them personally while visiting family.

Human Radio (1990) - Probably their first terrifying forray into the major label market.

Screaming Trees (1990) - I think Lanagan gave this tape to Tammy personally back inthe Einstein's days. I wish he had signed it.

Steel Toad, Lick the Toad - There is much to discover in this crate.

Plus more than 135 more tapes. I will be exploring as many of them as I can stand in this blog for the next several years, so check back often and feel free to comment. I take criticism well.

2007-06-09T05:57:00.000-07:00

It was about this time last year that my friend Norm told me that he could get press passes to the Vans Warped Tour and he wanted me to write about it for his skate magazine. This was the beginning of my professional writing career in Jacksonville, as it was this piece that got me the job at Entertaining U Newspaper.

I named the piece "Battle of the Sweaty Tenth Graders" after a flier that Chris Spohn made in high school for the Battle of the Bands at Orange Park High. It just seemed so fitting, and like a title that should live on beyond the walls of Orange Park High in 1992. Now that the Warped Tour is back (and this year it's in Clay County) I thought it would be a good time to remind everyone what the festival is really like. Enjoy!

Battle of the Sweaty Tenth Graders
Van’s Warped Tour, Metropolitan Park, Jacksonville, Florida

“Italy’s team represents everything that’s wrong with Europe,” my friend Juan is really into the World Cup. He has teams he likes, and a couple he doesn’t, but he watches them all because he just likes the game. The Van’s Warped Tour represents everything that is wrong with the underground rock scene in this country. The only time I ever even wanted to go to this annual festival was when the Cadets played many moons ago. They wore their astronaut jumpsuits in that blazing heat and the drummer almost passed out from heat exhaustion.

After enduring the sweaty, brazen, and unforgiving social climate this year, I would pay for a video of that Cadets performance. I bet it was heartbreaking.

Punks’ not dead, it’s just a little embarrassed. Like the selection of sunglasses and fashion accessories at the various vendors around Met Park, everything at Warped Tour was pretty much the same. For an event that simmered out of a hardcore, skater punk ethic, it has become a grotesquely bloated marketing tool thinly veiled as activism.

Who the hell are all these kids that come out of the woodwork for Senses Fail but never darken the door of an underground music club in this town? Out of about 20 stages and hundreds of bands, everything sounded exactly the same. There was no punk (except the Buzzcocks), no noise rock, not even any real hardcore. Just a thousand versions of Further Seems Forever. The only thing that changed band-to-band was which instrument the fat kid was playing. In some bands the fat kid was the bassist, in some the guitarist. In a few rare occasions the fat kid was the singer. They’ll never get on the MTV with a fat kid singer.

Wanna feel like you are there? Imagine it’s a thousand degrees where you are standing and you’re surrounded by 15 year-olds that are either jumping or trying to masturbate against your arm. The band on stage is thugging away at muted power chords in 3-chord syncopation and then the song either goes double-time for a screaming chorus, or half-time for a screaming chorus. There is no variation from this format and there wasn’t a single good drummer in the lot.

That isn’t fair, I obviously couldn’t see every band, but since there was no printed schedule, it was hard to intentionally coordinate your listening experience. So there you are, trying to learn this new Emo-Core’s philosophy, and all that you can decipher from the lyrics is that someone’s gone and maybe they’re sad. Probably because their drummer is so bad.

Speaking of bad drummers: Helmet. Helmet was once revered as one of the Indie rock greats, when they were among the first indie bands to get a big-money contract. But when it came to their actual music the shining star was always the drummer. John Stanier, who currently plays with Battles and Tomahawk, is a machine, and he always managed to make Helmet’s stop-start half-metal sound edgy. Unfortunately he is no longer with Helmet and it shows. Their new drummer isn’t bad, he just doesn’t have that hammer that Helmet needs. They played mostly songs off of Meantime, their last big record in the 90s, and then a few even more torturous songs from their latest release. They sounded tired, off-balance, and stale. But who wouldn’t in that heat. I think a node from the singer’s vocal chord hit me in the face during their screaming chorus.

When I managed to find some shade next to a tent to stand in while I urgently poured gallons of $4 bottled waters down my throat, some security lady (off-duty moms I suspect) would come and instruct me to get out of it. I even offered to pay once, but apparently their only hope of getting all those sweaty teenagers out of there was in ambulances and so we were all required to stay in the sun.

I would have retreated to a covered picnic area next to the SmartPunk tent or the Ernie Ball Battle of the Bands tent, but if I could just wait out Helmet’s eternal medley finale and a set by some schlock band (whose name I never caught, but I know they have a fucking album coming out next fucking month and they worked really fucking hard on it) then the Buzzcocks would come onto the stage and the skin would fall from all of their eyes and they would see what rock is supposed to make you feel like. The Buzzcocks will lead the way for these lost souls.

Walking through the crowd, it is difficult to tell what lineage of rock brought them to this place in their lives. I’ve never seen anyone dress quite like the kids at Warped Tour. I’m not sure who their leader is. I’ve never seen anyone on the MTV (or even Fuse) that dresses like these kids. All eyeliner and black pants that look like dresses. They started the day off all dolled up, but as the sun burned brighter their eyeliner melted down into to their faces and the necks of their shirts. That was the Alice Cooper phase, between one and two. After that they all just looked wet. The fashion tastes were interesting in that a musician could be easily distinguished from the fans.

The musicians were really into ironic clothing. Dudes wearing tight, Sergio Valente designer jeans rolled up to the knee and a mullet. Or they wore daisy dukes, when they had really skinny, hairy legs. Aviator sunglasses were on all of the musicians, but not on sale anywhere in the park. Fans, on the other hand, were into low-rise jeans that accentuate prominent love handles. Even girls that are far too big to pull it off, wear Quicksilver…I mean Roxy half-shirts and jeans that show off their coin slot and their thong. Fishnet clothing was also popular with the fans.

There are times when I assume that a middle-of-the-day concert will mean lots of sexy punk rock girls in their late teens and early twenties running around spraying each other’s Sonic Youth and Against Me! shirts with Super-Soakers. Don’t ever think that of the Warped Tour. The Warped Tour is dangerous. If you accidentally look around, you’ll see the thirteen year-old girls whose dads told them there was no way they could go to a concert in their bikini tops, so they just ran around in their training bras, riding on the shoulders of their boyfriends.

Somewhere in the history of youth culture and rock and roll, the line got blurred between the tattooed junk rockers, who Korn brought into the fold after they awoke and found Dokken had split up, and the dorky new-rockers with their ironic haircuts and wallet-chains.

The schlock band on stage was taking their time, but the throngs of kids seemed to keep encouraging them, so I decided to get out of the sun for the rest of their set. I was thirsty as hell but had already spent all of my money on water, so I went to look for a water fountain. There was some sort of inflatable slip and slide I could run through, but I didn’t think being hot, wet, and thirsty was any better than just hot and thirsty. What I did find was free energy drinks. This is a terrible trick to play on people. When you are thirsty and sweating and not allowed in the shade, an ice cold 16-ounce energy drink sounds so delicious, but the truth that you don’t realize until 8 ounces into it is that it tastes like battery acid and leaves you twice as thirsty.

After two cans of battery acid, I headed back to the mainstage to see the Buzzcocks. As I passed the Cingular tent, where Helmet was signing autographs, I noticed that all of the sweaty teenagers were evacuating the mainstage area. I wondered if I had missed some terrific tragedy. Maybe terrorists had rigged the stage lights to kill the schlock band and that is why all the teenagers were flocking desperately away to hide their grief and reapply mascara. But, in fact, they were running away from the Buzzcocks.

The Buzzcocks are old, sure, probably in their mid-forties, but they are punk rock legends and they had all of the pizazz and shtick that they ever possessed. They were fun to watch, which should have been lesson number one for all of the other bands, and they looked like they were having fun playing for us. Both of us. Okay, there were more than two people watching, but the field seemed empty in comparison to the prior acts.

In the end I found that it is easier and cheaper to just catch the Buzzcocks, or even schlock bands, at a little club that is moderately air-conditioned and has $1.50 PBRs. The fashion show isn’t as entertaining, but it still has its moments. And I thought there was supposed to be extreme sports? Does a single half-pipe with eight skaters count?

2007-04-29T19:41:00.000-07:00

The Not-Ready-for-the-Paper Movie Review
Tideland

To call this a movie review could be quite an understatement.
I've been thinking about art a lot lately. Part of being the editor of a weekly paper is coping with the omnipresence of deadlines and stress. Things always need to be accomplished now and now and now. I love my job dearly, it's the first time I have ever been okay with my life becoming my job, however there are some things that are important to me that fall to the wayside because of this hectic new pace. The most precious of these failings is my time for my craft as a writer.
I was frustrated and driving through our hot town in my black, air-conditionless car this week when my phone rang. It was my writing mentor. She claimed to have a vision of me red-faced and pursing my lips. This vision wasn't too far from accurate. She asked me to come over and so I did. In the brief few moments that she and I spoke I realized that my life would have no modicum of satisfaction or joy unless I worked on the things that satisfied me on a deeper level than just Jacksonville's entertainment.

I recently interviewed a good friend and a talented writer and artist (among other things) Oscar Senn. Oscar told me of an equation for happiness that he had learned about and how important it was to make good use of your time and invest in voluntary activity that makes you happy. It is one of the few aspects of our happiness that we can control.
Taking all of these things in only frustrated me further, because the desire to adequately use your free time is great, but if you only get a few moments of free time every week, you tend to fall asleep in those moments. But the other night, instead of sleeping, which I desperately needed, and instead of working, which I had plenty of backed up, and instead of writing, because my wife prefers that I spend my minutes with her actually with her, I watched the movie Tideland.
In college I have always had a tendency to way overshoot expectation when it came to papers. I rarely did the least I could do. I have a love for learning and a natural curiosity that has always driven me on, so when I took on a director's analysis paper of Terry Gilliam, I turned in a paper and a DVD that almost rivaled a master’s thesis, even though this was only an elective, humanities credit. The point being, I am an enormous Terry Gilliam fan and I am thoroughly versed on his voice in cinema, so I have been eager to see this film for some time. Lord knows his vision needed some redemption after Brothers Grimm.
Kellie Abrahamson, a skilled writer that contributes to EU, wrote a review of the DVD when it first hit the disc, and although her review was complementary, it was ambiguous and understated (read that short review). Plus, I have no way of knowing just how familiar she is with his work or how to frame her opinion. It didn't matter; I had to see it for myself either way. Then I got scared. Everyone I asked, even those whose artistic appreciation I truly respect, said it was a terrible film. Even Brothers Grimm, easily Gilliam's most clumsy and forgettable work, was not a "terrible film."
The mentor I spoke of earlier, she sends me this email every six months or so (it may be because she is getting batty in her old age or it may be she thinks the lesson hasn’t been learned yet) that quotes the beginning of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer: "This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty . . . what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse."
When Tideland starts, it opens to a black and white, close-up shot of Terry Gilliam. He explains that many people will hate this film, but it is important to understand how it celebrates childhood. His remarks were unsettling, and my wife and I had second thoughts about watching it. When a man and his wife are snuggled between pillows on a couch to watch a movie, it is hard not to be in the mindset that a movie is about entertainment. Terry Gilliam's Tideland is NOT about entertainment.
Don't misunderstand that statement. This film is beautiful and truer than any true story. Consistent with Gilliam's constant theme, that the line between sanity and insanity is a choice (or if it isn't a choice, then it doesn't matter) this film tells the story of a girl who was abandoned by the only world she ever knew. She unwittingly kills her father and strands herself in a nearly imaginary world, sleeping at night on her dead father's lap and engrossing herself, socially, only in the world of her doll heads, each of which has their own personality, name, and voice.
Soon she meets a woman named Dell who has an irrational fear of bees and a "brother" named Dickens who had his brain severed to stop his seizures. Dell has imaginary friends in her dolls too, only her dolls are taxidermied corpses. It just so happens that the young girl also has a corpse that can use Dell's talents. For this abandoned and alone child that is so resourceful and has had to be so resilient and autonomous throughout most of her life, the end of the world could not possibly be a bad thing. So when she falls in love with the mentally disabled Dickens, he with his own strange fantasy world, and he moves to bring the end of the world to their strange, isolated existence, he saves the little girl by destroying many lives in order to bring the little girl out of hers.
This movie was painful to watch, and as Kellie said in her review "Like a car crash, you want to look away, but your eyes won’t allow it." It is not a popcorn flick. You will not laugh out loud. You will not sit on the edge of your seat. You will cringe and peek through parted fingers as the terrible adventure rolls on. As you dread each new reality that this innocent young girl encounters. This is not a Hollywood movie; this is a work of art. This film does not make you smile or excite your senses, as Fisher King, Brazil, and 12 Monkeys all did, this film serves only one function: to teach. To make us look harder at the spirit of a child and to try harder to understand its depth and meaning. To look at imagination and how it heals, hurts, helps, and destroys. This film makes us pursue that elusive concept that is love, human companionship, relationships, sympathy, empathy, passion.
Amazingly shot and flawlessly acted, this film tells a terrible story that everyone needs to hear.
With that said (that is the movie review portion of this rant) the point is that I remembered how important art is, even when it is not wanted. People said this film was terrible because an 8-year-old girl kisses a thirty-year-old man and it is presented as almost innocent and acceptable, given these circumstances, and that makes it even harder to deal with.
I first learned of the film more than a year ago, all of the information about it was on imdb.com but I could find the film anywhere. All I could find were bloggers railing the film (which goes to show that mass media cannot be blamed for America's disdain for art...that is to say, it isn't television's fault that most Americans would choose a night at Applebee’s over a night at the local art museum, it is something dreadfully imbedded in American culture). So I forgot about the quest until I saw Terry Gilliam panhandling from people in line to see The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Jon Stewart called attention to it. Hollywood wouldn't distribute his film. It wasn't commercially viable, and that is the problem. Commerce in this country gets in the way of art, but art is so important because it makes us think about what we believe, what is real, and what humanity is capable of.
If only for this reason, I now know that art, regardless of whether it pays any bills, is the most important thing in my cultural awareness. It is the only way, other then sex, that any two people can really communicate without all of our rhetoric getting in the way. It is as Oscar Senn said. "God is my progenitor. He creates. That's what I do. I create." It is humankind's need to create that pulls from our very souls why we exist. We don't name our airports after artists here, we name them after politicians. We don't believe in expression the way we think we do, we believe in ideologies. We believe in concepts. We believe in things as a mass populace, but we refuse that very thing that makes Americans different from most other nations - the strength and power of individualism. To celebrate an artists' vision is important even if all it does is facilitate their next vision, or the next artists' vision. This film has certainly bolstered my need to get back to my craft. To write, not just to tell you about cool new artists or musicians through the paper I work for, but to be one of the individuals that contribute to art. American art. American culture. We are what we eat. If that is all video games and action films, we are fucked. We are all stuck in Applebee’s forever.
Anyway, it was a good movie.

2007-03-05T04:57:00.001-08:00

The Flight of the Foxies

The boys and girls up at the Fox work hard to make everyone in Riverside/Avondale feel well fed in the morning. They scramble around a tight little dining and service area while a handful of hipsters slave away in the kitchen washing dishes, making waffles, and prepping the menu items. The result is one of the best breakfasts in Riverside. It is consistent, and their wheat toast is the best in town.

So when those Foxies cut loose, they may come across as a little crazy, but I would argue that it they are actually just far more enamored with science then you may at first suspect. Take the morning I spent helping chronicle one of their recent experiments, for instance. The Hot Air Trashbag.

When I finished my breakfast I wandered around back to see if any of the Foxies wanted to take a smoke break and I found Ian Chase, owner of the Fox, with mad scientist eyes as he scrambled to test and retest his hypothesis. Ian was certain that he could create a vessel that would attain a great loft. The evidence leading to his certainty was hanging from a high tree over this expensive Avondale neighborhood. A wilted, white trash bag sagging between branches and slightly masked by Spanish Moss.

"We're lucky that one didn't catch the whole neighborhood on fire."

So Ian, Josh, Mark, Ien, and the rest of the Fox breakfast crew were intermittently coming back and fine tuning this next craft, each with their individual specialties. Josh was something of the Fuel Technician as he advised Ian on how much Sterno to place into the cup.

During this flight attempt they had changed the fuel compartment from a styrofoam cup, which they found melted when in flight, thus dripping flaming Sterno dangerously down from this altitude onto the crew below. So during this test flight they switched to a grape soda can cut off at the bottom.

Here we see Ian and his flight test crew as the bag fills with heat, eagerly anticipating a successful launch. Ien was the Flight Engineer outside. Inside, a server would occasionally come back to partake in a cigarette break, cheer on the ambitious project, then announce that someone needs a waffle as they retreated back into the melee.

As the bag filled with hot air, it became obvious to Ian and his crew that the heat source was not close enough to the opening of the bag, so he adjusted the wire harness to increase the effectiveness of the fuel delivery system.

After adjustments are made, Ian readies the launching pad and begins launching preparations.

The crew looks on with baited breath as the bag, bulbous with hot air, tugs gently on the metal basket. Orders are being screamed out of the back door, but the crew is rapt and ready.... Nothing. In a disappointing fervor, Josh proclaims the wire harness is too heavy and slumps his shoulders as he returns to work. Ien suggestes that the tow line they attached, to keep it from disappearing into the trees like the last test flight, may be what is restraining it.

Ian snapped into action and feverishly cut wire harnessing away, trying to minimize the weight to just a more simple harness suspending a tray of Sterno, without the grape soda can. He is trying to do this without burning himself and without compromising the heat of the air still filling the bag and making it bouyant.

The bag wants to go. As the Sterno fills it with more hot air, it skips along the parking lot, taunting the crew. Ian heaps on another load of Sterno and suddenly she goes airborne.

After enjoying this elation for a brief moment, Ian realizes that the rest of the crew has gone inside to work and they were missing the joy of their struggle - the big payoff. Ian snapped open the back door and screamed "We have liftoff!"

Josh and Mark came out first to see the Hot Air Trashbag as it poked higher, finally clearing the rooftops.

When Ien came out to indulge in a cigarette and hopefully enjoy the spectacle, the Hot Air Trashbag was moved by a breeze at the high altitude and it shifted direction, moving hauntingly closer to the buildings. Ian struggled to reel in the guideline, to hopefully change its course from the nearby tress and buildings, and the sudden jolt made the basket tilt and drip flaming Sterno down on Ien like napalm.

Finally, similar to their first launch experiment, the Hot Air Trashbag came to a final rest between the branches of an overhead tree. Mark climbed on top of the walk-In cooler to retrieve the glorious vehicle, now reduced to a simple melted and tormented piece of trash. But had it not been for the devotion and dedication the Fox's flight crew, this piece of trash could never have known such great heights.

2007-03-05T04:57:00.000-08:00

The Flight of the Foxies

The boys and girls up at the Fox work hard to make everyone in Riverside/Avondale feel well fed in the morning. They scramble around a tight little dining and service area while a handful of hipsters slave away in the kitchen washing dishes, making waffles, and prepping the menu items. The result is one of the best breakfasts in town. It is consistent and their wheat toast is the best in town.

So when those Foxies cut loose, they may come across as a little crazy, but I would argue that it they are actually just far more enamored with science then you may at first suspect. Take the morning I spent helping chronicling one of their recent experiments, for instance. The Hot Air Trashbag.

When I finished my breakfast I wandered around back to see if any of the Foxies wanted to take a smoke break and I found Ian Chase, owner of the Fox, with mad scientist eyes as he scrambled to test and retest his hypothesis. Ian was certain that he could create a vessel that would attain a great loft. The evidence leading to his certainty was hanging from a high tree over this expensive Avondale neighborhood. A wilted, sag white trash bag sagging between branches and slightly masked by Spanish Moss.

"We're lucky that one didn't catch the whole neighborhood on fire."

So Ian, Josh, Mark, Ien, and the rest of the Fox breakfast crew were intermittently coming back and fine tuning this next craft, each with their individual specialties. Josh was something of the Fuel Technician as he advised Ian on how much sterno to place into the cup.

During this flight attempt they had changed the fuel compartment from a styrofoam cup, which they found melted when in flight, thus dripping flaming sterno dangerously down from this altitude onto the crew below. So during this test flight they switched to a grape soda can cut off at the bottom.

Here we see Ian and his flight test crew as the bag fills with heat, eagerly anticipating a successful launch. Inside a server will occasionally come back to partake in a cigarette break and cheer on the ambitious project, announcing that someone needs a waffle as they retreat back into the melee.

As the bag fills with hot air, it becomes obvious to Ian and his crew that the heat source is not close enough to the opening of the bag, so he adjusts the wire harness to increase the effectiveness of the fuel delivery system.

After adjustments are made, Ian readies the launching pad and begins launching preparations.

The crew looks on with baited breath as the bag, bulbous with hot air, tugs gently on the metal basket. Orders are being screamed out of the back door, but the crew is rapt and ready.... Nothing. In a disappointing fervor, Josh proclaims the wire harness is too heavy and slumps his shoulders as he returns to work. Ien suggestes that the tow line they attached, to keep it from disappearing into the trees like the last test flight, may be what is restraining it.

Ian snaps into action and feverishly cuts wire harnessing away, trying to minimize the weight to just a more simple harness suspending a tray of Sterno, without the grape soda can. He is trying to do this without burning himself and without compromising the heat of the air still filling the bag and making it bouyant.

The bag wants to go. As the Sterno fills it with more hot air, it skips along the parking lot, taunting the crew. Ian heaps on another load of Sterno and suddenly she goes airborne.

After enjoying this elation for a brief moment, Ian realizes that the rest of the crew has gone inside to work and they were missing the joy of their struggle - the big payoff. Ian snapped open the back door and screamed "We have liftoff!"

Josh and Mark came out first to see the Hot Air Trashbag as it poked higher, finally clearing the rooftops.

When Ien came out to indulge in a cigarette and hopefully enjoy the spectacle, the Hot Air Trashbag was moved by a breeze at the high altitude and it shifted direction, moving hauntingly closer to the buildings. Ian struggled to reel in the guideline, to hopefully change its course from the nearby tress and buildings, and the sudden jolt made the basket tilt and drip flaming Sterno down on Ien like napalm.

Finally, similar to their first launch experiment, the Hot Air Trashbag came to a final rest between the branches of an overhead tree. Mark climbed on top of the walk-In cooler to retrieve the glorious vehicle, now reduced to a simple melted and tormented piece of trash. But had it not been for the devotion and dedication the Fox's flight crew, this piece of trash could never have known such great heights.

2007-02-03T09:02:00.000-08:00

Bloggers Infighting GO!!
I'm so flattered to be the subject of so much blogging. If you haven't seen or heard any of it, you probably don't really care, which is a good place to be, but if you do care but just aren't in the know (I'm the topic of many of these blogs, and I didn't even know about them) then I will try to lead you down the threads I've found.
People are a-buzz about the Downtown Living issue of EU. There are people from The Landing that are up in arms because i said The Landing was the least interesting thing going on downtown these days.
The quote:
"The Downtown of today is a far cry from the ghost town that celebrated the opening of The Jacksonville Landing in the early 90s. In fact, The Landing is probably the least interesting thing happening at our urban core these days, although it always makes for a nice photograph. Now there are galleries, artists co-ops, some of the best dining in the greater metropolitan area, great night clubs, and even a friendly community."
I know. Harsh right. Theres one typo and the landing actually opened in the late 80s. I didn't really focus enough time on that "dis" to really make sure it came across right. So people are saying the writing is bad, EU isn't journalism, etc etc. The funny thing is that four pages later Kellie Abrahamson talks, in detail, about the great shops in The Landing:
"Take the Water Taxi over to the Landing and grab a quick bite to eat at one of their many restaurants and eateries. The Landing has a wide variety of restaurants, each with very different flavors, atmospheres and prices. Once you’ve eaten your fill, do a little shopping. Pick up unique gifts at Edgewater Treasures or an “I Love Jacksonville” T-shirt at Destination Jacksonville. Be sure to pop on over to The Toy Factory and let the kids check out some of the hottest toys in town."
Pretty berating, right? So The Landing is ostensibly pulling EU from its halls. That actually isn't much of a loss for our paper, in my mind, because I want our paper to appeal to locals and local people don't spend much time at The Landing. That's not because it isn't interesting. Its just because most of us have seen it and done it. I still go there all the time. Fortunately the people that have been blowing my phone up and blogging their bloody little fingers off about me don't have the first clue what I look like.
It is sort of fun to be written about, so I will share some of the highlights. Check out this thread at MetJax. Metjax is a blog about downtown by downtown merchants, residents, and other interested parties. Here's some of the highlights:
Pearlstone says:
"The Landing is probably the least interesting thing happening at our urban core these days..."
Well if that isn't a dis I don't know what is.
Doesn't matter anyway because Toney Sleiman just instructed all of them to be removed off the Landing property and not to be allowed back on.
If they feel we are the least interesting thing then they don't need to be utilizing our property free of charge to solicit their materials.
Downtown Parks Said:
I think you are taking this way too hard, personally. The fact of the matter is, downtown is more than just the landing, yet EVERYONE thinks thats all there is to it.
I dont think they were saying the landing isnt interesting, just that there are other things going on. The landing gets covereage all the time.
If its true Toney removed the EU, then he lost some credibilty in my book. Since when do large scale developers care about small scale magazines?
The IT Steve said:
the point was - what is going on at the landing that people can see? I have no doubt that Sleiman has good things planned, but until he turns dirt on these, people won't buy it.
Meanwhile places like the Burrito Gallery and Boomtown are doing very well, and didn't exist two years ago (boomtown did, but not in downtown).
Trust me, the landing gets it's due. Ask anyone from Mandarin what they know downtown, and the landing will be one of them. The next step is to get people to thing of Bay Street, Hemming Plaza, Laura St, the Cathedral District, LaVilla and Brooklyn. Downtown must be more than the Landing.
Duval Democrat said:
thats your first mistake, confusing the EU with journalism, or anything printed in this area really.
Then Pearlstone said this, which is hysterical to me because what better promotion did Downtown get last week than the cover of the EU?
"That's why it is incumbent upon each and every one of us to promote our city, especially our urban core, as a whole and to the very best of our abilities ... that way our enthusiasm is the impression the visitors are left with. Something they can truly 'FEEL'.
We do have an AMAZING amount of influence how the outside world thinks of us and I say it's hightime we use it!!!
Are you ready? I am!!!!"
So there is a lot of drama on those three pages of threads, feel free to check them out yourself if you can bear the catty infighting of people at their computers discussing an outside world. But if that isn't enough to fulfill your need for local gossip and you still feel like your personal opinion hasn't been conveyed, but you're teetering on the edge wondering if you should log on and insert your opinions, maybe this will push you over.
Another local blog, probably more popular with general audiences, is Urban Jacksonville. Go to urbanjacksonville.info and read the 30 posts about this same issue. Again, I've pulled some of my favorites out for you to read right here.

fawnleibowitz said:
The way i feel about downtown in general is kind of the way I feel about really good unknown bands I like: I really want people to like them, but not too many people, if that makes sense. It’s like, I want downtown to become vibrant and appreciated, but I don’t want all the bandwagoners just latching onto and making it lame. I like that when I go to TSI it’s full of cool kids while Mark’s is full of Yuppie douches who’re dressed like they just came from Sunday school. Coincidentally, its the latter people who I feel are the bandwagoners who are going to make downtown as lame as the rest of Jacksonville is. So, i mean, i want progress, but I would like downtown to keep what is, i think, it’s edge and coolness, if that makes sense.
Adam Beaugh said:
i checked out EU over lunch today, and overall it’s pretty good. My main problem is with the guy who writes the movie reviews. They are so poorly written that it’s almost fun to read. Maybe he’s 16, which would explain it. the wording, sentence structure, and stream of thought are horrible. i don’t want to be mean, but it’s just in my nature.
Nick said:
EU’s redesign is nice, but the writing is often atrocious. There doesn’t seem to be much of an editorial presence at the mag.
Vicup state said:
Excellent coverage and publicity for DT. To Tony, Joey, Terry, Stephen, et al….Thanks for bringing Sexy Back !
UTurn said:
So, if we’re supposed to be going to all these cool bars and restaurants at The Landing and Downtown and Springfield and hanging out at the coffee shops and the record stores while we’re purchasing furnishings at Urban Outfitters for our new $300,000 downtown loft and taking part in all the art gallery galas and taking in all the indie bands playing in the various venues - when is anybody supposed to actually work?
And then Travis really brought it home with this hit:
I’ll make a fortune in recycling Pabst cans. You can be my helper. We’ll give each other horrid haircuts and listen to bands with impossibly long names that tend to sound like a marching band farting in an elevator.
We’ll have business cards with so many buzzwords on them that the pure synergystic light will melt the face off of mere mortals.
At the end of a day of hard work, we’ll both retire to our floor on the strandoplex and web 2.0 the shit out of each other.

If there are more threads out there about EU or the Downtown issue, please let me know. This has been solidly entertaining me for days and days. If I could get people talking about EU like this all the time, our paper would be filled with only the advertisers i want in it and I could afford to hire the writers I want to hire that will provide real local representation in the media the way no other paper does. So blog on, and let me know where you blog about it. I want to read it. I want to laugh and get mad and use lots of exclamation points in my posts!!!

2007-02-02T05:25:00.000-08:00

Atlanta Pranks Boston

I have spent many a night in front of my television trying desperately not to fall asleep so that I could watch Adult Swim on Cartoon Network for just a little longer. It's during these nights of laughing myself to sleep, that I often wish I worked at Adult Swim. I want to be one of the people that makes the chat-room-like spots that run between the shows. They are this hysterical dialogue with the viewer, making your single-sided television experience slightly more intractive.. or at least seemingly so. I get the sense that I have friends on Williams Street in Atlanta sending me funny texts at inopportune moments. These friends just haven't met me yet.

Although I've often wanted to be one of them, right now I wouldn't. If you didn't see the news yesterday about Adult Swim's guerilla advertising campaign for the new season of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, They sent out almost forty light-boards that has a flashing Mooninite (an Atari-looking character that speaks in a refined thug slang) flipping his middle finger.

Authorities in Boston saw flashing boxes with wires and batteries on them on local bridges and buildings around town and naturally assumed a terrorist attack was underway.
CNN reported it thus:
"The devices displayed a 'Mooninite' -- an outer-space delinquent who makes frequent appearances on the cartoon -- greeting passersby with an upraised middle finger. But the discovery of nine of the light boards around Boston and its suburbs sent bomb squads scrambling throughout the day, snarling traffic and mass transit in one of the largest U.S. cities."

In an age where we are numb to the forced advertising impressions of television and we avoid or ignore most solicitations because we are so thoroughly inundated, reaching us is especially difficult. Advertisers are learning (as displayed by the recent drop in dollars from major television advertising in expensive and ineffective television campaigns) that get the attention of your target customer, you have to be creative, innovative, and relevant. Adult Swim employing a guerilla advertising campaign is both innovative and brilliant for a medium (TV) that is usually so sycophantic in its approach to promotion, made the most relevant impact a campaign in this new era can make.
How can the blame for the panic be blamed on Turner Networks when the panic has been nursed and cultivated by the administration on television everyday? Well they can be blamed because they got outside of "the box" which in this case was a television set. Bush and Fox News can terrorize us across the ariwaves, because we know not to listen to any of the propoganda that comes to us through ellectronic media. Thats why television advertising doesn't work for all things. When you are a bizarre channel that only operates late at night, you want to do what you can to cost-effectively get the attention of your target consumers, but you can't just advertise on your own network, because that's preaching to the choir, you have to do something that gets people talking about your product.
Had I seen a flashing Mooninite flicking me off on one of the bridges, you better believe i would talk about that all night to everyone I saw or spoke to on the phone. That's good advertising, Adult Swim, and frankly, all this news coverage ain't half bad either, but the bottom line: Adult Swim didn't do anything illegal.

CNN:
Boston's Attorney General Martha Coakley:
"It had a very sinister appearance," Coakley told reporters. "It had a battery behind it, and wires."
"I just think this is outrageous, what they've done ... It's all about corporate greed."

Corporate Greed? Our president bought his way into a professional baseball franchise by negotiating a deal with city government in Texas wherein the city claimed private property and used taxpayer dollars to build a stadium so that he could own his own baseball team with no money down. Adult Swim trying to get some people to watch their show is corporate greed? Wal-Mart walks into towns and they substantially increase that towns health risk by driving the employers that live in the community and pay for their employee's health benefits out of business, then hiring those people to work half of their old schedule with less pay and no benefits. But don't arrest them, they have the lowest prices everyday. When the Mays family can sell off Clear Channel to private companies (that the Mays family also owns) so that they are able to simultaneously broker a deal that pays the stockholders off handsomely (including the Mays family, who are the primary stockholders anyway) and also enables the Mays company that purchases Clear Channel to be private instead of publicly traded, so that a large portion of their restrictions are removed and they can essentially do what they want with the electronic media; That's what I call Corporate Greed. Not a Mooninite flicking me off. That makes me laugh.

"The first device reported was at the Sullivan Square commuter rail station, near the suburb of Somerville, Wednesday morning. Wednesday afternoon, four other devices were reported -- near the Longfellow and Boston University bridges over the Charles, at New England Medical Center and near the intersection of Stuart and Columbus avenues in the city itself, and four more turned up over the course of the day."
So everybody was scrambling around in a panic and ordering hundreds of thousands of dollars of response services, but between Wednesday morning and the arrest on Thursday morning, no one walked up to one and said "Hey this is just a Lite Brite, guys, no big deal."

CNN:
Rep. Ed Markey, a Boston-area congressman, said, "Whoever thought this up needs to find another job."

"Scaring an entire region, tying up the T and major roadways, and forcing first responders to spend 12 hours chasing down trinkets instead of terrorists is marketing run amok," Markey, a Democrat, said in a written statement. "It would be hard to dream up a more appalling publicity stunt."

Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis called it "unconscionable" that the marketing campaign was executed in a post 9/11 era. "It's a foolish prank on the part of Turner Broadcasting," he said. "In the environment nowadays ... we really have to look at the motivation of the company here and why this happened."

Sorry, Adult Swim, that you have to get punished for your innovation, but look at it like this: You've created folklore here. There is a Big Brother tale in this. Your advertising campaign may be the thing that puts this panic and hysteria into perspective for some of us. Your art has transcended the screen, in that sense, and proven what the Mooninites have always known. Mooninites are "Advanced beyond all that you can possibly comprehend with 100% of your brain." (that link takes you to a Mooninite game on the Adult Swim website. Go and show your love.) Our hearts go out to those people, filled with corporate greed, that were stuck in traffic on their way to work because of the panic our president instills in all people, that they must be scared and independently wealthy to be of any use to this adminsitration. But my heart especially goes out to those poor souls that are going to jail for their great ideas. I hope Turner sends his best attorneys.

2006-12-26T11:02:00.000-08:00

Is Disney Still Racist?

I can't possibly believe that I am the only one to notice this, so does anyone else see the Disney Pixar film Cars as racist? My brother-in-law thought I was being ridiculous. We were enjoying Christmas with the entire family at my parents' home when the subject came up and almost ruined Christmas. Not because he and I were getting heated, but it was one of those situations when everyone else thinks you are getting heated so they try to distract you from your conversation, which ultimately makes you mad at them.
I understand his hesitance to agree with me, I remember when everyone was talking about Lion King as though it was racist because the bad guys were voiced by Whoopi Goldberg and Cheech Marin, but that argument was ridiculously inconsistent since James Earl Jones was the patriarch of the hero family and the British Jeremy Irons was the main villain. Obviously Disney does not gain anything by being racist any more than they gain something by sneaking phallic symbols into the poster art of Little Mermaid, but there is something unsettling about the new Disney films. I'm sure that my claims are equally as preposterous as those to most people, but I have made some observations that I believe to be case in point.
It strikes me as occurring only since any actual Disney family has left the company, and most likely it is not intentional, but when you are telling fables through talking animals and machines, you are recounting an ancient tradition of storytelling. You are bringing a truth of some kind to life for the listener of the story by getting away from all of the preconceptions we have about humans (sex, sexual preference, race, etc..) by telling a story through characters that you understand are not real. The important thing to remember when telling a symbolic story is that everything in your story is then assigned a subtext.
In the Disney animated film Tarzan, we are given the understanding that monkeys are the good guys. Oh, and elephants. Umm, okay, monkey's, elephants, and SOMETIMES humans. But Cheetah's are definitely bad. Why is that? No one can really answer that, but we can refer back to other Disney films to see how they handled it in the past. I remember in The Jungle Book that the panther was good, but the tiger was bad. And the snake was bad, but the bear was good. So it isn't about carnivores vs. herbivores that good and evil is decided, but rather based on the character of the individual, regardless of their genus or species.
However in Tarzan we are not provided a character assignment for the Cheetah. He doesn't talk or sing or anything. It's like he's an animal! But isn't everyone in the story animals? We are not given a reason for the Cheetahs' lack of personification, but we do understand that if and when the Cheetah dies, he deserves it. He was mean. He was a killer. But what is the subtext in that? It is acceptable for someone we fear to die? Death is a just reward for those we deem evil? Not only is that an arbitrary morality, but it is a death sentence? Isn't the message there that it is up to you, the individual, to decide if someone is good or bad? If that is the case, then I guess the killers at Columbine were justified. Those popular kids were mean to them, so, like the Cheetah, they had to die.
I realize I'm being ridiculous by saying that Tarzan is responsible for Columbine, but my point is that subtext is important in fables. The message must be consistent. Obviously there is plenty of racism in old Disney cartoons (see Song of the South) and I'm not suggesting that the good-old-days of Disney were morally superior, but certainly the consistency of their message remained aware of how to tell the story. The subtext must be handled deliberately and carefully.
So what is my big problem with Cars? Children age three to seven are not old enough to understand stereotypes, but an animated film targeted at their age sure can educate them about it. Especially a film targeted at "NASCAR dads" and people with a more rural mentality has the ability to get right in there and endorse a terrible ideology. My seven year old daughter didn't know that Mexicans like low-riders. She didn't know black girls have big asses. She didn't know white people with southern accents live in trailer parks. She didn't know that minorities belong together or that white people are always the heroes, but I think she might be getting the idea after seeing Cars.
Again, I'm painting with some broad strokes, I'm not suggesting that there be a government agency governing the use of stereotypes, or even that Disney be more aware of the political correctness fascism, I just want to see more parents outraged. Are the smart parents not watching this film with their children? I watched it at the San Marco Theatre and was sitting directly behind a young, well-dressed black couple with their children. They sat that entire movie, as tedious as the plot line was, and didn't even cringe. I was behind them with my head in my hands. On one hand, I know that this gives me a great opportunity to talk to my kids about stereotyping and racism, but on the other hand, I thought I would have more support in my argument. Especially from my sister and brother-in-law who are the only other "liberals" in my family.
To me, casting Cheech Marin as the low-rider that is dating Jennifer Lewis, the black girl with huge tailfins, is already horribly stereotypical. Adding Larry the Cable Guy to anything is just furthering its racist undertones, and then amidst all of these stereotyped characters that are race-identifiable even before you learn who does the actual voicing, there is Owen Wilson, the whitest of white men, and Bonnie Hunt, the ultimate natural blonde from Cheaper by the Dozen, as the romantic leads and the heroes of the story, makes it a study in why Disney must think that white society is the best and everyone else should remain in their boxes.
The only film I can remember feeling as strongly about the racial implications is A Time to Kill with Samuel Jackson. Don't even get me started about Grisham's need to send a white hero in to save a dim-witted but honest black man. My brother-in-law chalks it up to my white guilt, and I won't say he's completely wrong about that, but apparently there isn't enough white guilt going around to stop young children from learning how to stereotype. And if you discuss stereotyping with someone and they pull the old "stereotypes are rooted in truth" bit; remind them that that is exactly why they are so wrong. There is a big difference between mocking a stereotype to disarm it and reinforcing a stereotype so that it lives on.
Regardless of all of these semantics, Cars was just a plain old-fashioned bad movie. If you are in the mood for a good Pixar Disney flick, see The Incredibles again.

2006-12-19T12:37:00.000-08:00

My sister and I could be called "new urban parents" I suppose. Whether you are a parent or not, anyone can find this funny. It's from a new website called babble.com and it made me laugh out loud at my monitor, which was a little awkward for everyone around me, but if it makes you do the same thing, it'll all be worth it.

Bratz Dolls: Brides of Christ in Pleather Minis

Did anybody else just completely freak out in the midst of reading that article in The New Yorker about Bratz dolls? The whole thing is just apocalyptically depressing. I mean, Barbie was bad enough: the giant rack, the blond hair, the twiggy hips and legs. And now she's supposed to be the model of feminist empowerment? Because, see, Barbie actually holds down a job, or appears to want one.
The Bratz dolls, by contrast, are "party girls." Their chosen activities, as set out in the various sold-separately Bratzanalia, includes trips to Vegas and all-night mall parties. They dress in that fashion that was once, long ago, called "trampy," but that we must now learn to call "sassy" and "super-cute!" They wear short skirts and tight T-shirts with inspirational slogans like "My Heart Belongs to Shopping" and "So Many Boys, So Little Time." It would all be kind of cute (in a Jonbenet Ramsey sort of way) if the target audience for Bratz wasn't, like, six-year-old girls.
Honestly, I wouldn't even give a shit about this half-witted huckster mysogyny, except that I've got a baby girl now and at some point, presumably, she's going to start running with a posse of other little girls who all play with these dolls. And so I'm going to have to come off like this big, crusty curmudgeon when I tell her, No, she can't have a Bratz doll, even though Ashley and Sadie and Madison have one! Because, honestly, you can't explain concepts like self-commodification to six-year-olds. They just want the damn product. And the more you withhold it from them, the more precious it becomes in their gimlet eyes, and the harder they're going to push for it.
Fuck.
So I'm sitting there stewing about all this last night and feeding Josie her bottle and staring into her innocent, not-yet-self-commodified little eyes and anticipating the day she will toddle home and calmly announce that she's disowning me if I don't buy her the Yasmin Bratz doll, and the whole prospect is giving me Daddy's First Ulcer.
And that's when it hits me.
Rather than fighting against the current, why not bodysurf the new wave of under-age sexualization/consumerization?
That's why (just as soon as I scratch together the scratch), I'll be introducing a new doll to compete with Bratz: Baby's First Slut!
That's right, parents! She's the Baby who goes all the way! All her parts move. Yes they do. All of them. A few even secrete! Sometimes, Baby's First Slut wears outfits, but not when she's feeling naughty! Some of the other dolls don't like Baby's First Slut, but that's only because all the boys love her. She knows how to make them happy. So happy that they buy Baby's First Slut lots and lots of sassy outfits.
This is where we get into the really big money: Accessories! Baby's First Slut is all about the product:
Baby's First Bling!
Baby's First Escalade!
Baby's First Ice!
Baby's First Cristal!
In the interest of being culturally sensitive – as well as making sure we nail down all our market sectors – we'd need some multi-ethnic Slut equivalents:
Baby's First Concubine!
Baby's First Courtesan!
Baby's First Puta!
Baby's First Ho!
And we'd need to make sure that we gave the girls exciting narrative elements to work towards. That's why we'd publish a whole set of books (with necessary spinoff product, obviously) to stake out the following exciting adventures:
Baby's First Internet Porn Video!
Baby's First STD!
Baby's First Unwanted Pregnancy!
Baby's First Abortion!
Baby's First Substance Abuse Crisis! (Baby's First Rehab sold separately.)
Baby's First Suicide Attempt!
We wouldn't want to turn things dark too quickly, though, because we need to score some celebrity endorsements early on in the process.
If we position ourselves correctly, we'll get credit from the lefty moonbats (like myself) who are always moaning about the bad messages that dolls send, while also drawing the masses of little girls who just want to emulate the false versions of female empowerment and happiness peddled by the various Power Sluts of our age. I don't want to toot my own horn here, but this is basically a blank check for a gajillion dollars just waiting for you to sign.
Who's with me?"

If you know the name of the author of this piece, please let me know so that I can give them credit. My sister found the article on babble.com but I could not find it when i went to the site. Nonetheless, the entire site was funny as hell.
-Jon

2006-11-18T17:59:00.000-08:00

Living in the buckle of the Bible belt can be frustrating, even for devoted Christians. In some cases the difficulty comes from the image that is created when some of the more fundamentalist believers cast a shadow of intolerance around their specific moral agenda that seems at times to outweigh the love and grace aspect of the faith, and other times, liberal churches or followers are so tolerant that there doesn’t even seem to be a morality or an absolute to their belief. Those believers frustrate the attempts the stricter believers are making to make certain their culture knows where the God of the Bible stands on issues.
I was discussing some of the interesting things that have been happening in our pop culture recently with some friends of mine that are devoted, Bible-believing Christians (as well as some of the most intelligent people I know), around a bonfire at one of their 30th birthdays. We discussed the recent resurgence of morality-inspired albums and artistic projects that are reminiscent of the anti-war, secular humanism of the Vietnam era. Artists that were appreciated on a strictly artistic level throughout the Clinton and Bush I eras of Pax Americana, such as the Flaming Lips, Beastie Boys, and Cursive, that have recently released albums propagating a moral and political agenda.
On one hand, these artists have worked hard for many years to build a reputation as artists and as personalities, so there is some level of justification to them using that influence to endorse philosophies they believe deeply in. After all, every one of us around that bonfire had been fairly ignorant about the situation in Tibet until the Beastie Boys brought it to our attention. But they didn’t do it by tainting their music with a specific agenda, rather through external activism, without alienating any of their audience. With To the Five Burroughs, the Beastie Boys compromised their art as well as the integrity they had before their listeners when they forced out a less-than-inspired album wrought with political messages and released during an election year. Similarly The Flaming Lips have released At War with the Mystics, a politically charged album about the people taking the power back.
Probably most blatant, when it comes to indicting religion, is the new Cursive album Happy Hollow. On this musically brilliant album, the lyrical content addresses war or religion in every single song. While Tim Kasher distanced himself from the listener more on Happy Hollow than on any prior release, he also made harsh indictments on the church and their responsibility for so much emotional trouble and fabricated guilt and frustration in the world. Alongside this message is the anti-war theme.
I had the good fortune to get an opportunity to interview Cursive’s bass player, Matt Maginn, last week and I asked about these things. Read that interview to see his responses to some of these questions, but that is not really what I am addressing in this particular blog. In this blog I am addressing the place of pop culture in our personal philosophies. Books have been written and pundits have been outspoken about the illegitimacy of celebrities using their soap box to provide opinions that are neither expert nor qualified to be as influential as they are, as though they should be discredited for their opinions because they are artists. Personally I would rather hear what an artist that I admire thinks about something than listen to a pundit who is hardly more qualified and often seems to have put even less thought into the issue.
I don’t prefer the voice of the artists because I am more likely to sway to their ideals, in fact I doubt anyone likely to sway their ideals based on their fan status has ideals worth a shit anyway, but I enjoy a new perspective that forces me to rethink my own political and religious ideas. If believers are sincere in their convictions, if they really believe that the God of the Bible is an absolute and has established an absolute moral reality, there is no reason to be afraid of contrary voices. Truth is truth. So if Dan Brown releases The DaVinci Code and everyone wants to read it; let them. If it makes people question why they believe what they believe, won’t that deepen their faith and invoke a recommitment of sorts? If they are dealing in truth, won’t they come back to the true conclusions regardless of what the message was that inspired them to think on it again?
When I listened to Cursive’s Happy Hollow, I was upset by the distraction from the amazing music by the agenda that is showcased on the album. But the more I listened to the record, the more I realized the value of that distraction. Unlike The DaVinci Code, which presented “facts” contrary to a believers’ upbringing for cerebral and intellectual consideration, this was presented in the intimate moment of getting absorbed emotionally in the story of a song. Cursive’s Bad Sects off of Happy Hollow is a perfect example of this dichotomy. When I first heard it I wondered why Cursive wanted to throw their hat into the political discourse of gays in the church, and especially in the priesthood, but as I grew fonder of the song I started to experience it differently. Unlike Dan Brown’s poorly constructed mystery novel, Bad Sects pulled me into the story of one priests’ struggle to find a balance between his faith and his flesh.
“I know this is wrong because I’m told this is wrong.”
How often does our faith or our political position commit us to an idea that we have not thoroughly thought through on our own? We’ve taken ideas provided to us by a person or organization we trust, be it our church, our peer group, our candidates, or our favorite celebrities, and toted the party line because we are told how it makes sense. We are told this is wrong, but have we really taken it to court? Have we delved into why we think it is wrong and whom we are affecting with that decision?
Cursive didn’t change my mind about anything I believed spiritually, politically, or morally, but I realized the intimate depth of thought that can be brought on through a song. Through art that moves me. It is emotionally interactive. The depth of that impact can be threatening to someone that is weak-willed or has a poor foundation for their philosophies anyway, but for the thinking person, these re-evaluations are a good thing. They keep us honest.
As we stood around the bonfire drinking our cocktails and making toasts, we also discussed the resurgence of the concept that religion is bad for our culture. The new children’s movie Happy Feet presents the idea that religion handicaps society. Green Day, in their American Idiot album, suggests that religion is the thing that starts wars and fights. This is a popular concept lately. But in their idiot savant brilliance, the writers of South Park have once again displayed their courage and unbiased frankness in a recent two-part episode wherein Cartman, impatiently awaiting the release of the Nintendo Wii, travels to the future. In the future he finds a world in the violent throes of war, even though in this future no one believes in God. The basis for their violent struggle is the inability to agree on a name for their atheist culture. The message: even if there were no religion, people would find things to fight about. How true.
All in all I would prefer a culture that trusts its participants to make their own informed decisions based on many presented options, rather than a culture that legislates morality and doesn’t allow for discourse. Ultimately this is the American way: to allow for individuality and to trust our citizens to pursue honesty, personally and interpersonally.

2006-11-05T13:26:00.000-08:00

Life in the South's biggest small town is as exciting and rewarding as you want it to be, you just have to know what you're looking for and know where to find it. That is where EU Jacksonville wants to take you. We are not a Folio Weekly. We don't care who you vote for and it isn't up to us to inform you about corrupt city officials. The Folio Weekly does that and I for one am very glad we have a paper in town like that. But when it comes to entertainment, we want to provide more complete, comprehensive, and local coverage of what is really going on.
This blog is as close as you'll ever see to an editorial from me in EU Jacksonville, because I try to dillute my opinions among the vast and virtual space of the worldwide web, anonymously and drenched in cowardice. Here in the halls of the EU Jacksonville, my only goal is to let you in on the little secrets. You see there are amazingly creative things going on all over town and they are being put together by these innovative minds that we cultivate right here in the River City.
Jacksonville has a rich culture, but let me let you in on a little secret about the art and music scene. In every town, and even nationally, there are the people that are trying to hustle money out of the general public for their own gain. These people shake hands with other hustlers and schmoozers and they all pat each other on the back before and after shows at some beaches bar. There are the people that barely make above minimum wage working for local radio stations and they leverage their air time to try to make some money on the side. There are the myriad "Promoters" in town that put out flashy fliers and get some schlock bands from Orange Park to perform and the whole thing is sponsored by Duff Beer. Then there's the "managers" which are these green kids that happen to like their local metal core band so much they are willing to run their myspace and book their shows, and they call up all of the media outlets and try to blow their band up to help them make it big. The goal with these scheisters is always the same. Get money. Gain power and influence. This is the faux scene. The real artists are always hiding underground.
So think of the city as a swimming pool and all of the musicians and painters and performers as the aquatic life that is indiginous to our pool. The ones hustling to get somewhere are thrashing about, worried more about propulsion than creation or inspiration, and because of that, they rise in the pool and are more visible to everyone for their height and often will make it to the top, where they assume success is, and eventually they will get plucked out by fishermen, birds, or other predators that feed on their energy but have no use for their uninspired creations. They worked hard on success but never thought to look into their inspiration and the artists that preceded them. These people are not true artists, they just like the life of rock and roll or they enjoy a lofty status as an esoteric artist, but they have nothing to give the world that the world will later cherish.
On the bottom of that pool, on the other hand, are the artists. Bunkered down with the rest of the real people at the bottom of the aquarium, they are emmersed with the dregs of the pool, because they live in that reality, and their true and honest inspiration is something they pursue, not for fame or fortune, although this consumerist nation gets us all and of course the artists would like to be able to live off of their art and still eat, but this is not what compells them to keep on. They see success as the ability to be honest through their creativity and have their peers revel in their creation.
In the national scene there is a similar hierarchy. There are your Paris Hiltons and whoever that guy from Sugar Ray is, and then there are the real artists. Sometimes they are able to bring their honesty to the surface without compromising, such as artists as the Flaming Lips, but more often than not, the best artists you will never know about. Not enough people are excavating them from their individual pools. It is easier for national media to take people that are thrashing and report on them. So the best artists in every town probably never make it to the forefront of even their local scene, much less a national visibility. Unless their community is so supportive of them that the national scene is forced to pay attention.
At EU Jacksonville we hope to excavate these talents and show them to you. We hope you are not compelled by what the national scene thinks or what the local media tries to tell you you are supposed to like. My objective is to bring the most innovative and compelling artists in this city and parade them before you alongside every entertaining event happening in the coming week so that you can be aware of your community.
Although technically the "U" in EU Jacksonville doesn't stand for anything, it is a silly way to say "you" as in "Entertaining U, Jacksonville." I prefer to think of the "U" as standing for Understanding. To really get to know this city, you have to know more than Jaguars and Limp Bizkit. You have to really get to know the artists and entertainers that this city has nurtured in secret. See what we have to offer that you can't find anywhere else in the country. You have to know about the San Marco Theatre's midnight movies, the underground music venue in Springfield that isn't even a real club, musicians like Bob Maynard and The Yusge, and record stores such as Moon Colony Razorblade. You won't see an ad in Folio Weekly for TSI. You won't find anything about Moon Colony Razorblade in the Florida Times Union (but that's mostly because you don't read the Times Union) and you won't find these advertisements here either. These things are underground, and they enjoy it there. They cannot afford to advertise, perhaps, but more likely they are not interested in it. They are interested in a community that wanst to understand them. The real people don't have publicists to organize an interview. The true artists and the performers worth seeing are spending their time creating and concepting, not hiring promoters and managers. To understand this community, you have to understand the creative people that are under and behind it.
So here we are. Entertaining and Understanding Jacksonville. Our goal is to provide a weekly guide to everything going on in this town. We want to be the most comprehensive guide to entertainment in the town, and we say that we don't just want to remind you that Toby Kieth is playing at the coliseum or that the Gator Bowl is this weekend, we also want to be the ones that let you know about a garage rock showcase at Jack Rabbits or a festival featuring eight hardcore bands at a little dive bar in Murray Hill. Whatever people are working hard to bring to life in this town, we intend to showcase it for you: the local. We will feature the true underground in Jacksonville's invisible culture so that you can be proud of it.
I'm not supposing that an Emperor X performance at TSI is more relevant or better for you than a musical presented by the FCCJ Artist Series, I am simply suggesting that you can find out about the musical anywhere; we want to give you the option. You are free to enjoy the same things that hundreds or even thousands of your peers enjoy, but if you are one of those few that are looking for something different, exciting, or original, we want you to find what you are looking for as well. Vote for whoever you want when elections roll around, we aren't here to demonize any political party or even give you our opinion of people or events. We are here to find and report on those things that are Entertaining U in Jacksonville. We are Entertaining and Understanding Jacksonville and then passing the things we learn on to you so that you can be entertained and in turn understand that Jacksonville does have a culture of its own.
So instead of moping about how much this city sucks, try to find something that will spark your interest. Lord knows the underground needs more audience participation, and you are sitting around wishing there was something to entertain you. No matter what you are into, hip-hop, local films, rock bands, local theater, jazz, writing workshops, break dancing, or anything, we have it here. It's going on somewhere and you are missing it if you are not staying in touch. Our new goal is to help you stay in touch as much as possible. So check us out. We are about to be making big changes in line with many big changes we've made over the past five years, all to be a better source of information for you. Let us know more about what you'd like to see and we will respond. Let us know what entertainment is slipping through our fingers and we will tighten our grip. Entertaining U is a team effort. We have to know what entertainers are doing in town and we have to know every little thing you are interested in being entertained by. Get on the team and tell others about this publication. Make us your source and we will do our best to make sure you learn about what you want to know about.
-Jon Bosworth
Managing Editor
EU Jacksonville