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Grizzly Bear
August 14, 2008 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
Photo credit: Tim Bugbee

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TIGHT BRIEFS? With 82 percent of their songs running less than a minute, the Coke Dares are ahead
of their time — by about 40 seconds.

It’s not that I can’t appreciate “Stairway to Heaven,” “November Rain,” “Free Bird,” “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” “Thick As a Brick,” and, uh . . . classical music — but I spent my childhood watching sugar-cereal commercials. Then I upgraded to MTV. Now I have high-speed wireless Internet that enables me to check my seven e-mail addresses in seconds, once every 10 minutes. If any shiny objects are within eyeshot, my interest is as good as lost.

I’m told there’s an epidemic of shrinking attention spans, yet our demand for rock remains unchanged. With 82 percent of their songs running less than a minute, the Coke Dares of Bloomington, Indiana, are a band ahead of their time — by about 40 seconds.

“There are so many classic-rock choruses with terrible verses or bridges, but the good parts of those songs are so memorable, you’ll listen to a whole song just to get to them,” says Jason Groth over the phone from Bloomington. “So there’s this idea that we can be more efficient.”

If there is a scientific formula that will maximize the volume of rock per second, the Coke Dares are on the cusp of its discovery, and they make it look as easy as sticking a simple idea to proto-punk hookage and ’70s rock riffology, with gusto . . . and brevity. Any ol’ idea will do — assholes at AutoZone, an offhand remark from a co-worker or stoned person, trucker speed, or a dream about broken hand bones. But the Coke Dares are no joky-ha-ha band. They’re serious musicians, so the reductive policy yields a ton of songs.

“Some of our songs have to be 15 or 20 seconds while maintaining a sense that they’re actually songs, not just fragments,” says Groth. “I think we don’t always succeed, but we spend as much time learning them as we do standard two-and-a-half-minute songs.”

The band’s 2005 debut album, Here We Go With . . . (Essay Records), was recorded for $90 in three and a half hours; it detonates 32 songs in little more than 30 minutes. Their newest, Feelin’ Up, takes it to the next level: 33 songs in just over 20 minutes. Groth: “We’re not just trying to be ridiculous, but we are trying to see how far we can push it. Maybe the next full-length will be 34 tracks. I don’t know if it will be shorter, but if it is, we’ve done our job.”

Radiohead
August 13, 2008 at the Comcast Center, Mansfield, MA
Photo credit: Carina Mastrocola

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Lionel Loueke, Newport Jazz Festival, 2008
Photo credit: Jean Hangarter

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In 2004, a newspaper report appeared in the Guardian — the biggest daily newspaper on Prince Edward Island (PEI) — that was at odds with the outside world’s image of the idyllic Canadian province. Two bullets had hit local resident Kenneth Rae MacFarlane while he was home alone in the midst of a blizzard. With the help of snow-plow operators, an ambulance and a police team eventually reached him. He survived the attack, but ended up in court with some explaining to do. It seems in the course of investigating the shooting — so rare on the island that emergency-room physicians are routinely sent for training to Baltimore, where such injuries are a dime a dozen — police made an unexpected discovery. MacFarlane’s home housed an elaborate indoor pot-growing operation, with two rooms dedicated to cannabis cultivation and a third undergoing conversion.

When you think of PEI, you probably come up with crisp, clean-cut tourist-brochure images: lush and rolling hills, tranquil ocean beaches, villages of whitewashed cottages and, inevitably, the smiling face of the island’s indefatigably cheery heroine, Anne of Green Gables. But while Lucy Maud Montgomery’s fictional Edwardian character maintained her Pollyanna disposition on the strength of nothing but her spunk and a cheerily romantic vision of how life should be, it seems modern-day islanders have discovered another way to smile through the summer and avoid the blues during the bleak local winters.

A recent issue of the Guardian, for instance, featured the headline POLICE SEEK HELP FINDING MARIJUANA GROWERS, followed by a lurid story about local pot cultivators and a warning to the populace to be on the lookout for suspicious activities along country lanes and farm fields.
Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) spokesperson Sergeant Denis Morin, located in the capital of Charlottetown, admits that there is a something of problem — and his statistics prove it. The number of plants seized through the end of May (250) in areas of RCMP jurisdiction — excluding the island’s four small cities, which have their own independent police departments — already exceeds the 200 plants seized in all of 2007.

To be sure, PEI — where Canada’s province-by-province alcohol prohibition started first and ended last, in 1948 — is still largely a bastion of clean-cut, yesteryear values. A number of island communities remain defiantly dry. But it is also home to a thriving cottage industry that includes both indoor hydroponic pot production — aided by the inexpensive electricity the island imports from Quebec — and a more daring coterie of growers who take advantage of the island’s perfect summer climate and endless fields of spuds, soybeans, and corn to pursue small-scale cultivation en plein air.

Rob Zammarchi

With the polls continuing to show John McCain giving Barack Obama a run for his money, much of the press has seemed flummoxed by the turn of events. After all, the narrative of this campaign was supposed to be how a triumphant Obama rode discontent against the Bush administration to an overwhelming victory.

That still could happen. But if reporters seem surprised at the way things have gone so far, it may be because their account of what has already happened is flawed. As the poet once said, what’s past is prologue.

The dominant narratives of this race have been how Obama upset the odds (and the Clintons) through a brilliant campaign, and how McCain mostly stumbled his way to the nomination, staging a comeback in New Hampshire and riding the momentum to victory. But maybe that’s not what really happened. In truth, Obama always had a much better chance of emerging as the nominee than the press gave him credit for — which is why this column even made him the slight favorite over Hillary Clinton way back in March 2007.

Yes, Obama was new to the national political scene. But in the primaries, insurgency is often an advantage, especially if the novice is as brilliant an orator as Obama. More important, because of Obama’s race, he knew that if he could get a successful launch in Iowa or New Hampshire, he could count on solid support in the African-American community that would guarantee him more than a third of the delegates needed to nominate. That’s one heck of a benefit, and he took advantage of it.

Moreover, Clinton was never as strong as advertised — in part because she’s not an exceptional campaigner, but mostly because of Clinton fatigue. If she could be beaten early (and she was), it was axiomatic that much of the support she had garnered simply by being the front-runner would evaporate.

True, Obama ran a creditable campaign and proved himself a brilliant fundraiser. But he was no powerhouse. Outside of a few states, such as Wisconsin and Missouri, he was never really able to expand his base beyond his coalition of African-Americans, the young, and the well-educated.

Every time he had a chance to beat Clinton decisively enough to force her from the race — in New Hampshire or Texas or Pennsylvania or Indiana — he lost. In fact, had Clinton not committed a major strategic blunder by failing to get organized for the large caucus states, she could have beaten him.

THIS IS THE INTERNET Facing steep odds against an entrenched incumbent, Kansas state
representative candidate Sean Tevis took to the Web and raised nearly $100,000 through a
comic strip mashing “xkcd” and 300.

The term “Internet famous” brings a few things to mind: nerdy guys caught doing nerdy things, vitriol-fueled bloggers typing away in their basements, Tila Tequila — in other words, people who are more infamous than famous, and usually pretty broke.

If he does nothing else this summer, Sean Tevis should change that stereotype. The 39-year-old information architect from Olathe, Kansas, became an Internet celebrity this July when he put up a comic strip soliciting donations for his state-rep campaign. Within two weeks, he had raised close to $100,000.

What kind of comic could inspire such widespread generosity? Well, it’s done in the style of the popular Web strip “xkcd,” features a verbal Rick Roll (check Wikipedia if you’re not in the loop), and contains a lot of references to the movie 300. (See for yourself at seantevis.com/kansas/3000/running-for-office-xkcd-style.)

Call it Revenge of the Nerds for a new age.

Tevis, a first-time Democratic candidate, was just trying to raise $26,000 to run a competitive campaign against Sunflower State incumbent Arlen Siegfreid. He figured that he could probably find 3000 people who agreed with him that would be willing to donate $8.34, but he reached that goal within two days. In fact, as of his July 28 campaign contribution filings — the most recent figures available — Tevis had collected the relatively astronomical sum of $96,512.76, to fight an opponent who has raised roughly a sixth of that amount.

According to his filings, $70,000 of his donations were less than $50, but plenty gave more than that. Most of the biggest spenders appeared to be, like Tevis, employed in the technology sector, including a couple of them here in Massachusetts.

“It wasn’t so much his positions . . . but more of the fact that he was a computer geek who decided to get up and actually inflict some change in his surroundings,” wrote John Resig, a computer programmer from Somerville, in an e-mail. He found out about Tevis through the news-aggregating Web site reddit.com, and donated $120.88 to the campaign.

Tevis, who was not available to comment for this article, has been pushing a progressive agenda, calling for reform of the schools in Kansas — perhaps saying goodbye to the Flying Spaghetti Monster — and bringing more transparency to the government. Even with a war chest like his, fighting against an entrenched incumbent is never easy, and Tevis faces an uphill battle. Still, his fans are hopeful.

So much for the Republican Party’s long-standing boast that Ronald Reagan neutered the Soviet Union.

Russia’s brutal Soviet-style invasion of the relatively small and decidedly democratic nation of Georgia this past week may not have been enough to provoke a “better-dead-than-red” backlash here in the United States. But the Russian tanks that rumbled toward the Black Sea must have made former Soviet citizens (such as the independent people of the Ukraine) and former Soviet clients (say, in Poland and the Czech Republic) more than a bit nervous.

The Kremlin has been off its game for much of the past 20 years. Losing control of Eastern Europe and watching the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics dissolve into 15 different nations must have been a bummer.

Now, thanks to the corrupt and anti-democratic leadership of Vladimir Putin, together with a multi-billion surge in treasure from oil and natural gas, Russia is again flexing its muscles.

Putin, having squelched Chechnyan rebels in two multi-year rounds of bloody fighting, was emboldened to deal with the Georgians, who Russians traditionally consider to be obstreperous upstarts. The Kremlin likes its neighbors tame.

Georgia, with 4.6 million people (a bit more than half the population of New York City), is — or was — perhaps the most pro-American of the former Soviet Republics: witness the 2000 troops that nation committed to President Bush’s Iraq War.

The ostensible trigger for this latest invasion was the desire of provinces in western Georgia to break away and affiliate with Russia. Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, an admirable democrat who nevertheless is considered a loose cannon by diplomatic standards, appears not to have handled the situation well. Two weeks ago, the long-simmering conflict erupted into mortar fire along the border, prompting air strikes from the Kremlin soon thereafter, as Russian troops and armored forces entered the fray in support of the splinter region. Early Wednesday, a cease-fire was agreed upon by both sides, but the peace remains tenuous at best.

However, when a big power like Russia (or China or the United States) desires to intervene militarily in a neighboring state, almost any reason can be manufactured.

Turmoil in the Georgian provinces is only a pretext for the Russian war. The underlying reason has more to do with the misguided American policy of seeking to integrate such former Soviet Republics as Georgia and the Ukraine, and such former subject Eastern European nations as Poland, into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) — against Russia’s protestations.

K.Bonami

Sara Orozco and Scott Brown, total opposites, are perfect candidates for a State Senate district with political bipolar disorder. Challenger Orozco comes from the northern part of the Bristol, Norfolk, and Middlesex district, where liberal communities such as Wellesley and Needham elect lefty Democratic state reps like Alice Peisch and Lida Harkins. Incumbent Scott Brown comes from the south, where rock-solid conservative bastions like Wrentham and Attleboro send three of the state’s few Republicans to the House of Representatives.

The two candidates are, like the two parts of their district, ideologically split on almost every issue. With such a clear-cut distinction, in one of the few competitive races in the state, you might imagine that Democrats and progressive groups would have Orozco near the top of their list of priority causes.

That’s starting to happen, but slowly. They realize how high the stakes are — Democrats would dearly love to deal a deathblow to Brown’s political career, which many see leading to a run for governor or US Senate. But so far, many remain unconvinced that Orozco, a lesbian Cuban-American psychologist who has never held public office, has any real chance of knocking off the state’s current GOP poster boy.

She is up against an all-American incumbent straight out of central casting. Brown is tall and model-handsome (he in fact did model at one time), with the best head of hair in the State House. He is married to WCVB-TV reporter Gail Huff, with two daughters — one of whom starred on the Noble & Greenough basketball squad (and currently plays for Boston College) and was an American Idol finalist. Brown is involved in everything good and clean-cut, from the Wrentham Lions Club to the USA Triathlon Federation. He is a crusader against sex offenders, for which he has received recognition from the US Chamber of Commerce. For chrissakes, he was unavailable for interviews this past week because he was serving his National Guard duty — how all-American can you get?

Orozco is not from central casting — she is more of an indie-film character. A first-generation American born and raised in Miami, daughter of a Kmart employee and a cement-factory worker, she worked her way from nothing to a Harvard Medical School academic appointment, and eventually her own psychology practice. She is a breast-cancer survivor. She is a single mother of twin nine-year-old boys from her 12-year relationship with another woman — which ended in divorce two years after they finally achieved the right to marry.

Allow me to open by crediting Mike Miliard for “Where has all the Gonzo Gone?” (News and Features, July 25). In the first two pages of the article, Miliard managed to capture the quintessence of Hunter S. Thompson’s lifeblood. He also took a distinctive look at a somewhat hackneyed subject in a day and age when it seems like everyone who once brushed elbows with Dr. Gonzo is writing a book about the event. The piece was well-researched and eloquently written.

But my fancy quickly ebbed when I turned to the second page and saw Matt Taibbi’s sheepish grin, alongside a comparison with Thompson. I was even more chagrined by Taibbi’s faux assurances that he’s not trying to usurp with his drivel the fallen mantle of a truly inspirational author.

Taibbi claims he’s unique. He prattles on about how “embarrassed” he is each time a book critic or reporter likens him with Thompson. Yet all these assertions seem a bit contrived when Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner has done just about everything in his power to connect Taibbi’s destiny with Thompson’s legacy. This forced linkage was never clearer than when Thompson’s mug graced the September 2007 cover of the magazine along with a campaign-trail article Taibbi attempted to write in the good doctor’s voice. Instead of recreating the Prada of prose, he penned his own cheap knock-off akin to something you’d expect to find at a sidewalk bizarre.

Sure, Taibbi’s writing looks real to the undiscerning eye. For the rest of us, it’s nothing but a sad reminder of the piss-poor quality of product produced by brazen, unabashed scam artists. While imitation is often considered the deepest form of flattery, Taibbi’s writing does a tap dance on the still-fresh grave of a true American rebel. It’s a shame Miliard couldn’t see through his despicable charade.

Justin Mason
Saratoga Springs, New York

IN THE EYES OF THE BEHOLDER
Many thanks for Greg Cook’s frank and insightful article about the rise of the Peabody Essex Museum. (See “Peabody Rising,” News and Features, July 25.) I have one comment to offer about comparing the exhibitions of different museums. When organizing theme shows with numerous loans, the playing field is not level. For example, the MFA finds it easier to secure loans than PEM because it has a broader, deeper collection that allows it to make reciprocal loans down the line. In the case of “Painting Summer in New England,” the checklist changed dramatically because of the strenuous loan process.

This article originally appeared in the August 12, 1988 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

By 1:55, finally, they were all there. Crammed onto Boylston Street in front of the Boston Public Library, a dozen or so fed-up and pissed-off demonstrators were ready. Their armbands — color-coded to show which ones were willing to protest their way into the slammer — were secured, and Cindy Miller started giving instructions. Stay together, she said, single file, down Boylston Street to the Transportation Building. And yell. Let ’em know you’re coming, and let ‘em know you’re mad.

At two o’clock, the caravan started moving. Miller led the way, followed by Jim Brooks, a big man with a big voice and a bullhorn to make it even bigger. “Hey, hey, hey, ho,” he chanted, “discrimination’s got to go.” The marchers, a platoon of approximately 15 people with disabilities, who stretched out for almost a block behind Brooks, joined in, belting the words out into the sticky August heat. After five weeks of watching the MBTA’s RIDE service — their only reasonable public-transportation option — disintegrate around them, the words came easy. They were mad. And today, on Monday, August 8, they were going to be heard.

For years, disability-rights activists have struggled with a movement that’s never fully blossomed. Split by differences in philosophy, hampered by a perpetual isolation that makes organizing doubly difficult, disabled people have spent years waging sporadic battles that have won small victories but never the big war. But now, after coming dangerously close to losing one vital asset — reliable transportation — the movement may have hit a turning point. On August 8, the radicals and the establishment insiders of the disability-rights movement joined together to confront the MBTA and its general manager, James O’Leary. And the media, in a rare display of interest, turned out in force to chronicle an angry response to a shoddy service. The failure of the RIDE, activists say, may prove to be the catalyst that turns a fractured disability-rights movement into a full-fledged attack.

“There was something magical about it [the march],” says John Winske of the Massachusetts Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities (MCCD). “It suddenly felt like something. It finally felt like the whole world was watching.”

This article originally appeared in the August 7, 1973 issue of the Boston Phoenix.
 
"You got to organize. You got to pressure the police force to patrol the area. Maybe you'll find you need to hire supplemental police forces or organize your own patrol," Rep. Royal Bollings Jr. (D-Mattapan) said, his thin frame sprawled across the top of a desk in his real estate office. The room was filled with Mattapan businessmen, who'd come to the July 16 evening meeting with one purpose in mind: find an answer to the crime problem, find out how to protect themselves against the kind of violence that had killed one of their number less than a week earlier.

The early morning gun duel that killed James B. Miller in his Fish and Chips Store in Mattapan was not the only impetus for the area businessmen. They'd been planning to find better protection for their stores before the shooting occurred. Miller was to have been among the group of businessmen who'd been planning to meet with police to demand better protection. His death spurred the community into action, and that was why they were meeting in Bollings's Blue Hill Avenue office that night. There were close to 50 store owners crowded into that room, some in a miscellaneous collection of chairs pulled in for the occasion, others standing near the door at the far corner of the room where the sign-in book was being passed around.

Bollings finished his speech advising his constituents of the possibilities of protection by police, by private patrols, and by vigilante-type groups. "I'll just tell you this one last thing," he said. "If you ask me what has to come first, I say organize! You gotta have an organization to get police to listen."

"I beg to differ with you, Brother," a tall, heavy-set man called out. "We had a businessmen's organization before."

"That's right," a woman said, and many others in the meeting murmured the same.

"We tried that before," the man continued, "in the past eight years we tried many times (to organize a volunteer citizen's night patrol) and we could get it going for one week, then everybody, they lax off. Only a week at a time, and only after something big happens."

Royal Bollings Jr., watching the man intently while he spoke, pushed himself up with his arms and off the desk. He rose to speak, but another member of the Mattapan business community beat him to it.

CAM’RON, who’s remained largely reclusive since the failure of his 2007 beef campaign against 50 CENT, has sold off his one remaining asset: the recording contract of his amusing retardate protégé, JUELZ SANTANA. Juelz, known for his distinctive bandana fashions and his trademarked rhyming-words-with-themselves-five-times flow, had a Top 10 hit in 2005 with “There It Go (The Whistle Song),” for which he should only drop dead. Cam’ron managed to get a cool $2 million by selling his old friend down the river (to Def Jam), which ought to be enough to keep him brooding in his estate for a couple more years. After that, expect to see a lot of purple fur coats flooding the garage-sale market.

For demonstration purposes, a representative Santana rhyme: “You be like, ’damn, that’s one nice ass rapper/I kinda like that rapper, want to be like that rapper.’”

DMX, who in recent months has been arrested approximately twice a day, dazzled onlookers with an impromptu freestyle outside the Phoenix courthouse where he had just pled not guilty to whatever the hell he did this time. “If and when you ever fall down, get back up/Drop something, stop fretting, pick that shit back up/Stand for something or fall for everything, wait for the right pitch or miss with every swing.” Great time to toss us some nuggets of wisdom, DMX. Keep these little life lessons coming, ’cause nothing gets me all pumped to succeed like the inspiring words of a broke dude with a house full of dog corpses.

Former boy-band mogul LOU PEARLMAN — now serving a 25-year prison sentence for screwing investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars with various endeavors of extreme bogusness — made news this week by snitching on an alleged cop killer. Pearlman claims that after hearing the 19-year-old Davin Smith boasting of the murder to fellow inmates, he struck up a little investigation, gaining the boy’s confidence after a chance meeting in the prison showers and extracting details of the crime, which he promptly turned over to the police. Pearlman hopes that his sleuthing and snitching will reduce his prison sentence. After all this publicity, I think he can definitely expect a dramatic reduction in his not-getting-stabbed-in-the-shower hitch.

In a rather disappointing move, BARACK OBAMA’s camp has condemned LUDACRIS for the ribaldry of his recent pro-Obama mixtape track. Campaign spokesman Bill Burton, desperate to make white people forget that Obama met privately with Luda in 2006 to talk about “empowering the youth,” trotted out the same old rapophobia: “Rap lyrics today too often perpetuate misogyny, materialism, and degrading images that he [Obama] doesn’t want his daughters or any children exposed to. . . . While Ludacris is a talented individual he should be ashamed of these lyrics.”

SKINNY TIE, SYNTH, NO HAIR “A hell of a lot of it is nostalgia, right?” says the Human League’s
Phil Oakey.

The ’80s, pop culture’s most tenacious decade, were a mix of greed, technological breakthrough, and hope for a bright future. At least, that’s the story we buy into before pegging our pants and bounding out to one ’80s karaoke night after the next.

“The music from that era is very uplifting — I think it’s the last really creative decade of music,” says Belinda Carlisle, solo artist and still-occasional Go-Go, speaking from a London hotel before embarking upon the 2008 Regeneration Tour, which comes to the Comcast Center this Wednesday with a cavalcade of ’80s recidivists. “A lot of songs from that era are anthemic and uplifting. Sometimes the stuff sounds ’80s due to production, but the decade, songwise, certainly has a certain sound.”

The Human League began in the late ’70s as a product of and a reaction to the rise of British punk; their career culminated in the worldwide smash of their 1981 Dare album and single “Don’t You Want Me.” “There was a bleak industrial movement going on in Britain, and we sort of liked being a part of it, but at the same time, we really loved pop. I wanted to be Donna Summer or Barry White, you know? And we really wanted chart success. People that we admired, like David Bowie or Bryan Ferry, were often people who’d stepped up their game and said, ‘Right, we’d better do some popular records!’ ”

One defining characteristic of this game-stepping-up was technology — in particular the rise of the synthesizer. Oakey and Mike Score, singer and synth player for A Flock of Seagulls (also on Regeneration), had similar moments of epiphany. “When I was a kid, I was into science fiction,” says Score, “and that’s what I wanted the band to sound like: from outer space, almost. And synthesizers were the newest, latest thing. I think I was the second person in Liverpool to have a synthesizer.”

GROUP IDENTITY Blade’s Fellowship band are a resolutely ego-less bunch.

You could find just about any kind of jazz you wanted on the three stages at the JVC Jazz Festival in Newport last weekend: jazz as heavy metal (Marco Benevento Trio), jazz as twee prog (Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey), jazz as history lesson (George Wein’s Newport All-Stars), jazz as avant-trad import (Empirical), jazz as pop funk (Herbie Hancock), jazz as magazine-cover glamor (Christian Scott, Esperanza Spalding), jazz as Latin diaspora (Guillermo Klein y Los Guachos), jazz as African bebop (Lionel Loueke), jazz as R&B (Aretha Fanklin), jazz as lingerie-buying background (Chris Botti), and jazz as jazz (Warren Vaché, Wayne Shorter, Sonny Rollins).

There were plenty of other spinoffs, but perhaps the most telling of any current trend was the post-rock contingent, which included Benevento, the Jacob Freds, Christian Scott’s quintet, and, most provocatively, the Brian Blade Fellowship. Blade is a first-call drummer among the jazz elite — he was also appearing at the festival as a regular member of the Wayne Shorter Quartet. But the Fellowship have been his pet project since their first disc in 1998. At the Pavilion Stage on Saturday, they played a chunk of their latest, Season of Changes (Verve). Led by Blade and composer/pianist John Cowherd, the line-up includes star guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, but this is a resolutely ego-less bunch. The songs suggest beautifully arranged and detailed folk rock, with carefully cued entrances and exits and layered, brooding themes.

The group ethic so predominates over the individual that the first song, “Stoner Hill,” was played straight through without a single solo. The Fellowship line-up also includes two crack reedmen — alto/bass-clarinet man Myron Walden and tenor-sax Melvin Butler — as well as one of the best drummers in jazz and a jazz-guitar visionary, so they can’t help sounding like jazz. But when you pretty much declare your indifference to the improvised solo, you’re discarding an idea that’s been central to the music since Louis Armstrong.

It hardly mattered — the Fellowship were compelling at just about every turn. Certainly the audience was unconcerned: the 500-plus who filled the chairs and overflowed the open sides of the Pavilion tent were rapt for the Fellowship’s 75 minutes on the stage. When Butler solo’d, it didn’t matter that his passage served more as a structural bridge than as improvised personal statement — the audience hooted and hollered anyway. By my watch, the first full-blown solo came from Rosenwinkel, nearly a half-hour into the set. (Although, as Ben Ratliff pointed out in his recent New York Times live review of the Fellowship, Blade improvises almost constantly.) Jazz is usually about how individual expression works within a band — but this project seems to be about the ensemble itself as a expressive statement.

NO, BUT SERIOUSLY For their current exploration of modern-day anxieties, Gintz and Burgess wrote
through the naive perspective of 19th-century America.

The two guys who make up Clawjob, bookish gents named Mike Gintz and Nick Burgess, have an unnerving tendency to describe something as funny when it’s anything but. As in, “There’s a funny Andrew Jackson speech where he’s explaining why Indian removal would be such a great thing for them.” The speech, says Burgess, was the inspiration for “Reservations,” the finale of Clawjob’s new EP, Manifest Destiny. “It’s horrifying to read.”

A Clawjobian description of Burgess & Gintz’s project might go something like this: “Their albums are funny concept pieces — a rock opera about a love triangle in outer space, a post-punk paean to the 19th century — that are really just veiled satires of human cruelty, environmental destruction, and the coming apocalypse.” Of course, as anyone who’s heard them can attest, Clawjob, who play at the Papercut Zine Library in Harvard Square this Friday, defy summary.

Burgess and Gintz met at BU freshman orientation in the summer of 1999 and started Clawjob as a joke during their sophomore year, recording an album of covers of mediocre ’90s songs played in the style of other bands — Lisa Loeb’s “Stay” as Limp Bizkit, Deep Blue Something’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” as “Mexican revolutionaries in the desert” — in their Warren Towers dorm rooms. Later that year, they recorded the entire soundtrack to the video game Mega Man 3 using guitars and computers — a painstaking process undertaken with limited technology. Project X, as they called it, was such a huge hit among the then-burgeoning video-game-remix community on the Internet that they decided to spend two more grueling months doing the Mega Man 2 soundtrack. Video-game-music fans (nerds) ate it up. “We knew at the time that if we ever made any non–Mega Man music, it would never be anywhere near as popular as that stuff,” Gintz recalls. Six years later, the Project X Web site still gets some 600 visitors a week.

In the fall of 2002, our heroes’ senior year, Gintz started the beloved Clickers, his first “real” band, and Clawjob/Project X fell by the wayside. After graduation, however, Gintz and Burgess got jobs at the same photography place in Newton. They began talking about old song snippets they had written in the dorms, how in their fragmented state they sounded as if they could be parts of a rock opera. Clawjob was (re)born.

FOLLOW THE LEADERS In the Geometry Wars sequel, the scores take center stage.

What makes a man lust for the high score? What primal urges drive him to submit to one punishing gameplay session after another, in a vain and almost certainly futile attempt to surmount the highest peak of video-gaming glory? It’s a question scientists may never answer. For now, we can only observe the effects of this phenomenon — and never more clearly than on the roiling leaderboards of Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2.

Geometry Wars 2 retains the spicy retro flavor of its predecessor while bringing several new entrees to the party. In each gameplay mode, the fundamentals are the same: you control a little C-shaped ship with the left analog stick while firing unlimited shots in any direction with the right stick. You’re confined to a small, rectangular area that quickly fills up with enemies to be blasted. (Each enemy is a basic geometric shape, hence the name.) Within that framework, however, developer Bizarre Creations has found plenty of room to experiment.

“Evolved” mode is the one that will be familiar to those who played the first Geometry Wars, and it follows the most traditional rules. You start with three lives and a handful of screen-clearing bombs, earning more of each as you reach certain score markers. Ever more challenging waves of enemies spawn at intervals, until the screen is saturated and your ship is a microsecond from destruction at all times.

By itself, “Evolved” is enough for an entire game, and indeed that was the case with the original. A few tweaks make it seem new. Previously, you earned score multipliers only by blasting prescribed quantities of enemies. This time, shattered foes drop “geoms,” little jewels that increase your multiplier by one. Not only does this change result in stratospherically higher scores, it also creates an incentive to keep moving instead of trying to cover your flank in the map’s corners.

HIGH-QUALITY CINEMA Great stop-motion animation is better than bad CGI.

A long time ago, on a bricks-and-mortar soundstage far, far away, the last great Star Wars movie was made. The sad truth is that, since that day in 1982, many of the parodies, mockumentaries, riffs, mash-ups, and fanboy homages out there in interstellar cyberspace have been far better than any actual Star Wars film.

Hardware Wars, Spaceballs, Chad Vader, The Family Guy’s “Blue Harvest” episode, Eddie Izzard’s “Death Star Cantina” bit (the stand-up version, or the Lego re-enactment) — each is more entertaining than, say, that awful Attack of the Clones scene where Anakin and Padmé go ga-ga, gamboling with the tick-cows in a digitally rendered Naboo field. Or, I suspect, the forthcoming computer-animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars, in which George Lucas finally surrenders to his CGI fetish and gets rid of live human beings entirely.

One of the best parodies around is Seth Green & Matthew Senreich’s stop-motion Robot Chicken: Star Wars (Warner), which aired on Adult Swim last summer and has just been released on DVD. One almost wonders whether it’s as good as it is because of or in spite of Lucas’s blessing and participation.

First, fair warning: the main feature here is over quickly. It’s just 22 rapid-fire minutes. But the extras, which include deleted scenes and short making-of documentaries about production design, puppet fabrication, and stop motion, are just as entertaining.

For a show as gleefully crude as this one, it’s remarkable how much work and craftsmanship go into each lightning-fast set piece. But it’s also worth remembering that the clunky, labor-intensive look of stop-motion animation is really cool — especially to older Star Wars geeks who were weaned simultaneously on Ray Harryhausen fantasy fare, like 1981’s Clash of the Titans. And certainly in comparison to the stylized, facile-looking 1’s and 0’s that Lucas now adores. His added CGI scenes tainted the late-’90s re-releases of the original trilogy; computer effects were relied on far, far too heavily in the prequel trilogy; and the digital animation in The Clone Wars — at least in the clips I’ve seen — seems blocky and cheap. But that’s just one fan’s opinion.

A fan who’s also of the opinion that these quick-cut shorts, some only a few seconds long, are funnier than an open-mic night at the Mos Eisley: a Saturday-morning commercial for Admiral Ackbar cereal (with imitation crabmeat!); a late-nite ad for Max Rebo’s Greatest Hits (with obligatory Joey Fatone duet); Boba Fett, helmet off, coming on to a carbonite-frozen Han Solo; a Bespin weather forecast (“Cloud City will be cloudy this evening, followed by clouds”); Emperor Palpatine ordering take-out while ripping Darth Vader a new asshole for getting the Death Star blown up (“That thing wasn’t even paid off yet! Do you have any idea what that’s gonna do to my credit?”).

• FULL STORY: Ready or not (mostly not): Beijing says it's ready for the Olympics. Uh, really, Beijing? By Sara Faith Alterman.
• SPECIAL SECTION: China, Tibet, and the Olympics

Beijing 2008
Photo: Sara Faith Alterman

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Our correspondents spent three 10-hour days under the sun in Chicago’s Grant Park documenting performances by Cat Power, Grizzly Bear, Brazilian Girls, Gnarls Barkley, Broken Social Scene, Radiohead, and more.

Lollapalooza 2008
Black Kids
Photo by Melissa Pocek

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The most popular adjectives with which to describe North Korea are "Orwellian," "paranoid," and "totalitarian." "Repressive" and "isolated" get ample play, as do "dystopian" and "Kafkaesque." Christopher Hitchens once described it as a "slave state." Dubya name-checked it in his infamous "axis of evil" speech. Let’s add another to the list: surreal.
 
Life in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), to use its official title, revolves around the personality cult of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung -- who was rather absurdly made president for life after his death in 1994 -- and that of his son and successor Kim Jong Il. Kim the younger is usually referred to as the General or Dear Leader, but has also been variously described by the Korean Central News Agency as the Sun of the 21st Century, the Highly Intelligent and Almighty Leader, the Greatest Personifier of Human Wisdom, the Incarnation of Might Displaying Infinite Creative Ability, and Top Brain of the Socio-Political Organism. 
 
In the capital Pyongyang, your tour group (there’s no other way to enter but on an officially sanctioned tour) will cheerily clap along as your shy guide, exhibiting all the undisguised nervousness of a karaoke virgin, balances at the front of the bus while warbling the cheery Korean song “Pan Gap Seumnida,” or “Pleased To Meet You.” Should your country ever cross swords with hers, however, rest assured that she would have no qualms about mowing you down with an AK-47. The DPRK is permanently on a war footing, and all outsiders are viewed with suspicion.
 
Souvenir hunting proves tricky, and foreign visitors are kept clear of shops frequented by everyday folk. Books, all published by the state propaganda department are available (big seller: the snappily titled The American Imperialists Started The Korean War). Postage stamps are also popular, especially a design -- frequently sold out -- featuring former US President Richard Nixon being stabbed in the eye with a pen. Splash out on a beer with lunch and, should the eatery be short of Euros or Chinese yuan (foreign visitors are not permitted to handle North Korean Won, and US dollars are a political no-no), you could get two more beers as your change.
 
And while China has marshaled its masses to provide cheap labor for the rest of the world, thereby becoming an economic superpower, the DPRK invests an estimated 200 million of its people’s man-hours each year in a choreographed extravaganza of gymnastics, music and dancing. That way the politically vetted elite permitted to reside in Pyongyang can watch kids in fuchsia leotards doing back-flips through hula-hoops. They call it the Mass Games, and it’s the most surreal sight in the most bizarre nation on the planet.

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Spiritualized know how to bring their aural soundscapes alive in real time and space. Add strobe lights, psychedelic shapes, and an audience dancing as one and you have the perfect night out. (Click here to read the full review.)

Spiritualized
July 30, 2008 at the Roxy
Photos: Derek Kouyoumijian

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Thanks to the Olympics, the world’s attention is trained as it never has been before on China, the superpower that many believe will economically and politically dominate the 21st century, just as the United States dominated the 20th. For those, such as myself, with deep misgivings about what this international transformation of power and influence will entail, the plight of Tibet — its people, its environment, its religious and cultural traditions — provides a sobering lesson in reality.

It is difficult to imagine an American — perhaps any Westerner — with a greater sympathy for, and understanding of, Tibet than scholar-activist Robert Thurman, a Columbia University professor who also happens to be the first American ever to be ordained a Buddhist monk. Presiding over Thurman’s ordination was the Dalai Lama, then as now the spiritual and temporal ruler of Tibet, who has lived in exile for the past 49 years, following a failed uprising against the Chinese, who entered the nation in the 1950s.

Thurman’s most recent book, Why the Dalai Lama Matters (Atria/Beyond Words), is the fruit of a 45-year-long friendship between the two men. A week before the beginning of the Olympics, I spent an hour on the phone with Thurman discussing intersecting issues that concern China, Tibet, and the world. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation.

When you speak, can readers assume that you are speaking for the Dalai Lama?
Not precisely. I quote the Dalai Lama frequently to support many of my points. I also have other inspirations. I want him to have plausible deniability in terms of his formal relations with the Chinese. The Chinese, however, do not seem interested in negotiation. They like to preach and to scold — it is hard to get a word in edgewise. My aim is to explain to people what the Dalai Lama wants without making the Dalai Lama responsible for my explanation. For example, take the case of [the Paramount Leader of the People’s Republic of China] Hu Jintao. When I say that the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu would nominate Hu Jintao for a Nobel Peace Prize if he or any other Chinese leader had the balls to stop acting like a 19th-century imperial power or a 20th-century superpower wannabe, I am explaining a course of action that would quite naturally result if the Chinese began acting in a humane way and granted the Tibetan people autonomy. I’m suggesting what the Dalai Lama might do, could do, and what would follow.

Most of the job-related fears that keep journalists up at night are relatively mundane. We worry about getting scooped, making factual errors, pissing off the occasional source or story subject. But on rare occasions, a more ominous scenario presents itself — namely, the possibility that our reporting could cause actual harm to someone we cover.

In a grim front-page piece published in the Sunday, August 3, edition of the Boston Globe, columnist Kevin Cullen wrestled with just this concern. Cullen’s subject was the death of Rakan Hassan, a 14-year-old Iraqi boy who was brought to Boston for medical treatment in 2005, after a mistaken attack by US soldiers killed his parents and left him paralyzed.

Cullen had written about Hassan before, in a series of stories that detailed his evacuation from Iraq, recuperation at Massachusetts General and Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospitals, and return to his home city of Mosul. Those pieces — published in 2006, before Cullen was tapped as a metro columnist — were models of great feature writing: highly readable, packed with evocative detail, touching but never maudlin.

This story was different. Hassan, Cullen told his readers, had been killed earlier this summer, in a bomb blast at his family’s home. As the story progressed, Cullen explored whether Hassan’s Boston caretakers should have allowed him to return to Iraq — and whether the Globe’s coverage of Hassan’s story might have somehow led to his death.

“All of us who cared about this boy, who loved this boy, are left to wonder: did we do something, however unwittingly, that got him killed?” Cullen wrote. “Did somebody somehow read Rakan’s story, maybe online, and set out to kill him and his family, to prove that anybody who takes sweets or help or anything from the Americans is a collaborator who shall die the death of an infidel?”

After mentioning other potential factors that may have made Hassan a target (his treatment by US Army physicians stationed in Iraq; his brother-in-law’s security job with the Iraqi government), Cullen concluded that the motivations of Hassan’s killers might never be known. But then, a few paragraphs later, he found himself returning to the question: “Would he still be alive if I didn’t write about him? If Michele McDonald’s beautiful photos of him never appeared in this newspaper?”

Photo illustration by K. Banks.

When the 21st century is old enough to support a sense of historical perspective, the date 8/8/08 may well be more significant than 9/11. The Olympic Games, which begin today, mark China’s modern coming of age.

“Modern” is an important qualification. As the planet’s oldest civilization with a recognizable sense of continuity, China has seen glory before. Gunpowder, paper, printing, and the compass were all products of its ancient genius. But for much of modern history, China was a nation on the margins: misunderstood and discounted, shamelessly exploited by Western powers and brutally pillaged by the Japanese.

Chairman Mao Zedong changed that — though it takes a strong constitution to stomach the murderous nature of his achievement.

Mao brought China neither peace nor prosperity. His Soviet-inspired agricultural policies led to famine; his Cultural Revolution transformed the country into a massive concentration camp. Median estimates of the total number dead as a result of Mao’s will and whim float around 50 million — give or take 10 million. Whatever the body count, most historians agree that Mao was the greatest mass murderer of all time.

It was Mao’s perverse achievement to forge in the smithy of the ancient Chinese soul the makings of a reconstituted superpower. Whether the nation’s ascendancy is because of Mao or in spite of him is almost irrelevant. The DNA is too tight to unravel, the duality too synthesized to deconstruct. Mao, or a version of him, is China. China, in some manifestation, is Mao. Mao’s embalmed corpse on display under glass in a mausoleum in Tiananmen Square taps into the Confucian ideal of ancestor reverence, and yet also transcends it. Mao, the great helmsman, washes all other ancestors with his wake.

The cult of Mao is a form of zombie politics; it is part of the voodoo employed by the shrewd, sophisticated bureaucrats who command the Middle Kingdom. They are, by Mao’s standards, faceless. The art of ruling the world’s most populous nation is to be one of a crowd. (During the terror of the Cultural Revolution, only Mao’s favor could save one from the chaos; to survive, the individual had to melt into the mob. Its memory disciplines the masses.)

China today is a dragon with a capitalist head and a communist heart. It is a living, breathing, thriving contradiction. Because the dragon is rising (the metaphor is no less apt because it is melodramatic), its momentum tends to mask its weak spots.

Illustration by Chad Crowe.

For the next month, self-important columnists will station themselves in Beijing and argue over which country established itself as the world’s biggest sporting superpower this summer — the United States, China, or maybe even Russia.

But — news flash — the contest is already over. The winner is (drum roll, please) . . . Spain. This surprise sporting development tells us something about the diminishing role of the Olympic Games in the modern sports world, the power shift going on in Europe, and even something about the state of the current presidential campaign.

True, Spain won’t win all that many medals at the upcoming Games — but that’s beside the point. Despite all the hype about to smother the planet like a Beijing smog cloud, the Olympics will soon be unmasked as the overrated spectacle it is — one that is also long past its modern heyday, which occurred in an era when there were few other international competitions.

Today, of course, is much different. In terms of the intensity of worldwide interest, the Olympics pale in comparison with such events as soccer’s World Cup, and even the world cups for cricket and rugby. In the US, the Olympics do draw decent ratings, but mostly from a non-traditional-sports-fan demographic (i.e., women), attracted to both the “up close and personal” network portraits of the athletes and the focus on events that seem less physical than conventional sports (i.e., gymnastics).

But this year, even the patience of traditional US Olympics fans will be tested. Because of the 12-hour time difference between Beijing and the East Coast, most of the winners will be known via the Internet long before the events themselves are actually telecast here. Meanwhile, the audiences for any network television event are diminishing by the year — thanks to competition from the Web, cable, and other outlets.

So, even if the Chinese emerge as the upstart athletic power they have been quietly boasting they are, or the US once again fends off all challengers, fewer are likely to care than ever before — outside of China, of course.

A new armada
On the other hand, the Spanish have already won this summer’s triple crown, a feat that hardly raised a flicker of interest in the States, but that in many other parts of the world counted for a lot more than a bushel-full of Olympic hardware.

With Beijing 2008 finally at hand, China’s Tibetan occupation remains Hollywood’s cause célèbre. And why wouldn’t it be? Which other oppressed minority has the Beastie Boys, Michael Stipe, and Richard Gere as spokespeople, and a spiritual leader who’s played Lollapalooza?

But all this focus on Tibet sells Beijing short in the Nasty Oppression Global Standings. Under Paramount Leader Hu Jintao’s big, secure tent, there’s room for all of China’s recognized minorities, dissidents, journalists, unapproved religions, and trade unionists to have their land and resources encroached upon and their spirits, souls, and possessions (as well as fingers) crushed! Wielding the catch-all charges of splittism, organizing and leading a counterrevolutionary group, and illegally providing state secrets (a handy one for those nosy journalists), Dai Lo (that’s “Big Brother” in Cantonese) has effectively sidelined all critics of the party. (If the various crimes and statutes are too confusing, just remember the maxim that guides lawful Chinese citizens: Hu’s Your Daddy.)

Though Beijing’s enemies — at least those who haven’t been bred out of existence through intermarriage with China’s Han majority — are way too numerous to list, consider the following four non-Tibetan religious, ethnic, and intellectual minorities a sort of Olympic qualifying heat. In order to advance Beijing’s “Harmonious Society” in preparation for the 2008 Games, members of these groups have been locked up, exiled, or have disappeared altogether. Enjoy the synchronized swimming!

Uighurs
The Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) contains China’s largest reserves of oil, natural gas, and coal. To meet mounting Chinese energy demand, Beijing’s building an 1100-mile pipeline to funnel natural gas from both the XUAR and its energy-rich Central Asian neighbors Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan.

The pipeline and attendant urbanization of Xinjiang are tied to the Western Development Strategy, a Chinese government plan to move millions of Han Chinese (who make up 92 percent of China’s estimated 1.3 billion people) to Xinjiang. The Han have claimed the bulk of the jobs extracting the area’s resources. Thus, much like their Tibetan neighbors, the native Turkic Muslim Uighur minority has been marginalized in their own homeland.

As it does with other minority areas, Beijing ostensibly treats Xinjiang as an autonomous region. Uighurs can worship in state-approved Mosques and become Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members. But when Uighurs second-guess Beijing, they are quickly reprimanded. Rebiya Kadeer, a former high-ranking party member who questioned the income disparity between Uighurs and Hans, was charged with sharing state secrets for mailing newspaper clips to her exiled husband in the United States. After serving six years, Kadeer was allowed — as a condition of Condoleezza Rice’s 2005 state visit to China — to join her husband in Washington, DC. After her release, however, Beijing locked up two of Kadeer’s sons on trumped-up charges. They are hardly alone. In 2004, Uighur journalist Nurmuhemmet Yasin received a 10-year prison sentence for inciting separatism. His transgression? Writing a short story about a caged bird that yearns for freedom.

The 2004 United States Olympic basketball team featured such high-priced NBA pros as Tim Duncan and Allen Iverson — but barely limped to a bronze medal by beating Lithuania. The vaunted ’08 squad, meanwhile — featuring Kobe Bryant (who couldn’t play in ’04 thanks to his since-dismissed rape trial) and LeBron James — looks like it might be poised to suffer a similar indignity: they recently only eked a win against an Australian team that had its best guy resting on the bench.

Then there’s the Jamaican bobsled team, who, in the 1988 Calgary Winter Games, didn't even finish a run to officially qualify — the only team out of 26 nations to DQ. They became the darlings of the Games, and their story was made into a Disney flick starring John Candy. (Er, you win some, you lose some.)

Point being, sometimes we’d rather root for the unknowns, the underdogs, and the uniques than the professional jerks who are only competing to sweeten their endorsement deals. Here, then, in honor of China’s love for the auspicious number eight (the Beijing games are to kick off this Friday, August 8, 2008, at 8:08:08 pm), are eight athletes from around the world you may or may not have heard of.

MA LIN, CHINA, TABLE TENNIS
“Boring, dry, and extremely effective,” Ma’s official bio describes his style of play. Uh, whatever happened to “Swifter, Higher, Stronger?” No matter. Ma, who joined the Chinese national team 14 years ago (at age 14), is a ruthless competitor. He “isn’t trying to please a crowd,” he’s just gunning for a win. We still think we could beat him at beer pong after a few keg cups of Milwaukee’s Best.

LUMINIŢA DINU, ROMANIA, HANDBALL
Dinu, whose name means “little light,” is a blindingly popular figure in Romanian handball. Indeed, she’s considered the greatest goalkeeper in that country’s history. But don’t take our word for it — consider the following news account: “Două dintre componentele de bază ale echipei naţionale de handbal feminin a României, portarul Luminiţa Huţupan Dinu şi pivotul Ionela Gâlcă Stanca, nu au fost convocate în lotul tricolorelor pentru returul cu Islanda, din barajul de calificare la Campionatul European 2008.” (We’re assuming you speak Romanian.)

RICHARD “STUBBY” CLAPP, CANADA, BASEBALL
This is probably Olympic baseball’s last stand. The International Olympic Committee has voted to remove the sport from the 2012 London games. Still, the Washington Post reports, “players and USA Baseball officials are optimistic that a clean, competitive tournament in Beijing will help to convince the IOC that the sport holds valuable global interest and deserves to be included in future Olympics.” Rather than the Americans, though, it may actually be the Canadians who change people’s minds. Make that one Canadian — if a 35-year-old veteran of the Edmonton Cracker-Cats with a name like Stubby Clapp can’t save Olympic baseball, no one can.

Facebook follies
I’m still chuckling to myself thinking about how true the “Not-So-Pretty Facebook” article (News and Features, July 18) rang. Seriously, why are we friending people on this medium that we barely knew in high school, or maybe didn’t even like? And why the need to broadcast every last feeling, thought, meal ate, song heard, and heartbreak to our current status?

It’s absurd, and yet when I log onto Facebook in the morning before I start my day, it feels like walking into a big party where I know everyone there. It’s also a fun distraction, but there is a balance to be achieved, of course, between “tastemaking” and oversharing.

Put in its proper place (I’m not including the time I couldn’t sleep and was up at 4 am adding flair to my profile), at this point, I’d rather live with Facebook than without! Thanks for all the truisms and the Friday laugh.
Rachel Lombardo
Manchester-by-the-Sea

It seems Sharon Steel’s issues are not with Facebook, but with her own high school–esque insecurities. While everyone would agree that Facebook is a gossip fest, it seems she dedicates entirely too much time and thought to her social-networking-site presence.

I’ve never stressed over what people would think of me based on my profiles, even when my psycho older sister and my former boss added me as a friend. My privacy levels are set so that potential employers can’t search for me on either site, but I still posted the pictures of me in a pink cowboy hat at the recent Gay Pride parade! These sites are for fun and keeping in touch with faraway friends, a point the author seems to have forgotten. I read the article a few times looking for a hint of sarcasm but didn’t find any; I’m hoping Ms. Steel exaggerated her Facebook woes to make a better story.

There are more legitimate concerns about Facebook, a great example being their creepy online tracking system that posted what you purchased from certain Web sites. I was none too happy to be a member of a site that employed a 1984 Big Brother marketing feature. It was highly protested and I believe it has been removed, but who knows what they’ll come up with next?
Theresa Condito
Somerville

I read your Facebook article with interest, but it seemed overblown to me. Folks like Emily Gould and Julia Allison would be overwrought oversharers with or without the Internet. And people who lament over Internet insecurities probably are insecure in other aspects of life, too.

Greetings, Olympic sports fans! You are out there, aren’t you? NBC Universal sure hopes you are. Because if you aren’t, and you decide to spend the next three weeks watching anything except the hammer-throw quarterfinals, heat six of the women’s 4-x-400 relay, and profiles of the Hungarian dressage team, there are going to be some TV executives committing suicide. Well, assisted suicide, maybe. If you’re a Nielsen viewer, there might even be a camera in your house — and if it catches you switching to Greatest American Dog during the trampoline semifinal, an animatronic chain will yank a pin from a grenade crammed in the mouth of whichever NBC marketing executive promised a 17 share to the suits upstairs at 30 Rock.

So, lives are in your hands. No one is telling you what to do, but think twice before you turn on Don’t Forget the Lyrics!, or any other non-Olympic programming for that matter, next week. Besides, it’s not like the Olympics are completely boring. True, the actual sporting competitions have lately taken a back seat, drama-wise, to the question of whether terrorists will strike during the Games, or whether the budget can be managed by the IOC without two dollars out of every three ending up in mysterious accounts in Antigua, or whether Chinese guards will bayonet free-Tibet protesters along the torch route, or, indeed, whether NBC will be felled by yet another disappointing ratings showing. But that’s not to say the athletes aren’t providing some sordid entertainment themselves.

In fact, just like regular athletes, Olympians frequently rack up ugly arrests. Who can forget these anti-heroes of sports-crime?

The lover’s lane rapist
This was a recent one, actually. Alvin Henry was a one-time Olympic sprinter, a New Yorker who ran for Trinidad and Tobago. He went to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney on the T&T 4-x-100 team, but never actually ran in the Games. He returned to America, however, and did some running there. This past month, Henry was arrested 16 days after a rape in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, when the victim identified him while riding around the park with police. Henry had allegedly raped the woman at gunpoint and was a suspect in numerous other sexual assaults dating back to 2003. The unknown serial rapist had been called the “Lover’s Lane Rapist” because he frequently targeted women he had seen having sex with their boyfriends in the park — he told one of the victims he had taped her in the act. “I knew something wasn’t right with him,” Henry’s cousin told New York papers.

SÃO PAULO ROCK CITY? “It’s our home, we love it — but I think everyone in the band feels that
every time we come back, nothing’s really changed.”

CSS guitarist Luiza Sá is resting in New York City, on a rare break from her band’s non-stop tour, and reminiscing about the first song they played at their first rehearsal: Madonna’s “Hollywood.” “We met up to rehearse, we were all in the living room, and we’re like, let’s just play something to see how it sounds. And then [CSS vocalist] Lovefoxxx came in wearing a Motörhead T-shirt — I think she was scared that we were going to be all ‘Rock and roll, grrrr!’ — and we turned to her and said, ‘Hey, we just learned Madonna’s “Hollywood,” ’ and she was so happy about it, just ‘Oh, thank God!’ ”

Said songs are fun and wacky; they’re also naively naughty. “Fuck Off Is Not the Only Thing You Have To Show” is all the more insanely catchy for its nutty use of the English language. “When we did the first album, we didn’t speak English all the time, so we could say a lot of shit and we didn’t realize it. Now, we’re not the same people because we’ve toured a lot, and we speak English all the time, and the new album shows that. The first album we recorded not really even considering that we were going to tour; and then we toured so much that we changed as musicians. This new album is much more organic, much more how we sound live. We’re not being all serious and trying to start a revolution, you know. It’s still us, we’re just a little bit more mature.”

As indie rock extends its colonial gaze eastward, ravishing (in several senses) the musics of the Balkans, Russia, and (increasingly) Southeast Asia and Indonesia for their odd meters, gudoks, and slendro scales, you can’t help feeling that, despite all the gusto and the well-intentioned curiosity, something essential’s getting squandered in the fusion. If much of the fervor over Eastern adventures mounted by bands from Brooklyn seems charitable, meet Alina Simone — who, despite being Ukraine-born and now residing in Brooklyn, considers herself “a Boston person,” having grown up in Medford. On her newest album, Everyone Is Crying Out to Me, Beware (54°40’ or Fight!), she may have discovered the easiest (and most difficult) strategy for preserving the power of music from elsewhere: language.

Those who see the opacity of a foreign language as prohibitive to their enjoyment have probably overdosed on shittily produced Starbucks-ready “world music.” The language barrier is no hazard when it comes to Simone, whose voice (despite an American accent that I can’t detect but that she swears is there when she sings Russian) quivers and hovers around its unfamiliar phonetic terrain while deftly conveying the dark, frustrated emotions of the songs — each one a cover of Siberian-born punk-folk singer Yanka Dyagileva. Along the way, searing guitars creep, trumpets swoon, moody backdrops unfurl, and scratchy hard-struck acoustics light up each track with arresting immediacy. It’s no act of tourism.

While living in Hoboken, Simone hopped the F-train to Brighton Beach — her first entry into a predominantly Russian community since departing Ukraine at the age of one. “I was in a state of shock,” she says, at seeing signs in Cyrillic and hearing couples conversing in Russian and, especially, the music of the street performers. They weren’t playing the “thinly veiled political songs” Simone had endured from her parents’ hi-fi. (Her father, a Russian ex-pat, fled to the US after his rejection of a KGB recruitment overture — and “flagrantly checking out of books from the library” — landed him on its blacklist.) It was straight-up indie rock, but in Russian, odd in its competing familiarities. The performers invited Simone to Manhattan’s Elbow Room, where a steady stream of Russian rock was carving out a niche. There, she was given a cassette with some Yanka songs.

Eli “Paperboy” Reed seems dubious about my following him for a few hours before and after his five o’clock Lollapalooza show in Chicago’s Grant Park last Sunday. “I’m not doing anything,” he says, looking up from two girls he’s chatting to as I walk up. I dispel his fears that I’m looking to play Rock Band with an up-and-coming R&B star. If he wants, we can just have a quick chat.

Reed says goodbye quickly and we’re off to his band the True Loves’ dressing room. But we’re inside just long enough to compliment the A/C — God’s gift to August — when he observes we’ve only 20 minutes to snag grub from the buffet. We’re up again and moving.

Actually, Eli Reed seems dubious about my being able to write an interesting article about him at all. While I’m eating lunch with him and the True Loves, he keeps asking, “What’s this article about again?”, his eyebrows raised over rectangular, bank-teller glasses that he eschews during performances. It’s no wonder — pretty much anything written on the guy (a) calls him a Jewish kid from Massachusetts or (b) compares him with any number of soul legends from the ’60s or (c) calls him a Jewish (!) kid (!!) from Massachusetts who likes gospel music (!!R.U.F’NKIDDING?!?!). Yet according to Eli, the Dutch have US writers beat with the compact headline: “Courageous Jew Guy Knows What To Do With Jesus Music.”

“So, what’s this article about again?” I tell him I’ve been thinking about Monterey Pop, the difference between . . .

“Otis! And I’m gonna be Otis! Say this [hands up and swooping for emphasis]: ‘ELI REED SAYS HE’S BETTER THAN OTIS!’ Say that, put that in the article.” The band and I giggle, and for a second I zone out thinking about Otis Redding at the Monterey Pop Festival singing “I’ve Been Loving You.” Shot on 16mm, D.A. Pennebaker’s famous footage of the performance catches Otis from the back during part of this song, the 25-year-old (six months from death) bending and swaying, his body fighting against (reaching out to?) an insistent spotlight that cuts his silhouette and overtakes the frame, blinding the viewer.

“I mean, obviously, Monterey was important because it was the moment that all these boundaries came down.” Musical boundaries, Eli means, the moment when the folk festivals and the rock festivals and the country festivals and the soul festivals and whatever genre we’re putting Ravi Shankar in came together and decided to be one big lollapalooza.

Milli-selling rapgoblin Lil Wayne probably didn’t worry too much about borrowing the Rolling Stones’ “Play with Fire” for the hook of his track “Playing with Fire.” Hell, it wasn’t even a sample. He hired R&B sublegend Betty Wright to sing it, shuffled some words around, changed the tune a bit, and called it fair. In the grand scheme of hip-hop infringement, it seems like a mere trifle.

But no! A suit has been filed against Mr. W.F. Baby and Universal Records seeking undisclosed damages in return for their reckless theft. Aside from the copyright issue, Wayne had the indecency to use ripped-off Stones lyrics alongside “explicit, sexist, and offensive” language, something of which the Stones would surely never approve. But wait! Before you accuse the Stones of being huge fucking hypocrites, consider this: the senior rockers lost the publishing rights to their entire pre-1970 catalogue decades ago, and they most likely have nothing to do with this lawsuit. (In fact, they just signed a huge contract with Universal.) A far more malevolent force is at work.

I’m guessing Weezy didn’t realize how appropriate the title “Play with Fire” is. In releasing a track that borrowed from classic Stones (however lightly), he not only played with fire, he stirred the wrath of someone whose strongarm tactics over the years have earned him a reputation as one of the most sinister, bellicose volcano gods of the recording industry. ABKCO Music holds the rights to an exceedingly valuable catalogue, one that includes the classic work of the Stones and Sam Cooke plus material by many other eminently reissuable ’60s hitmakers. It’s quite a nest egg, and ABKCO defends it like an angry mother eagle.

ABKCO is the brainchild of Allen Klein, a classic supervillain of the music biz who spent a few years handling the business affairs of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles before bitterly alienating them with self-serving management and ugly dealings. Klein’s first major taste of infringement litigation put him on the wrong side of the courtroom; while he was managing George Harrison, he was involved in the famed “subconscious plagiarism” suit regarding the ex-Beatle’s hit single “My Sweet Lord,” for which Harrison had unintentionally used the tune of the Chiffons’ 1963 hit “He’s So Fine.” Bright Tunes, the owner of the “He’s So Fine” publishing rights, had a strong case and stood to make millions.

YOUR PROBLEM “I know we’re making quality music, and if people don’t like it, they’re just wrong.”

Strange hairdos aside, you’d be hard-pressed to find a link between Melvins frontman Roger “Buzz” Osborne (a/k/a King Buzzo) and 13th-century theologian St. Thomas Aquinas. But over the phone from a tour stop in central California, the 44-year-old singer/guitarist loosely paraphrases the Dominican friar in summing up his band’s long, bizarre career: “Basically it’s like, if you get what we’re doing, then no explanation is necessary, and if you don’t, then no explanation is possible.”

That’s true. The more-than-30 full-length albums and EPs the LA-via-Washington band have issued since 1984 defy all attempts to define their style or determine their genre or even say what the bleep is going on. That hasn’t stopped people from trying, however. The Melvins’ sound is most often reduced to either “stoner rock” or a slow, Sabbathy sludge “that begat grunge.” Both of which it has been, at various points, but such descriptions don’t take into account the forays into menacing ambient/industrial creepiness, thrashy noise punk, trippy psych freakouts, and even something approaching pop, however skewed and darkly humored — experiments that can all pop up on the same album. It’s like watching one of David Lynch’s baffling cinematic sequences: you’re better off just enjoying the strange ride than stopping to try to figure it out.

Which brings us to the band’s new Nude with Boots (Ipecac). The one-two opening punch of “The Kicking Machine” (with its Zeppelin-style boogie rock) and “Billy Fish” (built on a guitar riff very like the one in Stone Temple Pilots’ “Plush”) would seem to augur a quasi-conventional outing. But that turns out to be a tease. “Dog Island” writhes in an electronic-dappled tarpit for nearly eight minutes, and the unsettling instrumental “Dies Irae” summons demons quicker than that puzzle box in Hellraiser. The nimble, comparatively speedy “Suicide in Progress” and the title track might be some of the Melvins’ catchier work, but then there’s the soothing “Flush,” which sounds like whales and birds swimming together in ocean depths, and the howling, clattering closer, “It Tastes Better Than the Truth,” which sounds as if it had been recorded during the Spanish Inquisition.

In other words, it’s another killer Melvins album, and another killer Melvins album that’ll probably sell fewer copies in our lifetime than Coldplay move in an hour. “We’ve been far more adventurous than most bands, and paid the price for it as well,” says Buzz. “It’s strange. It’s something that I’m used to, I guess, but you just hafta realize that, you know, I’ve always been right about everything I’ve done in life, and I’m still right. We’ve never been welcomed with open arms, but I don’t care. I know we’re making quality music, and if people don’t like it, they’re just wrong.”

FEY APPEAL Pegg’s may be the famous name, but the real discovery here is Jessica Hynes.

Simon Pegg is funny. Anyone who’s seen Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz knows that. So why has it taken us so long to find out about Jessica Hynes? Known by her maiden name, Stevenson, back when she created the BBC series Spaced with Pegg and director Edgar Wright in 1999, Hynes is a comedy dynamo: pratfalling, deadpanning, and decked out in thrift-store chic, she’s a little like a North London Tina Fey.

It’s a mystery why Spaced: The Complete Series (BBC) has taken this long to be released stateside on DVD. As Saturday Night Live’s Bill Hader says, in an effusive packet of press blurbage from high-profile fans (Patton Oswalt, Diablo Cody, Eddie Izzard, Judd Apatow), Spaced is “the show we American comedians watch and say, ‘How the hell did they get away with this?!’ ”

For Spaced novices: Pegg plays Tim Bisley, a comic-book artist who works in a comic-book shop (with a boss whose name is Bilbo Bagshot). Hynes is Daisy Steiner, a writer who doesn’t do a whole lot of writing — she’s far too busy being bubbly and babbling, doting over her miniature schnauzer, Colin.

Tim and Daisy, platonic friends, decide to pose as a “professional couple” so they can apply for an exclusive apartment. Not that their landlady, Marsha (played to pickled perfection by Julia Deakin), who’s never without a bottle of wine in one hand and a lit fag in the other, is all that picky. They get the flat and soon find themselves neighbors with Brian Topp (Mark Heap), a conceptual artist who deals in “anger, pain, fear, and aggression.” (“Watercolours?” Daisy asks. No, he says. “It’s a bit more complex than that.”) Tim’s best mate, Mike Watt (Nick Frost), a militaristic geek with detached retinas, and Daisy’s fashionista friend Twist (“my parents were hippies”), played by Katy Carmichael, round out the cast.

Over Spaced’s two too-short seasons, we follow the quotidian existences of these six characters, who co-exist, as one promotional blurb puts it, “in a world perched precariously on the edge of normality.” But though these humdrum lives may lack a certain élan, they’re related to us with a cartoonish joie de vivre: flashbacks and flash-forwards, jump cuts, rapid-fire edits. Tim is a video-game addict and a movie geek, and the funniest thing about Spaced is how these banal lives — clumsy romantic entanglements, joblessness, procrastination — are presented using the language of silver-screen epics, sci-fi movies, and horror flicks.

CRYING TIME FFIV is one of few games of its era to evoke real emotions.

They say there are no new ideas in Hollywood, but when it comes to advancing sequels, remakes, and general nostalgia exploitation at the expense of more creative concepts, the major motion-picture studios have nothing on the video-game industry. Square Enix has now released its fourth different iteration of the landmark game Final Fantasy IV, this time for the Nintendo DS in all its 3-D graphic glory. In the video-game world, however, it makes sense to update these things, and FFIV both retains its original charm and feels upgraded enough to justify revisiting.

Cecil is a troubled Dark Knight in the monarchy of Baron. Already ambivalent about Baron’s “might makes right” policy, Cecil finally snaps after the king — who’s been acting odd lately — orders him out to sack a peaceful magic-loving village. To quell an uprising, the king sends Cecil and his lifelong friend Kain on what seems an insignificant mission, though in fact it will take them on an epic journey involving brainwashing, bratty ninjas, spoony bards, romance, airships, trips to the moon, and ultimately, self-discovery.

This wasn’t the Square folks’ first attempt at a grand story line, and it wouldn’t be their last, but in 1991 its scope and ambition were unprecedented. The characters range from the noble Cecil to the eccentric Cid to the mysterious, wise Lunarian FuSoYa. The romance between Cecil and his girlfriend Rosa is hardly matched in subsequent FF entries. Indeed, FFIV is one of a few games of the era to evoke real emotions; when two characters sacrificed themselves for the greater good, I nearly burst into tears. The dialogue has been retranslated to clarify certain situations, but some of the character development feels a touch rushed. The narrative economy works here, however — the game is long enough as it is.

In the development process, Square focused on the storyline, so combat and gameplay get short shrift. Several staples of the RPG genre are absent. Characters aren’t especially customizable; for the most part their abilities are fixed. You don’t even get to control which spells the magic users learn. The story also dictates which characters are in your party at a given time — which means you have to battle monsters with what you have. Random battle encounters, standard in the ’90s but a relic today, have survived into this edition, and they annoy with their frequency. And the battles against the scrub monsters can get repetitive. But the boss battles more than compensate. These require strategy, planning, and creativity, as you seek to find and exploit some specific unusual weakness, such as whether a spell is effective when reflected back against the user, or whether a particular weapon can produce a one-hit kill.