Cerebral Decanting

Listening Notes, Ultra-Brief (Pt. 90)

PICKS

Pistol Annies, Annie Up     (RCA Nashville)

It’s slightly worrisome that three combined talents can’t match one member’s solo effort, although maybe that says as much about the perils of collectivism as it does Ashley Monroe’s pop gifts. Still, there’s only one out-and-out dud among these dozen portraits of imperfection and feisty pride (a trite “Loved By A Workin’ Man”), and most numbers claim an admirable devotion to detailing the downsides of lives lived roughly - rehab stints, dinner-table propaganda, alcoholism as family tradition, depression entrenched beyond self-medication’s relief, agony over an abusive relationship’s end because a child means it might never be over, the ugliness inherent in a fashion industry selling beauty as unobtainable ideal. So credit the meaty guitars, lithe mandolins, and Lambert, Presley, and Monroe’s songwriting gifts and broadly-accented vocals for keeping such dark affairs moving briskly along, all before going out on a warm farewell that pines for the storybook romance they’ve spent the previous forty minutes dismantling. They’re so disarmingly savvy it’s worth asking if there’s more to that working man song than first seems apparent. After all, in this economy, there’s hardly enough work going around. Wouldn’t be the first time a working man was being propped up by a woman offering both financial and emotional support.

Chance The Rapper, Acid Rap     (self-released)

Lil B take note. This young Chicagoan just bested you on the based front, sampling Willie Hutch’s “Brothers Gonna Work It Out” as if nobody thought to do so before and dropping a “hidden track” in the midst of song number two, complete with twenty seconds of silence separating “Pusha Man” from “Paranoia”. Drenched in the pleasures afforded by recreational drug use-not-abuse, he’s at times more callow than boosters admit - “slap happy faggot slapper” (ugh), “hope your pussy gets herpes” (ugh), rhyming “Trayvon” with “shoppin’ like I got a coupon” (ugh). Then again, he’s awfully young, and when he wants to get deep, he’s impressive. Few hip-hop albums not by Common go out with the rapper’s father expressing pride in their son’s accomplishments; few mama tributes are as nicely detailed as the sorry-my-clothes-stink-like-tobacco-ma number “Cocoa Butter Kisses”; few songs in any genre have so sweetly asked a substance-addled love interest to screw as “Lost”. And when he considers the heartbreak that is his beloved Chi-town, he stares hard, praying to God for a little more spring because he knows warm weather elevates murder rates, excoriating Matt Lauer and Katie Couric for ignoring homeland catastrophes in favor of far-flung crisis points, asking those living their lives safely outside Cabrini Green never to ignore “funerals for little girls”. You’ll hope that boast about his 9 mm having the shits is just evidence of a self-proclaimed “literary knack,” because he’s no gangsta, not him: “lotta niggas wanna go out with a bang / but I ain’t tryna go out at all”. 

NEAR PICK

Dur-Dur Band, Volume 5     (Awesome Tapes From Africa)

Continuing to do yeoman’s work for those committed to such things, blog/record label Awesome Tapes From Africa restores to circulation what little remains of Mogadishu’s premier party band, those uptempo pop ensembles flourishing during the Somali capital’s brief 1980s heyday. Transferred directly from cassette, the fidelity will annoy certain listeners, although bass notes perfectly signify. Some sources list twelve active members, others fifteen, brandishing guitars, horns, hammond organ, dinky keyboards once in a while, drums. All sources agree on four lead singers trading off songs and verses, three men and one woman. Horn of Africa funk that stays true to the region’s rich and melancholic melody bank, with periodic detours into what sounds like reggae crawl (“Fagfaglay” and “Dholey,” the latter claiming an utterly idiosyncratic blend of Kingston horn lilt and shit casio) and psychedelic guitar improv, Dur-Dur Band would seem to have felt little compunction lifting from whatever source intrigued them at the moment. Since the moment was 1987, you can guess at the fun to be had for those willing to look past intermittent tape hiss. 

BOMB

Fall Out Boy, Save Rock And Roll     (Island)

From the title itself to the enlistment of Sir Elton as hammy safeguard against criticism, this expert nonsense claims the kind of bold emotions and genre blurs one either laughs along with or laughs at. You sort of want to laugh along - these pros are so sincerely insincere, it’s tempting to forgive every clenched note and over-enunciated turn-of-phrase. Only then you notice Courtney Love’s brief cameo and how she could teach these perfectionists a thing or two about winging a performance. Really, do people have the gall to highlight Ms. Love’s one-two minutes of funny fury as this sprawling album’s biggest misstep? Nobody comes to this band for lyrics (or “ideas”), but holy gawd, is this inane. From empty imagery (“we are the jack o’ lanterns in July”) to maudlin grandiosity (“the person that you’d take a bullet for / is behind the trigger”), from the banal (“we could stay young forever”) through the self-pitying (“my heart is like a stallion / they load it more when it is broken”) and the idiotic (“change you like a remix / raise you like a phoenix”), Pete Wentz has never come across a sophomoric scribble too dopey for Patrick Stump to inflate. Question: How young does Wentz the geologic-time expert think “Young Volcanoes” really are? Maybe just ponder this scrap of verse: “you are what you love / not who loves you / in a world full of the word ‘yes’ / I’m here to scream…………/ NO!”

Here Come Those Santa Ana Winds Again: Joan Didion And The Hot Breezes

“It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself; Nathanael West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust; and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.”

— Joan Didion, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” 1968

http://www.amazon.com/Slouching-Towards-Bethlehem-Essays-Classics/dp/0374531382

Are You Not Afraid? Carbon Dioxide Levels At 400 ppm

1.  The level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, has passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported on Friday, reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years.

Scientific monitors reported that the gas had reached an average daily level that surpassed 400 parts per million — just an odometer moment in one sense, but also a sobering reminder that decades of efforts to bring human-produced emissions under control are faltering.

The best available evidence suggests the amount of the gas in the air has not been this high for at least three million years, before humans evolved, and scientists believe the rise portends large changes in the climate and the level of the sea.

 

2.  The new measurement came from analyzers high atop Mauna Loa, the volcano on the big island of Hawaii that has long been ground zero for monitoring the worldwide carbon dioxide trend.

Devices there sample clean, crisp air that has blown thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean, producing a record of rising carbon dioxide levels that has been closely tracked for half a century.

Carbon dioxide above 400 parts per million was first seen in the Arctic last year, and had also spiked above that level in hourly readings at Mauna Loa. But the average reading for an entire day surpassed that level at Mauna Loa for the first time in the 24 hours that ended at 8 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Thursday, according to data from both NOAA and Scripps.

Carbon dioxide rises and falls on a seasonal cycle and the level will dip below 400 this summer, as leaf growth in the Northern Hemisphere pulls about 10 billion tons of carbon out of the air. But experts say that will be a brief reprieve — the moment is approaching when no measurement of the ambient air anywhere on earth, in any season, will produce a reading below 400.

3.  From studying air bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice, scientists know that going back 800,000 years, the carbon dioxide level oscillated in a tight band, from about 180 parts per million in the depths of ice ages, to about 280 during the warm periods between. The evidence shows that global temperatures and CO2 levels are tightly linked.

For the entire period of human civilization, roughly 8,000 years, the carbon dioxide level was relatively stable near that upper bound. But the burning of fossil fuels has caused a 41 percent increase in the heat-trapping gas since the Industrial Revolution, a mere geological instant, and scientists say the climate is beginning to react, though they expect far larger changes in the future.

Governments have been trying since 1992 to rein in emissions, but far from slowing, emissions are rising at an accelerating pace, thanks partly to rapid economic growth in developing countries. Scientists fear the level of the gas could triple or even quadruple before being brought under control.

Indirect measurements suggest that the last time the carbon dioxide level was this high was at least three million years ago, during an epoch called the Pliocene. Geological research shows that the climate then was far warmer than today, the world’s ice caps were smaller, and the sea level might have been as much as 60 or 80 feet higher.

Experts fear that humanity may be precipitating a return to such conditions — except this time, billions of people are in harm’s way.

4.  Countries have adopted an official target to limit the damage from global warming, which by most estimates requires that emissions stop by the time the level reaches about 450. “Unless things slow down, we’ll probably get there in well under 25 years,” Ralph Keeling said.

Yet many countries, including China and the United States, have refused to adopt binding national targets. Scientists say that unless far greater efforts are made soon, the goal of limiting the warming will become impossible without severe economic disruption.

Climate-change contrarians, who have little scientific credibility but are politically influential in Washington, point out that carbon dioxide represents only a tiny fraction of the air — as of Thursday’s reading, exactly .04 percent. “The CO2 levels in the atmosphere are rather undramatic,” a Republican congressman from California, Dana Rohrabacher, said in a Congressional hearing several years ago.

— “Carbon Dioxide Level Passes Long-Feared Milestone,” Justin Gillis, New York Times, May 10 2013

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/science/earth/carbon-dioxide-level-passes-long-feared-milestone.html?hp&_r=0

LIstening Notes, Ultra-Brief (Pt. 89)

PICKS

Ceramic Dog, Your Turn     (Northern Spy)

Power trio dynamics from uncategorizable skronk king Marc Ribot’s rock band, only here the vibe is more avant-garage with plenty of blues, thanks to bass/drums duo Shahzad Ismaily and Ches Smith morphing between punk gallop and jazz groove as the boss wails atop. You got your rinky-dink reggae, you got your Sonic-Youth-scrape-meets-Hendrix-white-noise, you got your Cole Porter joke followed immediately by your Dave Brubeck/Paul Desmond joke, you got your what-if-D.-Boon-had-lived-beyond-1985 punk jam (“Ritual Slaughter,” for those keeping track). Plus, some actual songs with verse/chorus/verse, like a Pretty Things opening crawl or the horn-laden Beastie Boys joint “We Are The Professionals”. And while nobody here has a singing voice for the ages, the untrained vocals are consistent with that avant-garage aesthetic. Besides, the words do matter - even signify. “Our lives will not be sweated / from birth until life closes,” goes one line from the Rose Schneiderman-inspired, James Oppenheim-derived, Lawrence Textile Strike-memorializing, killer guitar solo-boasting “Bread and Roses,” which in its call to “share in life’s glories” helps contextualize earlier anti-downloading rant “Masters Of The Internet”. When Ribot sarcastically sneers “we ask no compensation,” he isn’t demanding your money, not really. He’s defending his own dignity in a right-to-work kinda way. Which may have something to do with your money.

Peter Evans, Zebulon     (More Is More Records)

It wouldn’t be fair to label these four very long acoustic trio cuts “crowd-pleasers”. Still, nothing by this Oberlin-trained, NYC-based, avant-garde trumpet player (and part-time Mostly Other People Do The Killing member) prepared me for how stripped down and basic he could get when backed by John Hebert (bass) and Kassa Overall (drums) in a live recording from a now-defunct Brooklyn club kindly memorialized in the album’s title. Give partial credit to the rhythm section for the relative accessibility - Hebert can lay claim to both Andrew Hill and Fred Hersch as mentors, while Overall has drummed behind everybody from Geri Allen to Das Racist. But it’s Evans himself who sets the tone by eschewing electronic tricks he previously flaunted. True, he doesn’t completely play straight, managing to simulate digital noise and feedback through mouthing/breathing techniques, periodically indulging in the kinds of impressive circular figures which will delight experimental types while convincing plenty of others that the hornman just ran out of ideas. Yet the dominant characteristic here is Evans’ brusque and full tone, sharp blasts and note flurries showcasing perfect intonation amid wisps of the blues. Highlights are tough to pinpont - best just to let each performance wash over you - but the rising/falling dynamics of twenty-five minute set-closer “Carnival” darts from briefly-emerging melody to fever pitch through joyous swing and tight groove. The Zebulon crowd does sound mighty pleased.

 

 

NEAR PICK

The Stooges, Ready To Die     (Fat Possum)

Proof positive he’s at his best when stooping towards the lewd and crude, Iggy leans hard on a rejuvenated James Williamson, whose great riffing on “Gun” can’t overcome the leader’s banal observations on American violence or, worse yet, said leader’s lame delivery. Far better is something like the Spaghetti Incident-era G’n R sleaze of “Job,” as in “it don’t pay shit,” graced around the edges with castanets the way Raw Power’s “Penetration” made room for a celeste. While 2007’s The Weirdness floundered under such lyrical misdemeanors as “my dick is turning into a tree,” here Mr. Osterberg revels in fabulous stoopidity - “I’m on my knees / for those double D’s,” indeed. And if the slow ones serve as a reminder that Leonard Cohen shtick is best left to L. Cohen himself, it’s entirely possible that acoustic crawler “Unfriendly World” boasts the best riff on an album filled with good ones.

 

 

BOMB

She & Him, Volume 3     (Merge)

These are real catchy and throwbacky and cute, plus they got strings and handclaps. But it’s also so mannered it goes beyond twee, and while Ms. Deschanel’s more than occasional flat notes aren’t of the greatest concern, such sour droplets do spoil the sweet cream on offer. Indie that rocks as hard as Terry Stafford - who knew there was a demographic still anxious to scarf it up?

Combating The Anti-Vaccination Fraud: Canada Shows Us How

1.  Late last month, public health officials issued a final ultimatum to the parents of school students in the Ottawa area: Vaccinate your kids, or we will suspend them from school.

On Wednesday, Ottawa Public Health made good on the threat. As of Thursday night, 603 Ottawa students had been sent home by suspension orders.

The idea is not to suspend students arbitrarily, say officials, but to drive home the point that they are no longer messing around when it comes to parents who forget to vaccinate their children — or who refuse the shots outright due to pseudoscientific claims.

Eric Leclair, spokesman for the agency, says there are “a lot of mistruths out there.”

“We have to fight that reality and try to show that vaccination, next to clean water and sanitation, is the most powerful public health tool that exists on the planet.”

 

2.  Fifteen years ago, in an act of scientific fraud that has since gone down as one of the biggest lies in modern medical history, a onetime University of Toronto researcher named Andrew Wakefield published a study claiming a link between autism and the vaccines that prevent measles, mumps and rubella.

The findings have been debunked, the study has been retracted, and Mr. Wakefield has been stripped of his medical licence and accused of collecting more than half a million dollars from lawyers drawing up litigation based on his bogus claims.

Regardless, Mr. Wakefield’s unholy creation, the idea that vaccines are a threat to public health, lives on in a worldwide scourge of plummeting vaccination rates — and a troubling resurgence of once-dormant diseases.

 

3.  Canada’s public health officials may have once been content to sit back and lob informational pamphlets at vaccine alarmists. But now, with preventable epidemics returning to the Canadian landscape, schools, hospitals and doctors are buckling down to stamp out the forces of anti-immunization once and for all.

Ottawa’s “vaccinate or stay home” regulations have actually been on the books since the early 1980s, but officials never felt the need to fully enforce them until now.

“It’s being taken seriously more and more,” said Mr. Leclair, citing a 2011 measles outbreak that struck Quebec. Sweeping through unvaccinated populations, the outbreak became the largest anywhere in North and South America since 2002, when the continents were optimistically declared “measles free.”

 

4.  Since November, more than 1,000 people in Wales have been infected with measles as the disease swept through a generation of people whose parents eschewed inoculations due to autism fears. With Welsh-levels of inoculation common across Europe, similar epidemics could just as easily strike the continent.

As Western countries go, Canada is actually quite soft on vaccine denialists. In the United States, schools maintain “minimum immunization requirements” for pupils entering kindergarten. And in Australia last month, the president of the Australian Medical Association actively called for sanctions against vaccine-eschewing parents.

“We’ve seen a couple of pockets where there are outbreaks,” Dr. Steve Hamilton told reporters on April 1, ‘‘and in both those areas there … are anti-vaccination networks active and they should be stopped.’’

In Canada, the culprit may not be so much ignorance as complacency. Canadian cities no longer abound with limping polio victims and measles-scarred children, prompting a new generation of Canadians to assume that measles and polio — like smallpox — is no longer a health risk.

 

5.   In a 2011 survey commissioned by the Public Health Agency of Canada examining “barriers” to immunization, the top reason parents cited for not vaccinating their children was “vaccines are not necessary.” In a distant second place was “concerns about vaccine safety.”

In recent months, the Centre for Inquiry, a Toronto-based secular advocacy group, has emerged as a leader in the charge against anti-vacciners.

In March, it spearheaded a much-publicized appeal against an anti-vaccine summit to be hosted at Simon Fraser University. The month before, they spurred a successful campaign to have prominent vaccination foe Jenny McCarthy dropped from an Ottawa cancer fundraiser.

An actor, former Playboy model and now ex-partner of Canadian-born actor Jim Carrey, Ms. McCarthy is arguably the most vocal face of the anti-vaccination lobby. Blaming her son’s autism on vaccines, since 2007 she has repackaged Mr. Wakefield’s claims into a series of influential books and talk show appearances.

Yet, as the Centre for Inquiry’s opponents go, the anti-vaccine movement is among the least structured, with no centralized body and few visible spokespeople.

No organized resistance seems to have arisen to oppose the likes of Ottawa Public Health. The children of hardcore vaccine holdouts can  return to school after a 20-day suspension, on the condition that they will be immediately sent home in the case of an epidemic.

According to the Centre for Inquiry’s executive director, Michael Payton, the movement’s scattered nature makes it more dangerous than ever. Instead of fighting against coordinated public campaigns, pro-vaccinations must do battle against a faceless network of blogs and social media posts.

“I would be very glad to say that the anti-vaccination movement is dead and buried, but I really don’t think it is,” he said. “It will continue to have a very different sort of presence that is much more difficult to combat because it is so disorganized.”

— “The anti-vaccination fraud: Health officials forced to get tough as once-dormant diseases returning,” Tristin Hopper, National Post, May 5 2013

http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/05/03/na0504-th-vaccines/

Listening Notes, Ultra-Brief (Pt. 88)

PICKS

The Knife, Shaking The Habitual     (Rabid)

Certainly the politics inform everything here - “rewrite history / to suit our needs” is the kind of line that can equally inspire and chill, especially since rewriting history is the rallying call for any number of contemporary professional reactionaries, cultural and otherwise. But what about “sometimes I get problems that are hard to solve,” which handily summarizes why the personal is always the political? Or a crowd-pleasing Salt-n-Pepa nod (“let’s talk about gender, baby”) affixed to their most epically propelling beat? Because maybe it’s actually the beats informing everything here, helping prop up the politics and streamlining the message(s), whether Karin and Olof are making room for Shannon Funchess on a death disco number or slyly name checking Margaret Atwood’s 2003 pandemic treatise. Yet for all the media blather about how these Stockholmers epitomize the “post-human” (because, what, they wear masks sometimes? and prefer digital beats?), this supposedly difficult dance project is hardly a conceptual album - more a series of considerations on gender, inequality, and environmental degradation. That latter topic explicitly informs the most radical track here, “Fracking Fluid Injection,” which lingers on the sampled noise of a squeaking bedspring and Karin’s mannered vocalisms for ten uncomfortable minutes, a downer insomuch as fracking’s rape of the earth is also a downer. Odd, then, how the most controversial number among consumers seems to be the nineteen-minute drone placed midway through proceedings. Mesmeric and ambient after the continental tradition of Ash Ra Tempel’s softer interludes or Tangerine Dream’s Zeit, it’s meant to fill a room, not send your mind racing. Even radical politics needs to take a breather sometimes. 

Fantasia, Side Effects Of You     (RCA)

The producer’s heavy hand lingers distractedly over several numbers by this toughest American Idol winner’s toughest album, and there’s no ignoring a few clunkers - a brief and useless “Girl Talk” skit, the big old ballad that is the title, an avian transformation number in which Fantasia imagines herself a bird the better to you-guessed-it “fly away,” and the belabored lighthouse imagery on one of the five songs she didn’t co-write (“I’m a lighthouse/ that’s me”). But there’s also plenty to savor on a sexy and gritty album that glides lithely across, like when Kelly Rowland and Missy Elliott drop by and try to keep up over a routine taunting a lover because the sap will never do any better. And I count four great songs here: the reggae/r&b whoomp of “Ain’t All Bad,” the “Fingertips”/Gary U.S. Bonds vibe on beefy horn workout “Get It Right” (in which one may savor Ms. Fantasia’s expert call to “give the motherfuckin’ drummer some”), and two bravura pop steals, one from The Commodores (“Lose To Win”) and one from Whitney Houston (“Change Your Mind”), the latter brandishing a nasty guitar riff as the narrator promises a decidedly lowdown bedroom romp if the wronged suitor would only wander back home to her.

 

NEAR PICK

Steve Martin / Edie Brickell, Love Has Come For You     (Rounder)

At first, this screamed (well, not screamed, maybe smirked) vanity project, until it became clear that giving the comedian top billing over the singer was the same idea as giving Pat Metheny top billing for Song X - fair enough as far as it goes, yet ultimately misleading. Even if Brickell will never be your singer of choice, her husky and decidedly non-pure-as-a-mountain-stream vocals are one of the major reasons this batch of tunes never sinks into the miasma of well-heeled folkiedom. The other major reason is the comedian himself, who knows enough about the banjo and composition to avoid bluegrass exhibitionism. Plus, “Sarah Jane and the Iron Mountain Baby,” a sorta-murder ballad in which nobody actually dies. 

 

BOMBS

Snoop Lion, Reincarnated     (RCA)

“Yo, got the fake patois / KRS-One did a fake patois / Miss Cleo got a fake patois / even Jay-Z did a fake patois / Bad Brains had a fake patois / my man Snow had a fake patois / even Jim Carrey fuck with the patois / so you know he come through with the fake patois / patois, got the fake patois / you come through with the fake patois / patois patois patois / fake fake patois.”

will.i.am, #willpower     (Interscope)

Do check out “Scream & Shout”. As for the rest, well, I’ll just quote Wikipedia at length: “On August 13, 2012, will.i.am held a “wrap party” in celebration of cease production of #willpower. A flyer, which unveiled a silhouetted variant of the album artwork, invited fans for an open event, which would feature performances from artists who have worked on the new album and others. The party also included a private listening party of #willpower attended by invited guests, and asked listeners to pick the next single, which would succeed as the third American single from the album. There was a rumor that the next single chosen would be “Scream and Shout” featuring Britney Spears, which she later confirmed on Twitter. The party featured a red carpet event, which featured the new album artwork on wallpapers surrounding the event. It features the back of Adam’s head imposed on a white background, imprinted with the words “#WILLPOWER” across. The party also featured experimental light and pyrotechnics which will be used on Adam’s upcoming tour to support willpower. The event was attended by Lindsay Lohan, Meagan Good, Nicole Scherzinger, Steve Aoki, Wilmer Valderrama, Corey Feldman, David Faustino, and many others.” 

The hospital, in a statement, rebutted his allegations, saying it “does not, nor has ever, sold ‘body parts.’ ”

Paul Kevin Curtis and James Everett Dutschke have a lot in common, though they would probably not like to think of it that way.

Both are musicians, both are interested in martial arts, both have irked friends and associates by their particular way of seeing the world. 

And in the past week, both have drawn the attention of the authorities in an increasingly bizarre but still-unsolved federal criminal case.

“I have told Kevin, ‘You two are so much alike, you should be friends,’ ” said Mr. Curtis’s former wife Laura. 

What initially appeared to be an odd if rather uncomplicated story — a conspiracy-minded Elvis impersonator mailing ricin-laced letters to President Obama, Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi and a local judge — began to grow much stranger over the course of a federal hearing.

An F.B.I. agent testified that physical evidence had not been found tying the letters to Mr. Curtis, who was arrested last Wednesday.

Mr. Curtis’s lawyer, Christi McCoy, suggested that her client might have been framed. 

And on Tuesday, the charges against Mr. Curtis were dropped as the focus turned to Mr. Dutschke, 41, a martial arts instructor, sometime politician and, as of this year, a man accused of child molesting.

While Mr. Curtis, 45, has battled mental illness and been in and out of jail on various misdemeanor charges, he rarely struck those who knew him as someone with hurtful intentions. 

A father of five, he worked in the late 1990s as a cleaner at the North Mississippi Medical Center. On Dec. 17, 1999, when he was mopping up a room, he says, he opened an industrial refrigerator to find frozen body parts.

Mr. Curtis was fired shortly afterward, and contends that his firing and all of his troubles since have come because he exposed what he claimed was an organ-harvesting scheme at hospital.

That belief touched off a relentless one-man campaign, that culminated in a manuscript titled “Missing Pieces.” 

The hospital, in a statement, rebutted his allegations, saying it “does not, nor has ever, sold ‘body parts.’ ”

“When he’s well, he loves to do things and keeps himself busy,” said his stepfather, Edward Harmen. 

When he isn’t, “there are pages and pages written on the computer.”

Until he began receiving disability payments, Mr. Curtis supported himself performing, mostly as Elvis, who was born in Tupelo, but also as Conway Twitty, Prince, Roy Orbison and others. 

He and his brother Jack would sometimes perform as a duo: Jack playing the Las Vegas-era Elvis and Kevin the younger one.

Then in 2007, Mr. Curtis met Mr. Dutschke.

Mr. Dutschke had been working in a Tupelo insurance office that Jack Curtis managed.

Those who know Mr. Dutschke described him as very intelligent if rather difficult and often haughty.

When he made his first court appearance earlier this year on charges that he had groped three under-age girls he signed his appearance papers with a smiley face, said James Moore, a prosecutor in Tupelo.

It was sometime in 2007, Kevin Curtis said, that he heard that somebody was asking around about him.

He assumed it was a jealous husband.

“It’s just one of those things with the music business,” he said.

“Lot of Elvis fans.”

He said he learned that it was Mr. Dutschke, who at the time was putting out a local newsletter.

Around the same time, at a Tupelo restaurant called Barnhill’s Buffet, Mr. Curtis publicly challenged Mr. Dutschke to publish an article about his allegations about the hospital.

Several years later, Mr. Curtis said, they clashed again.

This time it was over their music careers, after Mr. Dutschke started a band.

And when Mr. Curtis posted a fake Mensa certificate on the Web, the online rebuke from Mr. Dutschke (an actual Mensa member) was seen by the Curtis family as so harsh that they approached a local lawyer to ask if they should take legal action.

Mr. Curtis continued to send rafts of e-mails to public officials about the hospital.

He always signed them “I am KC and I approve this message” — as did whoever sent the ricin letters, who also referred to “Missing Pieces.”

Then last Wednesday, as he was sitting at his house in Corinth, Miss., his dog Moo Cow in his lap, a swarm of armed federal agents descended.

They took him into custody and, according to Mr. Curtis’s stepfather, tore his home apart in a search for evidence.

Mr. Dutschke was not, at that moment, foremost in Mr. Curtis’s mind.

No, he was thinking about the 14 years of insistently pushing to expose what he saw as a wide-ranging organ-harvesting conspiracy, seeing his personal life fall to pieces, and trying desperately to convince anyone who would listen that the authorities were out to get him.

And here they were.

— Campbell Robertson & Cynthia Howle, “2 Tangled Lives Collide, Again, in Ricin Case,” New York Times, April 24 2013

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/25/us/ricin-case-reveals-a-strange-rivalry.html?hp

Listening Notes, Ultra-Brief (Pt. 87)

PICK

Paramore, Paramore     (Fueled By Ramen)

A joyous raspberry in the face of anybody deluded enough to doubt the vital signs of widescreen pop, this emo-no-more Tennessee trio shakes off the sting left by vindictive ship-jumping bandmates and delivers a stylistic tour de force the simple (and hard) way - chorus after verse after bridge of hooks glorious hooks. Hayley Williams has the kind of expressive big voice that can’t avoid going heart on sleeve, the type of singer unwilling to distinguish between humdrum reality and epic grandiosity, partly because she believes humdrum reality serves as the foundation for every epic. Which means her song about daydreaming betrays all the subtleties of a car chase, her crazy girl number peaks with breaking into somebody’s closet to sniff their wardrobe, and her Jam/Lewis move involves both a kalimba and an assembled gospel choir taunting “don’t go crying to your mama / ‘cause you’re on your own in the real world”. It’s all certainly a bit much. Yet Williams gets the details right when she needs to, like identifying a slowly moving clock on the classroom wall as a signifier for lives too bursting with life to submit to bored authority. And the band backstory lends gravitas to the unfolding drama(s), placing all those encomiums to weathering on and the scary freedoms of maturity into a proper context, right where they belong next to the Robert Smith guitars, ukelele interludes, and something called “Anklebiters,” which sounds like nothing less than a Minor Threat/Cyndi Lauper pastiche that beats both at their game. So allow Hayley and company the privilege of sprawling out, even if they take eight unnecessary minutes to close proceedings and even if they melodramatically claim in “Last Hope” that the feel of blood pumping through their veins is all that’s keeping them alive. You can recoil from the sentiment even while hoping it gives somebody who needs it some solace.

 

 

NEAR PICKS

Khat Thaleth, Third Line: Initiative for the Elevation of Public Awareness   (Stronghold Sound) 

You do need the lyric sheet with translation to grasp the context of these twenty-three tracks of contemporary hip-hop selected from across the Middle East, because the unifying factor here isn’t so much geography as it is political truth-telling in the Arab Spring’s uneasy aftermath. Boroughs represented: Ramallah (Rami GB), Tripoli (El Rass), Damascus/Homs (LaTlaTeh), Bizerta (Armada Bizerta), Amman (El Far3i), Ba’albak/Hermel (Touffar). Themes under discussion in colloquial Arabic: poverty, refugees, international borders, brutality, electricity, running water, forgiveness, The West, religious extremism, intolerance.  But the big reason you need the lyric sheet is because the music alone won’t transport you, not if you’re familiar with American hip-hop circa 1991 or the Stones Throw aesthetic - despite the obvious nods to Arabic tones, mid-tempo loping beats plus a few scratches equals nearly zero surprises. Still, the need for the contributors to speak and be heard is palpable. Or, as Nasser al-Din and Jaafar of Touffar put it, “We do not rap because this is a cool thing for others to listen to without being disturbed. If our work is not annoying, we regard it as a failure. We would have to reconsider our entire project”.

Maxmillion Dunbar, House Of Woo     (RVNG Intl.)

Behind the grandiloquent sobriquet lies Andrew Field-Pickering, a genial DC-area music blogger, record label founder, and bedroom electronica adherent, and the love he espouses for r&b would seem to be genuine - those buoyant squiggles and that synth bass do reflect the bright tones of somebody’s idea of 80s boogie. Still, it’s hard to nail down exactly how cheesy he means for all this gorgeous sound to be. Something like “Kangaroo” seems a pointless exercise in squelch, whereas “The Figurine” demonstrates his admirable ability to leave well enough alone. It goes nowhere, but that’s hardly the point. More troublesome is “Ice Room Graffiti,” esoteric electro-funk no less danceable for its studiousness, synth lines intertwining melody and bottom end in rather delightful fashion. Then he fucks with it midway through, dragging the beat down just to prove he’s in control. Oh well.

 

BOMBS

Jaimoe Brown, Transcendence     (Motema Music)

At the heart of these relatively brief and unremittingly solemn excursions into modality lies the rural African-American community of Gee’s Bend, a Alabama settlement known for its luminous quilting tradition and here honored with field recordings and spirituals woven into the electric jazz mix. Brown’s both leader and drummer, bowing to JD Allen’s tenor sax and Chris Sholar’s electric church guitar to carry the melodies, yet also folding his own family (father, mother, sister, daughter) into the mix. Inviting East Indian vocalist Falu to soar wordlessly over stormy chords will no doubt please global pantheists. I’m more partial to Geri Allen’s piano spot on “Power Of God,” lingering meaningfully on a bare minimum of chords after the vocals fade away three minutes in. But the slow and severe drift of these sketches reflect just one side of the often-joyous spirituals Brown means to showcase. Transcendence or the weary blues? Langston Hughes knew how to combine the two. 

Marbin, Last Chapter Of Dreaming     (MoonJune Recordings)

Israeli jazz/rock fusion group now based out of (where else?) Chicago, and the Israeli heritage is detectable via melodies often literally as well as figuratively Balkanzied. And it is also loathsome. More bluesy than Weather Report, and more earnest, too, this is virtuosity as its own fetid reward, from the gay Paree nonsense of “Cafe De Nuit” to the horrid construction that is “Breaking The Cycle,” which marries “Kashmir” chords to third rate-Warren Haynes slide and plops a dollop of Herb Alpert’s “The Lonely Bull” over the top for good measure. You Dixie Dregs believers will eat it up.

They Did Give Aid And Comfort To Our Well-Regulated Militias: Meet The Gun Lobby

U.S. Senate Roll Call Votes 113th Congress - 1st Session

Question: On the Amendment (Manchin Amdt. No. 715 )

Vote Number: 97 Vote Date: April 17, 2013, 04:04 PM

Required For Majority: 3/5 Vote Result: Amendment Rejected

Amendment Number: S.Amdt. 715 to S. 649 (Safe Communities, Safe Schools Act of2013)

Statement of Purpose: To protect Second Amendment rights, ensure that all individuals who should be prohibited from buying a firearm are listed in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, and provide a responsible and consistent background check process.

Vote Counts: YEAs 54

                        NAYs 46

NAYS:

Max Baucus (D-MT)    

Mark Begich (D-AK)    

Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND)    

Mark Pryor (D-AR)   

Lamar Alexander (R-TN)

Kelly Ayotte (R-NH)

John Barrasso (R-WY)

Roy Blunt (R-MO)

John Boozman (R-AR)

Richard Burr (R-NC)

Saxby Chambliss (R-GA)

Dan Coats (R-IN)

Tom Coburn (R-OK)

Thad Cochran (R-MS)

Bob Corker (R-TN)

John Cornyn (R-TX)

Mike Crapo (R-ID)

Ted Cruz (R-TX)

Michael Enzi (R-WY)

Deb Fischer (R-NE)

Jeff Flake (R-AZ)

Lindsey Graham (R-SC)

Chuck Grassley (R-IA)

Orrin Hatch (R-UT)

Dean Heller (R-NV)

John Hoeven (R-ND)

Jim Inhofe (R-OK)

Johnny Isakson (R-GA)

Mike Johanns (R-NE)

Ron Johnson (R-WI)

Mike Lee (R-UT)

Mitch McConnell (R-KY)

Jerry Moran (R-KS)

Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)

Rand Paul (R-KY)

Rob Portman (R-OH)

James Risch (R-ID)

Pat Roberts (R-KS)

Marco Rubio (R-FL)

Timothy Scott (R-SC)

Jeff Sessions (R-AL)

Richard Shelby (R-AL)

John Thune (R-SD)

David Vitter (R-LA)

Roger Wicker (R-MS)

http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=113&session=1&vote=00097