Sara Hickman's Newest: Little Voice, Big Sound

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SARA HICKMAN

Shine

Kirtland Records KR-77

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If you think that women with small voices can’t make big records, check out the latest from Sara Hickman, who is certainly the best news to come out of Texas lately. Shine is true to its title, songs that uplift, outrage, and bring joy, but nothing that just lies on the plate. This is a work of maturity in which Hickman showcases how she frames a song. She knows when to go girly and when to add a whiskey-soaked rasp to her voice, and she delights in using fragile vocals to front muscular instrumentation. Her love of contrasts extends to moods as well. On tracks such as “Cocky Friend” and “Primitive Stuff” she wears attitude like a rodeo queen strutting around in hand-tooled boots, yet on songs the likes of “Human Wish” and “Rapture” she exudes all the tender fragility she assumes when she’s doing her children’s songs gigs. Add splashes of girl-group- meets-New Wave, some rockabilly, and some truly offbeat folk, and it adds up to ten fabulous tracks.  Rob Weir  

This one is hot off the presses and there aren't even YouTube clips yet, but you can order it from http://sarahickman.com/music/

A-Rod and AIG: American Greed Stories

 What do Alex Rodriguez and A.I.G. have in common? More than you think

Today on adult “Sesame Street,” privileged, greedy piggies that start with A. The cases in point are Alex Rodriguez and AIG.  At first glance, there’s not much to connect a baseball player and an insurance company, but allow me to suggest that both are examples of how unregulated capitalism turns the American Dream into the American Nightmare.

Let’s start with the fact that A-Rod is Major League Baseball’s highest-paid player, and that AIG was once the world’s most valuable insurance company. That would be enough for most folks but, alas, it goes against the grain of a culture that all too often emphasizes maximizing value beyond the bounds of what reasonable people would call ‘enough.’ Alex Rodriguez was once heralded as the most talented player in baseball, skills that earned him a contract that yielded $30 million per year for suiting up for a game boys play for free. Not a bad deal, by any means. A-Rod was gifted with a body and skills that fantasy players would have sold their souls to possess. He was on track to become baseball’s all-time homerun leader and a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame. Then he lost his edge and, for a time, was considered merely as among the top five players in the game.

Who among us would not wish to be in the top five of the pursuit of our passion? Alas, American culture places little value on being other than number one. Remember the Olympic swimmer who wept with disappointment because she only won a silver medal? Name the player who finished third last year in the Most Valuable Player voting for any American sport.  So when Rodriguez slipped from the top, A-Rod became A-Roid and he sought illegal supplements to give him back his edge. In so doing, he will be suspended for his role in the Biogenesis Clinic scan. He very well may have damaged his health permanently by pumping poisons into his body. A-Rod now has little chance of catching Babe Ruth (#3) on the all-time homerun list, and virtually none of surpassing Hank Aaron (#2) or Barry Bonds (#1). He may not even get the chance to hit 14 more to pass #4 Willie Mays. There’s a pretty good possibility that, once the farcical dust has settled, the Yankees will void his contract and that A-Rod will be banned from Major League Baseball. So long Cooperstown.

Alex Rodriguez was vain; AIG was/is arrogant. It’s currently suing the government to recover untold billions it claimed it lost during the period of time the government controlled 80% of its stock. Talk about ingrates! AIG took $182.3 billion of taxpayer money when it was near collapse in 2008 and now has the audacity to moan that stockholders were shortchanged of potential dividends during a period of time in which they could have wiped their rear ends with their stock certificates if Uncle Sam hadn’t saved their heinies.

American International Group was in the insurance business, but it used over $440 billion in credit default swaps to insure securities mostly tied to the mortgage market. In essence, it used the value of its insurance portfolios to buy mortgage securities that turned out to be overpriced. It also dabbled in hedge funds, derivatives, and other high-flyer games. In other words, AIG played the Stock Market with funny money—on-paper assets based on wishful projections of the future. Mind, it did all of this while it was already under investigation for questionable practices in the field of what was putatively its number one product: insurance. And it did so at a time in which it was a multinational company doing business in over 130 nations and had a workforce of around 118,000. Its total assets were valued at over $1 trillion. Don’t you think that would be enough?

I guess it wasn’t enough merely to dominate the insurance industry. Maybe AIG executives couldn’t countenance the fact that there were actually 17 richer companies in the world. I can’t think of what else would prompt them, including Hank Greenburg who was forced out in 2008 and is now championing the lawsuit against the government, to gamble in the Stock Market like a Vegas drunk holding at 15 who just doubled down a blackjack bet with his last hundred. In 2013, AIG is still a big firm: 63,000 employees in over a hundred nations, though its current capitalization value is a paltry $57.5 billion.

Like A-Rod, AIG is busy blaming others for its woes. We can only hope that both A-Rod and AIG go away. If there’s one thing we no longer believe, it’s that any star or company is too big to fail. Let them perish, and don’t expect a lot of mourners to line the graveside. Write the epitaph: “Choked to Death on Self-Fed Greed.”  As for we survivors, it’s time to change the culture. Salary caps and a restoration of business regulations would be a good place to start. The wisdom to quit while we’re ahead would be even better.

Step Casey's Luminous Debut

STEP CASEY

Whisper and Holler

Self Produced 001

http://stephcasey.bandcamp.com/album/whisper-holler

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Step Casey is a Wellington, New Zealand-based singer/songwriter, though one quickly hears that her muses have spent considerable time across the pond in the United States.  Among the influences she cites–and which you’ll hear on her debut record–are Gillian Welch, The Be Good Tanyas, and Lucinda Williams. Voice-wise, her dulcet tones resemble those of Joy Williams of The Civil Wars, another inspiration. That said, her career path more resembles that of Mary Gauthier in that not many folks decide to hit the road as a folk/country/pop singer in their late thirties. (Gauthier was 38, Casey 39. Gauthier latter chucked her life as a restaurateur, Casey hers as a graphic designer.)

If there’s any advantage to a later-in-life music career, it’s that you’ve outlived both wide-eyed optimism and close-minded cynicism. Casey offers a mix of emotions and themes. She opens with “Nice to Know You,” a sticks-in-your-head song that highlights the infectious catch in her voice. It’s also the first of three songs of loss, the second of which, “My Lovely Letterbox,” is a duet with veteran New York City hard rocker Gary Sunshine. She teams with him again on “A Love to Die For,” though it is her voice that’s the effulgent contrast to Sunshine’s gravely tones. As that song’s title suggests, there is plenty of upbeat material to balance the sorrowful. One of my favorites is “Thievery,” a no-punches-pulled song of longing. Another is “Heavy Warm Heart,” an off-kilter little number heavy on the first beats, in which Casey lets her light voice bounce off and between picked acoustic guitar notes whilst viola and cello add sonorous depth. Add some splashes of soul (the Hammond-enhanced “No Love”) and a carefree beach song about one of my favorite places, “Kapiti,” and it all adds up to later-in-life promise. Nitpickers would be correct to say that Casey could be more emotive if she dialed back the vocal ornaments a tad and trusted her material more. I suppose–but this is a solid debut, no matter how long it took to arrive.--Rob Weir         

Pro-Dzhokhar Crowd Deserves to be Monitored

 

Trolls for Dzhokhar

 

That the Internet is disproportionately populated by weirdos, cranks, racists, and sickos comes as no surprise to anyone who has ever spent time in a chat room or the comments section of a news story.  I’ve noticed that a lot of those folks are also paranoid about the government . Strangely, the same people who casually spout all manner of hateful bile in a public forum–the Internet–are often the people who think everything they say and do should remain anonymous. They worry that Big Brother is monitoring them and would like to see laws protecting their right to absolute privacy.

Okay, so we have a basic contradiction from the get-go: people who worry that the government is watching them want a law to prevent that. Civics 101 question: Who passes laws in the USA? We could add a socio-economic question: Do you really think you have privacy in the first place? If you’ve ever visited sites on the Internet or ordered online, you’ve left a cookie crumb trail for all manner of advertisers, marketers, retailers, and special interest groups—each of whom develop complex algorithms whose sole purpose it is to track you. Use your credit card or call in an order by telephone and the same thing happens. You have no privacy in the public realm. Get over it. But let me introduce another question: Is it in the nation’s best interest to monitor citizens here and abroad?

 Before you cite the relentless pursuit of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, or the NSA’s extensive phone records to prove the government’s evil intentions, take a deep breath. Ask yourself who is more dangerous, the government or the online trolls you encounter on a daily basis. Then ask yourself whether it might be a good idea to keep a close watch on the trolls. Are there, in fact, people that deserve to be monitored? Consider, for example, the gathering movement of those that think Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsaraev is innocent.

Just about the time you think the human race can’t sink any lower, it manages to do so.  I can’t decide what’s most appalling about the “Free Dzhokhar” crowd, the stupidity, the paranoia, or the insensitivity. For the sake of their health, I’d suggest these folks should steer clear of Copley Square. But for the sake of national security, I want their Facebook, Twitter, and Internet activity monitored. This is especially the case of the “Dzhokhar is Innocent” page that has 13,500 followers, many of them abroad. Ditto the followers of the “We are the Lion” Website, which also has lots of overseas subscribers.  I want my government to know who these people are, keep a dossier on them, and watch their movements.

There are people here in America that worry me. Someone needs to watch Rebecca Lynn Crovello, 20, of Somerville, who told the Boston Globe “the pieces of the puzzle just don’t match up.” Rebecca’s a psych major at RCC and her keen instincts tell her that Dzhokhar is a “handsome kid” and, thus, Navy SEALs actually bombed the Marathon. Gee, Rebecca—I’ll bet you once took a course in criminal justice at Roxbury Community College that makes you a better investigator than the FBI and the Boston PD, who obviously misread evidence such as Dzhokhar’s shoot out with police (caught on video), his role in the murder of an MIT patrolman, the fact that he ran over his own brother, or the forensic evidence linking his backpack to the Marathon bomb. Sure, Rebecca—it happens every day that innocent people exchange gunfire with cops and then lick their wounds by writing anti-USA slogans in their own blood under a boat tarp in someone’s backyard. I want Rebecca watched. Ditto several others who had the courage/stupidity to give their names: Lindy Uros, 45, a Stamford, CT lawyer; and Neda Kidri, 31, of Detroit who calls herself a public relations worker. (I also want all of Kidri’s clients to be watched. A person who’d hire her for PR work can’t be up to any good.) At the very least, I want each of them to come face-to-face with Marathon bomb victims and tell them exactly why they think Tsarnaev is innocent. Maybe they could write a 10,000-word essay in which they carefully, dispassionately, and evidentially disprove the prevailing theory about Dzhok the Joke: that he’s waste of human genetic material.

Do I worry about the government monitoring my computer use? A little. But I worry a whole lot more about fools who can’t face reality and people who are so evil that they’d make a pact with the Devil to advance their own fanatical causes.  So let me put it in the language of faux hipsters so they can understand: Dude, you deserve to be monitored.

R.I.P. Alex Colville, a Canadian Treasure

For many Americans, the phrase “Canadian culture” conjures images of ice hockey and very little else. This is, of course, the sort of thing that drives Canadians to cold fury (and rightly so). Our neighbors to the North have rich traditions of their own and those looking to put themselves on a crash self-education course to correct past xenophobia   could do worse than explore the paintings of Alex Colville, who passed away last weekend. Colville was 92 when he died–a good, long life to be sure, though his art was seldom shown in the United States after the 1950s. That’s our loss; in Canada, Colville was sometimes referred to as the nation’s painter laureate.

Colville admired Edward Hopper, and that influence shows. Many of his works have a detached feeling, as if the central figure is in his or her private physical and mental worlds–even if there are others present on the canvas. One such painting was his 1965 “To Prince Edward Island,” a painting I first saw in Ottawa back in the 1980s, and the one that made me a fan of his work. One can’t help but notice the woman that dominates the work. She gazes through binoculars and, though she’s staring straight ahead, it’s clear she’s not looking at us or anyone else. What, exactly, is she looking at? Note her expression, one that’s every bit as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa’s smile. Now look closer. Colville makes her the center of the work, though she is listing slightly to our right and the weight of the composition is actually to our left. Now look even closer. You probably missed it the first time; there is a man behind her, though we see little but his arms and a glimpse of his head. Who is he? Husband? Lover? Stranger? (Maybe all three!) Notice also how Colville used geometric shapes that give the unbalanced composition the illusion of symmetry. That trick come from another great Colville influence–Precisionism (especially Demuth and Sheeler).

Colville delighted in making us wonder what is was we are seeing. Take “Horse and Train,” a 1954 work that first brought him acclaim. We see a black horse running full speed toward the headlight of an oncoming black train. The sky above might be ominous, or it might simply be twilight. Maybe the horse will veer away in time, but perhaps something more sinister at work here–perhaps a metaphor for the national destructiveness recently witnessed in World War II.  Black, after all, is the color of death. Note that the rails and the smoke are tinted blue, the heraldic color of masculinity and sincerity, but also strength, valor, and power. Are such qualities admirable? Surely it depends upon how they are used. Is suicide valorous?

Another personal favorite also displays motion–Colville’s 1978 “Berlin Bus.” If you need any more confirmation of Hopper’s influence, here it is. A young woman in a short skirt bolts down the payment and we do not see her face. Nor do we see those of the silhouetted passengers seated in the bus, though we can tell that they are as disengaged as the young woman is focused. She is in literal flight–like Muybridge’s famed sequential photos. Her feet are off the ground, her arms are pumping, and her drive suggests she’s either going to catch that bus, or vault over it. It’s a small drama, but a powerful one nonetheless.

Good stuff, huh? I consider it a minor tragedy that Colville’s work hasn’t been better appreciated on this side of the border. The New York Times noted that Colville studied artists that challenged him to look beneath the surface. It would be a fitting posthumous tribute if a new generation of fans rediscovered Alex Colville and began to gaze deeply into the treasures he left behind. --Rob Weir

Zedashe Spotlights the Traditional Sounds of the Republic of Georgia

ZEDASHE

Intangible Pearls

Multaflora ECR-710

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Folk music scholars generally divide those performing traditional songs and tunes into two categories: tradition-bearers and revivalists. Tradition-bearers are those that grew up within a specific folk culture and learned the music in customary and informal ways; revivalists are those that professionalize older music–it’s part of their repertoire, not their identity, if you will. Where one classifies a group such as Zedashe renders such distinctions problematic.

This ten-member group hails from the Republic of Georgia and specializes in music from loads of small villages wiped out by war, Soviet cultural hegemony, and modernity. Some of them grew up with memories of the old ways, though most are too young to have grown up in them. I suppose technically they are revivalists, but their approach to the music is more folkloristic than commercial. It’s certainly not like anything you’re used to hearing. Traditional Georgian music is polyphonic, meaning there are two or more dominant melody lines going at the same time, not just the one found in most Western music. This gives the music a primal, raw quality, a mood enhanced by various voice modulations, keening, and the chant-like structure of many songs. The closest thing in American music is shape note singing in that both styles are stripped down, feature unusual harmonies, and sport unexpected tonal shifts. A lot of the songs are rendered a cappella and what instrumentation there is trends toward sparse and spare. You will hear the chongur, a sort of ukulele/lute hybrid and a button accordion called a garmon that’s often used for its drone-like effects. The garmon serves drone duty because the region’s bagpipe, the chiboni, is a double-chambered affair with a bell-like chanter that has no drones; instead it produces a shrill sound whose sound is roughly like that of a Breton biniou. North American audiences will thus find that even dance tunes such as those heard on the track “Ajarian and Khorumi Dance Melodies” challenge the ear more than the feet.

When encountering music so far out of one’s own tradition it’s important neither to romanticize nor exoticize. You can rest easy on the first score–even casual listening reveals that Zedashe is made up of enormously talented musicians. As for the second, the music is indeed exotic and unusual for Westerners. The CD is 25 tracks long and that’s probably too many for most listeners for one sitting. I recommend that you dip in and out of this one so that you can appreciate it more thoroughly. And it doesn’t hurt to Google some of the things you encounter so you can learn about Georgian history and culture as well. --Rob Weir

Rand Paul: The Worst Politician in America.

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Rand must get some of his ideas from beyond the galaxy! 

A few years ago I was in Amsterdam, where I struck up a conversation with a young Dutchman named Hans. I enjoyed his animated observations of peoples from around the globe and his razor-sharp political analyses of world events. Out of the blue, Hans uttered this observation and question: “In the Netherlands, we pass laws to control corporations, but we let people do what they want. In the United States, it looks to me like you let corporations do what they want, but you control the people. Is this correct and, if so, can you explain to me why?” What more could I say beyond,  “Yes, and no I can’t.” The Dutchman nailed it.

I mused on this encounter recently when I was at the gym and a friend asked me who got my vote for being the biggest disappointment in all of American politics.  Now that’s a loaded question! Where does one even begin? American politics is filled with loathsome, inept, and deplorable creatures. Look up the word “buttocks” and the first definition is Eric Cantor. Harry Reid is a synonym for ‘sclerotic.’ Mitch McConnell is to the right of Mussolini, David Vitter is dumber than gravel, Michele Bachmann escaped from the asylum, Rick Scott is why the word “creep” was invented, Anton Scalia represents the Vatican with such naked fervency he’s in danger of losing his U.S. citizenship, and Clarence Thomas is rumored to be a fully owned subsidiary of Scalia, Inc. Then there’s the American Svengali, Barack Obama, who has mesmerized millions of liberals into believing he’s one of them without actually having paid any attention to them whatsoever.  But in the end, my vote goes to Rand Paul. Not because the most corrupt, amoral, or dumbest politician in the land, but because he fails the simplest task of all: he can’t even do nothing.

Before you jump on me for bad syntax, let me explain. Paul calls himself a libertarian and says that government should stay the hell out of people’s lives. That’s his main (only?) appeal. Lots of Americans hate government, taxes, and regulations. Paul’s bad-boy libertarianism appeals to the anarchist fantasies of so many Americans that even those smart enough to know better–a smaller number than one might presume–occasionally find themselves nodding in agreement. The problem is that Rand is the Wizard of Oz—all smoke and mirrors. He doesn’t believe what he says; it’s just a ruse to trick people into thinking he’s on their side. Has it escaped the feeble minds of Paul supporters that the Great Libertarian Phony introduced a bill that would outlaw all abortion and define life as beginning with conception? Or that he opposes gay marriage? Or that the guy who says he wants the U.S. to stop giving foreign aid and going to war faithfully votes for whatever military budget that is put before him? Or that he’s against immigration reform because it doesn’t “secure” U.S. borders? How hard is it to shut up and do nothing if you claim that’s what government ought to do?

I suspect that Rand embodies the true spirit of American libertarianism. That is to say, libertarianism as practiced is little more than a temper tantrum, not a serious political ideology. Few self-proclaimed libertarians actually believe much beyond wanting to have unrestricted access to guns and tax dodges.  What would true libertarianism look like? Probably something like the Netherlands, except with more guns. If you really don’t think government has any right to interfere in people’s lives then every woman can make up her own mind about abortion, drugs should be as legal as guns, sodomy among consenting adults is nobody else’s business, government (state, federal or local) should sanction the marriage of anyone who buys a license, prostitution would be legal, workers seeking jobs should freely cross borders in search of them, and the First Amendment ought to be interpreted broadly in matters of appropriate speech, dress (or undress), film, print, web, and music content. True libertarianism would mean a society in which we stop trying to “prevent” much of anything insofar as individuals are concerned, and one sanctions only public harm, not private preferences. In essence, one can be as stoned or drunk as one wishes, as long as one doesn’t go on to drive a car or rob a bank.

Rand Paul doesn’t believe this. I’m not sure I’m in favor of all of this either, but I’ve never claimed the libertarian mantle and he has. That makes me inconsistent, but it makes Rand Paul a charlatan and a hypocrite. All hail Rand Paul–the worst politician in a land of political rogues. His old man must be proud. Too bad Hans is Dutch; he’d be a candidate worth supporting.