Vic Chesnutt: Left to his own devices

Vic was our Keats, our Nina Simone. There will never be another like him. - Guy Picciotto, Fugazi
It’s funny the things we tend to remember, or I should say, the things I tend to remember. The minutiae. The first time I heard the name Vic Chesnutt was in the Fall of 1995; I was 20 years old and a sophomore at the University of Georgia in Athens. Having recently been turned on to Jack Logan, via the University radio station, I walked downtown to Wuxtry Records to pick up his 2-disc debut, Bulk. Paying for it at the counter the clerk, noting my purchase, asked if I  also liked Vic Chesnutt. No, I replied–I had never heard of him. That was 15 years ago. Chesnutt’s music has been with me ever since.
On Christmas day I heard the news that Vic Chestnutt was gone, dead at 45 from an overdose of muscle relaxants. Shocking as the news was, it was made even more surreal as I had just been shopping for Chesnutt vinyl a couple of days prior, had just seen him and his new (excellent) band December 1st here in L.A., and we had just listed At The Cut as not only one of our favorite albums of 2009, but deemed it “Chesnutt’s finest hour yet.” All appeared to be on the up and up for Chesnutt, at least from an outside perspective. In reality Chesnutt had apparently been struggling with deep depression, continued health issues, and stress and anxiety due to monster lawsuit from unpaid hospital bills in the tune of 50 thousand dollars. Tragic and sad.
Chesnutt was my kind of songwriter. There was no artifice, no bullshit. And while his music wasn’t pretty, and could be very grim at times, there was almost always a humor in it. How could there not be from the guy who wrote “Good Morning Mr. Hard On.” Like fellow Athenian Daniel Hutchens, he walked that fine line between the light and the dark. That magic lyrical twilight that you can’t quite put your finger on, but one that makes all the difference. Read Chesnutt’s lyrics; listen to his songs. A musician, he tread in the Southern Gothic literary tradition of William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O’Connor, but in the vein of contemporaries Harry Crews, Larry Brown and William Gay. Chesnutt wrote about what he knew; the new South, one struggling with its identity – half rooted in the present and half in the past.
Following a pair of critically well-received albums for New West Records, Silver Lake and Ghetto Bells, Chesnutt resurfaced in 2007 with the type of late-period album that not only revitalizes long-time listeners, but draws in new ones as well. North Star Deserter was the result of Chesnutt collaborating with Guy Picciotto of Fugazi, Thee Silver Mt. Zion and members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. It was a dark, challenging record that truly gave Chesnutt’s lyrics a powerful backdrop unlike any previous recording. He would take time to record another collaboration, the more light-hearted and whimsical Dark Developments with Elf Power in 2008, but would return to his North Star Deserter collaborators for 2009’s astounding At the Cut.
Every bit its predecessor’s equal, if not its better, At The Cut found Chesnutt in rare lyrical form – dissecting his usual themes of mortality and existence with amazing precision. From opener “Coward” and its powerful sonics while Chesnutt dictates about “the courage of the coward,” to closer “Granny” and its short vignettes of actual interactions between Chesnutt and his late grandmother based on a dream that he had, the album is a sonic and thematic triumph. Now, in the wake of Chesnutt’s suicide, one of the album’s best songs has also taken on a different tone. “Flirted With You All My Life” was, as Vic explained it in an interview we conducted earlier this year, “about being a suicide. I’ve attempted suicide a couple of times and I think about things such as that. [People who attempt suicide] have a kind of love/hate relationship with death. I do, in some ways. That’s what I say in the song – ‘tease me with your sweet relief.’ The song is about realizing that I don’t want to die. I want to live.” A song that seemed to point to a triumph over Death’s call, instead now reads like a lost promise.
Vic’s last tour before his death was with the North Star Deserter/At The Cut studio band promoting the At the Cut album. On numerous nights of the tour, they brought an amazing and jaw-dropping set of songs to bear on the audience. Again in the interview he described working with the band as “one of the most incredible experiences, musically, I’ve ever had. The power is like a locomotive or something.” Seeing the band live, he wasn’t kidding. It was one of the best concert experiences of 2009 to go along with one of its finest albums. Talking with Vic was always a pleasure, too. In interviews, he was genuine and forthright in the way he spoke of his turbulent life – in person, he was a kind and friendly man who was approachable to his fans. He will be greatly missed. words/ j gage & j neas
+ Musician Kristin Hersh has set up a donation website on behalf of Chesnutt’s family in tribute to the artist. 100% of all funds raised will go to Vic’s family.
MP3: Vic Chesnutt :: Degenerate
MP3: Vic Chesnutt :: Flirted With You All My Life

@'Aquarium Drunkard'

Flying soon? Have fun

In the wake of 9/11, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a New Yorker article on the history of hijackings (PDF), concluding:

Can we close the loopholes that led to the September 11th attack? Logistically, an all-encompassing security system is probably impossible. A new safety protocol that adds thirty seconds to the check-in time of every passenger would add more than three hours to the preparation time for a 747, assuming that there are no additional checkpoints. Reforms that further encumber the country's already overstressed air-traffic system are hardly reforms; they are self-inflicted wounds.

The history Gladwell had detailed is one in which, repeatedly, security procedures on air travel had addressed the most recent crime or attempted crime, always looking backward and always being evaded by the next round of hijackers.

And, despite all the improvements in airport security, the percentage of terrorist hijackings foiled by airport security in the years between 1987 and 1996 was at its lowest point in thirty years. Airport-security measures have simply chased out the amateurs and left the clever and the audacious. "A look at the history of attacks on commercial aviation reveals that new terrorist methods of attack have virtually never been foreseen by security authorities," the Israeli terrorism expert Ariel Merari writes, in the recent book "Aviation Terrorism and Security."

In the wake of Christmas Day's failed terrorism attempt, the TSA is self-inflicting a few more wounds. The upshot is that air travel is getting a whole lot more miserable for those who are still willing to endure it.

According to a statement posted Saturday morning on Air Canada’s Web site, the Transportation Security Administration will severely limit the behavior of both passengers and crew during flights in United States airspace — restricting movement in the final hour of flight. Late Saturday morning, the T.S.A. had not yet included this new information on its own Web site.

"Among other things," the statement in Air Canada’s Web site read, "during the final hour of flight customers must remain seated, will not be allowed to access carry-on baggage, or have personal belongings or other items on their laps."

Also, only one carry-on item may be allowed, it's reported.

So, to recap. Improvements in airport security have historically not worked. Yet, in response to a failed terrorism attempt, a struggling industry in a struggling economy, and the poor saps stuck as its customers, will have to deal with more restrictions imposed not because there's any empirical support for their effectiveness, but so the TSA can appear to be Vigilant and Responsive.

If some terrorist organization wanted to change its stated goals to killing the US airline industry, they could probably declare victory relatively soon.

@'Daily Kos'

Dubstep hits the big time in US

Newcomer Ke$ha takes her first solo chart single "TiK ToK" to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 (2-1), released on Billboard.com Thursday (Dec. 24). Ke$ha is the first female vocalist to rise to No. 1 with her debut single since Lady Gaga stormed the list with "Just Dance" in January 2009.

There are two remixes from Untold for this single,first time in history we have some dubstep remixes for nr.1 single USA, so this is the biggest success for Untold and dubstep scene so far.

Ke$ha "TiK ToK"(untold remixes)

@'Extra Music New'

The Art of Drawing

isoHunt guilty of inducing copyright infringement

A U.S. federal court has ruled against torrent indexer isoHunt today, ruling the site is guilty of inducing copyright infringement. Claiming the case is so similar to that of Napster and Grokster in the 1990s, the case will not get a full trial and was given summary judgment.
The case, which began in 2006 when Columbia, Disney, Tristar, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal and Warner Bros issued a complaint against the site and owner Gary Fung, seems to be finally over, with the site seemingly going the way of Mininova, which removed all illegal torrents in November, at least in the U.S. It should continue to run full steam in Canada.
The ruling says Fung ran the site with “purposeful, culpable expression and conduct, aimed at promoting infringing uses of the websites.”
In their case, the defendants pointed out many cases in which users of the site were encouraged to pirate, including torrent categories such as "top 20 movies," or the ‘Box Office Movies’ section of the site which encouraged users to upload the top 20 highest-grossing movies of all time.
Staff and moderators of the site's official forum were also shown giving advice on how to download copyright films, how to rip DVDs, and how to use PeerGuardian to block IP addresses from the MPAA and other groups.

@'Afterdawn'

The Wire is an urbanistic enquiry too

They say “It’s not television, it’s Hbo”, but when you talk about The Wire is more like “It’s not Hbo, it’s even better”. Considering the quality of the writing, the value of the drama, the strenght of the plot, the series seems more like a vivid and grimey painting – near to literature – of the US society of the last decade, from the “post 9/11″ period to the financial crack of 2008.
But if this TV show is mostly a portrait of a society, it is also a map of an urban environment: in his case, the city of Baltimore (notably put for the first time on the once So-Cal-dominated series map, much like The Sopranos did with New Jersey).
Just like the characters are connected to each other and every action, as in the ancient epic or tragedy, has a cost for everybody, so are the locations.

The first season of the show starts at the Pit: a square, located in Baltimore’s suburbia, where a new organization of young and black drug dealers is pushing cocaine and crack, while sitting on a sofa literally placed in the middle of the square.
From there, the screenplay drives us through a lot of different locations, all connected by The (same) Wire. From the Pit to the Grand Jury, from the student buildings to TV and media centers, from the harbour to the prisons, from the police department to greats lawyers’s offices, from the crack addicts squats to middle class flats: everything in The Wire seems shaded by the same corruption that makes hard to distinguish what right or wrong are.

But the point here is not merely a moral question, the point is that, in The Wire, the city appears clearly for what it is: an organic Social Network in which commercial, political, criminal informations and goods are passed through, like it happens in a DNA chain, making a difference not only for the single point, but for the whole chain.

As noted by James Harkin in his recent book Cyburbia: The Dangerous Idea That’s Changing How We Live and Who We are, The Wire is one of the most accurate enquiries over an urban environment – if you think at them as a network of exchanges. But it’s more than that, The Wire gives us a map to orientate ourselves in a modern city. And not in a prototype or just a city of the future, but the cities as we already know it: an urban conglomerate of chinese boxes where the money, their movements, their transfers, their rehabilitation from dirty money to clean and disposable money makes everything happen – from the planning of the instruction system to the renovation of urban areas, from transportations to media topics.

As a result of all these blind effects, The Wire shows his “omniscient” follower the daily reterritorialization of Baltimore’s “moral” geography.

As declared by screenwriter David Simon, the series’ deus ex machina, in a 2007 interview with The New Yorker: “The Wire was never a cop show. We were always planning to move further and further out, to build a whole city”.
For this and for several other reasons, we can say – along with a lot of other magazines and websites – that The Wire is not only the most outstanding TV show of the decade near to his end, but that it promises to become, even in the next years, an influential critical tool for social and urbanistic thought.

@'Y mag'

(Thanx Stan)

My steampunk wish

Should I ever get a MAC this is the one I want (combined with an old typewriter!)

*woof*

(Nervous) Rex AKA Fatboy Fat

Rex is about 17 and has been with us for 16 of those years. We got him through a newspaper ad. He had been found in the bush and we think had been hit by a car.
He initially was so nervous and cowered at the slightest movement and didn't bark for about the first year.

Now as he nears the end of his time with us he is very lame, very blind, very deaf, very smelly and still very loved.

The film above is a very moving account of the last days of Oden.

This one's for you Spacebubs

                                Via 'Mogadonia'

Page to donate money for Vic Chesnutt's family set up by the very wonderful Kristen Hersh

What this man was capable of was superhuman. Vic was brilliant, hilarious and necessary; his songs messages from the ether, uncensored. He developed a guitar style that allowed him to play bass, rhythm and lead in the same song — this with the movement of only two fingers. His fluid timing was inimitable, his poetry untainted by influences. He was my best friend. I never saw the wheelchair—it was invisible to me—but he did. When our dressing room was up a flight of stairs, he'd casually tell me that he'd meet me in the bar. When we both contracted the same illness, I told him it was the worst pain I'd ever felt. "I don't feel pain," he said. Of course. I'd forgotten. When I asked him to take a walk down the rain spattered sidewalk with me, he said his hands would get wet. Sitting on stage with him, I would request a song and he'd flip me off, which meant, "This finger won't work today." I saw him as unassailable—huge and wonderful, but I think Vic saw Vic as small, broken. And sad.

I don't know if I'll ever be able to listen to his music again, but I know how vital it is that others hear it. When I got the phone call I'd been dreading for the last fifteen years, I lost my balance. My whole being shifted to the left; I couldn't stand up without careening into the wall and I was freezing cold. I don't think I like this planet without Vic; I swore I would never live here without him. But what he left here is the sound of a life that pushed against its constraints, as all lives should. It's the sound of someone on fire. It makes this planet better.

And if I'm honest with myself, I admit that I still feel like he's here, but free of his constraints. Maybe now he really is huge. Unbroken. And happy.

Love,

Kristin

HERE

Vic Chesnutt - Supernatural

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6967927.ece

Neda Agha-Soltan is Times Person of the Year

Neda Soltan was not political. She did not vote in the Iranian presidential election on June 12. The young student was appalled, however, by the way that the regime shamelessly rigged the result and reinstalled Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ignoring the pleas of her family, she went with her music teacher eight days later to join a huge opposition demonstration in Tehran.

“Even if a bullet goes through my heart it’s not important,” she told Caspian Makan, her fiancé. “What we’re fighting for is more important. When it comes to taking our stolen rights back we should not hesitate. Everyone is responsible. Each person leaves a footprint in this world.”

Ms Soltan, 26, had no idea just how big a footprint she would leave. Hours after leaving home, she was indeed shot, by a government militiaman, as she and other demonstrators chanted: “Death to the dictator.”

Arash Hejazi, a doctor standing near by, remembers her looking down in surprise as blood gushed from her chest. She collapsed. More blood spewed from her mouth. As she lay dying on the pavement, her life ebbing out of her, “I felt she was trying to ask a question. Why?” said Dr Hejazi, who tried to save her life. Why had an election that generated so much excitement ended with a government that claims to champion the highest moral values, the finest Islamic principles, butchering its own youth?A 40-second telephone clip of Ms Soltan’s final moments flashed around the world. Overnight she became a global symbol of the regime’s brutality, and of the remarkable courage of Iran’s opposition in a region where other populations are all too easily suppressed by despotic governments.

Her name was invoked by Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and other world leaders. Outside Iranian embassies huge crowds of protesters staged candlelit vigils, held up her picture, or wore T-shirts proclaiming, “NEDA — Nothing Except Democracy Acceptable”. The internet was flooded with tributes, poems and songs. The exiled son of the Shah of Iran carried her photograph in his chest pocket.

She was no less of an icon inside Iran, whose Shia population is steeped in the mythology of martyrdom. Vigils were held. Her grave became something of a shrine, and the 40th day after her death — an important date in Shia mourning rituals — was marked by a big demonstration in Behesht-e Zahra cemetery in Tehran that riot police broke up.

It was not hard to see why Ms Soltan so quickly became the face of the opposition, the Iranian equivalent of the young man who confronted China’s tanks during the Tiananmen Square demonstrations 20 years earlier. She was young and pretty, innocent, brave and modern. She wore make-up beneath her mandatory headscarf, jeans and trainers beneath her long, black coat, and liked to travel. She transcended the narrow confines of religion, nationality and ideology. She evoked almost universal empathy.

The story of her death was so potent that the regime went to extraordinary lengths to suppress it. It banned a mourning ceremony, tore down black banners outside her home, and insisted that her funeral be private. It ordered her family to stay silent.

In the subsequent weeks any number of leading officials, ayatollahs included, sought to blame her death on British and American intelligence agencies, the opposition, and even the BBC — accusing its soon-to-beexpelled Tehran correspondent, Jon Leyne, of arranging her death so that he could get good pictures.

The regime announced investigations that, to no one’s surprise, exonerated it and all its agents. It managed to coerce Ms Soltan’s music teacher into changing his story, but it failed to do the same with Mr Makan, despite imprisoning him for 65 days — many of them in solitary confinement. Released on bail, he fled the country — making a five-day overland journey to escape.

Dr Hejazi also fled, back to Oxford where he had been taking a postgraduate course in publishing. There he confirmed in an interview in The Times that Ms Soltan was shot by a Basij militiaman on a motorcycle. But the regime still hounds him. It has harassed his family in Tehran, is trying to close his publishing company in the capital, and has accused him of helping British agents to kill Ms Soltan. It stages demonstrations outside the British Embassy demanding his extradition. He would be arrested the moment he returned to Tehran, meaning that he, his wife and infant son are now exiles.

When The Queen’s College, Oxford, established a scholarship in Ms Soltan’s name the regime sent the university a furious letter of complaint.

Back in Tehran, the regime tried to buy off Ms Soltan’s parents by promising them a pension if they agreed that their daughter was a “martyr” killed by foreign agents.

Her mother, Hajar Rostami Motlagh, was outraged. “Neda died for her country, not so that I could get a monthly income from the Martyr Foundation,” she said. “If these officials say Neda was a martyr, why do they keep wiping off the word ‘martyr’ in red which people write on her gravestone? ... Even if they give the world to me I will never accept the offer.”

Soon afterwards, government supporters desecrated her grave. The regime has not arrested or investigated Abbas Kargar Javid, who was caught by demonstrators seconds after he shot Ms Soltan. The crowd, unwilling to use violence, and with the police the enemy, let him go — but not before they had taken his identity card.

Six months on, it is obvious that Ms Soltan did not die in vain. The manner of her death, and the regime’s response, has shredded what little legitimacy it had left. She helped to inspire an opposition movement that is now led by her generation, which a systematic campaign of arrests, show trials, beatings, torture and security force violence has failed to crush, and whose courage and defiance has won the admiration of the world.

As the new year approaches, the so-called Green Movement appears to be gaining confidence and momentum. It no longer seems impossible that the regime could fall in 2010. If and when it does, Ms Soltan will be remembered as the pre-eminent martyr of the second Iranian revolution.

@'The Times'

Vic Chesnutt RIP

Vic Chesnutt, a singer-songwriter whose music dealt with mortality and black humor, died on Friday in a hospital in Athens, Ga., a spokesman for his family said. He was 45 and lived in Athens.
He had been in a coma after taking an overdose of muscle relaxants earlier this week, said the family spokesman, Jem Cohen.
In a two-decade career, Mr. Chesnutt sang darkly comic and often disarmingly candid songs about death, vulnerability, and life’s simple joys. A car accident when he was 18 left him a quadriplegic, but he has said that the accident focused him as a musician and a poet.
“It was only after I broke my neck and even like maybe a year later that I really started realizing that I had something to say,” he said in a recent radio interview with Terry Gross.
Discovered in the late 1980s by Michael Stipe of R.E.M., who produced his first two albums, Mr. Chesnutt has been a mainstay in independent music, collaborating with the bands Lambchop and Widespread Panic.
In 1996 his songs were performed by Madonna, the Indigo Girls, Smashing Pumpkins, R.E.M. and others for “Sweet Relief II: The Gravity of the Situation,” an album that benefited the Sweet Relief Musicians Fund, a nonprofit group that offers medical support for musicians.
His survivors include his wife, Tina Whatley Chesnutt; a sister, Lorinda Crane; and nine nieces and nephews.
Recently Mr. Chesnutt had had a burst of creativity, releasing two 2009 albums, “At the Cut” and “Skitter on Take-Off.” In the song, “Flirted With You All My Life,” from “At the Cut,” Mr. Chesnutt sings about suicide, which he had attempted several times. Written as a breakup song with death, it expresses a wish to live:
“When you touched a friend of mine I thought I would lose my mind
But I found out with time that really, I was not ready, no no, cold death
Oh death, I’m really not ready.”
@'NY Times'

Vic Chesnutt RIP

kristinhersh

he's gone...so much to go away in a moment 36 minutes ago from Echofon Retweeted by you and 7 others