The Daily Sabbatical

Man who killed burglary suspects cleared

HOUSTON, Texas (AP) — A Texas man who shot and killed two men he suspected of burglarizing his neighbor’s home was cleared in the shootings Monday by a grand jury.

Joe Horn, 61, shot the two men in November after he saw them crawling out the windows of a neighbor’s house in the Houston suburb of Pasadena.

Horn called 911 and told the dispatcher he had a shotgun and was going to kill the men. The dispatcher pleaded with him not to go outside, but Horn confronted the men with a 12-gauge shotgun and shot both in the back.

“The message we’re trying to send today is the criminal justice system works,” Harris County District Attorney Kenneth Magidson said.

Pattern is Movement have been around for a while, but it was only when local record shop guru CJ Davis drooled effusively over their new album “all together” that I gave the band a chance.  As usual, CJ is right.  This is a very rewarding release.

For some reason I had filed Pattern is Movement away with Math-rock wannabees who had ignored the fact that Don Cabballero achieved perfection and made it pointless to be in that genre.  Perhaps some of their older stuff should be so summarily dismissed, but I doubt it.  All together is a different animal, um, all together.  There are, to be sure, radical changes in tempo and time signature, along with sudden changes in instrumentation, but there is a lot of room to be explored in that territory.  Anyone who is uncompromisingly wedded to the traditional pop song should probably steer clear, but those whose ears tolerate a little experimentin’ should listen.  My comparison is–ready for this?–Deerhoof meets Oingo Boingo.  Perhaps the closest comparison in one band is the early early XTC (Go 2 and such) but PiM goes for a little more repetition and sound swatching than that.

It’s not easy to find a representative track, but the first track, Bird, will have to do.

Bird.mp3

Devotchka might have made the best album of the year.  For years they’ve been on my radar as a band that blended international influences from Mexico to Moscow, but I mistakenly wrote these guys off as merely filling the indie-world-music nitch alongside bands like Gogol Bordello and Beirut.  Not that the bands in that nitch are bad, but in my opinion they don’t solidly transcend it the way Devotchka does with their latest.

You might have heard Devotchka’s music before.  Their score for Little Miss Sunshine is apt to stick in your head, despite playing its assigned supporting role.  If you’ve never heard the wonderful voice of Nick Urata belting above the multi-ethnic sounds of the band, however, you haven’t heard Devotchka.  I don’t issue comparisons to Roy Orbison lightly–next to Otis Redding, he’s probably the best male vocalist in history–but Urata earns the comparison.  There’s no question the voice is not quite as pure as that of the Big O, but Urata is in the ballpark nonetheless.  Look: if you’ve got a group that’s instrumentally and compositionally competent to record scores, and you’ve got a vocalist like Urata, the only way you could go wrong is by having illiterate lyrics.  No worries there.  The songs are written carefully and intelligently, without having too heavy a hand and without irony.

I really cannot recommend this album enough.  Go check out their gorgeous website and buy an album or two while you’re there.  (Check out their song “Transliterator” when on their website.  It’s the best song I’ve heard this year.  But, since it probably doesn’t best represent their sound, I’m including a different track here.)

Along the Way.mp3

The National Applications Office is a) a part of the INS dedicated to processing immigration forms, b) the part of the CIA in charge of gluing false mustaches on the upper lips of spies, c) a domestic surveillance program involving spy satellites.

If you choise c, you have caught on the the Bush Administration’s antics.  Fortunately congress is not quite ready to swallow the whole fish:

A Bush administration program to expand domestic use of Pentagon spy satellites has aroused new concerns in Congress about possible civil-liberties abuses.

On Tuesday, the House Appropriations Committee approved an amendment denying money for the new domestic intelligence operation—cryptically named the “National Applications Office”—until the Homeland Security secretary certifies that any programs undertaken by the center will “comply with all existing laws, including all applicable privacy and civil liberties standards.”

Read the Newsweek story here.

I love rankings: top ten, top hundred, worst twenty, middle fifteen. Write a list, I’ll probably read it, especially if it is a list ranking “great books.” Lists like this are, of course, made to be trashed, but that’s part of the fun. Man, was I ready for some list-trashin’ when I found out that Entertainment Weekly, of all forums, was ranking the top 100 books of the last 25 years.  And then, I was disappointed.  The list simply makes fun of itself.  Take, for example, the top six:

1. The Road , Cormac McCarthy (2006)
2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling (2000)
3. Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987)
4. The Liars’ Club, Mary Karr (1995)
5. American Pastoral, Philip Roth (1997)
6. Mystic River, Dennis Lehane (2001)

Did the editors really put this Harry Potter book after McCarthy and above Morrison?  Above Roth?  I mean, I’m guilty of having read several of those formulaic Potter books, but classics?  I guess it depends on what we mean by classic, but any list that has this top six is a strange list indeed.

To be honest, the list isn’t all that bad.  There are a surprising number of really, really good books on it, and a surprising number have never been for sale in airports.  You really won’t go too far wrong with any of the books on the list–with the possible exception of The DaVinci Code.  And putting The Road at the top warms my heart.  Kudos EW.  You could have done much worse.

Miracle in Dallas!

The reporter here does a good job of playing this straight.  Note especially: “Granite is typically used for kitchen countertops, tubs surrounds, bathroom vanities, etc.”

Residents See Jesus In Granite Slab

DALLAS (CBS 11 News) ― Workers at a marble company in Dallas say they have a slab of natural granite that has the image of Jesus in it.

Verona Marble Company Inc. takes pictures of every slab of stone in their inventory and posts them on their website. Wednesday, the owners say a customer in West Texas spotted the image among dozens of pictures and called to tell them about it.

Those who look at the 6×10 foot slab say they can see the head and arms of Jesus, along with either a belt, sword or glowing book.

The company has pulled the slab from its inventory and put it on display.

Verona Marble has had the granite slab, which came from a quarry in Brazil, since December. Company owners say the image is unique, especially since hunks of granite are sliced into slabs, like pieces of bread, and no other slabs from that particular piece of granite have the image.

Granite is typically used for kitchen countertops, tubs surrounds, bathroom vanities, etc.

The slab weighs between 900 and 1,000 pounds and is worth about $1500 wholesale.

The company owners say they feel blessed to have the piece and hope to sell it and donate the proceeds to a struggling church in Madill, Oklahoma.

(© MMVIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)

I admit to being reluctant either to embrace or write about Shearwater’s Rook, because I have not fully digested the album.  I just discovered, however, that they’ll be at Good Records tomorrow with a free instore performance, so now is perhaps the time to say a word.

Shearwater is from Austin and overlaps with the excellent Okkerville River, so they have to marks in their favor before you even hit play.  Their music is a heavily orchestrated affair, led by the resonant voice of Jonathan Meiburg (think Scott Walker) who pens songs with pensively poetic narratives (believe it or not, this disgusting alliteration was accidental, so I’m keeping it).  The end result, though, is a little too melodramatic for me to love, but judging from the critical acclaim this album has received I seem to be in the minority.  Whatever your final judgment, these guys clearly deserve respect and I have little doubt that their Good Records performance will be worth catching.

The Hunter’s Star.mp3

Fleet Foxes will be in Dallas on the third, and this is a show I can’t miss. The buzz about this group is pretty monumental, but I’d say they live up to it. While they do not fall into a clear natural kind of music, they are not without influences and resemblances. On their “Sun Giant” EP, for example, there are times when early seventies bands like America are clearly in the background, and other times when Crosby, Stills and Nash appear to have come together to lay a track down at Sub Pop. (See, for example, Mykonos, posted below.) On the more recent self-titled LP, with its strikingly appropriate Bruegel cover, fans of My Morning Jacket will be pleased, as will those who would prefer that the aforementioned Kentuckians would be a tad less jammy.

The most striking feature of the Foxes is their layers of vocals, at times choir-like, while at other times a little more Wilson-like.  I’ll be very interested to see how it goes live, since I’m pretty sure this is one guy multi-tracked.  In the end, though, I’ll bet I prefer the live version to the albums because my one complaint about them is in their recording.  (What’s more, on the few tracks that are less produced, the singer sounds completely angelic.)  On my first few listens, I felt like the sound lacked crispness and I was frustrated that perhaps my car stereo was to blame.  Torin Alter, though, pointed out the real problem: too much reverb!  Perhaps this was done to paste over some of the seams in the track integration, but for my money I’d go with a more natural sound.

That being said, this is a clear purchase, and my understanding is that the gatefold LP is gorgeous and comes with a code for free downloads of the album.  I’ll probably sell my cd to buy that.

These guys will be at The Loft on Wednesday.

Mykonos.mp3

Tiger Mountain Peasant Song.mp3

For various predictable reasons I’ve been reading a fair amount recently on the origins of life and the likelihood of its emergence.  So I was particularly interested when the New York Times reported the discovery that there are likely to be a great many suns with planets some of which are bound to be apt for life.  A snippet of the most recent article:

…roughly one in three stars surveyed showed signs of harboring stony planets, and other researchers performing similar studies said the figure might be more like one in two. And though the 45 planets on the Geneva list are all “star-huggers,” as one astronomer put it, with orbital periods of 2 to 50 days — even Mercury needs nearly three months to circumnavigate the Sun — researchers are confident that other rocky planets remain to be found at Earthier distances from their suns.

Sara Seager, a planetary theorist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said astronomers hunt for planets by detecting telltale wobbles they induce in their host stars, a method that selectively nets the too big or too near. Nevertheless, she said, “the fact is, as soon as astronomers started looking for low-mass planets, they found a whole bunch, and that’s a real breakthrough.” Just imagine the orgy of moderation that a more inclusive scan would reveal.

To some theorists, the new results virtually guarantee the existence of other Earthlike worlds.

“Suppose you have a tribe, and the most noticeable members are the warriors, because they’re adventuresome, they roam around, they’re the first to be spotted,” said Douglas N. C. Lin, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “But you know that for every warrior, there’s a family behind the warrior.”

Dr. Lin continued, “Just as you can extrapolate from the warriors you see what the size of the larger population deep in the woods may be, so the presence of these short-period, super Earths implies that there are clusters of other planets farther out.” Potentially pleasant planets at that. “I would imagine that a significant fraction of ordinary Sunlike stars, maybe more than 10 percent, have habitable planets around them,” Dr. Lin said.

Check out the full article here.

Inspired by a Times Online segment in which critics and authors list their most loathed books, I’ve decided to name my most loathed author. I hate Milan Kundera. I have an imaginary button that I press to make it such that certain people never existed. (This is better than the imaginary hammer, which just poofs the despised out of existence, because there are some people whose influence needs to be stricken from the record as well.) I use it rarely–although I have been punching like mad for the past eight years–but old MK gets an enthusiastic push of the button. Now granted, there are some pretty sexy scenes in the movie version of The Unbearable Lightness of Being that would have to go, but that’s a small price to pay. Kundera is unsufferable.
I know of no other person whose estimation of his own intelligence so far overshoots his actual capabilities. (And this is saying something, since bad philosophers–usually bearded ones–have this trait in spades.) Now I must admit, my evidence is somewhat scanty. I’ve only read two halves of his books–I threw both Immortality and The Joke across the room upon reaching their midpoints–and a handful of articles, but my aversion to suffering overrides my desire for a conclusive brief. I can deal with a bit of pretentiousness. Nabokov was pretentious. I can deal with a bit of smarminess–Richard Dawkins can be a tad smarmy. But combine these traits with intellectual sloppiness, a questionably IQ and a tribe of adoring fans and I’m moved to hatred. If you are in that tribe, I suggest you not mention it. I also suggest that you read more widely, for if you did you would surely agree that Kundera is a buffoon whose place as a leading member of the intelligentsia is as absurd as George W. Bush’s place as the leader of the world’s most powerful nation.