New issue of Arthur is hitting streets across North America right about now. It includes another great "Do the Math" column from my pal Dave Reeves, he fresh out of the LA County Jail. It's a 14-point survival guide to modern incarceration, and a blackly comic reminder that we're all just a few wrong turns from landing in the pokey. As Jenny Burman at the wonderful Echo Park blog, Chicken Corner, puts it: "If you're just tuning in, Reeves was sentenced for failing to report a traffic accident in which he was not at fault." Sad but true.
Read the complete column online at the Arthur Magazine blog. Click here to explore more "Do The Math" columns + the backstory to the whole stupid fiasco.
As I learned when traveling around in the Mediterranean region of Southwest Asia back in 2005, the sound of the Arab street is delivered by way of cassette tape: From dubby Koranic readings emanating from the shitty speakers in Egyptian taxi cabs to the Syrian soldiers lazing around with their boom boxes blasting Damascene pop music in bombed-out buildings overlooking the Golan Heights. Such unique international recordings can be pretty tricky to track down here in the United States, so I was flipping out when I came across Awesome Tapes from Africa.
My day job: Uber's editor in chief. My night/weekend/early AM job: contributing editor at Arthur Magazine. I interviewed this dude here about his yard for the new issue:
His name is Tim Dundon, and he's been growing a tropical jungle in his yard for the last 30 years. My friend Eden Batki took some gorgeous pictures for the article, but I took these snaps here (with a camera that my pal Nhat graciously let me borrow) while we sat in his garden talking.
The full story's available in the new Arthur. See if you can find a copy in your town, or download it for free from the Arthur site.
Read a preview the whole story after the jump ... UPDATE: New issue of Arthur is due out anytime now, so I decided to post the whole deal.
Few things demonstrate the tenuous nature of online connection as well as the death of a blog. When a neighbor won't answer their doorbell, a shopkeeper stops opening for business or a friend doesn't return phone calls, one can convene with their mutual friends in the real world to find out what's going on and see if there's something they can do to help. Not an option when the Magic of Juju, a fascinating audioblog curated by two pseudonymous archivists of out-there international jams, went off the air last May.
When a blog goes dark, it's an unsettling reminder of how the internet allows us to turn one-sided, passive communication into the illusion of community. I might talk about online community, but I need a real person to make sure my cats stay fed when I go out of town. Sometimes it's because the blogger went on vacation, other times they got hassled too often by trolls and went subscriber-only. Sometimes it's worse than that.
Country music legend Porter Wagoner died Sunday of lung cancer. He was 80. Wagoner was one of those country guys that allowed cultural critics to make comparisons between violence in contemporary hip-hop/metal/whatever and classic country music. He wrote and sang songs like "The Cold Hard Facts of Life," which is a narrative about a guy who comes home early from a business trip to find out that his wife is fooling around with another fellow. After driving around the block and guzzling down the bottle of booze he was bringing home to celebrate with, Wagoner's character confronts the cheaters and, as they beg him for mercy, kills them with a knife. The singer wonders if he's going to hell after he spends the rest of his life in jail. He closes sounding pretty satisfied, if resigned to his fate, asking rhetorically: Who taught who / The cold hard facts of life? Grim stuff.
And then there's all of his songs about going crazy and being committed to mental institutions, the most famous being "The Rubber Room," which is like a 3-minute Appalachian version of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest ...
Hanging out at Arthur Magazine headquarters last week, and editor Jay blew my mind with his screener of Ultimate Reality, an epic 40-minute psychedelic odyssey scored by Dan Deacon, and animated by Jimmy Joe Roche. The kaleidoscopic visuals are comprised entirely from the filmography of California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Here's a clip of the first 10 minutes or so.
UPDATE: It looks like the video's been yanked from YouTube. I'll repost if it show up again. Until then, enjoy this earlier Deacon/Roche tag-team, and imagine it with more lysergic Conan The Barbarian imagery and less dancin' around.
thank you so much! the cover was really fun to do ... i had never done something for somebody else before like that. but i really liked interpreting someone elses idea with my drawing. : )
