Prole Call

Rockin' the Alphabet

2005-08-16T07:06:00.000-07:00

So people have been doing this for a while now: putting all the songs in their music library in alphabetical order, and listing the first song for each letter. When I read Dr. Frank's list back in June, my only computer was my crappy museum piece with a 10GB hard drive, containing a somewhat random selection of music that wasn't at all representative of what I dig.

Since I started working at Woot, I've been using a newer machine with considerably more space. I've stocked it with a couple hundred hours' worth of music, and so here, finally, is my list:

1-2 Crush on You - The Clash
A-Bomb in Wardour Street - The Jam
Baba O'Riley - The Who
Caballo Viejo - Simon Diaz
D.D.T. Beat 69 - Halo of Flies
Each Day - Gregory Isaacs
Fa Ce-La - The Feelies
Gaby - The Boots
Haberin Var Mi - Edip Akbayram & Dostlar
I Am A Rabbit - The Lemonheads
Jaadu Teri Nazar - Udit Narayan
Kabhi KabhiMere Dil Mein Khayal Aata - Lata Mangeshkar & Mukesh
La Bamba - Richie Valens
M.A.C.H.I.N.E. - The Stimulators
Naguara - Andy Palacio
O2 - Sleater-Kinney
P.A.S. - Scritti Politti
Quantum Mechanic - A-Frames
R.A.M.O.N.E.S. - Ramones
Sabotage - Beastie Boys
T.O. - Blitz
U Lijepom Starom Gradu Visegra - Mostar Sevdah Reunion
Vacuum Cleaner - Tintern Abbey
W.A.S. Lied - Seein' Red
X Offender - Blondie
Ya Yongo - Orchestre Empire des Babuka
Zalim Zalim - Edip Akbayram & Dostlar

Whoa! Turkish psych merchants Edip Akbayram & Dostlar sink one at the buzzer to "win"! Never mind that I've only listened to the album maybe three times! Everybody else on the list shares a 26-way tie for second. Just to make you scroll down even more, here are the first ten songs that played this morning when I was listening on random:

Nightmare - The Undead
Viva Venezuela - Un Solo Pueblo
Slipping (Into Something) - The Feelies
Chosen One - Riko and Target
(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher - Jackie Wilson
Pelo Telefone - Os Batutas
Trouble You a Trouble Me - Ini Kamoze
Wild Horses - The Rolling Stones
You Send Me - Sam Cooke
Sex Beat - Gun Club

Voices of the Cub Meltdown

2005-08-11T13:47:00.000-07:00

I have to confess that, as great as the Cardinals' 2005 season has been, I've enjoyed watching the Cubs fall apart almost as much. Thus is the natural order restored. Their current 8-game losing streak makes normally boring, broiling August as sweet as hopeful April or crisp October. How do the loathsome Small Bears keep discovering heretofore unknown ways to lose ballgames? My favorite is Michael Barrett's brainless misfire on that dropped third strike against the Phillies, the flub that started the streak. What's next? A stray dog wandering onto the field and making off with the ball?

Thrilling stuff indeed, especially when the Cubs themselves tell you how horribly things are going:

"It said, 'Dear Cubs, Please Stop Losing.' That kind of stuff breaks your heart."
-Todd Walker, on a sign held up by a fan at Wrigley Field

"I'm probably more bewildered than I am embarrassed. I can't figure this out."
-Dusty Baker

"Whether we are good enough or not doesn't matter. We're not playing good enough."
-Derrek Lee

"There's a million different reasons and excuses...but it's just not working out."
-Todd Walker

"They found every hole. We helped them with a couple of errors, and we weren't doing it offensively."
-Dusty Baker, after the Cubs were swept by the Mets

"We're not winning games. We need to win games, and we haven't done that in a week."
-Mark Prior

"It's tough to take. But you've got to play. You have no choice. They're beating us up."
-Dusty Baker

"We're in a funk. The harder you try, the deeper the funk you go in."
-Derrek Lee

"This guy wrote that he hoped I would hurry up and get my cancer back and die so the Cubs could get a real manager."
-Dusty Baker

Whites Lose Texas

2005-08-11T13:07:00.000-07:00

As announced Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau and illustrated by the map below, Texas has become the fourth "majority minority" U.S. state. Some 50.2% of Texans are not pale Anglophones these days. Somebody register these people to vote!

Oh, yeah, I have a blog

2005-08-05T09:26:00.000-07:00

More frequent updates coming soon! In the meantime enjoy this story about a wayward albino python found in a UPS truck.

Last Call, please

2005-04-14T07:12:00.000-07:00

In the rancid annals of late-night TV talk shows, be there any specimen fouler than Last Call with Carson Daly? I was up late last night and, noticing that David Cross would be a guest on the show, made the foolhardy decision to watch. Ugh. Daly is such an inept host, so fumbling and unfunny, that the show is dominated by long, painful stretches of silence, like the Wernham-Hogg office during a particularly awful David Brent routine. Turn it on in the middle of a segment, after the APPLAUSE signs are switched off, and you might go several minutes without realizing there's an audience in the studio.

The producers have so little confidence in Daly's charmless smarm and retarded comic timing that they don't even let him do a proper monologue, like every other such talk show in the history of television - he just trots out, announces the guests, and settles in behind his desk for the easiest money anyone's ever made.

Last night's big yuk-yuk bit involved Daly sitting in front of a green screen, on which was projected a static image of a beach, in anticipation of the show's upcoming stint in L.A. or some such banality. Carson pretends he's sunning himself. Carson turns in his chair to watch the surf. Carson pulls a prop beach ball out from behind his desk. Will he bat it into the crowd? Even a meager hack gesture like that would at least generate some visual interest, some color and motion. But no - panicked with uncertainty, he just puts it back behind the desk. A silence like outer space fills the studio, an epic void of sound and emotion.

But wait - a jogger trots by in the middle of the David Cross interview. Ho, ho! Out of sound comic instinct, Cross repeatedly tried to turn the conversation away from the deadly beach debacle, but Daly would not be moved, blundering ahead with more vacuous unjokes. "Sure, I've got one of the funniest men in America sitting right here ready to talk," Daily must be saying to himself, "but hey, check out this big picture of the beach! It's like we're doing a show right on the beach! I kill me!"

Cross, to his credit, could barely contain his contempt for the proceedings. Maybe he was extra-bitter because his excellent show, Arrested Development, is fighting for its TV life while Daly's fecal minstrel show eats up 2.5 hours of network TV time, every single week.

Fake Clash of the Week: the Radicts

2005-03-01T13:28:00.000-08:00

For many years of my life, any record review that compared a band to the Clash would send me in a preorgasmic tizzy to the record racks. What compels creative, vital, motivated young men to continue wearing quiffs with wraparound shades and writing songs with the word "rebel" in the title? Herewith, a mini-series in which we chronicle the many attempts to recapture that elusive Clash "thing" and the usually embarrassing results.

New York's own dress-up doll adventure rockers, the Radicts prefigured second-wave pseudo-Clashism by several years, recording the songs that made up the Rebel Sound album (whence comes the "Cruel Times" single pictured above) way back in 1989. For those of you scoring at home, that was when Lint Armstrong and Matt Freeman were still fresh-faced tots in Operation Ivy (who added a good deal more to the roots rock reggae template than Lint & Matt's later outfit - but that's a story for another week).

As much as I wanted to like this album when I first got my hands on it circa 1993, it was just too cheeseball to take seriously on any level. Start with the corny photo poses on the insert; rather than express anything about themselves, the aim seems to be to out-Clash the Clash, right down to the fingerless gloves and the carefully brandished cigarettes. One guy's Wolverine-like mane verges dangerously on the kind of teetering hairdon't pioneered by the Alarm. (Sorry I can't show you any of these insert photos: my scanner is having a rebellion of its own right now.)

Then there are the songs. They're not quite as slavishly imitative as the pictures, but it's hard to tell whether that's by design or by sheer lack of musical wit. A couple are pretty OK in a rote Sham 69 way - i.e., their anthemic choruses are actually catchy - and they get off a couple of decent faux-Strummer lyrical lines: "Expect the worst in Bensonhurst / When you're shopping for your car" even refers to political events from the band's own time and place, no small thing in a microgenre where American bands think it's OK to sing about dialing 999 in an emergency. But the rockified cover of "Johnny Too Bad," fun though it may have been to play live, is exactly the kind of punky-see-punky-do move that makes these fake Clash bands so aggravating.

The Radicts did their thing for a few years, fizzling out in the early '90s. A couple of guys moved on to L.E.S. Stitches, the punk band in Spike Lee's Summer of Sam. Singer Todd Radict then started a new band called the Bloodstained Kings, who mix up their influences a little more to come up with a fairly rockin' '70s punk sound. Weirdly, as I was researching this piece, I discovered that that dude has just released a split 7" with the Bloodstained Kings on one side and a previously unreleased Radicts tune on the flip. Seriously, there'd been no Radicts releases for, what, like twelve years, then this one comes out like a week ago. Well, it seemed weird to me, anyway.

Sam McPheeters of Born Against hilariously dissed the Radicts in an interview I did with him around that time. I like to think that he named the Born Against EP collection The Rebel Sound of Shit and Failure as a direct Radicts reference.

Clash replication quotient: 10/10. These goons have clearly studied every record sleeve, and learned to play every song on at least the first two albums.

Creativity factor: 2/10. Judging by Rebel Sound, these men have no interests or influences before "White Riot" or after, oh, I'll say "London Calling." They evidently tumbled out of the womb with greaser hairdos and gnarled teeth, wearing battered leather vests and clutching half-smoked Silk Cuts.

Overall justifiability: 4/10. Not something I'd want to show off to impress my colleagues at Pitchfork.

Maybe There Is A God

2005-02-22T18:16:00.000-08:00

The white-bearded, flowing-robed man upstairs hasn't been kind to rock n roll. We lost Little Richard and Al Green for some of their most potentially interesting years, and Bob Dylan's dreary Christian dalliance was his definitive shark jump, decades before the creepy lingerie ads. But Jahweh is making amends, mothers and fuckers: he's convinced one of the chumps from Korn to retire. Alas, his departure hasn't broken up the band, but Babylon wasn't destroyed in a day.

Labour Leaking to the Left?

2005-02-21T14:54:00.000-08:00

Despite Kerry's mystifying stance on the Iraq war, progressive American opponents of the war had a relatively easy choice on election day: vote against the bastard who started it, because we hated him already. But what about in Great Britain, where the war-happy Prime Minister is from the ostensible party of the left? Do progressives have any alternative to voting for Labour? The Guardian's Gary Younge thinks so.

Communist Mutants From Space

2005-02-21T14:40:00.000-08:00

It's nothing new, but this list of essential science fiction for socialists just came to my attention thanks to Davebug of GeekLife fame. As somebody who long ago dismissed most s/f as too escapist and too enamored of big booming guns, I'm intrigued by some of the books listed here, only five of which I've read (Swastika Night, The Iron Heel, Atlas Shrugged, Gulliver's Travels, and We). Trotskyist science fiction writers: now there are some people who aren't afraid of public ridicule. Would that I was half so bold.

Hey...all the new dudes...carry the new-hoos...

2005-02-03T08:59:00.000-08:00

L to R: Einar Díaz, David Eckstein, Mark Grudzielanek, Mark Mulder
What to make of the new Cardinals? Since the Birds have lost so many key players from last year's NL Champion team, I thought I'd look at the new guys in terms of who they're replacing:

Einar Díaz: He's no Mike Matheny, but then he's not really replacing Matheny - Yadier Molina is. Díaz is Molina's replacement as the backup backstop. I honestly don't know a whole lot about Díaz, but he has a reputation as a consummate decent-glove, decent-arm journeyman catcher. His offensive contribution is negligible. I'd say the Cards are worse off at catcher this year, but not by a whole lot. If Molina can stay close to Matheny's defensive standards and hit a little more than Matheny did, I'd be satisfied.

David Eckstein: Eckstein is my favorite new position player, but he also represents the biggest fall from his predecessor. Don't kid yourself: the loss of Edgar Rentería will make itself keenly felt at important moments throughout the season. But Eckstein's 2004 OBP was actually higher than Rentería's, and I have a weird feeling that he's on the verge of a career year, a la last year's leadoff man, Tony Womack. The key will be patience at the plate - Eckstein's OBP has varied from .363 to .325 through his career, and it'll have to be near the top of that range for the Cards to win with Eckstein batting leadoff. The biggest loser in Eckstein's acquisition was probably Bo Hart - now that we have a scrappy, hustling little white guy who can actually hit a little, who's going to buy all those Bo Hart t-shirts?

Mark Grudzielanek: Except for speed, Grudzielanek (thank God for cut-and-paste) is a pretty similar player to the aforementioned Womack. He's maybe a little better in the field, getting to almost as many balls with fewer errors. If he can keep his Achilles tendon intact, he'll be fine.

Mark Mulder: Walt Jocketty's big coup this offseason, Mulder comes to the Redbirds with a great past - and a looming question mark. What exactly happened in the second half of last season? Mulder started the All-Star Game for the AL, then subsequently stunk up the joint so bad that the A's were planning to leave him off the postseason roster. This is the offseason deal with the biggest stakes: if Mulder is the dominant ace that we've been yearning for, the Cardinals will waltz into the playoffs. If last year's problems were caused by an undisclosed injury, or if Mulder's just lost his stuff, we'll be very sorry that Woody Williams shuffled back to San Diego.

Despite the big defections, I have to say I'm pretty optimistic about the 2005 season - but...if Pujols and Rolen are still achy, if Morris and Mulder can't get their groove back, if Walker and Edmonds lose another step or two, the Cards' last summer at (the real) Busch will be a very long one.

If You Liked El Salvador, You'll Love Iraq

2005-02-03T07:16:00.000-08:00

What do you call a 12-year counterinsurgency proxy war with 70,000 people dead, unknown numbers of them at the hands of U.S.-funded government death squads, including an Archbishop and a bunch of American nuns? If you're the American colonel who ran the operation, you call it "a success." The BBC's Mark Gibb reports that some U.S. officials are now holding up the El Salvador disaster as a model for Iraq. With democrats like this, who needs fascists?

The Secret Police Can Always Smell the Crisis Coming

2005-02-01T07:57:00.000-08:00

Is Kim Jong-Il's lunatic North Korean regime teetering on the precipice of coup, collapse, or worse? Let's hope so. I think the fall of the Soviet Union turned Russia into a starving basket case of a nation that's still basically a dictatorship, but I wouldn't shed any tears over the end of the DPRK.

First in War, First in Peace, Last on the Best-Dressed List

2005-01-31T09:41:00.000-08:00

As much as I feel for Montreal Expos fans, who were royally screwed by Bud Selig, Jeffrey Loria, and Claude Brochu, I can't help but get excited about having a National League team in Washington, D.C. The Nats' ad-hoc ownerless management has done a decent job stocking the team, with Vinny Castilla and Esteban Loaiza among the better pick-ups. More than that, there's never been a team in Washington in my lifetime - the sheer novelty is somehow exciting.

But the new team's look represents a huge lost opportunity to echo the baseball traditions of DC. First off, their cheeseball logo looks tragically familiar:
But even without that eerie resemblance, this logo leaves a lot to be desired. How about the shading run amok on the letters and the ball? Is that border of stars really necessary? And if that font was the best the designer could find, he needs to invest in some new typeface packages.

Then there's the unfortunate matter of the uniforms, which may have looked cutting-edge circa 1992, but are now as dated as Jane's Addiction:

They're not quite as bad as the nightmare in yellow worn in the 1970's by the San Diego Padres (who, incidentally, came so close to moving to Washington in 1974 that Topps issued some player cards with the team designation "Washington Nat'l. Lea." I digress, of course). But I'd still have to rank them among the fifty or so worst MLB unis of all time, due to their just-plain-ugly typeface and colors.

OK, OK, none of this has anything to do with what happens on the field. But if you're going to bother wearing uniforms, why not make them look good? We're talking about the major league team in our nation's capital, not some Frontier League outfit from rural Kentucky. I predict these togs will be rotated out no later than the first game in their planned new stadium, to be replaced by a still-cheesy-but-at-least-tolerable "retro" design a la the late '80s Chicago White Sox.

Good News on a Bad Day

2005-01-20T08:39:00.000-08:00

As recently as three months ago, I was looking forward to January 20th as the day when the Bush madness would finally end. Alas, we all know how that turned out: just ask the majority of people around the planet who believe that Bush's re-election has made the world more dangerous. But instead of dwelling on the horrific reality of this day, here are some other news stories to illustrate that, reports to the contrary, progressives aren't dead:

First off, a hearty Prole Call "huzzah" to the thousands of protestors in Washington for the inaugural. Give 'em hell for those of us who can't be there, y'all.

Howard Dean has garnered the support of several state party heads in his campaign for the chair of the Democratic National Committee. His rivals, mostly the usual tepid party hacks, are scrambling to catch up.

The French working class is on the march again, with teachers joining the massive strikes against the conservative government of Jacques Chirac. The issue? He wants to privatize part of the state pension system. Where else have I heard that recently...?

Another Wal-Mart store has been unionized in Canada.

Union workers at 14 hotels in D.C. won a new contract that preserves their healthcare benefits after management backed down in the face of strike threats.

OK, this is pretty small beer compared to, you know, the real world, but Green Day's politically charged album American Idiot remains atop the U.S. charts.

And if, like me, you need the soothing balm of talk radio to get through the day but can't stomach the inauguration coverage, Pacifica Radio is running a full day of counter-inaugural programming both over the airwaves and on the web. Face front, true believers - our day will come...

Franz Kafka is alive and well and living in Zimbabwe

2005-01-12T16:20:00.000-08:00

What does a decent person do when her country descends into the dystopian madness of a decrepit dictatorship? If that person is Cathy Buckle, she writes weekly letters about the insanity of life in Zimbabwe under the Mugabe regime.

Stalinism Never Looked So Good

2005-01-06T09:11:00.000-08:00

OK, the old East Germany wasn't too good on human rights, economic efficiency, or cultural expression. But oh, the design! This site features scores of examples of classic GDR design, combining bold modernism with Soviet clunkiness to charming effect. (Scroll down in the left frame to the single-spaced list of German phrases; those are the galleries.) A wave of so-called Ostalgie has spread across Europe in the wake of movies like Goodbye Lenin, and these gorgeously anachronistic pieces make it easy to see why. If you like the site, I recommend this book, which I got for Christmas.

Inca Fascism?

2005-01-03T08:16:00.000-08:00

So what's the deal with these Peruvian military rebels, who seized a police station and wasted four cops? The story says they want a Peruvian state "modeled on the ancient Incan Empire." Their main beef at the moment seems to be that Perú's president is excessively cozy with rival Chile, and
their banner sure has some creepy Nazi overtones.

Right-wing paramilitary thugs more or less have the run of Latin America, so the chances of real justice for these cop-killing greenshirts are slim: they were previously pardoned for a rinkydink failed rebellion in 2000. Meanwhile, Lori Berenson, who even the state agrees never hurt or killed anybody, languishes in a Peruvian jail. If only you'd worn a nifty swastika-esque armband or something, Lori...

More Books About Guerrillas And Quiffs

2005-01-03T07:17:00.000-08:00

I've never thought that the Clash were The Only Band That Matters, but since I was 15, they've usually been The Band That Mattered Most. So I eagerly dropped some Christmas cash on Let Fury Have The Hour: The Punk Rock Politics of Joe Strummer. I was particularly excited about the reprinted interviews and articles from throughout Joe's career and the sections on his post-Clash wilderness years. And since it's on the Nation Books imprint, I assumed it would be well-done and thought-provoking.

Alas, for all his good intentions, editor/writer Antonino D'Ambrosio serves up a half-baked, superficial hack job laden with typos, unsupported assertions, and basic factual errors. One example: he says London Calling was recorded in New York (of course, it was London). I could go on all day, but you get the picture. The great but often-reprinted Lester Bangs piece takes up about fifty pages of the book, marred by pointless typos ("GIVING A DAMN about SOMETHING" is rendered as "GIVING A DAMN and SOMETHING," etc.) The other new writers here are nothing special, either. A potentially fascinating story about female attitudes toward the Clash comes across somewhere between a bad term paper and a crappy zine article.

So I learned almost nothing new, and the "analysis" here is nothing I haven't considered in my own idle musings about the Clash's legacy. I'll assume D'Ambrosio didn't intend to put together a crappy necrophiliac warm-over of Marcus Gray's Last Gang in Town, but that's what this amounts to. I'm looking forward to this instead, from former ZigZag editor Kris Needs.

Proles and animals are free

2004-12-04T13:44:00.000-08:00

Socialism. Baseball. Rock n roll. Design. And whatever else. This is Prole Call.