A Russian chimpanzee has been sent to rehab by zookeepers to cure the smoking and beer-drinking habits he has picked up, a popular daily reported on Friday. [...]

“The beer and cigarettes were ruining him. He would pester passers-by for booze,” the Komsomolskaya Pravda paper said.

Link (via New Shelton Wet/Dry)

Photo by Christopher Griffith for Esquire Mag

Quote by David Chang for NYT Grubstreet (Via Olivia Via FB)

Delta Momma Blues, one of Townes Van Zandt’s earlier albums, is not as cut and dry as one might think. While the title-track drifts by slowly and gives off a somewhat lazy-river feeling, it contains a double-meaning from the songwriter. “Delta Momma,” as Townes referred to it, was cough syrup with codine (Robitussin DM = Delta Momma), and was easily available over the counter. As the lyrics suggest, it made the consumer feel removed and relaxed. On the other hand, it is violently addictive (as a opiate) and it’s ingestion with the other ingredients of cough syrup in large quantities is not a good idea. Nevertheless, Townes Van Zandt and many other prolific songwriters swore by the Delta Momma, and it’s use continues in the southern United States – popularized again through hip-hop.

All songs are available at the author’s site, http://www.itsatangelo.com.

1964 – Buffy Sainte-Marie – Cod’ine
1964 demo - Donovan – Codine
1965 – Jimmy Gilmer & the Fireballs – Codine
1965-66 – Gram Parsons – Codine
1966 – The Litter – Codine
1967 – The Leaves – Codine
1968 – 31st of February – Codine
196X – Matthew Moore Plus Four – Cod’ine
1976 – Man – Codine
1983 – The Charlatans – Codine Blues
1994 – Poison 13 – Codine
2006 – Oakley Hall – Codine

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1970 – Delta Momma Blues – Townes Van Zandt
(Also a mention in “Waitin’ Round to Die”)

President Carter is looking… well….. Presidential!

I’ll be looking at him being presidential on Jan 19th.  Woot!

If they’re known at all, it’s as the Scottish rappers who conned their way into a record contract by pretending to be American. After failing to gain any notoriety as rappers, they effected American accents and rerecorded their music. They submitted the new recording to Radio 1, where it proved a minor hit. They took the new act on the road and played some shows in London.

Within weeks, the pair had signed a deal with a premier management company. Within months, they had signed a record deal with Sony. They headlined small festivals, played Brixton Academy, toured with Eminem, appeared on MTV, partied with Madonna, and got paid more than £150,000.

Then the whole thing became a too bit much

Every day for the next four and a half years, Bain [Brain] pretended to be an American. He had sex in an American accent, swore like an American, got drunk in American. Eventually he had a Texan girlfriend, and even she never suspected a thing. By the time Bain stopped talking like an American, he and Boyd [Silibil] were no longer talking to each other. He had a major tax bill, a drink problem and a stomach ulcer.

The group split in 2005. Bain wrote a book. Here’s a promotional video or something:

Last week as I listened, along with many other Americans and others around the world, to President Bush’s most recent effort to reassure us about the current economic meltdown I had a “Road to Damascus” moment. It happened as I heard Bush repeat the word “faith”: faith in America’s institutions, faith in its workers, faith in capitalism, faith in our capacity to survive other disasters (such as 1929 and 2001). And, of course, the faith we needed to weather the recent crisis and get to the other side, such faith, in Bush’s rhetoric, being not only the need of the moment but the fulcrum for the journey to recovery.

I instantly saw that a great feat in reverse discourse engineering had occurred: we had moved into the era of the “Faith-Based Economy.” Many of us had already developed a certain worry about the place of “faith” in the Bush administration’s weird form of ecumenical evangelism, which had used the idea of faith-based organizations to allow the covert infiltration of a certain brand of religion into American civic life, with a definite bias towards white, Protestant, evangelical forms rather than say, to Muslim, Catholic, Jewish, Hindu or Rastafarian forms. [...]

Practically, what does this mean? It means austerity, chosen or imposed: less insane credit-card acquisitions, less whacky mortgage seeking, less obese cars, fewer happy miles on the road, fewer “business expenses” (unless of course we are senior AIG executives). It means leaving our money in the banks and having renewed faith in the FDIC, for if we race to our banks and take our money home in cash, we shall show our lack of faith in the banks, and the banks will suffer, and if the banks suffer, the world financial markets will suffer, and if the world financial markets suffer, the volcanoes will explode, the rivers will flood, the lightning shall strike, and all of us will be reduced to ashes, along with our melted credit cards, our worthless pension funds and our homes with negative equity.

But Faith, it turns out, is not enough. Capitalism, as a master-belief system, reasonably operates on faith. But markets, especially capitalist financial markets, need something more specific: Trust. And that is the second biggest Revelation of the last few weeks. We have a trade deficit, as we all know, but much worse is our “trust deficit.” No one trusts the (financial) other anymore, we are told, and without trust no one lends and without lending the plastic ceases to work and everyday life comes to a complete halt. This news will come as a shock to all of us on “Main Street,” who trust our friends, our neighbors, our leaders, our churches and our employers as much—or as little—as we did last year. No, trust is not a Main Street problem, it is a Wall Street problem. In other words, banks won’t lend to one another, and that problem in the high mountains of finance is melting down into the valleys and plains of our everyday lives.

Why won’t the banks, the hedge funds, the investment banks and all the other gentlemen-rogues who are part of the banking business trust one another? Have they lost their faith in capitalism? No, not quite. They still believe in the financial markets and in the rightness of the larger principles of profit, speculation and upside risk. What they no longer trust in is—each other! And they don’t trust each other because they have constructed for themselves a version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma whereby they fear that each party’s self-interest lies in non-cooperation, and hence in suboptimal solutions, solvable only by a large infusion of cash from the outside to prime the Trust Pump.

The major arguments for the recent bailout still do not quite explain why the trust between banks evaporated when just a few weeks ago, the lending potlatch was in full swing, loans were being made to everyone except known felons, deportees or illegal migrants, and each of us on Main Street was receiving at least ten offers to get new credit cards every week. The banks trusted each other to a fault, and loaned money to one another as if there was no tomorrow. They became pathologically trusting of each other and were in an intoxicated haze of downstream trust-based lending. This orgy of trust was based on reversing Frank Knight’s great insight about risk and uncertainty, according to which uncertainty is what lenders should hate and risk is what they should seek to define and quantify, so they can take measurable risks to increase profits. It turns out that our banks have been pretending to know all about the risks they were taking, through devices which were mostly variations on derivatives. [...]

Yes, this is indeed a Ponzi scheme, but it is a Ponzi scheme with a few special twists: it required a certain number of arcane changes in the rules of accounting which allowed banks to disguise totally unspecified uncertainties as calculable (and profitable) risks; it required remarkable suspension of the elementary rules of government oversight over financial institutions; and it required a society that did not mind living with awesome amounts of debt at every level of its functioning. In other words, starting sometime in the 1980s we were already living in an FBE (Faith-Based Economy), in which no financial wannasteal really knew what derivatives were or how they worked, and each one hoped that they would be sitting on a secure chair (presumably in the Bahamas) when the music stopped. The music stopped because of the housing market (and the predictable end of the subprime lending orgy) but the game which stopped was a much larger faith-based system based on the radical replacement of risk by uncertainty.

Continue reading this post by Arjun Appadurai at the the Imminent Frame.

Standing near the front of a group of musical pioneers is Anthony Braxton. He conducts experiments in the sound and shape of music, and constantly challenges the boundaries of what we consider “music.” While some might not get his music, and others might not care to, I strongly recommend a healthy dose of reading/listening at Destination: Out. Like or dislike, hopefully you’ll catch enough to ride the spacewaves for a brief moment.

After all, without space pioneers like AB we would not have the pop-driven Bad Plus, or the avant-influenced Happy Apple (to name a few). It only takes a minute for the influence of AB to be impressed upon listeners of contemporary jazz.

The Anxiety of Influence.

Go here.  This makes me endless amounts of happy.  I cannot trumpet my love for lo-fi anymore than this.

photo from lubbockonline.

Some of you may already be aware of my obsession with the Austin, TX country scene – More specifically, the 1970s scene that put Austin where it is today. One of these pioneers is a man by the name of Joe Ely, formerly of the Flatlanders, and former employee of the Ringling Brother’s Circus. The man has skills, style, and has played with a wide variety of musicians from the Clash to Chuck Berry to Townes Van Zandt. According to his own FAQs, his first demo was recorded by Buddy Holly, a tape that has since been lost. Shame, shame.

Joe Ely writes story-style country and blues. His musical style is a cross between honky-tonk and hard Texas blues. He’s doesn’t write in the same way TVZ or Lightnin’ Hopkins did; he writes stories, which I think is more in the Texas tradition than anything else. He’s very similar to Robert Earl Keen, Jr. and Steve Earle, both who tend to tell an equal amount of boozing stories and moral-ridden life stories. With these musicians, being along for the ride is really what counts. “One more road,” indeed…

This is a solo show, so I don’t really know what to expect. In my mind the show resembles a country version of the Billy Bragg concert I saw in Winnipeg. I expect him to play acoustic guitar, but I’m really not sure what he’s going to do. Will be do some Flatlanders covers? Townes Van Zandt? Or all of his more recent solo stuff? It’s hard to say.

If you’re in the Boston area check him out tomorrow at Club Passim in Cambridge for $35. It’s almost as expensive as Lez Zeppelin at the Middle East ($20), but [a lot] cheaper than seeing the Police. All legends in their own right.

Flatlanders – Rose From The Mountain
Flatlanders – One Road More
Joe Ely – Baby Needs A New Pair Of Shoes
Joe Ely – Up A Tree
Joe Ely – Tennessee’s Not The State I’m In
Joe Ely – Boxcars
Joe Ely – Roll Again
Joe Ely – You’re Workin For The Man

**EDIT** This man plays country the way it should be played. Excellent guitar playing – switches from finger picking to flat picking to finger picking without picks. He’s got a style for each song he plays, and it’s obvious that he’s obsessed with the sound he has associated to each song. I’ve never been at a show where it’s actually been acceptable for the audience to yell out requests and then have the performer actually play them. I don’t think he even came with a set list. He even played two of my favorite Townes Van Zandt songs – White Freight Liner and Tecumseh Valley. See him live, if you haven’t already.