mission accomplished?
this is awesome.
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coming soon: live clips from the mountain goats, the gourds and the decemberists.
big microscope
live music and liberal rantsArchive for April, 2007
purple heart gifted to yellow heart
this is so pathetic it made me laugh out loud. then i just got mad. you have to wonder what really happened to this clown, bill thomas, in vietnam that he would be make such a stupid decision 42 years after being injured there. john mccain has a reason for his delusional behavior—he was a POW for five years. that doesn’t excuse his idiocy now, but it certainly helps to explain it.
bill thomas, on the other hand, is just—and i don’t throw this out there lightly—a fucking moron. sure, he can do whatever he wants to do with his purple heart; he earned it. but by giving it to a chickenhawk draft-dodging child of privilege who reneged on his commitment to serve a full term in the champagne unit of the national guard, bill thomas is sullying the service and sacrifice of every other recipient of the purple heart.
shame on bush for a) accepting it, and b) making a spectacle of it by inviting bill and his wife to present it in person. with people like bill thomas and george bush ‘serving’ this country, it’s no wonder we’re so fucked.
h/t to crooks and liars for linking to the story so i could start my week off good and pissed. here’s the original story in the killeen daily herald.
hyperlinkous? not so much
on february 8th of this year, the reclusive mark linkous came to town with his band, sparklehorse, and delivered what might be described as a sonic dose of lithium. linkous’ battles with depression and substance abuse are legendary amongst the indie-literati; as a result, he’s only released four full-length sparklehorse albums in the past 15 years.
the performance was solid, the song selection representative of the entire catalog. but something about the whole affair felt like a support group meeting dressed up as a rock show. this wasn’t the band’s fault, unless you hold linkous responsible for appealing to an overly earnest group of folks who seem to want their damaged hero to succeed so badly they’ve lost the ability to discern the merely okay from the truly great. the vibe wasn’t ambulance-chasing-esque like it can be at a daniel johnston show, by any stretch. all i can is that the perfect blend of melancholy and bliss that sparklehorse can achieve on record didn’t materialize as often as it might have given the songs played. and the audience was complicit, perhaps, in not coaxing it out of the band for fear of rattling the shattered genius. or maybe that ’s just how the bourbon remembers it.
jesse sykes and the sweet hereafter put on yet another fantastic performance, full of slow, aching melodies punctuated by phil wandschach’s mesmerizing guitar lines. i’ve written about these guys before, but i’ll say it again: buy the records and see them live any chance you get. this is music for people who like to think and feel at the same time.
the fillmore staff were not allowing audience taping (maybe an edict from sparklehorse’s label?), so unfortunately, all that exist are a couple of tracks that materialized out of the ephemera. here’s the final encore of the night, knives of summertime.
