Month: September 2004

YAWHS (Yet Another Wilmer-Hutchins Story) today, on a letter a top district employee wrote asking Wilmer-Hutchins’ police chief to lay off an investigation into the district’s problems. That top district employee is also a Dallas school board member.

Chanda wins her second round match at the U.S. Open, 7-5, 6-3 over Antonella Serra Zanetti. The fact she finished strong would seem to speak well about the condition of her knees.
I might be even more optimistic if she wasn’t facing Venus Williams in the third round. (Then again, Venus had to go to a tiebreaker in the first set against intriguingly named nobody Shikha Uberoi.)

Really nice interview with Mark Eitzel about the American Music Club reunion. Mark comes across as much more sane than usual.
His best line, in reference to some, er, lifestyle issues that once troubled AMC drummer Tim Mooney: “He had personal problems that made it inconvenient for him to be part of the band. Put it this way: At the time he was a close personal friend of Courtney Love.”
The new AMC album comes out next week in the U.K., but unfortunately not for another month in the States. They play the Gypsy Tea Room in Dallas on October 26.
One other bizarre Eitzel update: He provided vocals for a strange ’70s singer-songwriter parody project called Devon Shire, part of the Clubbo fake record label. Explanation of this strange situation from Paul Boutin here.
Finally, a few other Dallas-area shows worth attending in the near future: Sloan, Trees, Sept. 16; Starlight Mints, Gypsy, Oct. 1; Guided By Voices, Gypsy, Oct. 3; Gift of Gab, Trees, Oct. 6.; Ted Leo, Gypsy, Oct. 29.

Since I know you’re all dying to know how my fantasy football draft turned out last night, the answer is — pretty well, I think. The Bum Phillippi roster:
QB: Donovan McNabb
RB: LaDainian Tomlinson
RB: Rudi Johnson
RB/WR: Thomas Jones
WR: Laverneus Coles
WR: Plaxico Burress
WR/TE: Isaac Bruce
K: Adam Vinatieri
DL: Brian Urlacher
DL: Charles Grant
DB: Darren Sharper
DB: Dre Bly
D: Dwight Freeney
Bench: Amani Toomer, Roy Williams, Najeh Davenport, Byron Leftwich, Fred Thomas, Michael Pittman
(That’s Roy Williams the Detroit wide receiver, not Roy Williams the Dallas safety. Or Roy Williams the North Carolina basketball coach.)

Interesting interview with Sufjan (“SOOF-yahn”) Stevens, everyone’s favorite Christian indie rocker. I’ve already written about his tremendous Greetings From Michigan album. And while his followup didn’t do quite as much for me, he’s still a very real talent.
And he’s particularly interesting because he so thoroughly freaks out a big chunk of his cool-kid fans with his emphasis on his religious beliefs. His fan base, I would imagine, worships no gods but Pabst Blue Ribbon and Stephen Malkmus. But they like his songs about Old Testament prophets nonetheless.
“I think that when people react reflexively to material that is religious, they’re reacting to the culture of religion,” he says. “And I think an enlightened person is capable, on some level, of making the distinction between the institution of the culture and the culture itself. The institution of Christianity, the way that it’s set up, it’s institutionalized and commodified, and anytime that happens, anytime it’s incorporated, it leads to disaster. I’m on the same page as everyone. I have the same knee-jerk reaction to that kind of culture. Maybe I’m a little more empathetic to it because we have similar fundamental beliefs. But culturally and aesthetically, some of it is really embarrassing…I think it’s a fair and interesting question. Can you be a liberal, enlightened, modern person and still believe in God?”

Interesting story about Beausoleil and its leader Michael Doucet — without a doubt the most important Cajun musician of the last 20 years and a cornerstone of the Cajun cultural revival of the 1980s and 1990s. (The band’s got a new album out this month.)
He says Cajun music needs to be more about death and draws connections between Cajuns and the Roma — an interesting comparison I hadn’t thought of before.