Author: jbenton

And here’s my short-and-sweet story from Sunday’s paper. Not even remotely related to education, and featuring grown men crying.

A couple music-related thoughts:
– There’s a 68-meg Quasimoto mix tape available for download from Stones Throw. Quasimoto is, of course, the pitch-shifted alter-ego of Madlib, a crabwalk.com favorite. The new Quas album comes out tomorrow; the remix is by DJ Troubl, who is easily one of the 300 best DJs to ever come out of Poitiers, France.
– Speaking of Madlib alter-egos, I finally picked up Stevie yesterday, by the “jazz” “combo” Yesterdays New Quintet. (The joke being that all five members of the “quintet” are all Madlib, who plays all the instruments under assumed names like Monk Hughes and Joe McDuphrey.) The album is all Stevie Wonder songs, reinvented as fusion jazz with a smidge of hip-hop bounce. Jeezumpete, is it ever good! Perfect party music, great driving music.
– Video of Calexico covering Guided By Voices’ “Non-Absorbing” at this year’s SXSW. Sound quality’s only okay, but it’s still better than GBV’s studio version.
– Speaking of Calexico, percussionist John Convertino has an album out. Piano-driven track available here.
And one non-music note, a posting from Craigslist Seattle: “Hi. I’m a journalist. Or a reporter. Whatever word pisses you off more, I’m part of the mainstream media, the liberal media, the so-called liberal media. I am the epitome of all that is wrong with contemporary journalism. That is why I need you to fuck me until I feel as disgraced sexually as I do professionally.”

More self-love: I’m a finalist for the 2004 Livingston Awards, which is a $10,000 prize for the best work by an American journalist under 35. There are three of them, for local, national, and international reporting (which is why there appear to be so many finalists). I’m a finalist in international reporting, for my Zambia stories last year.
I have precisely zero chance of winning the thing, for the record. But, as Susan Lucci used to say every year at the Daytime Emmys, it’s an honor just to be nominated.
Congrats go out to the other finalists I know: My DMN colleagues Reese Dunklin and Katherine Yung; Anne Barnard of the Boston Globe, formerly of my college paper; Charles Duhigg of the LAT, who I got drunk with a couple times in college even though he worked for the rival paper; and Alec MacGillis, another college classmate of mine and a great education reporter for the Baltimore Sun.

Self-promotion alert: I’m in the cover story of the June issue of Reason, everyone’s favorite libertarian mag.
Well, sort of. See, the cover story (“How Schools Cheat: From fake test scores to bogus graduation rates and more, educrats are lying to parents”) touches on my cheating stories from the last year, at one point talking about “a December 31, 2004, expose by The Dallas Morning News.”
No idea if the story will ever be put online.

SeatGuru.com: the site that ensures you’re in the absolute best seat on your plane. For instance, say you’re on an American Airlines 737. Avoid Seat 9A! Noisy air-duct alert!
Another Decemberists profile, focusing on the nerdiness of their fans: “I ask [lead singer Colin] Meloy how he feels about being a heartthrob. ‘I feel great about it! I would certainly rather be that to a bunch of English majors and drama fags than a bunch of sorority girls.’ He laughs. ‘It’s one of our main m.o.’s to try to make the world safe for pansies.'”
Reagan Memories. “Once we were having a delicious dinner of fugu puffer with CIA Director Casey. As we worked our way through the non-toxic musculature, Casey noticed that the fish’s poisonous liver had been incautiously left inside by the food prep staff. (This was after President Reagan had broken the sous-chefs’ union.) I edged the liver into a napkin with my knife, but Casey, I saw, was looking on anxiously. ‘The forbidden delicacy!’ he said. ‘Let me have it!'”
Simple animation in Flash.
After over four years with the same aging desktop computer, I just bought a new one. Color me excited. But this probably means I need to change my computer naming system.
(I am not one of those people who names his car. Actually, I don’t believe I’ve ever met someone who names “his” car. “Her” car, yes, but not the hombres. Anyway, I am, however, a computer namer.)
My current setup is based on characters from A Confederacy of Dunces, one of my very favorite books. Ignatius is the dear ol’ desktop; its two other internal hard drives are Jones and Gonzales; Myrna’s my iPod; Dorian is my workhorse MP3-holding external Firewire drive; Claude is my portable Firewire drive; Santa Battaglia is my PowerBook; and Miss Trixie (an old iBook) and Mancuso (an old Firewire drive) are both now living happily in new homes.
(Yes, a significant portion of my disposable income goes to computer gear. I figure I could be blowing all that cash on crackwhores and heroin, so geek toys are a worthwhile alternative.)
Anyway, so Trixie and Mancuso are gone, and Ignatius and Gonzales will also hit the road shortly (to their retirement home in Louisiana). Even though some of the others will still be hanging around, it’s probably time for a new naming schema. Some possibilities:
– Small Louisiana towns: Mamou, Eunice, Rayne, Hackberry, Catahoula, Duson, Iota, Ville Platte.
– One-word bands: Spoon, Sloan, Calexico, Morphine, Quasi, Seam, Superchunk, Devo, Sebadoh.
– Noted journalists: Bradlee, Murrow, Mencken, Cronkite, Hersh, Breslin, Royko, Kempton.
– Paris Metro stops: Champs Elysees, Bastille, Bourse, Ch. De Gaulle, Les Halles
– Former North Carolina Tar Heels: Chilcutt, Forte, Glamack, Jamison, Lynch, Kupchak, Salvadori.
– New Orleans Saints greats: Hebert, Manning, Abramowicz, Kilmer, Gajan, Waymer.
All ideas welcome.

The video for “All Used Up,” one of two new tracks recorded for the new Sloan best-of compilation. Eh. Sloan once ranked as My Absolute Favorite Band In The Universe. (Perhaps that should be “Favourite,” seeing as they’re Canadians and all.) But the last couple of albums have been left me cold, more Kiss than Beach Boys. I liked them better when the songs had a sort of Tin Pan Alley complexity. Now they just drive one riff into the ground.
Nonetheless, the best-of should hit your Amazon wish list anyway, because the chronological track listing is heavy on their early greatness (basically 1992 to 2001 and tracks 1 to 11). And several of those early Canuck albums are still not that easy to find in the U.S. of A. (Among them is their stone-cold-classic second album, which was just named the greatest Canadian album of all time, edging out Neil Young and Joni Mitchell.)
The album’ll be released next Tuesday. For the dedicated Sloaner, the real joy will be the bonus DVD, featuring a variety of videos, live stuff, and such.
SuperSloanerTip: Order the Canadian version of the album (via MapleMusic). The Canadian DVD has a number of TV appearances that could only be licensed for the Pierre Trudeau edition; if you order from Amazon.com or buy in a U.S. store, you won’t get it all. And the price is virtually identical (US$14.99 at Amazon, US$15.62 at MapleMusic), ‘tho it’ll take a bit longer if you don’t want to pay insane shipping fees.

I know I’m behind on this, but this guy is painfully bad. More here.

Also, here’s my story from Nigeria that ran last week, on the day the Pope was picked. This story breaks my personal record for Most Nuns Quoted In A Single Story.

Several people have lambasted me for not posting here promptly upon my return to the states. They apparently fear my consumption by some rare Nigerian wildebeest, roaming the Biafran hillsides.
Well, I can report that I am back in the U.S. of A., no worse for the wear. May write about my Nigerian experiences here, but I may just wait until they appear in the paper — unlike many of my other jaunts, this was just work work work and there’s really not much to tell other than what’ll be committed to newsprint. A quick word of advice, though: Nigeria probably shouldn’t be in your honeymoon plans.
The other big news is that I have a new car, a replacement for the trusty Mitsubishi steed that a red-light runner totaled a couple weeks back. I bought a Mazda 3, the four-door model. It kinda rocks. If you’re in the market for a new small car, let me save you weeks of research: Buy the Mazda 3, probably the S version if you want a little more power. It’s by far the best-reviewed kinda-cheap small car on the road, and it’s a lot of fun to drive. After nearly a decade in the 92-horsepower Mirage, it’s such a change to be in a car where, when you press the accelerator, it actually speeds up.
And I can strongly recommend Town North Mazda in Richardson as a place to buy. As pain-free a buying process as you could hope for, and they gave me a good deal.
A movie of the first 343 days of the Mars rover Spirit.
So you’d like to… See the Mountain Goats’ list of Music You Should Hear. Head Goat John Darnielle‘s bizarro fixation on death metal — perhaps the single genre least like his own overenunciated grad-school folk — shines through his recommendations. Of the new album by someone called Buried Inside, he writes: “My favorite metal album so far this year. Sort of huge-canvas action-painting metal like Aeternus, but science fiction vs. Aeternus’s sword-and-sorcery stuff; it’s ‘metalcore,’ whatever that means, but it’s also really thoughtful and richly textured. Also has the most pretentious song-titles I’ve ever seen.” Those would include “Time as Ideology,” “Time as Surrogate Religion,” and “Time as Imperialism.”
(Today is release day for the Goats’ latest album, and yesterday was his wedding anniversary to Lalitree.)

FYI, I’m still alive. This is the first Internet computer I’ve sat at since Saturday morning, and the mouse appears to have been dipped in chunky molasses. But: I’m alive. Should have a pope-related story in tomorrow’s paper.