Author: jbenton

john hodgman, demetri martin, and me

It’s very funny to me that Microsoft has apparently hired Demetri Martin to be part of an upcoming marketing campaign. You see, the hiring of Demetri (a correspondent for The Daily Show) follows Apple’s hiring of John Hodgman to represent Windows in their recent “I’m a Mac,” “I’m a PC” commercials. And John Hodgman is, of course, himself a Daily Show correspondent.
But the amusing part to me is that I went to college with both John and Demetri. Not just the same university (Yale) — but the same undergraduate residential college (Calhoun College). Calhoun has, in any given year, about 400 students. It’s strange to think that both John and Demetri — independently selected by rival corporations to represent the same operating system after serving as non-traditional correspondents on the same late-night satirical news program — probably lived down the hall from one another.
(For the record, John was a senior when I was a freshman; Demetri was a junior. I have no memory of John, but I sort of knew Demetri — we were both history majors, so we took some classes together. Still, we’re talking maybe one or two conversations, tops.)
Unsupportable Claim Of The Day: The Daily Show, through its prominent use of Yale grads, is an overt attempt by the university to counterbalance the dominant role that Harvard graduates have traditionally had on televised comedy.
Demetri on Yale: “Take the alumni magazine, if you look in the back and see the class notes of everyone who’s still alive, it’s poetic — you can really see the trajectory of everyone’s lives. ‘So and so is just starting an international relations program at Georgetown,’ that kind of thing. When you’re first out, you’re trying to find yourself, then a few years later, everyone’s announcing their marriages and kids, and then you go back to class of ’60 or something and some guy just bought the St. Louis Cardinals. When you move back even farther, then it’s just about who’s alive and I guess a little before that, grandchildren, family.”
John on Yale: “I for one was certainly intimidated, as I had attended an experimental ‘alternative’ high school program which had many good points, but focused less on the classics of English and American Literature and more on reading One Hundred Years of Solitude as many times as possible. You would think this would at least give me a grounding in what the word ‘chthonic’ meant. But in truth, the first time one of my well-trained classmates spoke that word my brain exploded in fear. Luckily, I knew if I made it, Geo. HW Bush would be handing me 100 bars of gold at graduation with ‘Skull and Bones’ stamped on them, so I took some comfort in knowing I would always be provided for.”

more cheating stuff

Forgot to link to my story on Saturday’s page 1:

Calling the prevention of cheating “our highest priority,” the Texas Education Agency is tripling its number of investigators and preparing inquiries of the schools where test scores are the most suspicious.

The agency will also create an independent task force to oversee the investigations, which will begin in September. But it’s still unknown how many schools will be investigated.

“The Texas Education Agency is taking this matter very seriously,” Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley wrote in a letter to all district superintendents Friday.

MP3 Monday: July 31, 2006

This week’s MP3 Monday combines two of the most potent forces in nature: teenagers and funk music. And it contains a rare crabwalk.com-declared Must Buy Alert. For those unfamiliar, such an alert mandates that you head to your local music establishment and buy yourself the record I require.
Penalties for not making the purchase include hair loss, loss of sexual function, and instant death. As always, songs will stay on the server for one week’s time.
“All Praises/Zero Point (Reprise)” (live) by the Kashmere Stage Band. From the album Texas Thunder Soul 1968-1974 (2006).
Man, I’ve been waiting for this record for a couple years now. You see, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, band directors at a small number of black high schools decided to embrace the funk and soul music their students were listening to. They started creating stage bands that merged the propulsion of a good marching band, the big-band sound a large ensemble could generate, and the aforementioned black popular music.
There were a number of these stage bands, but far and away the best was the Kashmere Stage Band, at Kashmere High School in north Houston. The director, a genius named Conrad O. Johnson, was an old jazzman himself and decided that a bunch of untrained teenagers could, with work, become the tightest funk band in the world.
The Kashmere Stage Band became a dominant force in the world of band competitions. Between 1969 and 1977, the band took first place in 42 of the 46 contests it entered — despite often being the only black band competing. They toured Europe and Japan multiple times.
They also recorded eight albums, albeit in quantities small enough that the main audience didn’t extend far beyond the friends and families of band members. But enough of those LPs made their way into the used record stores of America that, in the early ’90s, the Kashmere Stage Band became a favorite of cratedigging DJs looking for funk breaks. Kashmere records were going for hundreds of dollars on eBay. (DJs know greatness when they hear it.)
Eventually, commerce and taste intersected, and the excellent folks at Now Again Records (the reissue side project of Stones Throw) have assembled Texas Thunder Soul 1968-1974, a two-CD set of Kashmere Stage Band recordings. And oh my lord is it amazing.
Take a listen to the track above, “All Praises” followed by a reprise of their signature track “Zero Point,” recorded live on February 26, 1972 at the Brownswood Stage Band Festival. With no disrespect intended to Soul Brother No. 1, I doubt The JB’s were this tight in 1972. That rhythm section! (Gerald Calhoun on bass, Gerald Curvey on drums.)
“Ain’t No Sunshine” (live) by the Kashmere Stage Band. From the album Texas Thunder Soul 1968-1974 (2006).
And here, have some more. I linked to Bill Withers’ live version of his song a couple months ago, but imagine your high school band being capable of this. (Recorded live at Sam Houston State University in 1972.)
It’s hard to say just how good the Kashmere Stage Band was, or how amazing its story is. Kashmere High is in a very poor part of Houston; the Houston school district nearly shut it down last year because its performance on state tests was so poor. Luckily, the liner notes of the reissue (by Egon) do an excellent job of shedding light on things. Anyway, you’ll see when you buy it, as you Must.
FYI, Conrad O. Johnson has a foundation to promote jazz in the Houston area and apparently still plays out at age 90.
“The Newborn Hippopotamus/Jazz Rock Machine” (live) by the One O’Clock Lab Band. From the album Schoolhouse Funk (2000).
This track is from the album that started my love of the stage band sound. Schoolhouse Funk was assembled by the great DJ Shadow (as was its sequel), and it compiles all sorts of great tracks from (mostly black) high school and college bands.
They’re not all great — a number of tracks are pleasingly amateurish — but a good number of them cook. (There’s a Kashmere track on there, too.) This one’s by the legendary One O’Clock Lab Band, the top jazz band at the University of North Texas in Denton. (For those who don’t know, UNT has one of largest music schools in the nation and one of the top jazz programs. Which is why so many of the rock bands out of Denton are so deliriously weird.)
Longtime crabwalk.com readers (and attendees of SXSW Interactive in 2003) may remember this track as the backing music to 20×2 movie that year. (More about that here.)

pitchfork on devendra

Interesting Pitchfork interview with Devendra Banhart, who instinct keeps telling me I should despise, but whose music I actually quite enjoy. Observations:

  • Major bonus points to D.B. for using the word “anthropophagic” — in a context that (a) makes sense and (b) applies to Brazilian ’60s music!
  • A memo from Pitchfork HQ seems to have directed interviewers to push them own personality into the conversation. Witness these words from our questioner, Dennis Cook: “I love the experience of cooking, especially for other people…It’s one of those experiences that places you in the moment. You’re only worried about what’s in the pan. You kind of salivate during the process. How many things in your daily life make you salivate?”; “I think a lot of people think of karma as this quid pro quo– you do this nice or bad thing then nice or bad things happen for you”; “Music, by nature, doesn’t want walls. Music wants to engage with every aspect of itself.” Speak it, Dennis!
  • The Devendra connection to Caetano Veloso makes so much sense. Great quote on that era of Brazilian music: “They were open to all these other cultures and experiences. There’s such a sense of humor. I love that they don’t call it rock ‘n’ roll. They call it ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah.’ You listen to Os Mutantes and they’re making fun of and honoring something that sounds American but it’s so Brazilian at the center. It’s a reinterpretation of things. It’s dealing with all these things that don’t have expiration dates.”
  • Dennis seems to get the definition of “catholic” exactly wrong: “You have really big ears and thoroughly non-Catholic taste,” meaning he listens to a wide variety of musical styles. “Catholic” means “Of broad or liberal scope; comprehensive; including or concerning all humankind; universal.” Methinks Dennis’ feelings for the Pope are subliminally affecting him. (Unless he’s referring to D.B.’s hatred of Gregorian chant.)
  • Obligatory faux-worldly quote from the interviewer: “We live in an age where many things are working hard to conk us out and anesthetize us. Anything we can do to shake us out of that — with no other purpose than to wake us — is valuable.” Only a person who has no knowledge of, say, every other age of humankind could say that the contemporary era — by leagues the most overstimulated in our biological history — is somehow uniquely anesthetizing or coma-inducing.

I don’t mean to diss on Dennis, who actually did a fine job. (And he fulfilled the Freelance Writer’s Pledge — namely, Always Get At Least Two Paychecks For Every Interview.)