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Monday is Juneteenth, the Texas-centric (‘though not Texas-exclusive) holiday commemorating the end of slavery. The American South after the Civil War was as close as I ever came to an academic specialization, so expect some 1860s/Reconstruction links in the coming days.
First off, did you know about the Knights of the Golden Circle?

The Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC) was a secret society originally founded to promote Southern interests and prepare the way for annexation of a “golden circle” of territories in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean which would be included into the United States as southern or slave states. During the American Civil War, Southern sympathizers in the North, known as Copperheads, were accused of belonging to the Knights of the Golden Circle…

[Founder George] Bickley’s main goal was the annexation of Mexico. Hounded by creditors, he left Cincinnati in the late 1850s and traveled through the East and South promoting an expedition to seize Mexico and establish a new territory for slavery. He found his greatest support in Texas and managed within a short time to organize thirty-two chapters there. In the spring of 1860 the group made the first of two attempts to invade Mexico from Texas. A small band reached the Rio Grande, but Bickley failed to show up with a large force he claimed he was assembling in New Orleans, and the campaign dissolved…

During the 1863 Gettysburg Campaign, scam artists in south-central Pennsylvania sold fearful Pennsylvania Dutch farmers paper tickets purported to be from the Knights of the Golden Circle for a dollar. Along with a series of secret hand gestures, these tickets were supposed to protect the possessions and horses of the ticket holders from seizure by invading Confederate soldiers. When Jubal Early’s infantry division passed through York County, Pennsylvania, they scoffed at these ticket holders and took what they wanted anyway, often paying with Confederate currency or drafts on the Confederate government.

A trailer for the upcoming Os Mutantes documentary. Not sure how the doc will turn out, but Brazilian 1960s culture has been a mid-level obsession of mine for about a year now.

“Imagine a 1960’s Brazilian rock band on a weekly television program disguised as aliens, witches, or conquistadors, performing surreal hymns to such bizarre figures as Don Quixote (or at other times Genghis Khan and Lucifer) while tossing massive nets and giant rubber caterpillars across their audience…[Os Mutantes] provoked even further outrage by fashioning their own outrageous musical instruments, often constructed out of such common household objects as rubber hoses, cans of hot chocolate, or bottles of bug spray. Finally, they did all of this under the watchful eyes of a brutally repressive right-wing military dictatorship, as they were regularly censored by the government…”
The name of the doc comes from their song “Panis et Circenses,” which means “bread and circuses” — “a derogatory phrase which can describe either government policies to pacify the citizenry, or the shallow, decadent desires of that same citizenry. In both cases, it refers to low-cost, low-quality, high-availability food and entertainment, and to the exclusion of things which the speaker considers more important, such as art, public works projects, democracy, or human rights.” Pretty ballsy to play that under a military dictatorship. Here’s a (so-so quality) video of the band playing the song:

The rather poetic lyrics are here (“I demanded that a dagger of pure shining steel be made / To kill my love, and I did it / At five o’clock on Central Avenue / But the people in the dining room / Are occupied with being born and with dying”).
Finally, here’s Os Mutantes playing with another great musical hero of ’60s Brazil, Gilberto Gil — currently the country’s Minister of Culture (!) in the Lula government. It’s astonishing how much joy they played with, considering the political situation and the sort of songs they’re singing:

And since it’s illegal to mention Gilberto Gil without mentioning Caetano Veloso — both were famously jailed by the government — here he is playing in 1998:

Finally, here’s a video of Brazilian songstress Cibelle covering Veloso’s 1971 “London, London,” written while he and Gil were in exile there. Both song and video feature American New Weird America singer Devendra Banhart (who I initially thought was too weird for his own good, but who I’ve come to enjoy quite a bit):

The horror of BodyFlex. Truly bone-chilling.

Cleaning out the “to blog” emails to myself:

• Tonight, I’m going to go home, put on some music, and pour myself a nice glass of pruno.
• Interesting story on the resurgence of French in Maine. There are some very clear echoes of the situation in south Louisiana: The post-World War I use of the school system to punish French speakers; the post-World War II push to assimilate; the “dumb Frenchman” jokes; the class barrier between native dialect speakers and those who consider Parisian French the only legitimate French. It’s one of my real regrets that I grew up in south Louisiana in an era when adults who grew up as French speakers were shamed into not teaching their children the language. As it was, the French I learned in school was so tenuous that Spanish has pretty much subsumed it all.
• If you’ll be in Chicago in early September, I’d highly recommend attending the Touch & Go 25th anniversary bash. Along with crabwalk.com faves Calexico, Enon, Quasi, !!!, Ted Leo, and Pinback, you get to see reunion shows by the pleasantly bludgeoning Girls Against Boys, the best-space-rock-band-out-of-Alabama Man…or Astroman?, and the dreamy Seam. (Seam is of particular note; they were terrific in the mid-’90s but haven’t done anything for eight years.)

  GVSB was featured in this week’s MP3 Monday. As was Bedhead, whose leading Kadane brothers now perform in The New Year, who’ll also be at the bash.

I’ve returned a bit to the cheating beat at work, which has produced a couple of front-page stories over the last few days. The better one ran Sunday:

An alarming number of students who graduated from Texas high schools last month probably cheated to get there – and state education officials are in no hurry to catch them.

A state-sponsored analysis found thousands of suspicious scores on the 11th-grade TAKS, the test students must pass to graduate.

The study found 96 Texas high schools where groups of last year’s 11th-graders turned in unusually similar answer sheets – suggesting they may have been copying each other’s answers. Scores in almost every Dallas neighborhood high school raised red flags.

Eleventh-grade classrooms were more than eight times more likely to have suspicious scores than those in other grades, researchers found.

The study’s results don’t surprise experts. “Levels of cheating in high school are at astronomical levels,” said Tim Dodd, executive director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University.

But in Texas, state and local officials say that these unusual patterns in data – even those that researchers say are millions of times less likely to occur than your being struck by lightning tomorrow – are not enough to trigger scrutiny.

The result is that many of the most egregious cases of likely cheating will go uninvestigated.

The other one ran Friday:

A state-sponsored analysis has flagged 114 North Texas schools as having suspicious scores on the 2005 TAKS test – scores that could suggest cheating by students or teachers.

Dallas, the area’s largest district, led the way with 39 schools. Plano ISD, with nine schools on the list, had the area’s second-highest total. Fort Worth ISD had seven, the Lewisville and Richardson school districts each had six, and McKinney ISD had five. Five charter schools also made the list.

Movie ads for Chiquita bananas, circa 1947. Of note: the deeply-unacceptable-today portrayal of cannibals, the intense promotion of brown-flecked bananas, and imagery that echo the nastiest-looking 20th-century dishes.
More on the unhappy history of Chiquita.

Since there was no MP3 Monday this week, I humbly offer you a new track from the great Dangerdoom: a version of “Space Hos” remixed by crabwalk.com favorite Madlib. Please look past the not-particularly-feminist use of “hos” and groove to the bizarre Judy-Jetson-inspired lyrics and the great bouncy flute that sounds straight outta Saturday-morning television circa 1978.
The rest of the Dangerdoom remix EP is available online, but it’s nothing special — the beats are flat and spare, not the funhouse vibe of the original album.
Speaking of Madlib, here’s a pretty good article on him and the rest of the Stones Throw empire, which provides roughly 20 percent of my total music listening these days. Also, a good-looking Stones Throw compilation hits stores in a couple weeks.

Strong column that gets at why I remain The Last Barry Bonds Fan Alive.

Dude, Shaq’s at my Walgreens!

Updates on two recent crabwalk.com posts:
May 24, The woman who confuses blindness with homosexuality: Here’s a different version of the video that includes the blind-not-gay mountain climber’s reaction.
May 15, fuzzy writing on the new West Texas speed limit: A later AP story clarifies what the original story fudged: “Agency studies found 85 percent of drivers on those highways are already cruising between 76-79 mph, said Carol Ranson, deputy director for traffic operations.”