Category: Uncategorized

Not long ago, I was hoping to make my way into Zimbabwe to do some reporting. Now, I’m pretty sure that would be a less-than-good idea, since the Zim government seems keen on shutting down all independent media.
After shutting down The Daily News and The Daily News on Sunday, Junior Information Minister Jonathan Moyo and Media and Information Commission chairman Tafataona Mahoso say they have turned their guns at The Standard and The Zimbabwe Independent.
Ranting and raving at the official launch of New Ziana, a multi-media State organisation charged with publishing pro-Zanu PF information, an agitated Moyo made it clear that after the closure of the two Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe (ANZ) titles, he was now after The Standard and The Zimbabwe Independent, two newspapers he called “running dogs of imperialism.”
A highly charged Moyo said the type of “trash” published by the newspapers, both owned by the same company, would not be published anywhere overseas…
“If we were serious people, who do not want to apologise for who we are … really we would shut these papers down because they are trash, they injure our national interest,” ranted Moyo, who incidentally only gained national prominence in the 1980s and 1990s by writing his anti-Mugabe and anti-Zanu PF tirades in the private media.
Moyo also pronounced the “death” of Studio 7, a Voice of America (VOA) news broadcasting station that beams to Zimbabwe.
“Studio 7 will die. It faces death. They think we are sleeping, we want to see where they are going with Studio 7, ” said Moyo.
I think I’ll stay in nice, peaceful Zambia.

Joe Pernice, leader of the Pernice Brothers and former copy editor for Cosmo Girl, has written a new novella about the classic Smiths album Meat is Murder. (Well, actually about a dorky Boston teenager who loves the album to pieces.) Here’s an excerpt:
“Why don’t you listen to something else…like jazz? That Smith Family is so depressing,” offered my mother, simply doing her best to help, and I blamed her for it. “No wonder you don’t feel like getting up,” she added, leaving a basket of folded laundry inside my room without coming in. “Their poor mother and father.” I rolled over on the bed so that if she had anything else to say, it would be to my back. Even as I was acting like a hateful little shit, I knew I loved her, but I could not stop myself from excluding her from my life in a hurtful way. It’s endearing now, the way she thought The Smiths were a real dysfunctional family. But then I was embarrassed both for her and for myself.
“They’re not related. It’s just a band name, like The Dead Kennedys,” I snapped (though at that time the Dead Kennedys were a band I knew by name alone), and closed the door hard in her face with my foot. “Besides, it makes me feel good.”
She stood outside for a few seconds, then she sighed. I could hear her footsteps moving down the hardwood hallway until I jacked up the volume knob on the tape player. Once again, thankfully, I was alone. I took a pen and some paper from my bag and started to write Allison yet another note I would never send. I flipped the tape from front to back as I imagined her on her bed, listening to a girlfriend on the phone, with her feet against the wall.
It’s part of the 33 1/3 series, “a new series of short books about critically acclaimed and much-loved albums of the last 40 years.”

I am happy to announce the birth of a new blog, hosted on one of my other servers: Trisarahtops, the site of Miss Sarah Collins, Austinite, education activist, and owner of cats (one slightly injured, by the looks of this morning’s post). One read and you’ll be hooked.

Saw Clem Snide and Califone at The Black Cat last night. Califone’s got a nice rustic, rhythmic thing going on, at times sounding like African drum music with a sitar. They’ve got two drummers; when I think two drummers, I always think of Allman Brothers-style rawk authority, but Califone’s more delicate than that.
Clem Snide was in fine form. Lead singer Eef Barzelay seemed a little tipsy at show’s start, but sobered up toward the end. (I’ve never seen them live before, so I can’t say if that’s just Eef’s schtick.) The band seems to have acknowledged what crabwalk readers learned some time ago: that their last album sucked. They only played two tracks from it all night (“All Green” and “Action”). In contrast, if memory serves, they played six tracks off The Ghost of Fashion (co-winner with Spoon of the coveted 2001 crabwalk.com Album of the Year award), three from Your Favorite Music, and a couple from You Were a Diamond — all far superior discs. (They even played my friend Kim’s favorite song, “Long Lost Twin.”)
Thankfully the new, unreleased songs they played were strong, including one about Enrique Iglesias’ mole (“That’s the kind of song you write when you read Us Weekly,” Eef said). The cover of Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful” was strong, too. It was kind of fun watching all the dedicated indie-kids sing along, obviously knowing every word.
Trivia alert! Eef is evidently a nickname based on his real name, Ifar.

A guide to the Internet in Zambia:
Almost very other business company in the world or home has a telephone line. This is one of the prerequisites for getting connected to the Zamnet Internet Services. Apart from the telephone line, two other essential components are needed for Internet connection, these are a Computer and a Modem…It is imperative for a dial-up client to have all the three components in a working order otherwise it becomes difficult to connect to the Internet.

Great mapping of the ancestry results from the 1990 census. It’s fun to see where everyone ends up:
The Finns in northeastern Minnesota (and the Swedes and the Norwegians who each went a few miles further west), the Poles along the Great Lakes (and in central Nebraska), the Slovaks in Pittsburgh, the Belgians in the Upper Peninsula, the Czechs in central Texas (where they thankfully make Shiner Beer), the famous Utah Danes, the western Iowa Dutch, the Germans all over the Midwest, the Michael Dukakis-led Greeks of Massachusetts, the Irish in Boston and Mississippi (!), the Italians in Jersey, and finally the English, who despite once owning the damned country, seem to have left their mark disproportionately in Maine and Utah.
Finally, of interest to my Cajuncentric worldview, we have the French and French Canadian maps, both of which leave south Louisiana swimming in a sea of red. (And which also serve to prove that (a) the southeast Texas border counties are almost as Cajun as south Louisiana, and (b) north Louisiana is really just southern Arkansas and nothing to get excited about.)
I should also point out that the 1990 census also included “Acadian” as a separate ancestry category (although I can’t find a map for it). I’ve got no doubt that category had a similar, although more pronounced pattern (with perhaps a flicker of color in Maine or Massachusetts).

One complication of planning a six-week trip to Africa: You can no longer automatically delete all emails from African-sounding names with subject lines like “IMPORTANT INFORMATION” or “Opportunity For You.” Sure, 99 percent of them are still spam, but they aren’t all spam anymore.
Anyone puzzling over my absence from this site last week should know I was in Centurion Risk Assessment training in the Virginia wilderness. This is the how-to-be-a-war-correspondent-and-not-get-killed course I mentioned some time ago. Among the things I learned in my 2.5 days of training:
– How to sweep vomit out of an unconcious person’s mouth.
– How to deal with a person who has just shot himself in the arm but is still holding the loaded gun while you treat him.
– If someone’s brain fluid is dripping out of their ears, that’s bad.
– If you’re cleaning an entrance wound caused by high-velocity ammunition, be sure to sweep out the little bits of clothes that probaby got sucked in by the ammo’s advance pressure wave.
– If you’re standing behind someone about a fire a Russian rocket propelled grenade — don’t. (Unless you’re more than 40 meters back.)
– How to tell if artillery rounds are getting closer to your sorry ass or farther away.
– Dim your headlights and turn on your interior dome light when you’re approaching a suspicious road checkpoint at night.
– How to give an effective bribe without insulting the bribee.
– How to make a stretcher out of a blanket and six rocks.
– What to write on someone’s forehead if you’ve applied a tourniquet to his leg.
– What chemicals can quickly stop the bleeding when a pig’s femoral artery has been cut.
– If you’re being kidnapped, fight like hell unless it’s clear the kidnappers have superior weaponry.
– If an injured man has a totally inappropriate erection, he’s almost certainly got a fractured pelvis.
– If you find yourself in the middle of a minefield, slowly clear your surrounding area with an improvised metal divining rod, applying pressure below ground at a 30-degree angle, then lying down to clear your way out of the field.
– Don’t buy a bullet-resistant vest that hasn’t passed the California ice pick test.
– If a grenade’s about to go off in front of you, get down on the ground with your head away from the grenade. Cross your feet and keep your mouth open. Running does no good.
– If you need to smash through a car that’s blocking your path, hit it just behind the rear wheel.
– If ambushed at a checkpoint, get out of the car and slither backwards (not forwards!) on your stomach.
– If you’re going to a riot with Molotov cocktails, don’t wear nylon.
– If you’re attacked by dogs, go for the snout.
I bet I just saved a few of my readers’ lives.

Remember that WaPo piece I linked too last week, about KBON radio down in Louisiana?
A week later, the Post printed two letters to the editor quibbling with facts in the article. The facts I quibbled with in my post? Nope, other facts — facts that are actually accurate. (Warning: Those who get bored easily in my Cajuncentric posts should skip ahead.) Let’s start with the unoffensive letter:
The one item I might take issue with is labeling this interesting culture “Cajun” rather than “Creole.” While the people we dealt with [on a visit to south Louisiana] spoke a French patois, and there are certainly “Cajuns” in the area, our contacts seemed to be a mix of Spanish, black and French who prided themselves as being unique and Zydeco as being theirs and theirs alone.
Martin Prochnik
Fairfax
Martin’s right that calling the area “Cajun” is limiting. It’s like calling parts of Boston “Irish” or Harlem “black” — largely accurate from a demographic point of view, but not exhaustive.
Many blacks in south Louisiana, for instance, resent the fact that everything is labeled Cajun. (Like the local university’s sports teams, the Ragin’ Cajuns, who play at Cajun Field during football season or in the Cajundome during basketball season.) There have even been occasional protests to that effect.
My only quibble with Martin is the idea that if you’re not of direct Acadian French descent, you’re not a Cajun. Cajuns are primarily Acadian French, but plenty of Germans, Spaniards, and non-Acadian French snuck into the gene pool along the way. There are lots of Cajuns with names like Romero (Spanish), McGee (Irish), and Stelly (German).
It was intermarriage with these other ethnic groups that really made Cajuns Cajuns and not just Acadians. While some have maintained some of their ethnic identity (notably the Germans), most have assimilated into their Cajunness. I’ve never met anyone in south Louisiana who considered himself “Spanish,” for instance.
My grandfather’s last name is Benton (Irish), and he’s just as Cajun as my relatives with French names like Mouton, Dugas, and Breaux.
Anyway, on to the offensive letter:
I enjoyed Steve Hendrix’s article about Eunice, La., KBON and the surrounding area. I have two comments, admittedly sort of nit-picky:
– Zydeco. The term arrived in Cajun Louisiana with the advent of MTV. Zydeco sounds similar to and is a rip-off of authentic French or Cajun music. The pioneers of this music — anyone over 35, clubs, dance halls and music stores — call the squeeze-box music that I love so well simply “French” music.
– Creole. There are more definitions of “Creole” than I can count. However, you would be hard-pressed to find a Creole in Louisiana’s prairie parishes, and I don’t think there is such a language in south Louisiana as “Creole French.” The many Germans who settled in these parishes brought the accordion, which is the defining instrument of French music. And yes, they do use Creole mustard, but mustard alone does not a Creole make.
Sterling H. Kelbaugh
Thurmont, Md.
Um, Sterling, nope.
To call zydeco an invention of MTV — either the music or the term — is insulting. Go read Michael Tisserand’s The Kingdom of Zydeco — he traces the use of the term back to the 1940s.
Zydeco and Cajun music have developed on parallel (and regularly crossed) tracks since World War II. The simplistic way to put it: Cajun music is the music white Cajuns played. It draws largely from country, folk, and Western swing, and it usually features a fiddle. Zydeco is played by south Louisiana’s French-speaking blacks and is influenced more by R&B, blues, and rock. It’s usually got a rubboard, no fiddle, and more prominent guitar.
But there’s plenty of crossover — much contemporary “Cajun” music shows a very clear zydeco influence.
Yes, old folks do often lump Cajun and zydeco together under the umbrella of “French music.” (My grandmother does exactly that, for instance.) But there are also a lot of old folks who lump Nine Inch Nails, John Denver, and George Clinton together as “rock music.” That doesn’t make further genre definition illegitimate.
And calling zydeco a “ripoff” isn’t just insulting. It’s plum ignorant.
As for Sterling’s second sterling argument:
– “You would be hard-pressed to find a Creole in Louisiana’s prairie parishes.” That might be news to the thousands of African Americans in south Louisiana who consider themselves Creoles. (In 1982, some of them even formed a cultural-preservation group whose acronym is CREOLE to ensure that Cajuns aren’t the only ethnic group associated with south Louisiana.)
– “[A]nd I don’t think there is such a language in south Louisiana as ‘Creole French.'” Again, that’s news to linguists and researchers, who recognize Creole and Cajun as separate (although obviously related) dialects.
It appears that in Sterling Kelbaugh’s world, black people have never contributed anything to south Louisiana. Dumbass. I hate it when the clueless position themselves as experts.
This concludes the latest lengthy chapter of my Cajun Education Project.

If, like me, you’ve been listening to The Decemberists‘ new album Her Majesty The Decemberists nonstop lately, you may have asked yourself the question:
Who is Myla Goldberg?
As in the album’s track six, “Song for Myla Goldberg.” Well, turns out Myla Goldberg is a novelist, author of Bee Season. Looks like a good read, and Myla seems like an interesting, vaguely crushworthy type. (Any book that combines spelling bees and Jewish mysticism is all right by me.) And judging by her publicity photos, the epithet in the band’s line “Seraphim in seaweed swim where stick-limbed Myla lies” seems appropriate. (The Eliza mentioned in the lyric is the book’s main character.)

Bands With Members I Went To School With Update, No. 1: The new Red Stick Ramblers album comes out tomorrow (Tuesday). Their first was terrific, and I’ve no doubt the second will be even better. (The Ramblers, for those not in the know, combine traditional Cajun music with Bob Wills-style Western Swing and Django Reinhardt-style gypsy music. Lots of fast fiddles and beats made for dancin’. I went to high school with mandolin auteur Josh Caffery.)
Bands With Members I Went To School With Update, No. 2: The new disc from Sea Ray, Brooklyn’s finest band, is out October 21. But it’s available for direct order now. Mark my words, indie rockers — I’ve heard most of the new album, and these guys are about to blow up. Get in while it’s still cool. (Check out the review in this week’s New York magazine. I went to college with I-Huei and Greg.)