Category: Uncategorized

The Christmas truce.

Amazon has the DVDs for seasons 1 and 2 of Arrested Development on sale for $31.94. That’s quite a discount from the $80 retail. And you should buy them, because they’re the best 40 episodes of television you’ll see.

Good story in the Sunday Chronicle.
Link Wray died, only three weeks after I linked to a cover of his “Falling Rain” by Calexico.
A few items that I’ve found sufficiently interesting to put on my Amazon wish list:
– Hey! It’s That Guy!: The Fametracker.com Guide to Character Actors.
– Tiny Cities, the new album of Modest Mouse covers by Sun Kil Moon (a.k.a. Mark Kozelek, a.k.a. Red House Painters).
– Gary Benchley, Rock Star, the new novel by Paul Ford.
– The Edge: David Axelrod at Capitol Records 1966-1970, a great comp of the great soul/jazz/funk producer. Produced by Egon.
– Terry: Terry Fox and His Marathon of Hope, Douglas Coupland’s bio of the greatest Canadian (Tommy Douglas be damned).
– Louis Riel : A Comic-Strip Biography, Chester Brown’s bio of the 11th greatest Canadian (or one of the worst, depending on how you define “treason“).
– A Decent, Orderly Lynching: The Montana Vigilantes, by Frederick Allen.

So very sad. I nearly coughed up my lemonade last night when I heard Paul Slavens announce on his show that Glenn Mitchell had died. Glenn was a very fine interviewer, booked consistently interesting guests, and just seemed like a really, really nice guy. Radio piece here.
There’ll be a memorial broadcast during what would have been the first hour of Glenn’s show today, from noon to 1 p.m. on KERA 90.1. Give it a listen.
On another depressing note, Glenn’s noon-to-2 show was the only locally-produced news/talk show left on KERA. When I got to Dallas five years ago, you had the Evening Talk Show each night and The People’s Agenda on Friday mornings. Neither was great, honestly — Marla Crockett is a smart lady, but she could never wrangle her TPA guests into interesting radio, and I’m on record stating the evening show was a snorefest. But they were local and on the air, and now they’re gone. I’m really curious to see what KERA does to fill Glenn’s void.
I’ve always thought that it would make perfect sense for my employer to cosponsor a show with KERA. First, there’s a big overlap between KERA listeners and Dallas Morning News readers — and the KERA listeners who don’t read our paper are prime candidates we should be chasing. Second, we, like every other newspaper under heaven, are in the midst of a multimedia push to get reporters more comfortable with working in other media. Radio counts as other media, I think. Third, it’d be a good opportunity to push DMN reporters and editors out into the public eye; with the demise of TXCN, we don’t get out nearly as much as we used to.
(My Grand Theory On The Future Of Newspapers, which will someday be revealed here, emphasizes the importance of branding your reporters as public figures — humanizing them in the reader’s eye so they provide the sort of value-added that TV reporters do. People look forward to a Brett Shipp story on WFAA or a Robert Riggs piece on 11 — just as they look forward to a Steve Blow or Jack Floyd column.)

Kazakhstan threatens “Borat” with court. “‘We do not rule out that [“Da Ali G Show” star Sacha Baron] Cohen is serving someone’s political order designed to present Kazakhstan and its people in a derogatory way,’ Kazakh Foreign Ministry spokesman Yerzhan Ashykbayev told a news briefing.”
Video of Borat in action.
Pardon my French, but: Those motherfuckers! You can’t kill the best show on television! Especially if you’re going to replace it with It’s Toby Keith!
Hipster trap!
My boring-ass story from Sunday’s paper. I can’t believe they killed my one lame joke, which despite its lameness was the only thing livening up my dead prose. (“The flurry of new exams may make you want to steal a line from the first George Bush: ‘No new TAKSes!'” Okay, maybe I can believe it.)

You’ve probably seen this story by now: Two Carolina Panthers cheerleaders arrested for allegedly having sex in a bathroom stall in Florida. Cheerleaders, sex…now that’s a story the media can sink its teeth into!
The terrible twosome have already been excised from the online roster of the TopCats — the names Angela and Renee are already gone. But they apparently don’t have anyone at TopCat Central with good Photoshop skills, because they’re still in the squad photo at the top of the page. (Fourth from the right in the back row and last on the right in the front row. Clicking on them brings up a blank page.)

The best part about liking Canadian indie rock is that, when you have a question or something and send an email to a band’s site, you’re likely to get a response straight back from the lead singer himself. I have, saved somewhere, an email from Charles Austin regarding my question for a Neusiland EP a few years back. And when I emailed the address on the City Field site — the band mentioned in the last post — to hunt down their EP, I got a reply from the great Matt Murphy himself.
It’s that personal attention to customer service that separates the CanRock stars from those south-of-the-border types. I love Canada.

I want to see this movie. “Jim Jablowski is a small-town [Canadian] Prairie kid who dreams of becoming a country-rock troubadour. Under the stage name Guy Terrifico, he finds the audience he craves — only they’re not loving him for his music. Instead, the crowd wants to experience his outlandish on- and off-stage antics, which include near-death experiences and a sexual act with a drum kit.”
While it sounds funny and all, my main reason is that Mr. Terrifico is played by none other than Matt Murphy, a very definite crabwalk.com favorite and ex-frontman for The Super Friendz (whose Mock Up Scale Down album is a forgotten mid-’90s classic) and The Flashing Lights, who were similarly terrific. Not to mention Little Orton Hoggett and a stint as one of Neko Case’s Boyfriends.
Here’s a brief in-studio performance by the FLights from 2000.
Nobody does smiley/crunchy power-pop quite like Matt, and I’m looking forward to hearing his new project, City Field. Quoth the press: “What is unexpected is just how very 1979 the fivesome sounds. On City Field’s snappy six-song Authentic City EP, the band makes no attempt to hide the new wave influence of the B-52s, Pere Ubu, the Talking Heads and Patti Smith.” In other good news, it appears there may be more Super Friendz or Flashing Lights work ready to come out soon-ish.
In unrelated news, this is the 2,000th post in crabwalk.com history.

I’ve got three stories to link to today:
– My page-one story on the growth of Chinese classes in high schools:
You could write a fair history of late 20th-century America just by tracking the languages high school students learned in school.
At the height of the Cold War, Russian was hot, spasibo very much.
Japanese boomed in the late 1980s, when it seemed the rising sun would eclipse America’s economy. And by the morning of Sept. 12, 2001, Arabic was getting more attention than ever.
But say “ni hao” – “hello,” that is – to the newest language to push its way to the forefront: Chinese.
– My metro-cover story on missing test documents:
More than 20,000 copies of state tests – supposedly kept under lock and key – disappeared from Texas schools this spring, according to state data. Dallas schools lost more than 7,000 test documents, more than any other district in the state.
State officials say they are reconsidering their testing security policies after some experts said having Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, or TAKS, questions floating around the state could put the integrity of the testing system at risk.
“We probably need to look at some ways to strengthen our security,” said Susan Barnes, associate commissioner of standards and programs at the Texas Education Agency.
– The Miami Herald ran my Jonathan Kozol review in their Sunday book section.

As of 26 minutes ago, I am 30 years old. Weird.
(At least by calendar date. I was actually born at 8:01 a.m., so I’ve got a few hours left before I start to bald.)
Also, apparently a few hours ago, I won a pretty nice award — the top prize for Best Investigative Reporting in a six-state area (Arkansas, Colorado, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas). This would be for the cheating stuff last year. Yay!