Crabwalk

A Year Following The Breakup — first linked here back in March — has come to a close. A year’s a year, apparently. Still, if you want to kill a few hours, there are worse ways than to start at the beginning, read in chronological order, and watch Arnie slowly get over his ladyfriend.

Why did no one tell me that Maury Povich had become a Dada artist on the order of Tristan Tzara or Max Ernst? I mean: Pickles?

Go watch this five-second video: What sound is he making?
Then listen to it again, this time with your eyes closed. What sound is he making?
The answers to this very cool optical/aural illusion here.

Attention crossword-puzzle fans: Take a moment out from your intense loathing of sudoku to go see Wordplay, the documentary film about your craft. And keep an eye out for no fewer than three appearances by my college buddy Ken. (He’s in the trailer on the web site, too — the bearded fellow posing for a picture, oh, about 35 percent in.)

Here’s my story from today’s front page. Foot fetishists, note that this story sets my new personal record for toe mentions:

If you own stock in a company that makes No. 2 pencils, now might be a good time to sell.

After a few years of tiptoeing, Texas is preparing to take its first big step into online testing. School districts have the option to administer next spring’s TAKS test by computer.

“Students have become more and more accustomed to a computer environment,” said Susan Barnes, associate commissioner for standards and programs at the Texas Education Agency. “That has become the mode of how they interact.”

Some worry that the shift, designed to eventually save money and time, could have substantial implications for the tests’ fairness. Not every school has access to the same quality or quantity of computers.

It could also be a solution to Texas’ cheating problems – or make them worse, depending on who’s talking.

I also never linked to my column from Monday:

Why do some parents make such stupid decisions?

That was the question that kept popping into my mind last week as I walked around the KIPP TRUTH Academy in South Dallas. (For the moment, please forgive their over-commitment to capital letters.)

Here was a middle school, in a poor part of town, that put academics first. A free charter school with a demonstrated record of taking struggling neighborhood kids and putting them on a path to college. A school whose graduates will get scholarships to Dallas’ most elite private high schools and who will eventually be successful in life.

And it opened school this month with 20 empty seats in its fifth-grade class.

Pitchfork has posted a list of 100 awesome music videos, all linked via Youtube. In other words, an excellent way to kill two hours. But not all awesome music videos are created of equal awesomeness, so here’s the crabwalk.com guide to which videos are most worth your time:
Page 1: A-Ha, Air, The Avalanches, Blur.
Page 2: Busta Rhymes, Cee-Lo, Cyndi Lauper, Daft Punk.
Page 3: The Decemberists, DJ Shadow, Dr. Dre, Duran Duran.
Page 4: Elton John, The Eurythmics, Frankie Goes to Hollywood.
Page 5: The Jacksons, Jason Forrest, Journey, Junior Senior, Kate Bush.
Page 6: KMD, Kraftwerk, Lionel Richie, M.I.A., Madvillain, Missy Elliott.
Page 7: My Bloody Valentine, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, The Postal Service.
Page 8: R. Kelly, Radiohead, The Replacements.
Page 9: Sinead O’Connor, Talking Heads.
Page 10: Toni Basil, Twisted Sister, Village People, Wu-Tang Clan, Yo La Tengo, ZZ Top.

No MP3 Monday this week, as I was up in Seattle this weekend for a wedding. But an update on an old one.
On May 15 I posted about The Trend, a terrific Missouri power-pop band active in the early 1980s. Today, I got an email from its leader-turned-lawyer, John McMullan.
“We have been very fortunate to have been given a tremendous ‘reminder’ by our inclusion in the newest Yellow Pills, and the feedback has been uniformly positive,” he says.
On to my write-up. For starters, I’d assumed an early R.E.M. connection (“You can tell they listened to Chronic Town, but the burbling bass and speed-freak drums say they were up to something of their own”). Not so, apparently:

[T]o my knowledge, none of us had ever heard Chronic Town prior to the recording of the album. I know that I became familiar with R.E.M. during the summer of ’83. (Our album was recorded in July, 1982.) Later demos of ours included guitar sounds derived directly from Peter Buck, but our album was mined from an odd Monkees/Records/Shoes/Fools Face combination. We weren’t sophisticated enough for R.E.M. at that moment!

And as to my in-retrospect-not-particularly-generous comment on his later work:

I happen to agree with your truism that power pop artists do not age well. In fact, none of them, including myself, retain the urgency required to play true power pop well. Maybe it’s a metabolism thing, or a domesticity thing, but it’s true. In fact, most of my favorite power pop acts never even made a 2nd album that I really liked!

For kicks, I’m reposting the Trend song that initially grabbed my attention, “(I Feel Like A) Dictionary.”

Today I make a nomination for Worst Mayor of Dallas Ever: John Henry Brown. I actually don’t know much about his term as mayor (1885-1889), but he’d already had a long and storied evil career by then.
“[A]malgamation of the white with the black race, inevitably leads to disease, decline and death,” he wrote in 1857, when he was a state legislator from Galveston. At the time he chaired the House Committee on Slaves and Slavery, and he was making a proposal that proved too radical for even that committee. Arguing that Africans had been “indisputably adapted by nature to the condition of servitude,” Brown proposed a legislative resolution calling for the rebirth of the African slave trade. (It had been banned in 1808, even though slavery was still legal.) The committee rejected the notion.
In 1860, with abolitionist fervor rising (particularly in parts of North Texas that didn’t grow as much cotton), Brown told Texans to “whip no abolitionist, drive off no abolitionist — hang them, or let them alone.” And after the Civil War, rather than stay in a Union-controlled Texas, he ran away to Mexico like a little punk.
John Henry Brown: A little punk.
There used to be an elementary school in Dallas named for him. In the segregation era, it was a whites-only school; when the children of Elmer Hurdle — a black man who lived half a block from John Henry Brown Elementary — were told they couldn’t attend there, they became plaintiffs in the first Dallas school-desegregation lawsuit. (It was dismissed four days later, in 1955; Dallas didn’t really desegregate for many years after that.)
As time moved on, the school’s student body shifted to being 98 percent minority, which created a bit of dissonance with Brown’s little punk past. But in 1999, the Dallas school board changed its namesake to Dr. Billy E. Dade, a Dallas teacher, principal, and college professor.

One of the best parts of the New Deal — at least from the perspective of a historically-minded journalist — was the Federal Writers’ Project, which paid writers to collect oral histories, pen travel guides, and otherwise keep busy. (Among the later-to-be-big names on the payroll were Studs Terkel, Nelson Algren, John Cheever, and Richard Wright.)
One of the works produced by the FWP was Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, a massive 17-volume compilation of just what it sounds like. Between 1936 and 1938, writers fanned out across America, searching out ex-slaves (by then quite old) and asking them about their lives. Their prose is marked by the time, with its exaggerated black dialogue, but it’s an invaluable window into the lives turned by slavery.
The Library of Congress has put more than 2,300 slave narratives online, and they’re worth reading. I picked out one to post here: the story of Lulu Wilson, aged around 97, and a resident of 1108 Good Street, Dallas, Texas. (Good Street is now called Good-Latimer; my guess is that her house was roughly where I-30 and I-45 meet on the southeast side of downtown Dallas.)
The images below are the entire five-page narrative (click on them to zoom to a readable size), but here are a few excerpts:

My paw warn’t no slave. He was a free man, ’cause his mammy was a full blood Creek Indian. But my maw was born in slavery, down on [her owner] Wash Hodges’ paw’s place, and he give her to Wash when he married. That was the only woman slave what he had and one man slave, a young buck. My maw say she took with my paw and I’s born, but a long time passed and didn’t no more young’uns come, so they say my paw am too old and wore out for breedin’ and wants her to take with this here young buck. So the Hodges sot the n—-r hounds on my paw and run him away from the place and maw allus say he went to the free state. So she took with my step-paw and they must of pleased the white folks what wanted n—–s to breed like livestock, ’cause she birthed nineteen chillen.

On her brothers and sisters:

I gits to thinkin’ now how [her owner] Wash Hodges sold off maw’s chillun. He’d sell ’em and have the folks come for ’em when my maw was in the fields. When she’d come back, she’d raise a ruckus. Then many the time I seed her plop right down to a settin’ and cry ’bout it. But she ‘lowed they warn’t nothin’ could be done, ’cause it’s the slavery law. She said, “O, Lawd, let me see the end of it ‘fore I die, and I’ll quit my cussin’ and fightin’ and rarin’.’

On the Civil War

Wash Hodges was gone away four years and Missus Hodges was meaner’n the devil all the time. Seems like she jus’ hated us worser than over. She said blobber-mouth n—–s done cause a war.

And on her grandson and the then-new Social Security program:

He’s got four chillun and he makes fifty dollars a month. I’m crazy ’bout that boy and he comes to see me, but he can’t help me none in a money way. So I’m right grateful to the president for gittin’ my li’l pension. I done study it out in my mind for three years and tell him, Lulu says if he will see they ain’t mo more slavery, and if they’ll pay folks liveable wages, they’ll be less stealin and slummerin’ and goin’s on. I worked so hard. For more’n fifty years I waited as a nurse on sick folks. I been through the hackles if any mortal soul has, but it seems like the president thinks right kindly of me, and I want him to know Lulu Wilson thinks right kindly of him.