shaq in 1988

I was looking through the DMN’s archives to see the first time we ever mentioned Shaquille O’Neal. Shaq went to high school in San Antonio, after all, and we’ve historically paid a fair amount of attention to recruiting.
Turns out that our first reference was in an article from Sept. 30, 1988, at the start of his senior year:

Basketball recruiting experts are touting four Texas big men as among the best in the nation — San Antonio Cole’s 7-0 Shaquille O’Neal, 7-0 Matt Wenstrom of Katy Mayde Creek and Kingwood’s pair of 6-10 posts, Todd Schoettelkotte and Rodney Odom. Schoettelkotte, who signed early with Purdue, is the only one of the four who has committed to a college.

We all know Shaq turned out to be pretty good. How about the rest?
I know all about Matt Wenstrom because he played for North Carolina, my college team of choice. He was — and I say this respectfully — a nobody. A big body, but no skills; he scored a grand total of 194 points in four years, mostly riding the pine behind Eric Montross and the immortal Kevin Salvadori. Because of that big body, he actually had a cup of coffee in the NBA, adding all of 18 more points to his life total.
Rodney Odom went to UCLA, redshirted, transferred to UNC-Charlotte and had a nice college career there. He played for a while in Poland, and now you can hire him to come train your AAU team.
As for Todd Schoettelkotte, he apparently didn’t stick around long at Purdue, since it appears he finished his playing career back in Houston at Rice. Now, it seems he’s “a Director in the FTI Forensic and Litigation Consulting practice,” with “significant experience assisting companies with complex financial accounting and litigation issues in a variety of industries.”
I’d imagine that that being mentioned alongside Shaq was, in retrospect, the peak of each of their athletic careers.

knights of the golden circle

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.

os mutantes, gilberto gil, caetano veloso

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):

pruno, maine frenchmen, touch & go

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.

latest cheating stories

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.

MP3 Monday: June 12, 2006

It’s a big week in sports. The world is enthralled by the the FIFA World Cup, which began Friday. I had big plans for a World Cup-themed MP3 Monday, but bailed out when I realized I didn’t have any songs from Costa Rica, Cote d’Ivoire, or Angola. (Although one presumes that Gal Costa‘s “Não Identificado,” Sound Directions‘ “Theme for Ivory Black,” and the Weary Boys‘ version of “It Takes A Worried Man” performed live at Angola Prison could have subbed in.)
Aw, hell, here’s that Weary Boys track anyway.
But instead this week’s MP3 Monday focuses on the mania du jour here at crabwalk.com HQ: the NBA Finals, which pit the Dallas Mavericks — force for all that is good, wholesome, and German in the world — against the bloated, retrograde Miami Heat, a team so awful it can’t even afford a plural noun for a name. This week’s schtick-to-match: Dallas songs vs. Miami songs.
First off, the Big D.
“Southside Funk” by The Soul Seven. From the album The Funky 16 Corners (2001).
The Soul Seven were a funk band formed in 1969 at Bishop College, the since-closed historically black college on Dallas’ south side. (Its campus is now Paul Quinn College.) The band didn’t last long and would have been forgotten long ago were it not for Eothen Alapatt (a.k.a. Egon), the soul-collector genius who compiled The Funky 16 Corners, a great amalgam of old funk 45s for Stones Throw Records. (The Soul Seven also appears on the Egon-produced South Dallas Pop Festival 1970 live album.)
(For the non-locals, South Dallas is the traditionally black part of the city — hence the name of the song.)
Check out Egon’s narrative of roaming the country, tracking down old funk tracks and bowling every night.
“Felo de Se” by Bedhead. From the album Beheaded (2001).
Bedhead were probably the biggest indie band to come out of Dallas in the 1990s. I saw them live twice. The first time was in a small space in Cleveland, on Fourth of July weekend 1996. I was visiting my buddy I-Huei, who was interning in Cleveland while I was interning in Toledo. Bedhead was great. The second time was with then-girlfriend Kelly in Detroit, at The Magic Stick. They were horrrrrrible. Lead singer Matt Kadane was sick, and his brother Bubba sang everything in his place. There was a reason Bubba was not the regular lead singer. The energy drained out of the place, and I ended up apologizing to Kelly for submitting her to the show.
“Felo de Se” is one of their later songs, and one of their peppier ones. The title means suicide. Having song titles in Latin makes perfect sense for a smartypants like Matt Kadane, who got his Ph.D. from Brown last year (dissertation: “The Watchful Clothier: The Diary of an 18th-Century Protestant-Capitalist”) and is now a lecturer at Harvard.
“Shake For Me” by Stevie Ray Vaughan. From the album In the Beginning (1992).
People think of Stevie Ray as an Austin product, but he was born and raised in Dallas (Oak Cliff, more specifically, also on the south side), and that’s where he’s buried. I haven’t yet been to the SRV Museum, but that’s a field trip for some upcoming weekend. This is from a radio broadcast of a Stevie Ray show on April Fool’s Day 1980, when he was still just an Austin club rat, three years before his first album. (It’s also my favorite SRV album, if you’re looking to pick one up.)
“Dallas, Airports, Bodybags” by American Music Club. From the album Mercury (1993).
AMC wasn’t from Dallas, but how could I pass up this song title? The surprisingly upbeat shuffle doesn’t give any clues what the title refers to, but my best guess is Delta Flight 191, which crashed at DFW on landing in 1985.
The last time AMC lead singer Mark Eitzel played a show in Dallas, I yelled out a request for this song. It was ignored.
“The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton” by The Mountain Goats. From the album All Hail West Texas (2002).
The Mountain Goats aren’t from Dallas, either. And I didn’t even choose their one Dallas-based song, the Casio-fueled “Blues in Dallas” (“Down in Dealey Plaza / The tourists mill about”). But Denton’s just outside town, and I have a special love for this song. Any song that ends with a rousing call to “Hail Satan!” gets the crabwalk.com seal of approval.
And I love this lyric: “The best ever death metal band out of Denton never settled on a name / But the top three contenders, after weeks of debate / Were Satan’s Fingers, and The Killers, and The Hospital Bombers.”
“Worst Case Scenario” by Cottonmouth, Texas. From the album Anti-Social Butterfly (1997).
Cottonmouth, Texas was (is?) the spoken-word project of Deep Ellum denizen Jeff Liles. This particular tracks tells the tale of an ill-timed acid trip.
I actually reviewed this album in my past life as a Professional Rock Critic™ and got a nice email from Jeff himself: “Thanks for buying my album. It’s the lowest selling record in the history of Virgin Records. You are a part of a small family of people who actually own it. I hope that you found it entertaining, and feel free to make cassette dubs for your friends. Peace to you and yours.”
So that’s Dallas. What about Miami? I have to say, Miami has not produced a big part of my music collection. I love Latin music, but the Miami stuff that’s reached any sort of national scale has been more poppy (Gloria Estefan, Jon Secada, etc.) than grimy. (The one great songstress I assumed was from Miami, the Cubana Celia Cruz, was actually based in New Jersey most of her career.) And I love hip-hop, but Miami bass has never struck me as one of the more positive influences on the genre. And as for guitar music…geez, south Florida’s just a black hole. Hell, even the panhandle has lapped it a thousand times over. (Seriously, look at this list. And the gall of claiming Debbie Harry as a Miamian when she moved to New Jersey at three months old!)
So I’m forced to rely, in large part, on songs others have written about Miami. I was tempted to include “Florida (Is Shaped Like A Big Droopy Dick For a Reason),” the post-2000-election plaint by Cex, but sadly the song’s just not that great.
“(Your Mama’s On) Crack Rock” by Disco Rick & The Dogs. From the album The Dogs (1990).
Probably the most socially transgressive song in the short-lived history of MP3 Monday, but in many ways the ne plus ultra of Miami bass. Be sure to gather the kids around the computer speakers for this one — it’ll encourage them to ask all sorts of interesting questions.
“Boogie Shoes” by K.C. & The Sunshine Band. From the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever (1977).
At least K.C. (nee Harry Wayne Casey) was from Miami. He got his start working in a record store: “He noticed often that customers would come in not remembering the titles of the records they wanted, and the store would lose the sale — this is the reason so many of his songs repeat their titles over and over.” Something to contemplate while listening.
“Florida’s On Fire” by Superchunk. From the album Here’s To Shutting Up (2001).
Superchunk’s from North Carolina, not Florida, but they can watch the news like anyone else (“Don’t you know that the dirt’s on fire down here?”). It’s a shame that it’s been five years since this record; I count the ‘chunk among the great underrated ’90s indie bands and Here’s To Shutting Up was strong.
Trivia: Superchunk drummer Jon Wurster is half of the Scharpling & Wurster comedy team familiar to WFMU listeners.
Trivia that’s well known enough it doesn’t really count as trivia any more: Mac and Laura from Superchunk are the forces behind Merge Records, which would be on any sentient person’s short list for Best Record Label Alive (Spoon, American Music Club, Neutral Milk Hotel, Richard Buckner, the Arcade Fire, Destroyer, Dinosaur Jr., Imperial Teen, etc.).
“Miami Skyline” by Girls Against Boys. From the album You Can’t Fight What You Can’t See (2002).
I remember getting a promo of the previous Girls Against Boys album in 1998. The press materials had an entire section telling critics how to refer to the band’s name. You had two options, if I remember: either write out the entire Girls Against Boys or use the shorter GVSB. Other variants, like Girls vs. Boys or Females In Direct Opposition To Males, were verboten. Anyway, I’d thought they were dead, but apparently they still tour every so often.
Trivia: New Wet Kojak, a GVSB side project, was even better than the original, in this reporter’s opinion. A little lounge-y, a little whispery.
Further trivia: GVSB bassist Johnny Temple runs a small publishing house off the money he made from that 1998 album, Akashic Books. Yet another man living the crabwalk.com lifestyle of choice, literary lion by day, rocker by night. And, to close the loop, here’s an article on Akashic written by none other than Jessica Winter, my old college newspaper buddy.

dangerdoom, madlib, stones throw

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.