shawn avery

this is one of the best clips i've seen regarding the election, via salon.com, could this be the real enemy ? also check this out... 1. this lady does some great art. it reminds me of some of matthew barney's work. 2. she uses dead animals. and - yep... she kills them herself. that's creepy and brilliant at the same time. here's the nathalia edenmont exhibit . and here's the rationale for the art-killings via the host gallery, wetterling. i don't really have an opinion. i just thought i should share that little art nugget. ...moving on... i got the final packaged verison of the jesse payne solo album. it was very well done. the front and back photo is of canterbury church here in birmingham. the liner book is solid white, with plain black text. very simple and clean. i like it. i'll post a pic in a few days. pay attention to rock radio in the next several weeks and you'll probably hear some promos for the album that is slated to drop in election day. ...

i read today that john peel, the famous british dj has died. rock afficianados are familiar w/ the john peel sessions, and other historic recordings. he was a champion of rock, early punk, hip-hop, various emerging scenes in the us, ireland and britain... a very important figure in popular music. he died in an ancient city on vacation in south america of a heart attack. weird. on saturday night, just minutes after watching the pathetic corporate robot known publicly as ashley simpson perform on s.n.l., i changed the channel over to c-span and watched about an hour of jon stewart from the daily show talk about the media... to the media... and watched about an hour of a conversation w/ the governator - arnold. he was at the pinetta institute talking about public policy, immigration, tax reform, pro-business policies, the environment, california's ailing infrastructure, the state's massive debt, special interest groups like the tribal gaming pac, border patrol, undocumented worke...

i started the weekend in earnest by going to the surprisingly long concert : co-headlining jay-z + r. kelly. jay z is simply the best rapper/hip hop artist alive. well, maybe not better than mos def , but close. he was so good, it's scary. we had seats eye level with the stage, in the 4th row. jay-z could have touched us if he wanted to. but, alas he didn't. and then there's r. kelly. we thought that each artist would do a set by themselves. nope. they went back and for for over 2 1/2 hours, each doing 20-30 minute sets. they opened and closed the show together. we ran into judah and his brother, on the way into the arena, and everyone, including them, seemed to have to go on a smoke break whenever the r. kelly set came around. it was so strange to go to a show where you completely respect and identify with one artist, and you totally loath the other one. i'd never gone to an arena show specifically to see a major hip hop act before. for instance, in the past i had seen...

this morning on salon, i read this article about world sentiment toward the american people vs. bush's presidency. turns out that they actually like us - probably because we make all of the big movies - but they hate bush. if we re-elect him, will the planet still show the love? i dunno - here it is . somehow i have found myself, by way of people cooler and more hip than i - going to the jay-z concert tonight. that should rock quite hard. i ended up not watching ambulance ltd. last night. i was all ready to go, but the prospect of watching eternal sunshine of the spotless mind w/ jim carry was too compelling not to watch - one of the best movies i've seen in years. what an incredible, impossibly hard-to-write script.

i think my body is starting to reject the 2004 election. i happened about 1:15 this afternoon... i decided to do some more reading on the election... electoral analysis... speeches, more polls... then i read the jon stewart vs. cnn/crossfire transcript. naturally i wanted some video of the argument on the crossfire episode - so i googled for a while. after a few minutes of not finding the clip i wanted, i got all anxious-like. then my tummy felt strange. it's around this time that i suspect my liver began to fail. it's a cliche, but it holds true for politics as well... everything is fine in moderation. i'm taking a break from the election for about 24 hours. so here's one last link about the election for a while. it's a big one. an empirical study that concludes that bush supporters have about as much of a command of "real facts" as bush has of the english language... "bush supporters still believe iraq had w.m.d." so anyway - tonight... i'm...

polls, and more polls kerry now leads bush in newspaper endorsements 45-30. and there are a growing number of papers who endorsed bush in 2000, that now either cannot support either candidate, or has endorsed jkf'04. i think florida will again decide the election this year. in my "research" on the electoral process, lately being done through poly-sci papers and non-network/broadcast sources, i've realized that the magic number is 50. no incumbent president has ever won re-election with public approval ratings below 50 percent. every president, i.e. reagan, clinton, nixon, etc. that has had a 50 rating or above during the final days on a campaign, has won. following the gop's $150 million dollar convention, bush was riding high (for him) at about about 47. (by anyone's standards in the "reality communities", this is still techinically an unpopular president) right now he's at 48-50 depending on the bias of the polling. no president involved in a r...

the man who would be king... mr. al gore, is hella pissed at the neo-cons. check out what the winner of the popular vote had to say about mr. bush. i couldn't agree more. i'll even leave the caps... (Reuters 10.19.04) "I'm convinced that most of the president's frequent departures from fact-based analysis have much more to do with right-wing political and economic ideology than with the Bible," Gore said in a speech at Georgetown University. "It is love of power for its own sake that is the original sin of this presidency," he said. He painted the Bush administration and its "right-wing" supporters as pursuing policies for the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the rest of the country. "The essential cruelty of Bush's game is that he takes an astonishingly selfish and greedy collection of economic and political proposals and then cloaks them with a phony moral authority, thus misleading many Americans ... who have a deep and ge...

i started the weekend early (thurs) with a group outing to a haunted house, did some editing on some of the tracks we recorded earlier in the year, saturday night i hung out with amber and judah... and we did lunch on sun at rojo. did more yardwork...and continued to read profusely on the election. factcheck.org, salon, ny times, time, newsweek, etc. i can't even estimate how many speeches i've watched and read, from both sides... i've listened to npr, talk radio, cnn, fox, pbs, internet radio. I would say that i am among the most informed of the peasants.

i went online this morning to get my stack of new cd's for the fall and noticed that the album cover i did for stateside has different looking text on amazon.com than the copy that i have. speaking of album covers... i guess ashby has decided that our new album will be titled wiseblood. i agree. very short and direct. southern. for the entire year so far, we had been considering ...and then we shall walk in endless light as the title. pretty longwinded. we shouldn't have that problem with the new title. i got the jeff buckley re-issue of grace. damn. that boy was good. probably too good. the included documentary was very well done. jeff was kind of a space cadet.the new u2 song being played all over the planet has some interesting lyrics, but the riff is kinda lame. it sounds a little too forced. although i love it when they rock out, this seems a bit to mainstream rock to me. the name of the album however, how to dismantle an atomic bomb is genius. and finally... jesse payne...

i was watching tv last night, and noticed a halloween promo that used clips from the 60's show the munsters... it was spooky how much john kerry looks like herman munster, the lovable frankenstein dad. what was downright scary was how much dubya looks like grandpa... the dracula dude. at best, on 11/2, we'll have another president from mass. who was/is a wounded, decorated war vet, and who happens to be a rich ivory school educated catholic democrat. he also happens to have the initials jfk. what were the chances of that happening twice? at worst we'll have a george bush in office for another four years. that would bring the total number of years under a george bush presidency to 12. add in another 8 years for george the 1st as v.p. and you get 20 years of republican / bush reign. 20 years under a george. didn't that happen once before? i guess we'll have to choose between herman or grandpa.

still no skybucket complilation of the local rock scene... i bought the (newly reformed) tears for fears cd. i've been a huge fan of tff leader roland orzabal since highschool, although i liked (like everyone else in america) the song everybody wants to rule the world way back in '85. curt (the cute one) left in '92 and roland continued on without him, releasing one of my favorite albums ever - elemental, followed by raoul and the kings of spain, and a b-sides collection. he decided to hang it up in 2001 and released a solo album. unfortunately he had distribution problems (don't we all?) and it was released during the 9/11 north american consumer black hole. well, curt and roland got back together and have essentially recorded the follow-up album to 1989's seminal pop masterpiece, the seeds of love -which it took 4 years and almost $1 million to produce. they put the "big" in "'80s". in the past decade, after both guys ventured off into lush...

i had a pretty interesting weekend, scene-wise. friday night i went to see the pierces at workplay. they are a sister-singer-songwriter duo, presumably from birmingham, but now based out of nyc. great voices. before checking out the duo, i ran into sidewalk ceo / og-mtv-vj, alan hunter . we talked about opening night at sidewalk and agreed that the editing of silver city could have been better. we spent some time pondering donnie darko , and ended up chatting about his new feature film, dreamland , the possibility of me providing film score material down the road... and the lifeless yet brilliant music of photek . alan is a great conversationalist. a dying breed. after seeing the duo sing some incredibly moving songs, i relocated to the workplay bar, where i struck up a conversation with graphic designer / filmmaker carl ross. we also talked about the festival, the films, zombie movies, " shaun of the dead " , local filmmakers and the annual sidewalk scramble , for...