Here is more on The Local: East Village, the NYU-New York Times hybrid web publication, from NYU’s Jay Rosen. We discussed this a bit yesterday. (And some of our criticism was interpreted by a few people to mean that 1. we hate students! and 2. we hate “new ideas”! Which, yes. Yes, we hate the young and their newfangled web journalism ideas! Isn’t that position obvious?) Now give that a read and you all can make up your own minds what you think of this new publication and we wish the young folks involved all the best in a great news-gathering experience! Obviously we have a couple of thoughts, because why wouldn’t we?

1. “The idea is that there’s no better way to learn about ‘reporting New York’ then to cover a neighborhood in New York for nytimes.com.” Completely agree with that! (Except for the last two words, but still, yes.)

2. “Students contributing to LEV as part of their coursework will not be paid….. The only compensation system that makes sense, and the only one that is practical for us, is to pay for a portion of the content, with priority given to the most reliable contributors, the highest value journalism and work that takes the most time, effort and talent. We certainly know that these sketchy promises will do little to mute criticism about exploiting cheap labor.” Well, hell, welcome to the club! (Not that we’re a good comparison, but we have not yet paid ourselves over here, so, sounds reasonable! Except… we expect in the near future to be nearing self-sufficiency, knock on wood, which we think needs to be a primary goal of any for-profit publication-which the Times very much is. People need to at least ask what it means for the Times to create an institution which is built upon not paying the real workers who make it possible. That is just how much I hate the young people-I want them to be paid for their work. The Times formerly paid its intern-reporters quite well, by the way! And by “formerly,” I mean, as of just a few years ago.)

3. “One of my priorities is the ergonomics of participation: making it super easy and efficient for people without journalism backgrounds to contribute.” Awesome! This is actually an extremely important bit of diversity. Anyone who has worked at a New York newspaper with any kind of awareness has long ago grown tired of the official channels through which a twice-yearly stream of Ivy League interns enter the system and obtain advancement, while those of us who did not attend college, or a best college, struggled for entry and access.

4. “You know what? It’s going to be messy and hard, which is to say real. But what better what [sic] is there to learn what journalists are yet good for in 2010?” Oh, fine: said the actress to the bishop.

This story from Britain is so much better if you know who Norman Tebbit is, but it’s still pretty funny either way:

Former Cabinet minister Norman Tebbit was today accused of attacking a child who was dressed as a ceremonial Chinese dragon.

Lord Tebbit, 78, ran outside his house after revellers celebrating Chinese New Year in the street at a nearby restaurant started banging a drum and cymbals.

He is alleged to have run into the crowd, put his hands over the drums and then kicked the rear of a child who was dressed in the traditional costume dragon.

The wacky misunderstanding was soon resolved with apologies all around, and Tebbit, who had only recently moved to the area, acknowledged that, “As a new resident, we immigrants should adopt the customs of the community we go into. It is up to us to co-operate with the prevailing culture.” Which, you know, points for consistency, I guess.

Hey, remember how we saw that Wired piece on Money Wanting To Be Free coming down the pike and we were like, uh, oh boy? Hey, it is here now! And it asks: “What if people could transfer money over Twitter for next to nothing, simply by typing a username and a dollar amount?” Well, what if I could shit gold coins, and pay people simply by pulling down my pants? That is totally possible as well, if I swallowed a bunch of gold coins and then had the ability to excrete at will. Let’s make this happen, people! Okay, but seriously, it’s fair to agree with Wired that we are maybe, maybe, sorta on the brink of undermining the massive, unfriendly and filthy rich credit systems of the world-and that would/will be wonderful, when it starts to work.

Unfortunately, what we have as a working example now is PayPal, which has its ups and downs. And in practice? They aren’t so different, in a few ways, from the big credit card vendors. Remember last year? “Starting in June, Paypal started assessing a fee of 2.9% on on purchases marked ‘goods or services’ to personal accounts.” And while the next PayPal evolution is Twitpay, which apparently has all of 15,000 users and seems essentially, so far, to be a way to notify people that you’ve made a PayPal payment to them, by means of Twitter, there’s definitely something in there. Also it does not seem to be taking off quite like wildfire?

But it could! Then the money will be totally in the Twitter machines… which surely will go well.

And then also there’s that new thing which you plug into your iPhone to make it into… a credit card reader. Which seems like the very definition of a transitional development.

But, yes, sure! We are going to get there! We all do want to get there. There may come a time when we are not beholden to fee-gouging, money-hoarding, float-subsisting mega-banks!

You Will Not Ever See The Light

We bring you this picture of the sun today as a public service, since it seems very likely that you will never see it again. That’s right, you should expect rain, snow, and clouds for the rest of your life. New York is going to be like some kind of Scandinavian crime novel for the foreseeable future, and there’s nothing to do about it but sit around and bitch, which is exactly what I’m doing right now. Welcome to the Dark Times.

In the latest of what seems like a real string of major developments in a war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Mullah Abdul Kabir, said to be very influential in east Afghanistan, has been detained by the Pakistan government. Even though this reportedly took place several days ago, the American government says it still can’t confirm this for sure-even though the Times (by way of the impeccable Dexter Filkins) asserts it directly. Weird, right?

Certainly it makes one wonder further about the constantly re-fraying relationship between Pakistan and the U.S.

Coming on the heels of Pakistan’s arrest of Taliban honcho Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, this is a surprising turn of events in light of Pakistan’s, let’s say… conflicted ideas about how to handle leadership in the region.

And then there’s this, which we expect to hear much more about.

Hajji Zaman Ghamsharik, an Afghan warlord accused of helping Osama bin Laden escape from the Americans at Tora Bora, was assassinated by a suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest. The bomber killed him and 14 others as they gathered at a ceremony to distribute land to returning refugees at a village in his tribal stomping grounds near the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad.

Um, what? Fascinating!

by Liz Colville

0:01 OK this is
0:02 reasonable enough.
0:03 This looks
0:04 familiar.
0:05 Wait those streamer things
0:06 kind of remind me of a
0:07 Pantene ad. Like illustrating
0:08 the magic of hair chemicals/cat food.
0:09 Now this is like The Lion, The Witch and
0:10 The
0:11 Wardrobe,
0:12 where a weird mirror
0:13 floating in space
0:14 equals wardrobe.
0:15 OK this is just UNFAIR.
0:16 NO CAT
0:17 experiences this kind of
0:18 ecstasy not even
0:19 on CATNIP. The
0:20 animation is atrocious. Those
0:21 turkeys are like something
0:22 from a computer game from 1997. Nanosaur!
0:23 What are the turkeys so
0:24 happy about? He is going to eat
0:25 them! This singing is like
0:26 a backing track on that sellout
0:27 Liz Phair album.
0:28 Don’t fall off the
0:29 cliff!!!!!!!! Damn, cats are agile.
0:30 Is that a litter? As in the thing
0:31 that someone rich sits in while minions
0:32 carry it and walk? Oh no, it’s a boat.
0:33 Cats hate water! Thank god for pirate ships!
0:34 The cat is meowing as if to say
0:35 “Where the fuck am I?!?!? I want to
0:36 go hooooooooooooooome.
0:37 REOW.”
0:38 OK safely in pirate ship.
0:39 Failing to catch any fish because fish are computer-animated.
0:40 Not actually looking directly at fish
0:41 because fish have been fake CG’d into this
0:42 lucy-in-the-sky-with-fishes world.
0:43 Oh yeah,
0:44 OF COURSE SOME RARE ENDANGERED
0:45 PHEASANTS ARE GOING TO ROLL DOWN
0:46 A RED CARPET FOR YOU. OBVIOUSLY.
0:47 (THEY MIGHT JUST BE TURKEYS.)
0:48 Okay now there’s an entire drum circle
0:49 of prey.
0:50 Oh but
0:51 maybe they are dancing in a farewell
0:52 like get the fuck out of here
0:53 don’t eat us! We’ll be nice to you if you
0:54 don’t eat us!
0:55 There he/she goes. Wait did he just
0:56 come out of the washing machine?
0:57 Yes the reality is that you are just
0:58 eating 99-cent horse meat.
0:59 SORRY ABOUT THAT,
0:60 MEOWIEKINS.

Previously: The Only Three Female Musicians, According to Many Male Music Critics

Liz Colville is exciting us day and night with endless enchantment.

by Matt Ealer

I have this problem with not wearing earplugs at shows. I can’t get a bead on exactly what it is; some long-held childishness about needing to “authentically experience the music,” which is probably just a cover for not wanting to look like “that guy” (“that guy who wears earplugs”?), or maybe just a willful and teenage-defiant attitude about the glories or total bodily desecration?

Whatever it is, it was still pretty imposing when Mission of Burma’s guitar tech rolled that Marshall stack right up to the edge of the Black Cat’s main stage, feet from my skull and inches from the club’s already pretty formidable house system.

But I mean, I hadn’t flinched throughout Office of Future Plan’s set; when a throaty tenor of a bass played against the keening wail of needling neon green guitar lines at opposing right angles (sort of like a version of the Jesus Lizard that forgot to drink the whiskey laced with mescaline) while the cello droned out washes of scrapes and the drums click-clacked in dub suspension until they all crushed together in a riffing fury, the vocals going from deadpan to heart-bleeding-off-sleeve harDCore scream-strains in an instant. That hadn’t hurt! So.

Here we were, though, the roadie and Roger Miller both now jingling a bottle that looked like some oversized container of Excedrin from a bad farce full of precious orange earplugs, almost pleading with us, their stupid children. Still I demurred. Still the both of them seemed to give me, individually, looks of “okaaaaay, yer funeral.”

And then it built. Miller’s three-chord bashing giving way to staccato, militaristic riffage giving way to noise breakdowns that never lost the melody, becoming at once the Anti-Rock Solo and the perfect rock solo, because you get the idea that he’s still exploring the thing, testing the possibilities, tossing what doesn’t work and making note of what does.

This is fine, I think. I’ve been at louder house shows, fer crissakes! (Peter Prescott jokes from behind the traps, “I sure Deep Purple was louder than us. I’m sure of it. Well, I’m not sure.” The reference is apt; Mission of Burma has been a band for, technically, more than thirty years.) In fact, my head is so not exploding that I can think about how well Miller’s stage shtick goes with his playing: marching like a a member of Janet’s Rhythm Army while also doing a version of the Keith Richards white-dude-with-a-guitar trope, simultaneously rendering it ridiculous and reminding you why it worked in the first place.

Bob Weston is back behind us, not only recreating the spirit of Martin Swope’s tape loops (which only sound kind of old hat today because they directly influenced 30 years of dudes and dudettes with guitars to play around with that thread), but smoothing out the chaos such that Clint Conley’s bass starts to take on his presence — the corduroy blazer quickly lost, the pretty soft gray button-up wrinkled into submission and slowly seeping sweat, the once-gleaming P Bass in tatters, paint chipped away to the bare wood. And it all looked magnificent.

So too his playing. A buzzing bundle of that sounded as though you could make out each rusty string vibrating wildly, jagged and violent. But it all coalesced, it never lost the plot, and when he worked it high you heard elegies for all the dead rock stars. And it all felt magnificent.

During one of the many encores, Prescott introduced “Academy Fight Song” with a plea for “complete silence!” Taking in the put-on from behind the wall of plexiglass that separated us, I thought about how aside from Steve Shelly, I’ve never really heard or seen live that drum sound of the post-punk original indie bands (from when “indie” did not connote bearded bros in flannels singing 38-part harmony in reverence to a song about the plight of the hummingbird). And maybe it was Weston, maybe it was that barrier, but I got the feeling that I was hearing it just as it was on record, that bubbling tom-kick attack punctuated ever-so-sparingly with snare thwacks that sounds dry and cracked but somehow also warm.

It’s an American sound, I think. The English bands of the time reveled in the cool until it was icy and you could see your breath. This, on the other hand, always sounded orange, a bright rust that blinded you into a haze.

I was really glad that they did sort of silly things like recreate the background shouts from the records exactly and get the tech to come up to Miller’s mic and count out just behind the beat the “1,” the “2,” the “3,” and the “party” of new crowd favorite “1, 2, 3 Partyy!”; because if they hadn’t, if they hadn’t taken me out of it, I could easily have gotten lost in those fey little thoughts.

Finally they stopped responding to the cheers, they stopped coming back out and back out again. And when the house lights came up on LCD Soundsystem’s “North American Scum” (which I thought was an odd choice at the time, but now I sort of “get it”), the crowd started to get the point that they really weren’t gonna come back and do “That’s When I Reach for My Revolver.”

Which was fine. Because to the guy beside me who kept going on about how “when am I ever gonna get the chance to see Mission of Burma again, you know?!?!” I say, hey man. Chill out? They have been back together and putting out music and touring the world just like a real Rock and Roll band since 2002 now.

Maybe there’s a chance that since they aren’t any longer some monolithic legend of the indie totem, that they have revealed themselves as a real flesh and blood group of guys, that their perfectly melodic sing-shouts over tasty churning will make them something of a rallying point? Like, is it too much to hope that when someone says “Boston bands,” that their name could come up?

Anyway, you should watch this excellent “1, 2, 3 Party!” video. Because not only is the song a total rad blast, but do you see the guy in the beginning who gets clocked in the face with a bottle of brew? That is how my ears/head/sense of equilibrium felt the morning after. And I didn’t even drink!

Mission of Burma is on tour this spring. Matt Ealer would probably see them again

.

ACORN is dead! Thank God! Now the right will have to go after some other group that helps the disgusting poor and works to raise the minimum wage and registers BROWN PEOPLE to vote.

“A higher density of alcohol sales outlets in an area means closer proximity and easier availability to an intoxicating substance for residents. Perhaps just as importantly, alcohol outlets provide a greater number of potentially deviant places. Convenience stores licensed to sell alcohol may be especially troublesome in this regard, as they often serve not only as sources of alcohol but also as local gathering places with little formal social control.”
-Indiana University professor William Alex Pridemore discusses his new study which shows that there is a correlation between the number of locations in which one can buy alcohol in a neighborhood and the rate of violence in that neighborhood. As it turns out, the more places you can buy alcohol, the more assaults you’re going to see. Which, you know, wow, who knew?

The current expansion of the New York Times into “local” sections, where the news product delivered is provided by students for no pay, has now come to hit us where it hurts-right by our offices. The Times has announced today that NYU students will staff its new “East Village local” web publication. My objections to this are two-fold and related!

First, this setup entrenches the professionalization of journalism. Want to get known at the New York Times, which has a hiring freeze, except where it doesn’t? Great: mortgage your future with a wildly-expensive j-school degree, which may or may likely not later provide you with a job that will not allow you to pay it back in the next two decades.

Second, this set-up suggests that the way to finance local news operations is only on the backs of free labor.

(Also, my third and minor objection is that most of the reporters are going to be young people who actually don’t know anything about the history of the area they’re reporting on. But that’s fine, if they are smart or have time to learn things or have a good editor.)

I can totally understand the argument that creating these publications and staffing them as such is the best way for the kids to learn. And sure, I’d rather j-schools have students go out and report for a publication than have them sit in class and talk about Twitter and whatever. But this kind of working for free isn’t just the situation of their school days; this is most likely how it’s going to be after they graduate too. (Heh?) Training them to accept these conditions is just a way to prepare them for the non-job market.

Better: why not partner the Arthur Carter School of Journalism gang with the Stern School of Business-and force the kids to, in concert, devise a model of a local publication that pays? Arthur Carter would approve, for sure.