THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

What's that first number up there in the title? That's the amount the U.S. military spends annually on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan: $20.2 billion. NPR has a nice article articulating the specifics, but I'm sure that most people can look at that number and gag, without ever reading a word of the details. And when it's juxtaposed with the fact that one-quarter of kids in the United States -- hence, the other number -- are currently living in poverty, it's even more nauseating, as this recent piece from 60 Minutes articulates: And after my afternoon viewing of the recent HBO documentary on Ronald Reagan , it's pretty clear to see how we got to this humanist disaster, but not so clear as to how we find a way off this rough and twisting road towards something even worse. Extricating ourselves from imperialistic overreaching and reorienting towards humane treatment of American youth (a "pro-life" argument were there ever one) is an impossi...

First off, when it comes to song lyrics, never trust the internet. We have Wikipedia for a shit-ton of factual information, but why is there no Wikipedia for song lyrics? Must we continue to rely on the misheard masses giving us five different takes on the lyrics of "Jet Airliner" or "Purple Haze" or whatever? But I digress. "'B' Movie" is the last track on Gil's 1981 album Reflections . It features some interesting covers of songs by Marvin Gaye and Bill Withers, but "'B' Movie" is an original that harkens back to his late-'60s spoken word beginnings, but with a sweet-ass late-'70s groove. And the lyric is as sadly true today as it was back then, at the dawn of the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The fog of time has been relatively kind to Reagan, but back in '81, Reagan's advancement of corporate greed and the conflation of fundamentalist religion and conservative politics devastated the lives of millions o...

Even though I haven't reviewed albums for over a year, I'm still on a lot of press release mailing lists, with my inbox flooded with email after email of overwritten descriptions of why the band that the PR firm is promoting is superlative, unique, transgressive, and so forth. The main reason for these press releases, of course, is that the historical channels for music promotion have shuttered -- the radio stations play generally meaningless aural vapor bought and paid for by major labels, the record stores are rarer to find than hair on the top of my head, the television performances produce nary a blip in the public consciousness -- leaving nothing but the small micro gesture, one person trying to reach another. You tell me if this works. Read the following press release below for a new band called Jealousy, sample the music, and decide for yourself if this model works. Because if it doesn't, what does the future hold for professional musicians w/r/t the models of the pa...

Free music day today, this time a collection from Jason Drake, otherwise known by his rock monicker Cassettes Won't Listen. Evocative and entertaining, his mixtape entitled 101 can be obtained here or at his website . Either way, download it and enjoy.

I was just a kid when I had my first contact with Gil Scott-Heron. Or at least, I think I was; with each passing year, memory becomes an unstable fog of moments unanchored by time and place as much as you'd like. But I know what delivered that memory -- the seventh episode of the first season of Saturday Night Live , from December 1975 with the electric Richard Pryor hosting -- and I remember that sliver of impact upon seeing Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson and the band pumping out "Johannesburg" with a mixture of funk and the blues and something more, something novel in the universe of my youthful brain. I just remember wanting to hear it again as soon as possible. And then, years later, I heard the atom bomb of his career: "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." Instantly dated (due to the specific cultural references) and forever timeless (due to the philosophy behind the use of those references), that song is often seen as the ground zero for the develo...