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October 30, 2005  After a week in which both the MVP of a major sports league and the helmsman of the Starship Enterprise came out of the closet, the only question left remaining is if they can team up for a buddy cop movie. Also, Lewis Libby's lies to the grand jury were hilarious. It's a really ominous sign when a defense attorney says "I would not want to defend this case." October 26, 2005  This is a post about Fancy, a recording artist from Germany whose 80s Eurodisco tracks stand as something of a monument of the era. Fancy is the male incarnation of drag queen Amanda Lear, who was "sponsored" by Bowie in the late 70s. Too cheesy and disco-oriented to qualify as pop, and too bizarrely foreign to qualify as anything in America, Fancy's music nonetheless carved out a niche, topping dance charts all over Europe. Fancy is often grouped in with other 80s Italo disco stars like Ken Laszlo, Miko Mission, Savage, Valerie Dore and Modern Talking, although Fancy's music has a bit more variety than those artists. Because I love Fancy and believe his place in music history has gone sorely unrecognized, I'm temporarily putting a few of the great Fancy tracks online to stir interest: "Flames of Love" "Fancy's Bolero" "Chinese Eyes" "Slice Me Nice" In a few days I'll have part two of this post, which will describe Fancy's output since the 80s. October 16, 2005
"Like a poor marksman, you keep missing the target..." The hugely lengthy pieces today in the Times on Judith Miller and the Plame investigation leave no doubt that Miller is one of the most useless people ever. Virtually no acknowledgment is made that the exact same thing that got her into trouble in the first place--being a Bush Administration shill--is making the Times look stupid. I give a huge nomination to this piece as "most inconsequential news article to ever take up more than one page in the Sunday Times."
On a wholly unrelated note, "For Crying Out Loud" is a revelation in surround sound on the Bat Out of Hell SACD. One of the best showcases for surround sound music I've heard, especially given the aural weakness of most standard CD releases of this album. But even a well-mastered version could not open the song up the way the surround sound version does during the explosive second chorus. October 12, 2005  On Ganymede's second album, Euromantique, there's a song called "Love Games" that was inspired by the priceless, trippy Italian Star Wars rip-off The Humanoid, which was released in 1979. The movie is not on DVD and is nearly impossible to find on video, but thankfully, a huge fan has an authoritative website that will give you almost every bit of necessary info about it. Recently, the guy who runs the site caught wind of our song, loved it, and has put up a page about us and our song for Humanoid fans. We're very humbled by the attention and glad that the song has gotten its due from someone who noticed its origins. October 10, 2005
The death penalty sucks everywhere.
October 06, 2005
I've been trying to resist the temptation to write a post about this misleading article on Teach for America that appeared in the Times on Sunday. Considering that the TFA offices are in midtown Manhattan, I have no doubt that this fluff piece is something of an inside job. The thing that distresses me about the article is that a discussion of the now 15-year-long criticism of Teach for America by educators like Stanford's Linda Darling-Hammond is extremely abbreviated and shuffled to the end of the piece--and doesn't even mention Darling-Hammond's main objections--while the characterization of TFA as the "do-good program with buzz" is top-heavy and pervasive.
Teach for America has long answered the howling chorus of disapproval swirling around it by attacking individual disgruntled TFA teachers as bad apples, or, when presented with an actual tale that's hard to refute, calling it a very rare or isolated anecdote. All I can say, really, is that I saw impropriety as part of Teach for America that would make your head spin. Whether all of these were isolated incidents is open to debate, but my guess would be that they were not. See here for a letter I wrote to the Swarthmore College magazine on the topic back in 2002, and here is the official TFA response attacking me. The response uses logic that I can't quite grasp, completely turning my argument--that the school system I taught in was racially discriminatory and completely ineffective, and that as teachers there we were simply meat for the beast, perpetuating a failed, racist school system--on its head by implying that I somehow didn't try hard enough or had the wrong attitude. Only after we arrived at the school did we find out that a TFA teacher had been sexually assaulted there the year before, and the year before that there had been what people described as a "race riot" at the school. Four out of the six TFA teachers placed in my school in 1998 left the program after one year. It doesn't seem to me that all of these "top graduates" who are racing headlong into this program "with buzz" are prepared for the kind of buzz that I witnessed. October 04, 2005  Was the world ready for the T.J. Hooker episode "Vengeance Is Mine," which debuted on February 5, 1983? I think not. October 03, 2005 |
