From Reuters
The Bush administration plans to announce as early as Tuesday that it will seek about $80 billion in new funding for military operations this year in Iraq and Afghanistan, administration and congressional sources said on Monday.
The new supplemental budget request would come on top of the $25 billion in emergency spending already approved for the current fiscal year, and will push total 2005 funding for military operations and equipment close to a record $105 billion, the sources said on Monday.
Up to $650 million is expected to be included in the package to fund humanitarian aid, reconstruction efforts and military operations in Asian countries devastated by last month’s tsunami, congressional aides said.

We made a trip in the snow to The Tainted Lady Lounge last night. It’s located in the Southside of Williamsburg, east or Berry Street and between Driggs and Havemeyer—the new haven for the aging hipster crowd. The Tainted Lady Lounge is appropriately mellow and quaint. Every square inch of the joint is adorned with kitschy pin-ups and the bar is among the more relaxing and unassuming in the neighborhood. They have Guinness, Stella, Sierra Nevada, and Brooklyn Lager on tap and a full liquor bar.
What really surprised us was the food, since at first glance Tainted Lady seems like an unlikely place to grab a meal. I had the tofu steak and my friend selected the wild salmon. Both were very tasty and reminded us of an unpretentious home-cooked meal. The garlic mash potatoes were amazing and the service was very friendly. Swing by and check them out. Here’s the menu, slightly fucked up by the snow ball fight we had on the way home.
Bar & Restaurant
388 Grand Street @ Havemeyer
Brooklyn, New York
718.302.5514

Kasabian are one of the big bands of the past year from England. They have been compared to everyone from Stereolab to Stone Roses to Primal Scream. They had four hit singles, and their first album came out in Fall 2004 and sold over 250,000 copies. Their shows have all been sold out all over England in the past year. The rise of Kasabian has been fast. A year ago they were unknown. Now they have played a sold out show in New York at Bowery Ballroom in November, without having any formal releases.
The group, who will embark on a month-long tour supporting The Music, is set to kick-off mid-February in NYC and end in March at SXSW. They’re from Leicester, England and are named after one of the killers involved with the Manson Family. I spoke to lead singer, Tom Meighan, around the beginning of the year, about this phenomenal band. Kasabian is Tom Meighan (vocals), Sergio Pizzorno (lead guitar, keyboards), Chris Edwards (bass) and Christopher Karloff (guitar, keyboards).
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AL: When did you record the album?
Tom: We recorded the album about a year ago at the farm. We had to move away from the city to get our heads together. We had to do that to record this beautiful baby of ours. If we would have done in a proper studio in the city we would have been out of it. We had to get our heads together and concentrate.
AL: How long was the recording process?
Tom: It took about eight months altogether. We had skeletons of songs for a long time. We knew what we wanted to do. We had the songs in our minds. We lived like hippies man for two years. It was amazing.

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First he talks Chloe Sevigny into blowing him. Now, he’s been asked to curate the UK’s celebrated annual All Tomorrow’s Parties music festival. What is the allure of this self-absorbed Jesus-wannabe? Maybe next year they’ll ask egomaniac runner-up Colin Farrell to curate.
From the ATP website:
VINCENT GALLO CURATES ATP APRIL 22-24 2005
“Vincent Gallo the actor, director, musician and general talented bastard is curating All Tomorrow’s Parties on April 22-24, 2005.
He has probably the biggest and one of the best record collections of anyone I know and I know from what he is planning, this ATP is gonna be fucking great.
The line up for this event is being worked out as I write this and tickets have already started to sell so look out over the coming weeks for new confirmations for the event.”
[for the record, Buffalo 66 is a great movie.]

from Pitchfork
Portishead begin work on first LP in eight years
“Along with Massive Attack, Portishead helped shape the hypnotic spaciness of trip-hop in the mid-90s with one of the genre’s defining albums, 1994′s Dummy. As the Bristol, England-based movement slowly lost its grip on the general public’s consciousness, the band also retreated, and despite an underrated 1997 self-titled LP, Portishead has spent most of the ensuing years gathering a healthy coat of dust.

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Check out this very generous free download page. Included are several concerts from 2004 and 2001. Some rarities. Covers of Portishead’s “Glory Box,” Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’,” and The Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry” are particularly notable.
Speaking of free, you can also download the complete BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE CATALOG HERE

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) – Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell will resign from the agency he has led for four years, sources told CNN.
A senior government official says Powell, a member of the FCC since November 1998 and the chairman since early 2001, will announce his resignation later Friday. His term on the commission runs through 2007.
FCC spokesmen were not immediately available for comment, though one person in the press office said a new release is anticipated.
Powell has been a relatively high-profile chairman of what had generally been a quiet regulatory agency before his tenure. He has pushed for increased fines for obscenity and indecent content by the nation’s broadcasters and backed a change in media ownership rules that allowed for greater consolidation by the industry’s largest conglomerates.

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At FREEwilliamsburg, we’re pretty open about our love for DFA and especially LCD Soundsystem. It started with “Losing My Edge” but really kicked into gear with the brilliant “Yeah” single, and we were looking forward to LCD’s debut full-length (due out next month) for most of last year. (It’s great and people will be talking about it very soon). So needless to say, we were pretty excited to do an email interview with DFA producer and LCD frontman James Murphy. Among other things, Murphy talks about tour plans, DFA’s relationship with EMI, his first concert, and “L train nonsense.” This interview is also available in its entirety at One Louder. Enjoy.
Q: We’re always curious to know people’s first concerts. What was yours?
A: It was the Ramones at City Gardens in Trenton, New Jersey. Not sure what year. Maybe ’83? It was fucking louuuuuuud. I saw Iggy the same week and thought my head was going to cave in. For some bizarre reason I think Fishbone also played both shows. In fact, I think Fishbone may have played every show in the 80′s ever. And sold that shirt, too.

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From Artist Michael Paulus’ Website:
“A character study of 22 present and past cartoon characters.
Animation was the format of choice for children’s television in the 1960s, a decade in which children’s programming became almost entirely animated. Growing up in that period, I tended to take for granted the distortions and strange bodies of these entities.
I decided to take a select few of these popular characters and render their skeletal systems as I imagine they might resemble if one truly had eye sockets half the size of its head, or fingerless-hands, or feet comprising 60% of its body mass.
Each character resides on a translucent, hinged panel. When the panel is lifted the character’s skeletal structure is revealed giving each a certain validity and glimpse into its origins. Each panel is hand-drawn with archival ink and covered with an acrylic/acetate transparency.
The photos of Hello Kitty on the site give an accurate idea of what the actual, assembled pieces look like—with the hinged translucent cover both closed and open. The rest of the characters shown on the site are approximations of what the transparency overlay looks like since I don’t have actual photographs of all of them.”
see the full collection here

Keane’s Blog-Friday Night in Williamsburg
Highest Score: 5 Greenbergs


The neighborhood isn’t dead. It’s just a little smaller this year. There certainly was a lot of energy Friday night in Williamsburg with a slew of openings from tiny Plus Ultra all the way down to Roebling Hall, who haven’t totally abandoned us for their Chelsea space. Anyway, I’ll dig some of the dirt off the coffin with two reviews of what I saw through a bourbon glaze. Those evil men at Plus Ultra were offering shots of Jack Daniels and a beer for 3 dollars. Well, they aren’t evil but I definitely left the gallery with a bit of vertigo, and it wasn’t caused by Thomas Lendvai’s space altering installation A Series of ‘nows’.

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