WHEN: Saturday July 30th - 2-6pm
PRICE: Free admission
WHERE: East River Park Amphitheatre
just south of the Williamsburg Bridge on the Manhattan side
SUBWAY: F or JMZ to Essex / Delancey

-- DJ Brian Turner
-- Tall Firs
-- Oxford Collapse
-- Oneida

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Oneida: Their latest album,"The Wedding", covers many bases, from ranging full-on rawk to quirky, low-key pop. Jagjaguwar describes their previous album as follows; this seems as good an encapsulation of their sound as anything I can come up with: "Their trademark iterated and psych-tinged noise attack is still fully intact, both nervous and subdued at the same time - like what happens when you give meditative children trained in the ways of yoga an excessive amount of caffeine."

MP3s:
http://www.scjag.com/mp3/jag/runthrough.mp3
http://www.scjag.com/mp3/jag/dididie.mp3
http://www.scjag.com/mp3/jag/treasureplane.mp3

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Oxford Collapse: The Oxford Collapse's newest album, A Good Ground, is a distillation of twenty-plus years' worth of underground rock and roll, evoking early REM, the Meat Puppets, and others. It's catchy as hell, propelled by melodic basslines and accentuated by jangly guitar work, and makes for a damn good summertime listen.

MP3s:
http://www.kaninerecords.com/mp3/proofreading.mp3
http://media.spin.com//features/band_of_the_day/audio/2005/06/
cracks_in_the_causeway_hi.mp3

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Tall Firs: Swirling guitars and edgy vocals; if the Oxford Collapse evoke SST Records circa '85, the Tall Firs could have fit on said label two years later. Described on the Tonic website as "Songs of time machines and whiskey."

MP3s:
http://www.tallfirs.org/mp3/the%20woods.mp3
http://www.tallfirs.org/mp3/buddy_baby.mp3

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Extra Action Marching Band: They're a marching band who've won the SF Bay Guardian's Readers' Poll for Best Rock Band, which should tell you a lot. Flag twirlers, a percussion section, you name it...twenty-eight people strong. They have the honor of leading us from the 'theater when the show is through.

Posted by freewilliamsburg at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This is our kind of site:

Having realized the dire need for a centralized and coherent source of openbar listings (because paying rent and shelling out 7 bucks on a Brooklyn Lager just wasn't working out), we took it upon ourselves to give you, our esteemed reader, this free service at our own, though insignificant, expense.

Check out MyOpenBar.com

Posted by freewilliamsburg at 02:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

As our friend Jahhoo pointed out to us yesterday, Republicans sure have short memories. Last week House Republicans drafted a resolution that stated proponents of a speedy withdrawal in Iraq (otherwise known as Democrats) are enemy appeasers:

[From the Progressive]
In a shameless swipe at their political opponents, House Republicans passed a resolution on July 21 that denounces those who dare to question the wisdom of an indefinite U.S. military presence in Iraq.

"Calls for an early withdrawal embolden the terrorists," the bill states, adding that the U.S. must stay as long as it takes to achieve a free and secure Iraq.

Yesterday Gen. George Casey made the high profile statement that "fairly substantial reductions" in troops can be made by next year. Think Bush and the House Republicans will be blaming this administration puppet of emboldening the terrorists? Think again. In response to Casey's assertion Rummy had this to say:

"We don't want any delays,.... "Now is the time to get on with it."

Read the rest of the Chicago Tribune article here.

Posted by freewilliamsburg at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We're not sure how to feel about Bush's nomination of John G. Roberts. Sure, he's a complete Right Wing nutjob. But anyone Bush nominates will be a Right Wing nutjob. The question we have is how Right Wing is John G. Roberts? That, and as Catch.com pointed out, why is he so sweaty? He's horrible, but he may be better than Bush's 2nd and 3rd choices.

Regardless of what anyone thinks.... this can't be good news for Roberts:

[From Washington Post]
White House To Withhold Nominee's Tax Returns
The Bush administration will not give Senate investigators access to the federal tax returns of Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr., White House and congressional officials said yesterday, a break with precedent that could exacerbate a growing conflict over document disclosure in the confirmation process.

Although nominees to the high court in recent decades were required to provide their three most recent annual tax forms, the administration will neither collect such documents from Roberts nor share them with the Senate Judiciary Committee, the officials said. Instead, the Internal Revenue Service will produce a one-page summary.

The White House yesterday began releasing the first of 75,000 pages of documents stemming from Roberts's service as a lawyer in President Ronald Reagan's administration two decades ago but refused to release papers from his time as deputy solicitor general under President George H.W. Bush from 1989 to 1993. These papers, Bush aides said, concern internal executive branch deliberations that remain privileged.

Senate Democrats and liberal interest groups immediately assailed the decision to withhold the more recent files, sharpening a dispute over the nominee's record.

"A blanket statement that entire groups of documents are off limits is both premature and ill advised," eight Democratic senators on the Judiciary Committee, led by ranking minority member Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), wrote in a letter to President Bush. The senators attached a list of 35 topics they want to see documents related to, including abortion, civil rights, Bob Jones University, death-squad investigations and school prayer.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan dismissed the requests as part of a political strategy outlined in media reports even before Roberts was nominated. "I hope Senator Leahy is not trying to demand documents that the president has not even seen as part of their lines of attack against the president," McClellan said.

The mushrooming fight over documents represents the first battleground in the confirmation struggle since Bush chose Roberts, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, last week to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. With Roberts's legal credentials not disputed and his views on the most sensitive issues facing the court hard to pin down, Democrats have chosen for now to make the issue of document disclosure their focus -- hoping to find ammunition to derail the nomination or to wage a public battle over the administration's refusal to turn over files.

"This is really part of the phenomenon of interest-group politics and the idea that part of the role of the confirmation process is to vet the ideology of the nominee," said John Anthony Maltese, author of "The Selling of Supreme Court Nominees" and a University of Georgia professor.

"The only reason I can assume some members would be trying to seek these kinds of documents would be to get something embarrassing or awkward, or that would allow them to paint Roberts as extreme on some issue."

Documents proved crucial to earlier debates. "Documents have played a role in scuttling nominations and causing problems," said University of Connecticut professor David Alistair Yalof, author of "Pursuit of Justices," another book on the confirmation process.

William H. Rehnquist had to explain a controversial memo at his first confirmation hearings as associate justice in 1971 and again when he was appointed chief justice in 1986. The memo, written when Rehnquist was a clerk to Justice Robert H. Jackson, argued against school desegregation during the 1950s. Rehnquist explained at his hearings that it represented Jackson's opinion, not his own.

During hearings on the nomination of Robert H. Bork in 1987, the Judiciary Committee was given documents relating to his service as solicitor general under President Richard M. Nixon, particularly his participation in the "Saturday Night Massacre" dismissing Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox.

"The precedents are that you can't go on a fishing expedition, but you can [seek], and many administrations have released specific documents related to specific requests," said Ralph G. Neas, president of the People for the American Way. He was a leading opponent of Bork and is a critic of the Roberts nomination.

Bush advisers yesterday were pressed to explain why documents generated when Roberts was a lawyer in the White House counsel's office are being disclosed but those from his work as a lawyer in the Justice Department's office of the solicitor general are not. McClellan said the difference is that documents from the counsel's office are covered by the Presidential Records Act, which calls for a presumption of disclosure, and those from the solicitor general's office are not.

To protect their deliberations, solicitors general from both Republican and Democratic administrations have opposed the release of internal memos. "If you want to chill robust debate over what government should do, the way to chill it is to disclose it," said C. Boyden Gray, a former White House counsel advising the Bush team on court strategy.

Not all Republicans sounded so sure. Asked why some legal memos could be disclosed and others could not, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said, "That's a weighty question which I would want to research before I answered."

The change in policy on tax returns could fuel the debate. The Bush administration changed the policy in 2001, no longer requiring judicial nominees at any level to provide tax returns. Instead, the IRS performs a "tax check" of the past three years to detect any problems or disclose if investigations were conducted during that period. "The reason we changed it was an effort to reduce the duplicative paperwork and streamline the process," White House spokeswoman Dana M. Perino said yesterday.

The White House did not announce the policy change, and some senior Republicans and Democrats on the Judiciary Committee said yesterday that they were unaware of it. When Democratic staffers learned of the change after queries by The Washington Post, they expressed surprise that the White House would not seek Roberts's tax returns, even if it did not plan to share them with the Senate.

Senate Democrats have suggested to Finance Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), who is authorized to obtain individual tax returns under prescribed circumstances, that he try to obtain Roberts's. Grassley said yesterday that Democratic staffers approached his aides with the idea, but he signaled he was inclined to rebuff them. "From the standpoint of taxes for justices, I don't know that that has ever been done before," Grassley said.

Posted by freewilliamsburg at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Holloway story is tragic, but it's not news

CNN continues to baffle us. After proclaiming time and time again that they will begin covering real news (now that they have a new president), they devoted their entire prime time slot last night to Natalee Holloway. Apparently, she's more newsworthy than, say, the attack in Egypt, because she's white and relatively attractive. And as icing on the cake, CNN's beltway reporter Bob Franken recently had this to say about Rovegate (as pointed out by the Huffington Post):

"Speaking of the Karl Rove matter, of course, that is news that is considered at the moment so yesterday. We've moved on." (read the article here)

Posted by freewilliamsburg at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This was buried deep in the New York Times yesterday, but is simply unbelievable. What sane argument can be made for failing to do our best to ensure fair treatment of detainees?

Vice President Dick Cheney is leading a White House lobbying effort to block legislation offered by Republican senators that would regulate the detention, treatment and trials of detainees held by the American military.

In an unusual, 30-minute private meeting on Capitol Hill on Thursday night, Mr. Cheney warned three senior Republicans on the Armed Services Committee that their legislation would interfere with the president's authority and his ability to protect Americans against terrorist attacks.

The legislation, which is still being drafted, includes provisions to bar the military from hiding prisoners from the Red Cross; prohibit cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees; and use only interrogation techniques authorized in a new Army field manual.

The three Republicans are John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John W. Warner of Virginia, the committee chairman. They have complained that the Pentagon has failed to hold senior officials and military officers responsible for the abuses that took place at the Abu Ghraib prison outside of Baghdad, and at other detention centers in Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The senators could attach their legislation to the $442 billion Pentagon authorization bill for the 2006 fiscal year, which is to be debated on the Senate floor next week. Senate Democrats, led by Carl Levin of Michigan and Jack Reed of Rhode Island, have said they will offer a competing amendment to establish an independent commission, modeled after the 9/11 panel, to investigate detainee abuses and operations.

On Thursday, just before Mr. Cheney's meeting, the White House warned in a blunt statement that Senate approval of a Republican or Democratic amendment was likely to prompt Mr. Bush's top advisers to recommend he veto the measure.

Mr. Cheney's meeting with the senators was first reported on Saturday by The Washington Post.

A spokesman for Mr. Warner, John Ullyot, declined Saturday to comment on the senators' meeting with Mr. Cheney and said, "the matter continues to be studied," adding that the Senate could vote on all or some of the provisions next week.

Mr. Cheney's involvement in the issue illustrates the White House's level of concern that the Republican bill could pass. Mr. Cheney is president of the Senate, and next to Mr. Bush, he is the administration's most potent lobbyist on Capitol Hill.

Maria Tamburri, a spokeswoman for the White House, said Mr. Cheney's conversations with members of Congress were private, and she declined to provide any details.

A senior Defense Department spokesman, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to talk publicly about the matter, said Mr. Cheney took the administration's lead role because the issue cut across the jurisdictions of several federal agencies, and because he had long been the administration's chief defender of presidential prerogative.

"There's a natural tension here between the executive and Congressional branches," the official said.

According to Senate officials, Mr. McCain is considering introducing four amendments. One would set standards for interrogating military detainees and would limit them to techniques outlined in a new Army field manual. It would not cover the Central Intelligence Agency.

A second provision would require that all detainees held by the military be registered with the International Committee of the Red Cross. This measures seeks to prevent the holding of unregistered prisoners, or ghost detainees, in Iraq and Afghanistan and at other military sites.

Mr. McCain is also weighing a provision to prohibit the practice of seizing people and sending them abroad for interrogation. This practice has become the subject of mounting international criticism, as some of the countries involved are known to use torture. It has caused a deepening rift between the United States and some of its strongest allies.

Finally, Mr. McCain's amendment would bar cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment of detainees in American custody. This would effectively prohibit not only physical abuse but also practices like placing women's undergarments on the heads of Muslim male prisoners in an effort to humiliate them.

Mr. Graham, who has expressed some support for the idea of a wide-ranging independent commission to look into detainee abuses, is seeking to define the term "enemy combatant" for detention purposes, and to regulate the military tribunals to be held soon at the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Also of note in yesterday's Times.... Has the Iraq conflict already become a civil war with our soldiers caught in the middle?

The first signs that America's top officials in Iraq were revising their thinking about what they might accomplish in Iraq came a year ago. As Iraq resumed its sovereignty after the period of American occupation, the new American team that arrived then, headed by Ambassador John D. Negroponte, had a withering term for the optimistic approach of their predecessors, led by L. Paul Bremer III.

The new team called the departing Americans "the illusionists," for their conviction that America could create a Jeffersonian democracy on the ruins of Saddam Hussein's medieval brutalism. One American military commander began his first encounter with American reporters by asking, "Well, gentlemen, tell me: Do you think that events here afford us the luxury of hope?"

It seemed clear then that the administration, for all its public optimism, had begun substituting more modest goals for the idealists' conception of Iraq. How much more modest has become clearer in the 12 months since.

From the moment American troops crossed the border 28 months ago, the specter hanging over the American enterprise here has been that Iraq, freed from Mr. Hussein's tyranny, might prove to be so fractured - by politics and religion, by culture and geography, and by the suspicion and enmity sown by Mr. Hussein's years of repression - that it would spiral inexorably into civil war.

If it did, opponents of the American-led invasion had warned, American troops could get caught in the crossfire between Sunnis and Shiites, Kurds and Turkmen, secularists and believers - reduced, in the grimmest circumstances, to the common target of a host of contending militias.

Now, events are pointing more than ever to the possibility that the nightmare could come true. Recent weeks have seen the insurgency reach new heights of sustained brutality. The violence is ever more centered on sectarian killings, with Sunni insurgents targeting hundreds of Shiite and Kurdish civilians in suicide bombings. There are reports of Shiite death squads, some with links to the interior ministry, retaliating by abducting and killing Sunni clerics and community leaders.

The past 10 days have seen such a quickening of these killings, particularly by the insurgents, that many Iraqis are saying that the civil war has already begun.

That at least some senior officials in Washington understand the gravity of the situation seems clear from remarks made at the Foreign Press Center in Washington two weeks ago by Zalmay Khalilzad, who arrives in Baghdad this week to begin as Mr. Negroponte's successor. In his remarks, Mr. Khalilzad abandoned a convention that had bound senior American officials when speaking of Iraq - to talk of civil war only if reporters raised it first, and then only to dismiss it as a beyond-the-fringe possibility. Using the term twice in one paragraph, he spoke of civil war as something America must do everything to avoid.

"Iraq is poised at the crossroads between two starkly different visions," he said. "The foreign terrorists and hardline Baathist insurgents want Iraq to fall into a civil war."

The new ambassador struck a positive chord, to be sure, saying "Iraqis of all communities and sects, like people everywhere, want to establish peace and create prosperity." Still, his coda remained one of caution: "I do not underestimate the difficulty of the present situation."

One measure of the doubts afflicting American officials here has been a hedging in the upbeat military assessments that generals usually offer, coupled with a resort to statistics carefully groomed to show progress in curbing the insurgents that seems divorced from realities on the ground. One example of the new "metrics" has been a rush of figures on the buildup of Iraq's army and police force - a program known to many reporters who have been embedded on joint operations as one beset by inadequate training, poor leadership, inadequate weaponry and poor morale.

Officers involved in running the program offer impressive-sounding figures - including the fact that, by mid-June, the Iraqi forces had been given 306 million rounds of ammunition, roughly 12 bullets for each of Iraq's 25 million people. But when one senior American officer involved was asked whether the Americans might end up arming the Iraqis for a civil war, he paused for a moment, then nodded. "Maybe," he said.

The war's wider pattern has always held the seeds of an all-out sectarian conflict, of the kind that largely destroyed Lebanon. The insurgency has been rooted in the Sunni Arab minority dispossessed by the toppling of Mr. Hussein, and most of its victims have been Shiites, the majority community who have been the main political beneficiaries of Mr. Hussein's demise. Shiites have died in countless hundreds at their mosques and their marketplaces, victims of insurgent ambushes and bombs, their deaths celebrated on Islamic Web sites by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, who has called Shiites "monkeys" and their religion an affront to God.

Last weekend, it was the turn of the small town of Mussayib, where at least 71 people died when a suicide bomber blew himself up under a fuel tanker outside the main mosque. Hitherto, Iraq's leading Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, had urged Shiites not to retaliate, but to focus instead on the American-sponsored electoral process, which brought Shiite parties victory in January and is likely to do so again in voting for a full, five-year government in December.

But this time, the ayatollah, his patience spent, demanded that the transitional government, which is led by Shiites, "defend the country against mass annihilation."

If that was a call for tougher military action against the insurgents, it played into a situation made all the more volatile in recent months by signs that hard-line Shiites have begun to strike back. There have been persistent reports, mostly in Baghdad, of Shiite death squads in police uniforms abducting, torturing and killing Sunni Arab clerics, community leaders and others. In Baghdad, a police commando unit composed mainly of Shiites raided a hospital two weekends ago and abducted 13 Sunni men accused of being insurgents. Sixteen hours later, the bodies of 10 were delivered to a morgue, the victims of suffocation in a locked metal-topped police van in a temperature nearing 120 degrees.

Even the new Iraqi forces, hailed by the Bush administration as the key to an eventual American troop withdrawal, seem as likely to provoke a civil war as to prevent one. The 170,000 men already trained are dominated by Shiites and Kurds, in a proportion even higher than the 80 percent those groups represent in the population. Though there are thousands of Sunni Arabs in the forces, including some generals, Iraqi units that are sent to the worst hot spots are often dominated by Shiites and Kurds, some recruited from sectarian militias deeply hostile to Sunni Arabs.

The contempt this provokes was voiced by Dhari al-Bedri, a Baghdad University professor with a home in Samarra, a Sunni town. "The Iraqi army in Samarra is Badr, Dawa and Pesh Merga," he said, citing the militias of the two largest Shiite political parties, and of the Kurds. "The people feel that the army does not come to serve them, but to punish them. The people hate them."

The American hope is that the political process under way will succeed, eventually, in forging a broad enough consensus that hard-liners on all sides will be isolated. The odds on that, though slim, seemed to rise a bit with an agreement this month that added 15 Sunni Arabs to the 55-member parliamentary committee charged with drawing up the constitution. But when two of the Sunni men involved in that process were gunned down in Baghdad last week, some other Sunni members pointed to Shiites as the killers, and said the killings showed that Shiite hard-liners wanted no compromise.

Despite these gloomy trends, American commanders have continued to hint at the possibility of at least an initial reduction of the 140,000 American troops stationed here by next summer, contingent on progress in creating effective Iraqi units. Some senior officers have said privately that there is a chance that the pullback will be ordered regardless of what is happening in the war, and that the rationale will be that Iraq - its politicians and its warriors - will ultimately have to find ways of overcoming their divides on their own.

America, these officers seem to be saying, can do only so much, and if Iraqis are hellbent on settling matters violently - at the worst, by civil war - that, in the end, would be their sovereign choice.

Posted by freewilliamsburg at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lightning Bolt (Photo by Jason Carlisle)

Friday July 22

Alec Ounsworth of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
Live at Pete's Candy Store
FREE
Click Here for more info

------------------------------------------

Saturday July 23

Todd P Presents:
-- Lightning Bolt with Afrirampo
-- USAISAMONSTER
-- Free Blood
-- Eloe Omoe
-- Japanther

Parking lot at 28-10 Queens Plaza, LIC
10 bucks

From Flavorpill:
Sure, the zany ramblings, bizarre chicken clucks, and unhinged swagger of "Paris Hilton" may have endeared them to the global dance floor crowd, but it's Mutsumi Kanamori and Maurice Fulton's unique blend of hardcore mutant funk that's solidified their street cred from Sheffield to Tokyo. On the married duo's sophomore album, Out of Breach (Manchester's Revenge), production-ace Fulton prods each track along with low-slung thumps, plumbing inky sonic depths for bass lines as vocalist Kanamori freezes the surface with her deadpan delivery and icy shrieks. Beats in Space host Tim Sweeney and Metro Area's Darshan Jesrani get the afternoon started behind the decks and under the sun in P.S.1's famed courtyard.

Click Here for more info

Posted by freewilliamsburg at 09:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

click to buy shirt

Time to call the ACLU and start crotching your one-hitter:

From the AP
Police will begin conducting random searches of packages and backpacks carried by people entering city subways, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced Thursday after a new series of bomb attacks in London.

Authorities said the system is still being developed, but the plan is for passengers carrying bags to be selected at random before they have passed through turnstiles.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly promised that officers would not engage in racial profiling, and that passengers will be free to "turn around and leave" rather than consent to a search.

Officials would not immediately say how frequently the checks would occur. The checks are scheduled to begin at some stations by Thursday evening and will be occurring throughout the system by rush hour on Friday.

"We just live in a world where, sadly, these kinds of security measures are necessary," Bloomberg said. "Are they intrusive? Yes, a little bit. But we are trying to find that right balance."

Authorities said there is also a possibility that checks will be conducted on some bus and train passengers.

Posted by freewilliamsburg at 02:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (20)

M. Ward
Thur 7.21 (7pm) at Castle Clinton (Battery Park)

[From Flavorpill]

M. Ward interlaces folk, rock, and the blues with a raspy whisper evoking Holiday, Young, and Waits. His latest, Transistor Radio, summons a time when Americans sought inspiration and solace in the airwaves.

Note: Tickets can be picked up at Castle Clinton on a first-come, first-served basis, beginning at 5pm on the day of the show.

Posted by freewilliamsburg at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

James Doohan dies at 85.

Read the obit here.

Posted by freewilliamsburg at 07:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bush strolls through the flowered streets of Heaven with Roberts

"When a president chooses a justice, he's placing in human hands the authority and majesty of the law."

This was the second sentence out of Bush's mouth last night as he announced his decision to appoint Justice John Roberts. Who even uses a word like "majesty?" Christians, of course. "Majesty" is a key buzzword tossed around by Christians and it was obviously Bush's acknowledgement to Evangelicals that Roberts was going to interpret the law the Jesusy way. In other words, gays deserve zero constitutional rights and Roe V Wade is toilet paper.

Here's what Bush's other architect, James Dobson, had to say:

"President Bush is to be commended for keeping his promise to the American people by selecting such an impartial, accomplished jurist to fill this crucial seat on the high court. Judge Roberts is an unquestionably qualified attorney and judge with impressive experience in government and the private sector. He has demonstrated at every stop on his career path the legal acumen, judicial temperament and personal integrity necessary to be a Supreme Court justice... We trust that, in light of these rock-solid credentials, the U.S. Senate will work together over the next several weeks to ensure Judge Roberts gets the up-or-down confirmation vote he is entitled to under the Constitution."

Can't you just smell the precum on Dobson's gay-hating cock? He couldn't be more excited about the selection. Pundits keep saying Roberts is a "wise" choice. Truth is, Bush wanted a staunch conservative with a limited paper trail. As always, the evangelicals are Bush's true architects. (Another article on Bush's "wonder-working" use of religious code terms can be found here.)

Posted by freewilliamsburg at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Rob Walker knows New Orleans. His travelogue and memoir, Letters From New Orleanss, breathes life into this history-rich city, transporting readers to the dive bars, gospel churches, and back alleys you won't find in Fodor's or The Lonely Planet. Walker, who pens the New York Times Magazine column "Consumed", lived in New Orleans from 2000 to 2003. His book is the culmination of his impressions of the city collected from journal entries and letters to friends. Walker's first person vignettes are marvelously crafted and richly conceived. But its Walker's humor that makes Letters From New Orleans truly unique. Musing on topics ranging from celebratory gunfire, to the St. James Infirmary, to used car dealers, Walker will leave you in stitches. We strongly recommend this enlightening, eccentric, and most importantly highly entertaining book. It has temporarily changed our opinion about memoirs. Pick up a copy here.

Posted by freewilliamsburg at 01:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Cakehead has a great entry on free food samples in New York. She shares our fear of the fish griller who hands out samples at the Whole Foods in Union Square:

You can always count on the fish griller to be lining up plastic ramekins filled with swordfish or wild salmon. But we warned. If you take seconds, he will hate you. Really, with him you can do no right. If you ask what he's cooking he'll grumble the answer. If you cower in fear, afraid to ask what you're eating he will say accusingly, "Don't you want to know what you're eating?"

Other free sample suggestions include the free wine at Astor Wines and Spirits everyday from 5-8. Read the whole article here.

Posted by freewilliamsburg at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We're happy to see MIA, Bloc Party, and Antony and the Johnsons made the list. Who the hell is K T Tunstall?

Bloc Party - Silent Alarm (5/1)
Hard-Fi - Stars Of CCTV (9/1)
Kaiser Chiefs - Employment (4/1)
MIA - Arular (10/1)
The Magic Numbers - The Magic Numbers (7/1)
Coldplay - X&Y (8/1)
The Go! Team - Thunder, Lightning Strike (12/1)
Antony And The Johnsons - I Am A Bird Now (12/1)
KT Tunstall - Eye To The Telescope (6/1)
Maximo Park - A Certain Trigger (10/1)
Seth Lakeman - Kitty Jay (14/1)
Polar Bear - Held On The Tips Of Fingers (12/1)

[thanks OneLouder]

Posted by freewilliamsburg at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Murdoch buys MySpace for 580 mil

From NY Times
News Corporation Buys an Internet Company By RICHARD SIKLOS

Asked if spending $580 million to buy an Internet company whose chief asset was created only two years ago gave him pause, Rupert Murdoch said: "You bet."

But after announcing the transaction yesterday, Mr. Murdoch, the chief executive of the News Corporation, said he was won over after meeting the entrepreneurs who run the company, Intermix Media, and studying the surging popularity with young consumers of its prime asset, MySpace.com.

MySpace.com is a social networking site that has grown to more than 16 million monthly users, and features the equivalent of home pages created by 200,000 music groups, big and small. Its users spend hours exploring areas devoted to personal classifieds, music, blogs, video games and chat rooms.

It swept past all the other people in this space, in particular by embracing music," Mr. Murdoch said.

Several prominent music groups - including the Black Eyed Peas, R.E.M. and Nine Inch Nails - have introduced their latest releases through MySpace. Major companies, including Procter & Gamble and Sony Pictures, have advertised on the site, and NBC previewed the comedy "The Office" there earlier this year, several days before its debut.

According to Nielsen/NetRatings, MySpace drew 12 million unique visitors in the month of June and ranked sixth among all Web sites in terms of page views, behind Yahoo, eBay, MSN, Google and AOL.

"They haven't spent a penny marketing - it's all viral," said John Tinker, an analyst with ThinkEquity Partners in New York who follows Intermix. "And they haven't spent a penny on content. It's a good model."

Intermix's other businesses include Web sites with names like grab.com and flowgo.com, which offer games, cartoons and other entertainment.

The deal for Intermix comes immediately after the formation of Fox Interactive Media, a unit within News Corporation that will include Intermix as well as sites like foxsports.com, foxnews.com, and fox.com.

The addition of Intermix to News Corporation's Web operations will nearly double the company's Web traffic in the United States to 45 million unique monthly users. Mr. Murdoch said Intermix could grow at least another 50 percent in the American market.

In buying MySpace, the company is following Mr. Murdoch's recent edict that his managers get serious about the Internet.

"This particular group of sites would appeal to young people who are watching less television and reading fewer newspapers," Mr. Murdoch said. He added that the Fox Interactive unit was working on several other acquisitions, though nothing as large as this one.

Intermix gained attention earlier this year when the New York attorney general's office filed a lawsuit accusing it of illegally planting spyware programs on the computers of people who visited its Web sites.

The company has since announced a preliminary settlement of $7.5 million.

News Corporation will pay $12 a share for Intermix, while Intermix said it would buy out minority partners who own 47 percent of MySpace.

Shares of Intermix closed at $10.72 Friday and rose 9.5 percent, or $1.02, yesterday.

MySpace was started in September 2003 by Chris DeWolfe, the chief executive, and Tom Anderson, its president.

Like other traditional news and entertainment companies, News Corporation has had a mixed experience in trying to extend its businesses online.

Part of MySpace's success has come at the expense of similarly conceived Web sites like Friendster, where the number of users has increased rapidly but then declined.

Mr. Tinker argued that MySpace has achieved a level of popularity and critical mass that will be difficult for rivals - including social networking services from online giants like Yahoo, Google and Microsoft - to beat.

Intermix reported earnings of $4.5 million on revenue of $78.9 million in the quarter ended March 31, in contrast to a loss of $12.4 million on revenue of $57.3 million in the period a year earlier.

The agreement is scheduled to close in the fourth quarter. Both Mr. DeWolfe and Intermix's chief executive, Richard Rosenblatt, are expected to stay in their positions.

Posted by freewilliamsburg at 09:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

The fact that Bush Inc and Congress are going to sit back and allow China [who recently threatened us with nuclear attack] to purchase Unocal boggles the mind. This is an administration that talks out one side of its mouth about national security while catering to business interests with the other. Allowing the purchase of Unocal is as dangerous as selling arms to China. China, on the other hand, has the wisdom to prohibit foreign ownership of Chinese companies. Nevertheless, they are publicly endorsing the value of free trade as a bargaining tool. This article from Daily News by Congresswoman Kilpatrick (D-Mich.)encapsulates the lunacy of the Unocal deal.

China's third-largest oil producer has made an $18.5 billion bid for Unocal, America's ninth-largest oil company. The move by China's state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corp., or CNOOC, marks the Communist nation's most ambitious attempt yet to acquire a Western company, setting the stage for potential national security issues.

Do we really want to assist China in meeting its energy needs, allowing it to compete against our interests? I say no. That's why I attached an amendment to a spending bill prohibiting the Treasury Department from approving CNOOC's takeover bid. The House approved the measure 333-92, sending a message to the White House and Treasury Secretary John Snow to take a serious look at China's interest in purchasing critical U.S. assets important to America's energy security, as well as its national and economic security.

When the Defense Department released a 2001 review following the 9/11 attacks, it highlighted the rise of a "military competitor" in Asia with a vast "resource base."

The Pentagon was referring to China.

China is ascending as an economic power as well as a geopolitical military force, and its economic transition within the past 20 years is to be admired. The country's aggregate Gross National Product has grown by approximately 10% each year since the 1970s, compared with U.S. annual growth of 3.5%. But the prospect of China's economy surging ahead of the U.S. by 2050 is startling. The U.S. economy is approximately twice that of China, $11 trillion versus $6 trillion-plus. U.S. per capita income is nearly eight times higher than China's.

To fuel China's economic growth, it must demand more of the world's energy resources. It is this demand that has forced oil prices to soar. To supply its energy needs, China is acquiring oil fields in Kazakhstan and securing strategic energy supplies from Iran and Sudan. CNOOC has invested $699 million for the purchase of a liquefied natural gas field in Australia, $592 million for oil assets in Indonesia and is now seeking to acquire Unocal. China's rise must not be fueled at the cost of America's security.

Posted by freewilliamsburg at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Friday, July 15th, 2005
ROOFTOP FILMS in Williamsburg:
8:30 - Live music by Honeychild (details below)
9:00 - Communities on the Edge

On the lawn at Automotive High School
50 Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
In the event of rain the show is indoors at the same location.
Click here for the schedule

Saturday, July 15th, 2005
Siren Festival is hot, crowded, and the sound always sucks. Plus the Voice is run by a bunch of douchebags. This year's line-up sucks too. We recommend this FREE event at Summerstage instead.

Celebrate New Orleans
3pm at Central Park SummerStage (Rumsey Field at 72nd St)

From Flavorpill:
The glory of New Orleans' music is on display today, beginning with a brass band that cranks to 11 — tubist Phil Frazier and headliner Kermit Ruffins co-founded the wily and playful ReBirth Brass Band, so when ReBirth turn the party out with their contemporary sousa-funk, don't be surprised if Ruffins joins in. A favorite son of the Crescent City, he's a trumpet-playing superman, a professional barbeque entertainer whose group swings like there's no tomorrow. The underappreciated Donald Harrison is also on hand — as comfortable in the fantastical garb of a Mardi Gras Indian as he is playing alto with Art Blakey — as are the crowd-riling, high-stepping Lady Buckjumpers. Perfect for everyone who isn't hearing the Siren song

Posted by freewilliamsburg at 03:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Interview by Monte Holman

You've heard their name sprinkled across blogs and music nerd sites like rainbow sprinkles on soft-serve for months now. But until recently Clap Your Hands Say Yeah was still mailing CDs to record stores from Alec Ounsworth's home in Philadelphia. Now, they're shopping for a label after selling out of their original pressing of their self-titled debut.

We're taught to be skeptical of bands that receive as much hype as quickly as these guys have—they've only been playing altogether for about a year. But after hearing the album, and especially after having the chance to converse with Ounsworth about real music icons like Axl and Tool, we're completely drained of skepticism.

They've been branded by Pitchfork's steaming hot prongs as this year's Arcade Fire. And for good reason. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah backs that shit up.

We talked to them about their music, Philly, and and found out about Alec's first concert and rumors about a Guns and Roses tribute band.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah are Alec Ounsworth (vocals, guitars), Tyler Sargent (bass), Robbie Geurtin (guitar, keyboard), Lee Sargent (guitar, keyboard), and Sean Greenhalgh (drums)

MP3s
In This Home On Ice
Upon This Tidal Wave of Young Blood
Over and Over Again (Lost & Found)
Some rarites at Philebrity

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FREEwilliamsburg: Area code 215, where am I calling?

Philadelphia, that's where I live.

FREEwilliamsburg: Does everyone else live up here in New York?

Yeah, everybody else lives up in Brooklyn.

FREEwilliamsburg: How does that work for practice?

It's, uh, you know. (laughs) It's good for them, bad for me.

FREEwilliamsburg: I really, really like the first song on the record. Why'd you choose that one to kick things off?

I don't know-I like the idea of trying to challenge people a little bit on an album, and it seemed like that was the only place we could put that one. I wrote it as an introduction to the whole idea of the band, so it seemed like the ideal place to put it.

FREEwilliamsburg: Have you been playing the songs from the album live long? How old are they?

I wrote a few five or six years ago. Some are pretty old, and I've rearranged them a bunch of times over the years and rearranged them while the band was working on them. Yeah, most of them are pretty old.

Alec Ounsworth

FREEwilliamsburg: Are the newer songs written by the band, or do you bring an idea to the table?

Usually I write the songs here in Philadelphia and bring them up. I built a studio, and I try to get everything together, which I suppose is one of the reasons we've been able to bring everything together. It's a combination of songs that are prepared to a certain extent combined with the guys in the band, who are very technically proficient. So that propels it all forward.

FREEwilliamsburg: Did you record the album at your studio in Philadelphia?

We recorded part of it in Providence, Rhode Island, and we recorded a few tracks in Brooklyn.

FREEwilliamsburg: Who'd you record with?

We recorded at Fireproof Studios with a guy named Adam Lasus in Brooklyn, and we recorded at a place in Providence at a place called Machines With Magnets with a guy named Keith Souza.

FREEwilliamsburg: Did you know those guys previously?

No, I didn't know either of them. Somebody from the band-these guys are all much more band - experienced than I am. (bark, bark) The other guys in the band suggested them. (growl, bark)

FREEwilliamsburg: What kind of dogs are those?

(laughs) I have two English Springer Spaniels. I'm just kind of chilling outside with them right now. We just took a little walk, and we went for a swim. So they're drying off.

FREEwilliamsburg: Sounds nice. Do you live in the city or outside the city?

It's in the city, technically, but it feels a little like outside the city. Philadelphia's an interesting place. We have an enormous urban forest, and I take walks with these guys and it's like going up to Vermont, really.

FREEwilliamsburg: Did you grow up around there?

Yeah, I actually grew up not too far from where I am right now. (laughs)

FREEwilliamsburg: Did the band start playing while you were all in Philadelphia then?

Yeah, I've been in Philadelphia the whole time the band's been in progress.

FREEwilliamsburg: How long has the band been together?

A little over a year.

FREEwilliamsburg: Seems like you did a lot of live shows before the record. How has that affected recording?

When we started recording, we had only played a handful of shows. In fact, it's something nobody's really brought up too much-but the recording was initially intended just to be six or seven tracks. We were just starting and were wanting to get more shows. (laughs) We were recording an album-not an album; I guess it's called an EP-for the purpose of getting shows at, say, the Mercury Lounge or something like that. It just happened that things started to move forward a bit faster than we thought, and by the time we got down to Brooklyn to add more tracks, we had started to play bigger shows, and we decided to make this a full-fledged album.

In any case, I guess that's not really answering anything. (laughs) Anyway, we had played a lot of live shows, and the studio recording was interesting because the guys in the band weren't too familiar with the songs yet. The studio recordings kind of pushed the live shows forward. I remember I was in the control room singing the lines and pointing out the parts when the guitarist was supposed to go and shit like that (laughs). So I think it was helpful to have the studio recording so everybody could go back and say "ok, this is the structure of the song." I don't know if that answers the question. (laughs)

FREEwilliamsburg: Did you feel any pressure to put out the album quickly because of the reception you guys have been receiving (which is pretty phenomenal)?

Yeah, we wanted to get it out as soon as we could. The live shows have been, surprisingly, great. Everybody's been very enthusiastic. Mostly the pressure came from everybody asking "when the hell are you going to put out an album??" (laughs)

FREEwilliamsburg: Internet sites and blogs and things have adopted and endorsed you guys pretty hard-core lately. How do you react to Pitchfork's making you their "it" band?

I appreciate it-that's the first thing I'll say-I appreciate it. I was very unaware of Pitchfork. I'm not sure I had been to the site before. Apparently their opinion holds weight in some circles. I appreciate it, but I've got to say I don't feel one way or the other about it. It's helpful. A lot of people wouldn't have thought of us otherwise. Sometimes you need a point of reference.

FREEwilliamsburg: Do you think it's pushed you toward considering labels, that sort of thing, since everything thus far has been pretty DIY?

Sure. I think for right now, we're pretty firm about being DIY. We've been talking to folks here and there about signing on, but I like the idea of it being an independent operation as long as we can do it. But the fact of the matter is, there are five of us. We all have our own obligations, and it's very difficult between five of us to handle everything. So that would be the purpose of a label.

FREEwilliamsburg: Do you mean that the label would take care of scheduling details?

Primarily distribution. We've literally sat around with a bunch of Uline packages, single boxes, to send CDs all over the world from my house.

FREEwilliamsburg: I got a mass email today from Sound Fix Records here in Williamsburg talking about how they finally got more Clap Your Hands Say Yeah records.

Well after the Pitchfork thing, I thought it would be a relatively gradual process and that me and another guy in the band, Robbie, would be able to handle it ourselves because everybody was preoccupied. But then the Pitchfork thing came out, and I realized that it was kind of humanly impossible. So essentially we transferred it over to a place called Insound, which I was pretty unfamiliar with, and they've been handling the bulk of it for direct internet sales. If we tried to do it ourselves, I don't know if any other albums would ever get made. (laughs) We'd be packaging this one forever.

FREEwilliamsburg: Are you familiar with other local bands in Philadelphia?

Not too much. I had a certain interaction with a certain group of people that were relatively off the map. I used to play performances at this cabaret, and it was interesting. There was this transvestite performer with a shaved head, and that was my real connection to Philadelphia. But as far as rock n roll bands are concerned, I don't know too much about it.

FREEwilliamsburg: What about Brooklyn? Any more connection?

About the same that I do to Philadelphia. I have to admit, I feel more connected to Philadelphia in a proudly superficial sort of way. (laughs) Know what I mean? There are bands that I hear are going to play with us that I hear are from Philadelphia, and I gotta say, I get all excited, and I don't even know who they are. (laughs) As far as NYC is concerned, I'm not too familiar with what anyone's doing, musically.

FREEwilliamsburg: Is it true that someone in CYHSY is in a Guns N Roses tribute band?

(laughs) Yeah, it's true.

FREEwilliamsburg: Who is it?

Sean, he plays the drums with us. And he's Axl Rose for Mr. Brownstone. He's taking on the world as Axl. (laughs) I've never seen them, but I hear a lot about them.

FREEwilliamsburg: What was the first concert you ever went to?

I think the first concert I went to-I could be wrong about this, but I think it's right-I was about 13 or 14, and I went to one of the Lollapaloozas. It might've been the second year in. I remember-who was it-Alice and Chains and Tool. Man, I haven't listened to Alice in Chains in years and years. When I was 13 it was great. Tool's performance was pretty cool.

FREEwilliamsburg: Tool's a great band.

Yeah, and Primus was good too-I liked them.

FREEwilliamsburg: Both of those bands had great videos. I was always disturbed by them. Tool videos always had a caterpillar going through a pipe underground or something.

I'm pretty sure that was first. It was either that or the Dave Brubek Quartet.

FREEwilliamsburg: Where'd you see them?

At a place called the Keswick theater, which is in Glenside, Pennsylvania, nearby. There are probably others before, but those are the ones that are bigger to me.

FREEwilliamsburg: You have a couple sold-out shows coming up here.

Yeah, at Southpaw and the Mercury Lounge.

FREEwilliamsburg: Has that been ordinary?

I don't know - I know we've sold out a few shows before, but I don't think it's been regular.

FREEwilliamsburg: We've mentioned the internet following. What's the deal with that video that guy made. Is that something the band endorses?

I'm not sure what to think about that. We've had plenty of co