New releases

Willie Nelson is “on the road again,”
spending
next month touring the East Coast with Asleep at the Wheel and
their new
album of Western Swing. Austin’s own Bismeaux Records releases Willie
and
the Wheel this coming Tuesday, an album that the late producer
Jerry Wexler
had been imagining for 30 years, now fully realized with his
hand-picked song
list. One selection, the 1927 instrumental favorite “South,” features
guests
Vince Gill and Paul Shaffer.

No bench for bums' bums

Dear Midlands area advertising contacts,
Buying these jeans from you doesn’t really fit my business plan right
now, chief. Yeah, I know we went to school together and you’re
struggling in this economy and blah, blah, but I’m locked into a
contract with Dillard’s for another eight months. Plus, we’re trying to
get a “Best of” sticker for the door. And, bar/restaurant manager dude,
I just don’t think having dinner there is a wise investment for me at
this time. Hey, talk to regional, man! I appreciate what you’re trying
to do, but honestly, your decor offended my mother-in-law and I’ve
already spent all my beer money for this entire fiscal year. Sure, it’s
laughable to budget that way, but you think I have a business degree?
C’mon! How ‘bout you try me again in the fall during back to school?
Yeah, I know I’ve said that for four years. You gettin’ wise? (The
nerve a these fuckin’ guys! Hey, Paulie, you heard what this guy just
said?)

Columbia City Paper

What is white phosphorous and is Israel using it in Gaza?

YOUR WAR QUESTIONS ANSWERED

On December 27, Israel attacked the Gaza Strip – a small coastal
enclave abutting Israel. Gaza is the very crowded home of 1.5 million
Palestinians.
As of January 15, 1,080 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. 765 of
them were civilians. An additional 5,100 Palestinians have been wounded.
13 Israelis have been killed. Three of them were civilians. An additional 80 Israelis have been wounded.
The disparity in the number of casualties is largely the result of each side’s relative military strength.

Live Music 1-31 to 2-12-09

 

SATURDAY
JANUARY 31
 
Art Bar
The Queen Is Dead
Leisure

Headliners
Snapshots And Streetlights
The Decade
Aviary Fire
Veara
And Then There Was You   
Mac’s on Main
Natural Desire Band

New Brookland Tavern
O’Death
Pattern Is Movement
The Magnetic Flowers

Sudworks Taphouse
Harmony Groove

Utopia
Patti Ficken
Jody Creel
 
Wild Wing Café - Vista
Dock Martin

Previews

Thursday Feb. 5, New Brookland Tavern 

Flo-town natives
Sequoyah Prep School promise to charm your pants off with mellow and
well-crafted –but still kinda rocking—tunes from their recently
released Ghost Town LP. (To say nothing of their older stuff.) This
show is on the home state leg of a semi national tour, so be sure to
catch these guys before the rest of the country discovers them and they
really blow up and stay on the road all year.


Dead Confederate Friday Feb 6 

Headliners
   You certainly can’t go wrong with the Vic Chestnut and Elf Power
show at the Art Bar on February 5th, but the pick this issues goes to
another Athens-based act, Dead Confederate.  This alt-country meets
grunge band is worth the price of admission.  Fans like to say they
sound like My Morning Jacket meets Nirvana.  I could blather on, but
it’s an apt comparison.
-Bryan Alexander   



Harptallica, Saturday, Feb. 7 –New Brookland Tavern 

Harptallica was founded in 2006 when Ashley Lancz Toman and Patricia Kline, two students at the Eastman School of Music in New York State, decided to arrange Metallica’s “Fade to Black” for two harps. Two years later, the girls have recorded a cover album and play gigs across the country.
Metal purists may bristle at the fact that Toman first heard of Metallica during a music theory class in college. And the two definitely have the look of band geeks turned metal. Still the arrangements are well done and the show promises to be fun, if only because it’s not something you’re likely to hear everyday. Harptallica also gains brownie points in my book for focusing on older Metallica fare. There’s lots of stuff from Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets. (“Orion” actually sounds pretty cool on a harp. I’ve heard they do “Battery,” too.)
So, uh, get ready to chug some white wine spritzers and mingle! Whoo!!
Harpist Mollie Marcuson is slated to fill in for Kline during the January and February leg of the tour.

For the entire New Brookland Tavern schedule visit newbrooklandtavern.com  

Hip Hop Events and Review

     Peace & Blessings!!!  The Holiday Season is over and people are
becoming more and more impatient with this world.  It’s crazy how when
you set goals, have dreams, and designs for yourself…it takes those
around you years to catch up.  I’ll tell you like this, f*ck the hate,
the negativity, the disbelief, the doubt, and fear people try to place
on you.  Remain faithful & focused on working your plan.  Day in,
Day out, you have to look at yourself in the mirror.  Remember
that….Let’s get to it!!

David Yaghjian

 

Some of Columbia’s most successful and well-known artists have come
together to present their new work to the public. The Ninth Annual
Winter Exhibition opened Friday, Jan. 23 at Gallery 80808 with
participating artists Stephen Chesley, Mike Williams, Edward Wimberly,
and David Yaghjian. This year’s exhibit will feature oil and acrylic
paintings, drawings and sculpture.

Dancing to Mellencamp at the Port-a-Johns

http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=63961

By Bryan Alexander

Photo's by Brittany Barton 

�There will be 4 hour waits for the Metro starting at 4
a.m.� one friend said. ÃƒÂ¢Ã¯Â¿Â½Ã¯Â¿Â½The traffic is already getting bad in the DC
area,� warned another.  �There are already lines several hours long at the
Metro stops for tickets.�  Etc. Perhaps it was the contrarian in me (I
didn't vote for Obama �or McCain for that matter�but was still going to the
inauguration) but I took this as a good sign.  Such stories typically
scare many people away from an event, and I was determined to be proved
right.  Unfortunately, my roommates started to get nervous, so we left the
evening before the inauguration to travel to DC. 

LTR's

Letters to the reader 

Dear Southern literature stereotype,
    From the porch I can still see Deddy spreadkneed and a-workin’ the
soil of that burnt up patch of land like the generations of my kin duly
passed. Out thar in his good church shoes. He’d fussed a right piece
this morn’ cause he couldn’t find his work boots. And finally he’d made
his way, headhung, on out across the yard past the great magnolia where
Essie Lee lay buried, his Sunday shoes gleaming in the light and
sounding clack, clack, clack across the gravel road to the family
fields.
   But how do I tell him what I seen? How do I tell him that the dawg
he won in a turkey shoot ain’t right? How old Duke broke his rope
yestday evenin’ as if the Devil hisself took holt of him and struck out
past the thicket that blooms them berries Mama bakes into pies in the
spring. Deddy ain’t seen Duke dragging his back end in the yard,
pulling hisself by the legs afront with a bootlace hanging from his
behind as if he’d growd a second tail. And it was then that I knew what
became a them boots beloved, that Duke had ate ‘em, by God! And sweet
Deddy out thar a-workin in his church shoes, them ruint now too, on his
knees as if searching for a thing forever lost to him.

Columbia City Paper

Don't Panic!

Did Bush’s War On Terrorâ„¢ succeed in Somalia? 

With just a few pages remaining on our “Countdown to a president who
can actually pronounce the word ‘nuclear’ and who doesn’t look or act
like he sprouted from the egg of a dim-witted chimpanzee fertilized by
the irradiated sperm of Roy Rogers” page-a-day calendars, George W.
Bush has already given up even pretending he’s President.
Instead, Dubya is in ex-President mode, focusing his energy on legacy-management.
Roughly half the White House home page is now occupied by links to
documents that attempt to spin a positive  , alternate history of the
Bush years.

Soak The Rich

   A moratorium on housing foreclosures and evictions is a good idea. So
is making the tax code more progressive. Obama’s plan to build new
public works is smart. But those are half-measures. Even if they don’t
come out of Congress watered down and wankified, they’ll come too
little and too late to kill the rapidly metastasizing disease that
threatens to kill the U.S. economy: income inequality.
Employers are shedding jobs at a breathtaking rate: more than 560,000
per month. The rate of job losses could soon hit a million. People who
still have jobs are being squeezed by pay cuts and freezes; even those
who have yet to be affected are closing their wallets out of fear that
they’ll be the next to get chopped. So consumer spending, which
accounts for two-thirds of economic activity, is plunging. Moreover,
millions of individuals and businesses have lost access to credit and
thus the movement of capital that might have pulled us out of this
tailspin.

S.C. needs a policy map

 

 
More than 40 years ago, my father did something clever in his small
weekly newspaper in South Georgia:  He started publishing a continuing
list of community objectives to help guide the town toward working
together to meet important common goals.
The list started off small, with just one entry in September 1963: 
Revaluation of property, which eventually happened.  By the end of the
year, he added another:  Establishment of a county fair, which he
recalls didn�t happen.

Music dates

 

 

THURSDAY JANUARY 15  
Utopia
Lucia & Levi
 
Wild Wing Café - Vista
Mighty McFly
 
FRIDAY
JANUARY 16 
 
Headliners
Pink Floydian Slip
 
Hunter Gatherer Brewery
The Robot Touch
 
Mac’s on Main 
Fatback & the Groove Band
Sudworks Taphouse
Herbie Jeffcoat Projekt
 
Wild Wing Café - Vista
Gary Pfaff & the Heartwells
 
SATURDAY
JANUARY 17 
 
Headliners
Concrete Jumpsuit
Peace Jones
 
Mac’s on Main 
Natural Desire Band
 
Sudworks Taphouse
Papa String Band
Utopia
Jellyroll & Delicious Dish
 
Wild Wing Café - Vista
Plane Jane

Upcoming picks

Toubab Krewe Jan 29 2009 

Headliners

    This Asheville based instrumental band fuses the music of Mali (it’s in Africa) with American musical styles.  For those not familiar with the band or the music of Mali, they could be described as a jam band with Caribbean flavor that loves to listen to Paul Simon’s Graceland.  Sure there are bound to be dirty hippies at the show, but don’t let that put you off.  This band puts on a great show.

-Bryan Alexander

 

Harptallica, Saturday, Feb. 7 –New Brookland Tavern 

Harptallica was founded in 2006 when Ashley Lancz Toman and Patricia Kline, two students at the Eastman School of Music in New York State, decided to arrange Metallica’s “Fade to Black” for two harps. Two years later, the girls have recorded a cover album and play gigs across the country.
Metal purists may bristle at the fact that Toman first heard of Metallica during a music theory class in college. And the two definitely have the look of band geeks turned metal. Still the arrangements are well done and the show promises to be fun, if only because it’s not something you’re likely to hear everyday. Harptallica also gains brownie points in my book for focusing on older Metallica fare. There’s lots of stuff from Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets. (“Orion” actually sounds pretty cool on a harp. I’ve heard they do “Battery,” too.)
So, uh, get ready to chug some white wine spritzers and mingle! Whoo!!
Harpist Mollie Marcuson is slated to fill in for Kline during the January and February leg of the tour.

-Todd Morehead 

Upcoming music releases

Fans of Galaxie 500 and Luna can find new music from Dean Wareham and
Britta Phillips in a transfixing environment worthy of their haunting,
ethereal sounds. The pair, as Dean & Britta, has composed a
soundtrack of sorts to a series of mute screen tests filmed by Andy
Warhol at his factory, holding time as the subjects stare deeply into
the camera’s eye. Plexifilm releases the DVD experience next week, as
13 Most Beautiful... Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, with the duo
jumping out of their current Mercury Rev tour to perform the songs live
on select dates, with projections of these vintage films as perfect
accompaniment. Two different editions of the DVD are available with a
deluxe edition featuring a hand-printed photo, selected from a unique
single frame from one of the original films. Among the anointed by
Warhol’s eye include Lou Reed, Edie Sedgwick and Nico…  Another cool
DVD on the horizon is Shout! Factory’s box set of performances from the
charitable comedy shows collectively known as The Secret Policeman’s
Ball. The three-CD box, due at the end of this month, is entitled The
Secret Policeman’s Balls and focuses on their inception in 1976 through
1989. Musical stars dot the package in what was then a novelty – the
unplugged setting – with Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Pete Townshend, Phil
Collins, and Bob Geldof. Two guitar duels find masters in their own
right sitting beside greatness, with Mark Knopfler & Chet Atkins
and Jeff Beck  & Eric Clapton bending strings.

Nude Chili Cook Off

It’s flustering enough as a reporter to have your contact peeved at you
for being late. It’s even more unnerving to be scolded when that
contact is completely naked. But Cheri Alexander, executive director of
the Travelites nudist club and sponsor of the “2009 Nude Chili
Cook-Off” at Cedar Creek Park, had a point. The prospect of a lengthy
commute should have been obvious to me –after all, nobody in their
right mind would put a multi acre all-nude park and campground in the
greater Columbia metro area. Still, I hadn’t accounted for the drive,
so we’d just missed the judging. I’d even brought a key lime pie for
the dessert table.

Constructive Criticism of America

McMaster Gallery’s new exhibition is likely to raise a few local
eyebrows when it presents a British artist’s views of modern America. 
For the last six years, Fletcher Crossman has been creating large
canvases that critique and often dissect American social and political
life. Crossman’s new show, “The Age of Endarkenment” is a collection of
the artist’s works completed while living in the U.S.
In 1999 Crossman earned a one-year Fulbright exchange program and came
to the U.S. to further enhance his art and painting. Later in 2001 and
2002 the British Council sponsored Crossman to be part of the New York
ArtExpo, so after numerous returns, in 2003 he decided to move
permanently to the States.  Since then, Crossman has been observing and
critiquing American life and producing large canvases to express his
verdict.

Tiki tu madre

Dear Mexican: I’m a Spanish teacher. I’ve been hearing my students say a phrase, and I am unsure what it means (if it truly means anything, which they swear it does). They say it’s a Mexican saying: Tiki tu madre. I don’t know what “tiki” means. So, I was wondering if you could shed some light on the subject for me.

Maestra de Español