Listening queue

Currently waiting for my review at eMusic, once my subscription renews: two early Lucinda Williams recordings, Gillian Welch’s Hell Among the Yearlings, In Camera’s 13 (Lucky for Some), and Scott H. Biram’s The Dirty Old One Man Band.

Currently listening: the Sacred Steel compilation, Max Roach’s astonishing We Insist! The Freedom Now Suite, and the Replacements’s Hootenanny.

I don’t know, but every now and then I run across a pile of music that makes me very very happy. This is one of those times.

Culture jamming as patriotism

I don’t know that there’s anything more inspirational on the anniversary of the post-Katrina disaster as this prank by the Yes Men, who impersonated HUD officials to tell a crowd of contractors and media in New Orleans that HUD would be refocusing its efforts on getting people back into their homes, rather than knocking the homes down and letting new contracts for mixed-income flats. Read the article. It, combined with the constantly excellent reporting from the New Yorker on the disaster and reconstruction (much of which is missing from the archive link), ought to raise some questions.