The guy in the background gets it.

Like everyone else, I first heard Supergrass through John Peel, who played their opener “Caught by the Fuzz” with zealous dedication. He went on to list it at number 5 in his Festive Fifty for 1994. The song told the semi-autobiographical tale of Gaz being nicked for possession of marijuana, when he was 15. It happened when he driving home one night, and was pulled over by the police:

“I stuck the hash down my pants,but I had it in a little metal tin. I was standing on the pavement, and the tin just went all the way down my trousers and landed on the pavement with a ting. The copper went, ‘What’s that, son?’”

It was perfectly pitched, capturing teenage angst and its bravado brilliantly, and was “exactly what being a teenager sounds like.”

With a musical introduction like that, I knew Supergrass would never disappoint - and they never did. Well, until they split up, that is. (Though I still await the release of their Krautrock inspired 7th album…)

In 1999, Supergrass played a short gig on Spanish television’s Radio 3, introducing material from their third album, as well as previous hits.

01. “Mary”
02. “Pumpin on Your Stereo”
03. “Moving”
04. “Alright”
05. “Late in the Day”
06. “Richard III”
07. “Caught by the Fuzz”

Gaz Coombes has just released his first solo album Here Comes the Bombs, which he describes as “11 little sonic explosions.”
 

New video from Father John Misty’s critically acclaimed Fear Fun album on Sub Pop Records.

I have no idea what the fuck is going on here—although the final moments make the intention a little bit clearer… I think—but I like it.

Knowing Josh Tillman, I don’t really wonder what kind of mushrooms are topping his pizza and neither will you when you watch this…

Directed and produced by Grant James. A divine guitar solo courtesy of Jonathan Wilson comes in at the 2:30 mark.

Click here for more Father John Misty on Dangerous Minds
 

This past March, standing outside a Shell station in Mellen, Wis., in the state’s far north, Mike Wiggins Jr. told me about a series of dark and premonitory dreams he had two years earlier. “One of them was a very vivid trip around the North Woods and seeing forests bleeding and sludge from a creek emptying into the Bad River,” Wiggins said. “I ended up at a dilapidated northern log home with rotten snowshoes falling off the wall. I stepped out of the lodge, walked through some pine, and I was in a pipeline. There was a big pipe coming in and out of the ground as far as I could see.

“I had no idea what the hell that was all about,” Wiggins continued. But he said the dream became clearer when a stranger named Matt Fifield came into his office several months later and handed him his card. Wiggins is the chairman of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, and Fifield, the managing director of Gogebic Taconite (GTac), a division of the Cline Group, a mining company based in Florida. He had come to Wiggins’s office to discuss GTac’s desire to build a $1.5 billion open-pit iron-ore mine in the Penokee Hills, about seven miles south of the Bad River reservation. The proposed mine would be several hundred feet deep, roughly four miles long and a half-mile wide; the company estimated it would bring 700 long-term jobs to the area. Fearing contamination of the local groundwater and pristine rivers, Wiggins told Fifield he planned to oppose the mine. He didn’t know at the time that the company’s lawyers would be working hand in hand with Republican legislators to draft a bill that would weaken Wisconsin environmental law and expedite the permitting process.

What followed was a drawn-out fight that resembled other statewide battles over labor, education and voter-registration laws — all of which have been introduced since the election of the Republican governor Scott Walker in 2010. The most bitter of these fights began in early February last year, when Walker proposed eliminating virtually all collective-bargaining rights for a vast majority of the state’s public-employee unions. Around the time that Walker announced the measure, similar laws were introduced in Michigan, Ohio and Florida, and a nationwide demonization of public employees caught fire. Within two months, the National Conference of State Legislators had tracked more than 100 bills, initiated across the country, attacking public-sector unions.

From the beginning, Walker, who declined to comment for this article, seemed cognizant that his move to end collective bargaining placed him at the forefront of a national conservative strategy. His attack on public-employee unions was lauded by Mitt Romney, John Boehner and Karl Rove, and he has received significant financial support from the billionaire conservative donors Charles and David Koch. In a widely publicized prank phone call with Ian Murphy, a blogger impersonating David Koch, Walker described a dinner he held for his cabinet at his Executive Residence on Feb. 10, the night before he announced the collective-bargaining measure. “It was kind of the last hurrah, before we dropped the bomb,” he said to the faux-Koch. At the dinner, Walker held up a photograph of Ronald Reagan and told his cabinet that what they were about to do recalled Reagan’s breaking of the air-traffic-controllers’ union strike in 1981. “This is our time to change the course of history,” Walker said.

The June 5 recall election against Walker and four Republican state senators will be a decisive and momentous day in American history—no matter which side of the political divide you are on—and not just for residents of Wisconsin. If the reichwing and the Koch brothers get beaten back, it’ll send a definitive message to Republicans—and draw an iron line in the sand—letting them know how far is TOO FAR and what NOT to do if they don’t want to end up like Scott Walker. If Democrats take back control of the statehouse, I get the sense that things would largely calm down in Wisconsin, after two years that have seen friendships ended, family arguments and nasty, nasty local politics, vandalism, etc. Clearly in this way, Scott Walker has been a disaster for life in his state. How many people who live there, no matter what their political affiliation is, would argue that the mood in Wisconsin has improved under Walker?

However, if the Democrats and the unions lose, and it appears that they will lose, it’ll be a sad day indeed and will be seen as a demoralizing lesson in just how DEAD democracy really is when billionaires and out of state interests can come in and defeat the determined solidarity of tens of thousands of Wisconsin’s most politically engaged progressive citizens. If Walker wins, it will be a significant blow to the labor unions and progressive morale in general.

With repetitive TV and radio ads blanketing Wisconsin’s airways (Walker is spending over 20x what his challenger Tom Barrett can afford) the Koch brothers and the GOP have brainwashed people into supporting policies that would beggar their neighbors, friends and relatives and destroy the hard fought gains of the unions in the state where the labor movement was arguably born merely so that the rich can get richer. It’s not like everyone in Wisconsin doesn’t already know what’s going on and I doubt that many people are still undecided if they’ll be voting for Walker or Barrett with just two weeks to go. The polls are TIGHT, and incredibly—when you consider how his governorship has torn the state apart and Walker’s SHITTY record on jobs—favor the governor. It’s going to be all about the ground game and the side who can get out the most voters (something the Republicans excel at ).

You can kick in a few bucks to kick Walker’s ass at ActBlue. Fingers crossed and GO WISCONSIN.

The festival was held in the amphitheater of the Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago, Chile on May 24, under the direction of Jaime Lorca.
 

 

 
Via UPI and with thanks to Franco!

This coffee table is a 12:1 scaled replica of a cassette tape. It is made of reclaimed maple, walnut and lucite. Dimensions are 47.25” x 30” x 5” with a 3/8” plexi top. This is a first prototype and one of a kind table. Future versions will be CNC machined out of high grade plywood with a variety of ply combinations and a glass top. This table has been an obsession of mine for 5 years! It is amazing to finally have it come to fruition. The table is completely reversible (sides A and B).

I’m not sure if Jeff’s “Mixtape Table” is a one-of-kind prototype or others have been made for purchase? You can contact him here to find out.

 
Via KMFW

 
Thanks, Dustin!

Initially ruled by the Ukrainian police as a random hit-and-run, pressure from the British Foreign Secretary William Hague and Mr Pring’s remaining English family (who are contesting £1.5 million Pring fortune with the widow) has led to it being upgraded to a murder inquiry this week.

“Ms Zuizina, a former stripper,” notes BBC News, with a frigid nudge-nudge wink-wink, “met Mr Pring on the internet in 2006.” Say no more, guv,nor, say no more!

Far be it for me to pre-empt anything, but if it was foul play, this sort of thing is apparently quite common, which is why any gentleman looking eastwards for a younger, poorer wife might do worse than consult the charming Russian Bride Guide: How to Meet, Court and Marry a Woman from the Former Soviet Union by husband and wife intercontinental matchmaking duo Stuart J Smith and Olga Maslova.
 
I must admit to bringing a number of preconceptions to the Russian Bride Guide, but, randomly opening the volume yesterday on the bus (not hugely recommended) I instantly came upon the following halva-sweet sentiment:

“Of course, love is ideal…”

Well isn’t that outright romantic, I thought – it just goes to show yet again that you should never judge a book by its cover, even if that cover does feature a half-naked woman athwart a cardboard box.

Yet what is it, I wondered, reading on, that drove such idealistic men to travel so far and to undertake the risks and costs detailed in this very practical book (its chapters have titles like “Scams, Scammers and Sharp Practice”)? The Russian Bride Guide (a sort of “The Decline of the Western Woman”-type manifesto) explains:

“Because they simply don’t find fat, lazy, smoking, junk food-eating, sloppy, flip flop-wearing [!] women to be attractive. Unfortunately, this is all they seem to see at home.”

Faced with all these “self-empowered, man hating feminists” (in the book’s words), what can the RBG’s “fat, old, ugly and bald” readers (also the book’s words) expect from a Former Soviet Union bride?

“Why pick girls from poorer countries? Less money means fewer cars and more walking, more walking means slimmer bodies. The same scarcity of money means junk food is unpopular, hence less junk food consumption and slimmer bodies again.”

One of the ways the good old RBG tries to protect its readers is by warning them off really excessive age differences. While a couple of decades are the least every “fat, old, ugly and bald” Western man deserves, a cautionary note is struck for those hoping to aim for anything significantly more pronounced:

“If seeking a very large age gap, you must consider the future when she is bopping around the house listening to the latest dance music eyeing the young muscular gardener through the window and you are dozing in your rocking chair with Bing Crosby oozing out of your stereo. It happens; what do you think will happen next?”

Ummm, Svetlana’ or Uschi forgets her gloves (and who could blame her)?

Last night CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° show saw the debut on the world television stage of Stacey Pritchard, one of the pinhead Christianists who attends the Providence Road Baptist Church in North Carolina. Providence Road has been getting a lot of unwanted (?) attention lately due to Pastor Charles “Kill the Queers” Worley’s recent sermon there about putting gays and lesbians inside of an electric fence until they died. Last night Pritchard went on CNN to defend Worley and the result was TV magic!

It is AMAZING just how stubbornly impervious this woman is to basic facts. It’s like she has an impenetrable bubble all around her where no intelligence can get in or out (Only Cheetos, Mountain Dew and Domino’s pizza can pierce her force field of ignorance. I don’t know what happens on the other end and I don’t want to know).

Mark my words, this is a bravura, star-making appearance by one of American’s most dreadfully dumb people. Of course, I jest, there might be people stupider than Stacey in some dark, backwoods"holler” of America, but do they have her sneering, know-nothing Tea party charisma? Her fashion sense? Her gift of gab?

I don’t think so. A STAR IS BORN.

This woman is already an ICON OF STUPIDITY, even if she doesn’t know what that means…

Why, Stacey Pritchard, you just might be the female equivalent to Joe the Plumber! (Secretly I think you’re better than he is!). Please run for US Congress in your state (you’d win!) and caucus with Michele Bachmann, Allen West, Steve King and your North Carolina home girl/soul sister in MENSA, Virginia Foxx! A Sarah Palin endorsement must be imminent. The abjectly stupid gotta stick together!

“Hey Stacey, phone for you. A guy callin’ ‘eemself Roger Ailes wants to offer yew a contract on the Fox News…”