Album Review: Stand In Line by The Cornerstones

I reviewed The Cornerstones back in August, but they have released a new album since then:

http://www.thecornerstones.co.uk/

One thing I found in doing the review is that they had another album that I missed completely, Begin To End, Volume 1. The sounds that I was listening to for the review were the newer material. So Stand In Line contains "My Mind" and "Smack Me In The Face" and all of the familiar songs, but also much more, with 12 tracks in all.

That balance that I remembered, of the cosmic and the blues, comes through again. I think I feel more of a folk influence as well this time around, but I would never consider them a folk band.

At times it feels like they are going to send you into space, and then you keep getting brought back to earth. The sound is grounded by rich and vivid guitar play, that keeps going to interesting places, but is very much bound to life.

So it's an interesting mix, and worth a listen. I hope it is well received.

There are links for purchasing at the page above, but it specifically lists iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, and 7 Digital.

http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2013/08/band-review-cornerstones.html

Band Review: Gone By Daylight

Gone By Daylight was a pleasant surprise. They have beats that are very danceable, but without feeling clubby, and there is an emotional depth beside that. "Someone Better Than You" is poignant, and it's accessible, and "All The Girls" could easily fit into a dance-off situation. "Up In The Air" starts out hypnotic, and the element continues, and yet it is something that a crowd could really respond to. They fit in with rock, but I think they have really good crossover potential.

they have several performances in Austin in about a week due to the SXSW festival, so that will be a good opportunity for exposure.

I have primarily been listening to them via Soundcloud, but there are additional songs available on a CD from their web site, or via Amazon MP3 downloads. It's not a lot to go on, but Facebook indicates that they are in the studio, so perhaps more music will be available soon.

Definitely worth checking out.

http://gonebydaylight.com/

https://soundcloud.com/gonebydaylight

https://www.youtube.com/user/gonebydaylight?feature=results_main

http://www.amazon.com/Gone-By-Daylight/e/B001LGYQ2A/digital/ref=ntt_mp3_rdr?_encoding=UTF8&sn=d

https://www.facebook.com/gonebydaylight

https://twitter.com/gonebydaylight

Poverty shaming

Possibly what I should really do is write something about the concept of shaming in general, because there are some frequent similarities, regardless of what is being attacked. It will probably happen sooner or later.

Today, though, I am going to focus on something that happened around Christmas. I posted the following article on Facebook:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/24/christmas-working-poor_n_4494631.html

Honestly, I did not think it was a particularly controversial piece, but it started off a pretty lengthy discussion about the family's options. Well, that may give the wrong impression.

First of all, let me say that I have decided that I am not going to delete anyone for being ignorant and heartless. If they are willing to be exposed to my posts, I am not going to terminate just because I find their political beliefs repugnant.

The discussion happened because he thought it was the family's own fault. They had accepted low-paying jobs. They should have known better.

One of the more interesting side notes is that he was saying that with the father having gotten welding certification there were fly-in jobs he could take where he could probably still come home on the weekends and there was no excuse. However, another friend, who is familiar with some similar programs pointed out that some of the family stress and safety concerns with that, as well as that for a family already in financial distress, relocating to try and get a job he had just finished his training on, therefore being completely inexperienced, had some potential difficulties.

(Quimby does not need a no-deleting policy.)

On the original article you do have some suggestions that it was a waste for him to study welding. They may have a point, but it's the wrong point. I remember spending two weeks in class, and bus fare, and then a lot of time going in studying and testing, to ultimately only get paid for a few hours of work doing tax preparation. I also remember getting a one-day job that required clothes I didn't own, so I think I spent $30 to make $60, and I missed a friend's mother's funeral for that. Sometimes you may be too desperate to do the best job of evaluating an opportunity.

I think one really important point out of this is that there are not a lot of great opportunities. If it takes capital that you don't have, for relocating or start-up costs, it is not a great opportunity for you. A lot of these chances to better yourself involve risks that someone living that close to the line can't take. If you've got a buffer, great. If you've built up this buffer because of your amazing hard work and frugality, good for you. Not everyone gets the same chances.

Actually, I have heard the line about choosing to take a low-paying job recently.

http://www.upworthy.com/a-senator-asks-a-panel-of-experts-to-defend-walmart-it-gets-awkward?c=reccon1

If they choose to take a low-paying job; try finding a high-paying job! There is no motivation for companies to pay decent wages when they can legally get away with paying the minimum, messing around with hours so that the employees are not considered full-time, and other labor abuses.

It used to be that people had this image of lazy people lying around collecting paychecks and living in the lap of luxury. That was based on a myth. There was a welfare queen, but she had her hands in all kinds of pots, and she worked really hard for it. Still, welfare reform happened, and the qualifications became more stringent. More people had to work.

The family in my original article is working, and they are not easy or pleasant jobs, and it is still not enough. Well, they chose a bad job. He's trying to learn how to do more. Well, he picked a bad field.

One of the more fascinating things about that thread is that everyone who commented was someone whom I knew through church. There should be some compassion there, but for some people all they can see is blame.

I wonder sometimes if it feels like a kind of talisman - if I can identify a way in which all of your problems are your own fault, then clearly it is not something that could ever happen to me. I worry about the reaction when the magical thinking runs out.

We have a world that breaks people. It is not only via the economy, but that one hits hard. Over and over again, you have people working against their own self-interests, and the interests of society, and the interests of human decency, and apparently the way they can do it is feeling comfortable looking down on someone else.

That's where I have the hardest time. It infuriates me, and that's not great for my own compassion. But that's why I don't delete him, or others like him. They have good points with their flaws. They're still human, and I can't stop seeing that. (But I may still blog mean things about them, and I did finally tell that one how condescending he was after he offered to let me shadow his job so I could see how I was wrong.)

Anyway, it may be some of the frustration over this, and things like it, that leads to me bringing back the celebrity hate extravaganza Monday, but then I will write two very sweet and touching things, and this is how I get by.

http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2012/10/100-wrong-about-47.html

http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2013/09/oh-snap.html

Gun control

I have a loose theme this week, relating to issues where the way we talk about them misses the point.

I am aware of the problem with people thinking that the passing of any gun restrictions at all is automatically equivalent to the government doing a house to house search and confiscating all guns and ammo and you can never get guns again. It does not matter how crazy that sounds, people's minds go there, and it has been very profitable for gun manufacturers as people keep stockpiling waiting for Obama to come for their guns. (He is going to have to hurry if he is really committed to that.)

It's probably hopeless to try and convince the crazy, so I am not going to go there, but there are a few things that get said, even by sensible people, that are wrong, and I would like to hit on that.

There are some things that are offensively stupid. One state senator recently suggested it was a good thing that the Aurora shooter used a large clip because it jammed; if he were using smaller clips he might have killed more people.

http://coloradopols.com/diary/54281/maybe-a-good-thing-that-he-had-a-100-round-magazine

I have heard the large clips jam argument many times. I know I'm going out on a limb here, but I think if they really had that high a failure rate, they wouldn't be so popular. The large clips used at Sandy Hook didn't jam.

Perhaps we need to collect more data on the use of large clips, but that leads to one of the other false statements - "The data is in and gun laws don't work."

No, the data is not in. Not only is the data not it, we can't even do a great job of collecting the data because Congress won't even allow a central database of gun transactions which not only affects what you can figure out statistically, but slows down crime-fighting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/us/legislative-handcuffs-limit-atfs-ability-to-fight-gun-crime.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

We do have data on what Australia did, and that sounds pretty promising, but if you want something more permissible than that, it might make sense to quit pushing so hard against any attempts at gun responsibility, including closing the gun show loophole.

"Well his guns were purchased legally anyway. You couldn't have stopped it."

Some of it comes from this focus that we have on school shootings. The emotions run high when this happens, so maybe that's why it's harder for people to think realistically, and the refrain becomes "If they are really determined, you can't stop them." (Except, of course, with a good guy with a gun.)

This thinking is wrong. First of all, sometimes you can stop a lot. I recently read about a bookkeeper in a Georgia elementary school who talked a gunman into giving himself up. She did this not by threatening him but by showing love.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/21/us/georgia-school-gunshots/

Perhaps he just wasn't that determined, but a lot of people aren't really that determined to kill someone. When two brothers, or an uncle and a cousin, get into a dispute over the holidays, no one came planning on a death. Yes, the alcohol was a factor, but it is easier to take guns away from family gatherings than alcohol.

It is a factor in suicides too. People think that if someone is really bent on taking their life, you can't stop them. Actually, you often can. If you can stop the attempt, or the attempt fails, that is often enough to get them through. Attempts with guns don't fail often enough.

I don't think the popcorn shooter was planning on killing anyone at the theater. I guess you could say he was determined to be macho, and not let anyone push him around, and the natural result of that is that eventually he is going to kill someone. That explains George Zimmerman and Michael Dunn too, but if the natural result of easy access to guns and our current society is additional violence and grieving families, I think we need to reconsider.

I will tell you the natural result of some of my frustrations. Trayvon Martin's death, and Zimmerman's acquittal, hit me hard, and I have written about that, and ALEC, at times. Another thing that has been going on has been the attempt to deny more people their votes. Some of the laws focused on IDs, making many forms of identification that are perfectly reasonable unacceptable, but concealed weapons permits were still going to be okay.

In my angry mind, I was thinking that every person of color, male and female, should line up for concealed weapons permits, and let that put the fear of God (and man) in the minds of the people who think Stand Your Ground is a good idea.

The problem with that is that it will be even more shootings. I have a friend who would always say that "An armed society is a polite society." That sounds good; I see no proof that it's true.

I suppose people could still get the permits and not carry guns, but it is still creating a more fear-ridden, trigger-happy society that perpetuates ugly stereotypes. It's still not the answer.

There totally is a lot that can be said about how our society runs, in terms of the strength of the economy and the safety net, and how that affects how many people are in distress and despair, and how we treat the mentally ill, and racism, and all of those factors.

We can't have good discussions if we get hung up on lies, and we shouldn't get hung up on lies that fall apart so easily.

Related posts:

http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2012/12/talking-about-guns.html

http://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2013/07/preparing-to-take-life.html

Art, artists, and us

Seeing chatter about the Oscars, I realized that I am really disconnected from movies right now, which probably does not bode well for me making it as a screenwriter. That is something I am going to have to deal with.

One question that came up recently with Dylan Farrow's open letter is to what extent we consider the personal life of the artist in our appreciation of the art. I am not a huge Woody Allen fan. I loved Midnight in Paris, and I thought Scoop had some good bits but was too loose, but those are all I have seen and that is without a lot of regrets. So, I could boycott Allen pretty easily, but I'm not sure that's the answer.

I have had this conversation with myself before, and I had come to the conclusion that if someone who was a bad person created some beautiful art, then that could be their big contribution and maybe it's really unfair to shun it. Of course, when I had that thought, it was about Romantic composers with messy personal lives. It was something far past, and not quite as repugnant.

One thing about the distance is that some things are more understandable. It is more understandable that George Washington had slaves, and more courageous that William Lloyd Garrison spoke out against slavery, in their respective time periods. In one of the Allen articles someone had mentioned Orff being a Nazi, which is not a great example and it is a complicated story, so we admire his friend Kurt Huber, and the other people in the White Rose movement more, but still, Orff is not automatically a monster, and even if he were definitely a full-fledged Nazi, I might still feel that was a natural result of his time and place, and still listen to Carmina Burana.

My problem, I suppose, is that if prominent director were found to be funding a Skinhead group or keeping slaves now, I believe that would kill the career pretty definitively. If someone proves me wrong, that will be very disappointing. However, we already have a director who definitely did rape a child, and people still work with him and admire him and don't want him in jail.

I read something interesting today. Nicholas Kristof has taken some flack both for publishing the letter, and for putting a disclaimer with it that we can't know that it is true. I was not bothered by the disclaimer, because I believe that is a mark of the paper's legal department. As such it feels reasonable, and it never occurred to me that he didn't believe her or didn't think his readers should believe her.

One of his critics is Janet Maslin, and in addition to a remarkably poorly-reasoned and offensive suggestion that the letter was inspired by sibling rivalry, she refers to Allen going through a dark period and that he "managed to rehabilitate himself through his work".

(I am taking this from a Gawker piece at http://gawker.com/times-critic-blasts-nick-kristof-says-dylan-farrow-wan-1527880499.)

That sounds an awful lot like she believes the abuse happened, but she doesn't think we should be making an issue of it. It might not bother me so much if that wasn't a feeling that I got over and over again. It's not really that the victim isn't believed, but we don't want to have to deal with it. He gets to do what he wants. If we can find a way to make it seem like you deserved it, we will; otherwise you are crazy and confused.

It goes along with something else I had read recently that disturbed me. The original post was an update from the mother of a girl who had been raped, and was being harassed for it, and she had attempted suicide. She was doing better, but was staying offline so she could heal, and that was completely understandable. What stung was that in the comments one woman wrote that this was why she had not reported her rape, and that she was glad she hadn't.

That's the thing we still haven't gotten right. We will still make a rape victim testify even though her rapist is already never getting out of jail because of murder charges. Not let her get her day in court because it's important to her, but make her because it's important to the prosecutor. We will still throw an unstable rape victim into jail when the prosecution finds her unreliable, while the person who set her up to be raped gets reduced charges for his cooperation with the prosecution. A judge will still base his sentencing on the girl looking older. (And her suicide attempt was successful.) And I could go on.

If we were not like that, maybe it wouldn't matter if Woody Allen still had a career. As it is, there is an overwhelming concern about smearing an innocent person. Well, that's fine, except over and over we see that the rate of false reporting on rape is about three percent, the same rate for most crimes. In contrast, the rate of successful prosecution of reported rapes is also about three percent. That's the number we should be concerned about.

I have no memory of the original charges. I think based on the timeline, it happened while I was on my mission, so I wouldn't have heard. When people found Woody Allen creepy, I thought it was just because of Soon-Yi. That was creepy, but even then the creepiness was minimized, because he was not biologically her father, and she didn't have his last name, and I knew nothing about grooming at the time.

I don't think I can watch Woody Allen films anymore.

Concert Review: Dave Hause

Since I already did a band review for Dave Hause back in October, I want to focus on things specific to the show.

I had never been to the Hawthorne Theatre or Lounge before, and I was pretty impressed with the separation of the spaces. There was a very loud T Mills show in the theater, and every now and then someone would open a door and you could kind of hear the beats, but basically their night did not intrude on ours, and that was a good thing.

The lounge was a more intimate space than I was expecting, and I have it on good authority that the PA system sucks, but I felt like the acoustics were good. The music filled the space well,and there was an overall feeling of warmth that was helped by the bands and the venue staff.

It was a pretty stripped down gig. Steve Nobles and Northcote were both one man with a guitar. When Dave Hause took the stage, he took it with his kid brother Tim, doubling the band size, but even so, Tim was only up there for some of the songs.

There was a flexibility and togetherness that worked. Not only did Tim keep getting on and off the stage, but at one point Northcote's John Goud came up and helped on another number, as well as a representative from Dave's label, Rise Records. Dave suddenly took over the keyboard on "The Great Depression", and it was beautiful and poignant and a different way of seeing the song.

It's not that there wouldn't be benefits in a bigger setup, with more crew and stage, but what there was worked really well, and it felt like an amazingly grateful version of "The Shine".  These are people who appreciate each other. Tim at times seemed very much the callow youth, but he did win my heart in the way he wholeheartedly enjoyed Northcote's performance, singing along and not being aloof.

It makes the shows good, but it may also have benefits on the road. Knowing that they have been touring at a fast pace through the frozen North, everyone's energy and spirits seemed really good, and Dave was in great voice. Some of the circumstances may not be ideal, but they are really handling it well.

The set was a good representation of Devour. It was not completely devoid of older material, but I did not get "C'mon Kid" or "Pray For Tucson", which I had wanted. "Bricks" evokes some of the same emotions of "Pray For Tucson" though, and ultimately, it was a good set. This was a good show.

There are still several opportunities to catch them. You can check the schedule at http://www.davehause.com/tour-dates/.

http://www.davehause.com/

https://www.facebook.com/DaveHauseMusic

https://twitter.com/hausedave

Concert Review: Northcote

The Northcote and Dave Hause reviews will probably bleed into each other quite a bit. They were a good match, but the primary difference for me was that I had listened to Dave Hause quite a bit, which is what brought me there, and had never heard of Northcote.

In preparing for the concert I had been listening to Northcote via Spotify this week, and I didn't feel like I had a grasp on it. Between the doors opening and the show starting there was one other performer, Steve Nobles, and he mentioned watching Northcote on Youtube. That is probably a better introduction. While there are not as many songs, you get to hear his voice through the parts of a brief documentary, and see some of his projects, and his personality.

Seeing him live is where everything coalesced. First of all, just that it was him and not them was unexpected, because I really thought I saw a picture of a four man band somewhere. Matt Goud is the "him", and he explained that when playing around Canada he had lineups with different sizes, but it was too expensive to do that for the extended tour, which makes a lot of sense.

Suddenly there was a face and name, but also the personality comes through more in person, and I can't overstate how powerful that is. Initially I was thinking that Goud has a big personality, but that implies some things that weren't exactly right, and then I realized that he reminded me of the Ghost of Christmas Present. Dickens described the ghost as apparently changing size so that he fit quite comfortably whether it was a giant banquet hall or a small hut, and Goud is kind of like that. He seems pretty tall, but it is more the adaptability and the ease. I believe that whatever the size of the hall, he would adapt to fill it, and he would be comfortable doing so.

Having now heard the songs live, they took more distinctive shapes listening again. That's not to say that you should wait to listen until you can hear him live, but I think it's worth checking out the Youtube channel.

Here are some thoughts from the CD I bought last night, Northcote, which has been playing all day.

The intro to "How Can You Turn Around" immediately sounds like you are heading into a good road trip sound track. There are certainly downbeats, and there is a very personal feeling to them. The use of names on "Burn Right Past Them All" and "Speak Freely" feels intensely real. I don't know if it is because of his talking about his small town upbringing last night that the sense of isolation rings through at times, or if it would anyway. For all that, it is not a down album. "Only One Who Knows" ends on a feeling of joyful collaboration. That all being said, I think "Drive Me Home" is my favorite.

Worth checking out. Music is available through iTunes and Amazon.

http://www.northcotemusic.com/

https://www.youtube.com/user/northcotemusic?feature=watch

https://www.facebook.com/northcotemusic

https://twitter.com/northcotemusic