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...a live set from the Kropotkins was just what the doc ordered to usher in the weekend's close. Split between Memphis and New York, this bunch gets together maybe once every five years to record and play shows, so landing them at the fair was an honor indeed. Led by Dave Soldier (composer/neuroscientist and presenter of some great films about his Thai Elephant Orchestra recording project at the fair on Saturday), the Kropotkins blur the line between downtown NYC avant and the Fred McDowell/Otha Turner shadow that looms large over Memphis/North Mississippi by shaking things down with the dulcet tones of singer Lorette Velvette, a mighty figure among unabashed fanboys and girls here at WFMU for sure. As dealers packed up their crates Sunday evening, a modest crowd gathered and even cut a rug right on the Metropolitan Pavillion floor, though no one to the best of my memory hollered goat. Usual members Moe Tucker and Charlie Burnham didn't make it up, the line-up still rocked, with ex-Swans/Transmission/Rhys Chatham drummer and (current leader of his new band February) Jonathan Kane stirring up the snare, downtown music/film fixture Eszter Balint hopping in last minute on violin, Lorette on electric guitar/vox, her husband Al X. Green on keys, Dog on guitar, Ron Franklin on bass drum, and Dave on violin and banjo. Some MP3s here from the band's two great studio records...
outside pipeline
stonehenge decoded
i keep meaning to post this upside down window installation in the gehry iac building on the west side.
After 24 years at the same Hudson River pier, the legendary aircraft carrier USS Intrepid was inched out of its berth by powerful tugboats on Monday - but it never got under sail because it got stuck in the mud as the tide went down.
The mission was scrubbed for the day at around 10:30 a.m., according to Dan Bender, a Coast Guard spokesman.
In the fall of 1971, two years after th Stonewall Rebellion, sixteen months after Ken State, and a couple of weeks after the priso riots at Attica, a few hundred bicyclists rod down Fifth Avenue and on to City Hall demonstrating for the institution of dedicate bike lanes and bike racks. They calle themselves Bike for a Better City. One ride held a sign that read, “The internal combustio engine is antiquated, obscene, and responsibl for more deaths thru pollution and mayhe than even that great curse war.” A few taxi-drivers razzed the protesters, and at one poin an infiltrator, concerned that there were greate causes in need of pursuing, joined the cyclists ranks, shouting, “People are being murdere and you protest bicycle lanes!
Since 2000, according to a certain moral calculus, more than a hundred and twenty New York City bicyclists have been murdered—struck dead by automobiles—and another twenty thousand have been injured, by enemy car doors and steel-fortified taxicab fenders. Three were killed in the course of three weeks in June of this year, including one, Dr. Carl Nacht, who was felled by a police tow truck while riding with his wife along the Hudson River Greenway—an officially sanctioned bike path. Since 2004, about six hundred cyclists have been arrested while participating in monthly political-protest rides known as Critical Mass, most notably during the Republican National Convention, when scores were ensnared in nets, and later imprisoned, and their bikes were confiscated as “evidence.”