I can’t tell you how awesome it was to stop and chat with Grass Widow before their Girl’s Rock Camp benefit gig at Lewis and Clark College a while back. Spec the edited interview at Bitch Media, but if you’re already here you can check out the full, un-edited, word-vomit transcript of our conversation. We covered everything from the origins of their spacy, loping new Internal Logic, to their identities as women and especially as more than women, and I even snuck in a question about Adam Pfahler. Check it out past the jump.
These two homies are Martin Van Buren Capps and Sarah Espy Capps, my great-great-great-grandparents (we think). After a long day of searching, I found (an accidentally kind of stood on, sorry pops!) their graves with my mother and grandmother.
MVBC founded Capps Station, a township outside of present-day Abbeville, Alabama. Too bad his little town got upstaged by pretty much everything else around it. At least you got the biggest graves in the cemetery!
“Fujiyama Mama” seems like a quaint little number until you realize it’s Wanda Jackson comparing her hot sex to the deaths of thousands of Japanese people. And how! Read what I wrote here.
I had to write a review of a creepy lounge downtown and I realized afterwards that their tile mural is taken straight from the DVD cover of Memoirs of a Geisha. I’m beginning to feel like my life is a sad parody of that show Girls except that I might be a man.
He says he’s been called faggot several times simply when walking down the street, and his introvert tendencies have only deepened in a town where he hasn’t found many friends. When I tell him that Durham has just been named the most tolerant city in America, he responds with a chortle, “By who, the Chamber of Commerce?”
This guy’s smiling because all of the money he just spent refurbishing his food cart lot nabbed him Oregon’s first annual liquor license for food carts. I interviewed some big-shot at the OLCC, you should read that or just go get a beer at Cartlandia. It’s probably going to be kind of expensive.
“There seemed to be a bit of an initial backlash about it, but we obviously weren’t looking to offend anybody and the majority of the feedback about it has been positive,” Ryan Midden, the general manager of the Ben & Jerry’s in Cambridge, Ma., told the Boston Globe.”
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Ben & Jerry’s created a “Taste the Lin-Sanity” ice cream flavor that used fortune cookies and apparently, some people believed this was so unbelievably racist that they complained and got the ice cream maker to remove the fortune cookie from the formula.
And that quote right there encapsulates the politically correct culture in which we live. Most people liked it, Midden said. But because a few people didn’t, Ben & Jerry’s caved.
The limited-edition flavor, “Taste the Lin-Sanity,” originally featured vanilla frozen yogurt, honey swirls and bits of fortune cookies, the latter ingredient serving as an obvious nod to Lin’s heritage. After the backlash, the company pulled the cookies from the mix and replaced them with waffle cone pieces that will be served on the side.
Every time I see a privileged writer whining about ‘political correctness,’ I imagine those kids on My Super Sweet Sixteen that would cry because their parents bought them a Lexus, not a BMW. And I like Josh Sternberg, too, but it looks like if he were an ice cream flavor, it would be pralines and dick.
Props to Inothernews for their (his?) response to this.
Few artist’s deaths lately have left me with the same sort of sadness as Christopher Reimer’s. Out of the stacks and stacks of records that truly mean something to me, Women’s first LP stood out as something that truly widened the boundaries of the institution of the “song.” I can remember the collective excitement as the burned through my group of friends that winter, and how our ears all suddenly turned a bit outward towards incorporating music we thought permanently segregated from the pop form. If anything, I hope Reimer’s death will send people to chase the same musical highs Women gave me.
We fucked this one up. We dropped the ball on Mayyors, sorry guys, but our chance is gone. They recorded some of the most caustic, lizard-brain one-chord-or-less 12”s of the last twenty years, and now they’re off the chart for good. See them rip into an undeserving SXSW crowd in the link.
