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July 30, 2004
Pogo In Your Head, Everybody
At last night's Merge 15th Anniversary show, Superchunk finished off their reverse-chronological-order setlist with a smoking version of "Precision Auto", the venerable "Throwing Things", and a few of their early 7-inch classics: "Fishing", "Slack Motherfucker", and "What Do I". Unless I was hallucinating, "Fishing" seemed to feature some additional and very timely "dirty little war" lyrics borrowed from John Prine's "Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore"! But the biggest surprise was getting to see the Chunk do covers of two other very memorable songs from that same 1990-91 era...featuring the original vocalists, no less! Superchunk started their first encore by bringing Ash Bowie on stage for a rousing rendition of Polvo's "Can I Ride". And they closed that encore off with their patented rocked-up cover of Sebadoh's "Brand New Love", with new Merge signee Lou Barlow doing the vocal honors on the very song that he wrote.
The Merge anniversary celebration setting and the fun of the surprise covers had me reminiscing about Polvo's amazing 1994 show during the 5-year anniversary Merge It Up showcase. Exactly 10 years ago today (7/30/1994), Polvo capped off the night and the festival with Husker Du's "What's Going On"....but their set-opening versions of Steve Miller's "Fly Like an Eagle" and Erectus Monotone's "Hummus" were the real mindblowers. A couple of years ago while browsing a filesharing network, I stumbled upon a live mp3 capturing this magic moment. Since there may be some Polvo fans out there that would love to hear these covers for either the first or second time, I've uploaded the mp3 here.
While I'm talking about Superchunk and dabbling in the art of Merge-inspired mp3 blogging, I might as well go ahead and share an mp3 of that infamous Superchunk bonus track for which I am partially responsible. Over 8 years ago, a couple of other WXYC DJs and I got on the air and jokingly took the art of deconstruction and lyrical overanalysis to absurd new heights by talking about Superchunk's "Hyper Enough" single for an entire hour. We had a really enjoyable time doing it, and the band thought the show was funny enough to warrant tacking it onto the end of their next EP, titled "The Laughter Guns EP" in reference to our mistaken version of the lyrics. This one's a really huge file because it's 42 minutes long.
Interestingly enough, things came full circle with this incident earlier this week. During the special 3-hour Merge feature on WXYC this past Monday, one of the trivia questions that Spott asked was "What was the name of the WXYC radio show where the DJs talked about 'Hyper Enough' for an entire hour?". "Into the Ground" was the answer that they incorrectly gave, but our show had actually been called "Into the Groove" in reference to its music talk show nature and as a play on the very different WXYC show "Into the Ground" (off the air by that point). Spott had called into that "Laughter Guns" show to let us know that we were getting certain Superchunk lyrics wrong...so it was only fitting that I finally got to return the favor by calling up the Merge feature and clarifying certain words on WXYC's behalf. Lofty currents, indeed...
Posted by Tim at 04:53 PM | Comments (5)
July 29, 2004
Twisting My Melon, Man
This summer I've been far too slack about getting up early on Saturdays and going to the Carrboro Farmer's Market. But sleep or no sleep, there was absolutely no way that I was going to miss last Saturday's market featuring the annual melon tasting. Watermelon is one of my favorite things about summer, especially now that the smaller and sweeter seedless varieties are readily available in major grocery stores. Over the past two months I've typed 4032 (and sometimes 4031) onto those self-service checkout touchscreens time and time again. But I'd been looking forward to a chance to cut out the middleman. Enter "Melon Tasting 2004"....
I arrived at the Farmer's Market around 8:45 am and got in a small line by the main gazebo structure where the tasting was taking place. Several melon tasting workers/volunteers were in the middle of the gazebo, cutting and slicing all sorts of different melons into small toothpick-able chunks. Plates full of these melon samples were arranged in a big circle around the edge of the gazebo. Tasting participants got to take a list of the different varieties and growers and also a ballot on which to cast votes for the best watermelon, the best cantaloupe, and the best "other melon". First up was the "Early Dew" melon from Stanford Farm. I'm normally not so big on honeydews, but this one was a pretty great melon. A little sweeter and more flavorful than most honeydews I've had...and the clear winner in the "other melon" category. Next up was an Athena cantaloupe from Maple Spring Gardens. One of several locally produced Athena cantaloupes and a little disappointing, I thought. Luckily, this was followed up by an awesome Cooperstown Seedless watermelon from Lyon Farms. There were several other great watermelons to follow, but the incredibly delicious Cooperstown Seedless wound up winning my watermelon vote.
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Posted by Tim at 12:33 PM | Comments (1)
July 26, 2004
Merch It Up!
It's every 5 years instead of every 4, but the Merge Records anniversary showcases are probably the closest thing that the Chapel Hill rock scene has to a festive, once-in-a-blue-moon, bring-on-the-out-of-towners political convention. This year the official Merge festivities have expanded to include not only the Sunday show at the Carolina Theatre in Durham but also a free Wednesday night show at the Local 506 and a free Friday afternoon screening of Looking For Leonard at the Carolina Theatre in Chapel Hill. But every good political convention has unofficial events and parties that spring up around it, and as someone who once helped plan such a Mergefest-timed event, I feel that it is my duty to help try and get the word out about "Merchfest", a free show that my friends at The Merch are putting on tomorrow night at the Local 506. I'm hoping that there will be some free or very cheap T-shirts available, maybe even a new one with the word "Merch" in that familiar Merge font...
Posted by Tim at 10:36 AM | Comments (0)
July 24, 2004
Bill O'Reilly, You Only Riling Me Up
I didn't attend one of the 3000+ MoveOn-affiliated parties that screened the new documentary Outfoxed this past Sunday. But a few days ago I got my own copy of the movie from Amazon, where it is somewhat surprisingly their top-selling DVD right now. If you haven't heard about Outfoxed, it's basically an in-depth exposé about Fox News and the extremely rightward tilt of their news coverage. One could posit that nobody really needed to watch a 77-minute movie to realize how "unfair" and "unbalanced" Fox's news coverage is, but even though I was already convinced that Fox News was a bunch of right-wing hacks, I was still pretty taken aback at some of the new things that I learned from this film. Because it's not just that the big Fox News personalities like Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity are completely partisan nutjobs who berate their guests, bullshit their way through arguments, and even make up lies to support their positions. Much more disturbing to me was all of the insider information about the internal workings of Fox News and the sophisticated and all-encompassing way in which the network's heavy pro-Republican tilt is explicitly coordinated and pushed from the very top levels. Through interviews with all sorts of former and current Fox staffers, Outfoxed shows how the Fox News "journalists" are told exactly what to cover and how to cover it. Detailed daily memos come down from Fox News chief John Moody explicitly dictating how the reporters, anchors, producers, and pundits should spin news about the Iraq War, the activities of Bush and Kerry, etc. Wonkette recently broke away from her sex-and-gossip obsession long enough to print the contents of about 30 of these Moody memos and they're definitely worth a read. A typical example:
"The president is doing something that few of his predecessors dared undertake: putting the US case for mideast peace to an Arab summit. It's a distinctly skeptical crowd that Bush faces. His political courage and tactical cunning are worth noting in our reporting through the day."
Fox reporters get in big trouble for breaking away from these directives or for doing things like asking challenging questions at Republican press conferences. Outfoxed also contains some disturbing segments on the obvious conflicts of interest that most real news networks purposefully avoid....things like the Fox News reporter who was assigned to cover Bush in 2000 while his wife was working on Bush's campaign....or the now-infamous Fox News pollster/first-cousin-of-Bush who analyzed the too-close-to-call Florida data on Election Night 2000 and decided to go ahead and call the election for Bush, leading the other TV networks to jump the same gun and endowing Bush with an initial sense of undeserved legitimacy that Gore never overcame. I rarely watch Fox News so I used to naively think that it was just an extremely right-leaning network that went out of its way to try and represent that side of political opinion that was supposedly getting ignored by the supposedly "liberal" media. Now I'm starting to realize that Fox is an extremely sophisticated 1984-like propaganda unit that is doing everything possible to advance the causes of the conservative wing of the Republican Party. In that light, this MoveOn ad comparing Fox to the Communist Party newspaper Pravda is actually much less far-fetched than it may initially seem. Anyway, if you haven't already seen it, watch Outfoxed. It's only $10 plus shipping via mailorder. Or I'll be happy to loan my DVD to anyone who lives in the Carrboro/Chapel Hill/Durham vicinity.
Speaking of news, spin, and media criticism.....how completely brilliant and hilarious was Jon Stewart's recent explanation of "talking points" and "conventional wisdom"? And how bizarre is it that a "fake news show" like The Daily Show has been totally outdoing its "real" counterparts when it comes to asking the hard questions and promoting critical thinking among its viewers? The Daily Show has been just about the only show keeping me from cancelling my cable subscription this summer.
Posted by Tim at 02:55 PM | Comments (6)
July 22, 2004
Audio Files
Via the worth-checking-regularly Notes From a Different Kitchen (a blog with a cool mix of some of my favorite topics: music, hip-hop, politics, culture, etc.), I stumbled upon USA Today's publication of a recent Reuters article on mp3 blogs. It's really interesting to see these mp3 blogs break away from the illusion of relative obscurity and enter a big huge grey area of legal considerations and a possible frightening future as promotional/marketing tools. I've been eagerly downloading mp3s from O-Dub's Soul Sides mp3 blog for a while now and it's been really fun hearing (and keeping) some great tracks that I probably never would have discovered otherwise. When done in this fashion, an mp3 blog can almost start to resemble a really good radio/mix show, one that's DJ-ed in extremely slow motion by someone with deep crates who gives you some good factual info and a decent amount of time to "tape" what you're hearing. On the flip side, one of the other mp3 blogs mentioned in the USA Today article (Royal Music) has been posting some very readily available tracks from the Beastie Boys, the Grateful Dead, and DJ Shadow. I guess the purchase-encouraging "Buy...." links to Amazon atone for any illicit uploading of copyrighted mp3s (which are all available on filesharing networks anyway), but I really wonder if a line is going to be drawn with regard to this sort of mp3 blogging. Clearly, posting all of the tracks of an album would be frowned upon, as would posting a very popular new single. But in between "that" and "this", there's a pretty big grey area and I don't see how the RIAA will be able to cleanly distinguish between the various cases should they decide to take any action.
Of course one way around all of this is to only post mp3s that aren't from purchasable releases or that have been OK'ed for posting by the original artist. Getting permission seems to be the modus operandi for Douglas Wolk (proprietor of the Dark Beloved Cloud label and a regular music journalist for the Village Voice, Slate, Spin, etc.). Wolk's blog Lacunae has been regularly featuring mp3s of songs from older (80s/90s) indie-rock 7-inches, all posted with the permission of the original artist. Despite helpful mp3/audioblog tips like these, I probably won't be starting my own full-fledged rip-and-upload mp3 blog anytime soon. I do, however, enjoy linking to existing online mp3s in order to provide some samples/context for whatever band/artist I happen to feel like posting about. I am often pleasantly surprised by how many legal mp3s are actually available via label and band web sites. For instance, the first five really great My Dad Is Dead albums are posted here in their entirety!
A few months back I was reading about a service called Webjay that allowed people to set up easily streamable playlists of online mp3s. I finally did some playing around with it and managed to come up with "Tuba City Radio", an hour-plus-long set of several of the artists that I've mentioned on this blog over the past few months...plus a few other online mp3s that I like thrown into the mix for good measure. What's pretty cool about this service is that I didn't upload a thing...I just typed in the mp3 URLs, specified the artist and song title, and arranged the order of the mix. Programmers, take note: this type of DJ-ing is pass by reference, not pass by value! Of course that means that my playlist is dependent on these other web servers (1) to remain up and running and (2) to continue offering the given mp3. But unlike most other streaming audio services, a Webjay playlist gives the listener the ability to go back and download specific mp3s that they may have liked. Webjay actually supports video files too, though I haven't played with that part yet. According to this recent NYTimes article, people are already using the service to do some interesting things with combining video and audio, making video "mixtapes", etc. Distributed real-time mash-up culture, here we come!
Update: Just found an mp3 blog "meta site" via Fluxblog: an mp3 blog aggregator called mp3blogs.org
Posted by Tim at 11:10 AM | Comments (5)
July 21, 2004
Go! Stops
Just got back from seeing David Grubbs at Go! Studios. I must admit that I haven't really kept up with much of Mr. Grubbs' more recent releases but Gastr del Sol were one of my favorite bands of the 90s and I've really been digging this song "Knight Errant" off of Grubbs' new Drag City album A Guess at The Riddle. Plus it's always a treat to see such a talented guitarist play in a fairly intimate setting. Grubbs sang and played acoustic guitar and was accompanied by Greek cellist Nikos Veliotis. Opening up the show was Chuck Johnson's newest solo project Pykrete - a mesmerizing array of warm drones and sporadic beats yielded by Chuck's astute sound-generating, knob-twiddling, and effects-processing maneuvers. Definitely check out these sample Pykrete mp3s if you're into that sort of music.
Sadly, tonight's show could wind up being my last-ever show at Go! Room 4. The club is shutting down after August 15th and due to another obligation this Saturday night, I'm not going to be able to make the first post-wedding Work Clothes show (also a CD release party for North Elementary). It's a real shame that Go! is going to disappear, the club has been a real asset to the area for the last 6 years. But as this N&O article points out, it's not easy paying all the bills with just a small percentage of the door money and not as much in beer sales as most 21+ rock clubs. I'll probably write some more Go! thoughts and reminiscences on here in a few weeks, but for now let's just pour out a little PBR for a small club that tried to make it.
Posted by Tim at 01:04 AM | Comments (0)
July 18, 2004
Partisans and Moderates
Several days ago, this guy left some skeptical comments on my Fahrenheit 9/11 entry from a couple of weeks back. A quick skimming of this commenter's own blog made it pretty obvious to me that his political leanings were pretty much diametrically opposed to mine. Which is fine, I recognize that there is a lot of diversity of opinion out there and that it's a very healthy thing to be exposed to alternate viewpoints and different beliefs. But the mere thought of directly responding to the comments in question and possibly getting into an extended (and ultimately unwinnable?) debate made me realize how much I dislike trying to talk politics with anyone whose fundamental beliefs seem so far apart from mine. For me, it's an unpleasant exercise that has probably become that much more unpleasant because of partisan fervor and deeply-held opinions about certain politicians, events, political parties, etc. So while I'm really glad that Fahrenheit 9/11 is closing in on $100 million and that it will be helping to "rally the base" and increase voter turnout this fall, I also admit to having some concerns about the increasingly divisive and self-segregating nature of American political discourse in the long-term.
With those sort of thoughts already in mind, I was excited to learn that former UNC student and onetime WXYC dj Thad Anderson has started a website called outragedmoderates.org. In his explanation for the site, Anderson talks about a moderate as "someone who weighs each issue on its own, rather than following a strict party line or ideology". One of the main goals of the site seems to be to fight the idea that America is completely polarized into two separate "red" and "blue" populations with completely irreconcilable viewpoints. Anderson takes a consensus-building approach by starting with "four things America agrees upon" and then describing how the Bush administration has violated even these basic principles. I admit to being more of an outraged partisan than an outraged moderate, but I admire this approach and imagine it could be effective where more partisan-type shouting has failed. One other cool thing about outragedmoderates.org is that Anderson has decided to take a bunch of government documents and make them more easily available by not only aggregating the links on his own web site but also making the documents available via various P2P file-sharing networks such as Kazaa, Soulseek, and Gnutella. Lots of official documents about the Halliburton contracts, the energy task force, the 9-11 commission, etc. A real no-spin zone, if you will.
I keep stumbling upon former Chapel Hillians writing about politics on the Internet....while skimming through the comments on a DailyKos story about recent NC polls, I found a link to this great overview of NC politics, voting trends, historical information, and other factors that will influence the way the 2004 presidential race plays out in NC. The author is Russ Barnes, another WXYC alum. Barnes is pretty optimistic about the chances that NC will go for Kerry/Edwards and I sure hope he's right.
Posted by Tim at 04:08 PM | Comments (0)
July 15, 2004
Making Carolina Blue
Went to the big Kerry/Edwards rally at NCSU last Saturday....it was extremely hot and really crowded, but definitely worth the trip. I took a bunch of photos and uploaded them here. Our 3pm-ish arrival helped us miss much of the heat and also "special musical guest" Hobex. What, no Hootie?!!? Actually, the Edwards music selectors still seem to like playing the Blowfish's "Hold My Hand" at rallies....oh well, not even Johnny Sunshine is perfect, I guess. But I digress. This N&O story about the rally is kind of light on quotes but it does mention the notable "How about 16?" line that Kerry used in reference to Edwards' potential 16-year VP/President career. Warming up the crowd for the big dawgs were some of NC's Democratic Congressmen (Price, Watt, Etheridge), Secretary of State Elaine Marshall, and Carrboro alderman/token Latino representative John Herrera, a fiery speaker and quite possibly one of the few Carrboro town officials that I've never seen in a bar. The one and only Dean Smith was on the V.I.P. riser, standing next to U.S. Senate candidate Erskine Bowles. I know Dean Smith is really reserved and publicity-shy, but it would be very cool to see him actively campaign for his beloved Democrats this fall. Though if former UNC basketball player (and one-time Larry Brown roommate!) Richard Vinroot somehow wins the Republican nomination for governor again, I guess loyal Dean will be splitting his ticket. Sure, talking about celebrity sports figure endorsements is pretty silly, but not quite as silly as potential celebrity sports figure candidates that haven't gone the more serious and legitimate Bill Bradley/J.C. Watts route. Maybe Ditka wised up and realized that rising star Barack Obama was going to Super Bowl Shuffle him in a landslide. Regardless, I'm really looking forward to seeing Obama deliver the keynote address on the second night of the Democratic National Convention.
On the way back from the rally, Fred and I talked awhile about what sorts of things we could do to help NC go for Kerry. I almost feel like at this stage in the game, most everyone I know is already committed to voting against Bush and that any preaching I do is pointlessly directed at the choir. And last December's Howard Dean fiesta was strangely fun but I don't really feel like having another fundraising house party. So if you're so inclined, please donate some cash to Kerry/Edwards via my new online volunteer/fundraiser page and we'll agree to keep our partying relatively free of external agendas.
After all, the best way to help make N. Carolina blue is probably just to get more and more people registered to vote, especially the thousands of new UNC students that will be arriving in Chapel Hill in a little over a month. I thought it was awesome that Sean from CD Alley had a big huge stack of voter registration forms by his cash register last week....he told me he'd been asking customers if they were registered, whether their address had been updated, etc. It's really not a hard question to ask, and many people simply forget or just don't realize that you have to re-register whenever you move. In North Carolina, the registration deadline for the November election is Friday, October 8th. Are you registered? What about your friends? The last five people that you talked to? I can't vouch for how this online Rock the Vote registration form works, but if you're unregistered and don't have a paper form at your disposal, give it a shot. Rock The Vote also has some sort of kit that allows you to have your own voter registration drive. Hmmm, who wants to help me out with a small drive here in the Triangle?
Posted by Tim at 01:40 AM | Comments (5)
July 08, 2004
Saturday at the Federal
If you're anywhere near Durham this Saturday night (July 10th), consider coming by The Federal for a drink or two. I'll be DJing from 10pm to 2am, playing hip-hop and some other beat-centric music. It'll be less overtly commercial and dance-party-oriented than the typical crowdpleasing Hell fare, definitely a nice change of pace for me.
Never heard of The Federal? It's a very cool new bar that opened up about four months ago in downtown Durham. It's on West Main Street, right next to its sibling bar James Joyce and across the street from Brightleaf Square. Lots of harder-to-find beers on tap, and plenty of wine & liquor options too. Instead of a jukebox, they had the foresight to build a little DJ area....and they've already got some cool DJs spinning on other nights - WXDU roots music DJ Steve Gardner on Wednesday nights and DJ Marco of the Solid Soundsystem every Thursday. If things go well, Saturday may turn into a regular DJ night for me and some of my DJ-ing pals, so come out and support!
Posted by Tim at 12:44 PM | Comments (2)
July 07, 2004
Riddim Nation
Last week I stumbled upon Sasha Frere-Jones' new singles column in The New Yorker via O-Dub's blog Pop Life. Frere-Jones used to play bass in the post-rock double-bass trio Ui and has consistently been one of my favorite music writers over the last several years, partly 'cause he tends to review popular/commercial releases in an intelligent and analytical way, placing them into a larger musical context and pointing out how simultaneously innovative and enjoyable some of them are. In this particular column, Frere-Jones makes a good jam-of-the-summer case for Nina Sky's "Move Ya Body", currently #9 on the Billboard Hot 100. As Frere-Jones points out, one of the most interesting things about this very catchy song is that it is one of several new tracks that use the "Coolie Dance" rhythm/riddim created by Jamaican producer Cordel Burrell. I haven't yet heard the Pitbull track that Frere-Jones mentions, but the hot new Elephant Man/Twista remix of "Jook Gal" is yet another jam propelled by the bouncy Coolie Dance beat. We played the "Jook Gal" remix twice at last Friday's Hell party and it's definitely a dancefloor burner as far as I'm concerned.
I'd love to learn more about any licensing/marketing/copyright details and processes surrounding these Jamaican rhythms, because there's something fascinating about the way many of them end up being used on so many different tracks. Of course, this sort of versioning has been going on in Jamaica for decades, but the recent explosion of Jamaican influences in American hip-hop/R&B has had me thinking a lot more about what appears to be an alternate economic model for, uh, "information exchange" (for lack of a better vague term). This seemingly viable model appeals to me in much the same way that open source, open standards, and open access do. Instead of the more closed American model, where a producer like The Neptunes or Timbaland typically sells a beat exclusively to one particular artist, a Jamaican producer like Burrell releases a hot rhythm out into the world, where singers, toasters, and rappers all have the chance to take it and use it ("improve upon it", if you will). If one or more of these tracks succeed in the competitive marketplace, both the producer and the singer/toaster/rapper reap the rewards. Because even with the imperfect open source analogy, I don't mean to suggest that Burrell is not getting paid....or that he didn't work out some arrangement with the artists using his rhythm. After all, this Billboard chart lists "C. Burrell" in the songwriting credits for two of these Coolie Dance tracks. Perhaps this Jamaican/American dichotomy is a bit of an oversimplification, since there are definitely some American breaks/beats records out there and American tracks can definitely pop up in remixes and subsequent samplings. And I admit that I don't know much about how the Jamaican tracks are actually distributed or licensed. Regardless, these Greensleeves rhythm albums remind me that I'd still love to see some sort of variation on this Creative Commons license that would encourage the creation of derivative works for commercial purposes, with the stipulation that the license-holder got a proportional piece of the action should the derivative work become commercially successful in some regard. Oh, and a Neptunes rhythm record would be nice, too.
Posted by Tim at 05:24 PM | Comments (3)
July 06, 2004
Here's Johnny...
Congrats to John Kerry for proving that not only can he make a really smart decision that may not exactly jive with his personal preferences but that he can very competently and discreetly control the flow of information so that it doesn't leak out early or come back to bite him on the ass. That alone shows that he'd be a much better person to have in charge of things like the names of CIA agents or shady characters like Ahmed Chalabi.
In reaction to Kerry's picking Edwards, Howard Dean's former "chief blogger" Mathew Gross says that "North Carolina has suddenly become a battleground state". Interestingly enough, Gross is actually a former and now once again an NC resident himself - he played drums in the Chapel Hill pop band June for a couple of years before the band's John Howie/Beggars Banquet era. But yeah, I like this battleground-state line of thinking. The conventional wisdom about Edwards as VP has tended to be that he can't carry NC but that he'll be a huge help in the Midwest states and that he'll help Democrats win some of the crucial toss-up Senate seats in Southern states like NC, SC, GA, FL, and LA. But I think it's time to throw out the pessimism and start thinking about and working towards a blue NC. After all, Edwards always closes well and he's risen rapidly in polls before. This American Prospect article from last summer points out that with 6 weeks to go before the 1998 election, Edwards was behind Faircloth by 10 points in at least one poll. Nothing will be determined until November, of course, but I can't wait to see the NC polls that come out in the next few weeks so that we can see what sort of bounce Kerry/Edwards might get.
The other day I was reading this News & Observer article about that other famous North Carolinian who spent the weekend restlessly figuring out his place on the national stage. And I was struck by one Dook fan's comment: "It's actually pretty exciting that somebody from N.C. is making it all the way to LA. Maybe he'll put Durham on the map." As wide-eyed and hillbilly-ish as that quote may sound, I bet a lot of North Carolinians are now feeling this same sort of positive sentiment in relation to Edwards and his own potential big-time job. When he was ambitiously seeking the top job for himself against unfavorable odds, some folks probably thought he was too-big-for-his-britches, foolishly trying to be above himself. But when the nominee chooses you and says that you're ready for prime time, then it's much more acceptable and everyone else can happily identify with you and your success. This is all baseless theorizing, but I do think that Southern attitudes about modesty and achievement are somewhat weird like this.
When John Edwards suspended his own presidential bid back on March 3rd, I drove over to Raleigh to see his concession speech at the Broughton High School gymnasium. Since the whole thing was a last-minute decision following the Super Tuesday primary results, there hadn't been much advance publicity for the event and it was surprisingly easy to get in. A short line, no metal detectors, no frisking, no questions. I was curious to see if Edwards was really as electrifying in person as all the news media folks had been saying. To be honest, it didn't seem appreciably different from the impressive stump speeches that I'd already seen on TV, but it was still cool to go and see folks swarm Edwards with post-speech autograph requests while his modest parents casually stood outside on the Broughton lawn. I took a bunch of photos, but except for the one above, they're are all fairly blurry and crappy due to the dark room and the bad camera angles. Oh well, it's not like Edwards is going to be lacking for media coverage anytime soon...
Correction in red added above, Mathew Gross apparently moved back to NC after the Dean campaign shut down.
Posted by Tim at 08:55 PM | Comments (3)