WHAT?
by The Scene on March 31st, 2008
Bob Lefsetz used to be be a big macha in the music industry so many industry-type people subscribe to his “Lefsetz Letter” email/blog/thing. His heart is in the right place about most of the industry-related issues he talks about so we generally give him a free pass when he says something stupid or crazy or both. He means well, it’s just that he’s 800,000 years old and all the damn kids refuse get off his lawn.
However, when we read this post we had to pause, take a deep breath, and calmly say to ourselves, “WHAT?”. In a short time he manages to rant about high CD prices, Ticketmaster, Hillary Clinton and like a million other things. He even manages to contradict himself by claiming that “the most legendary tracks are never hits. Not singles played on the radio, but album cuts that seep into the consciousness,”and then that “everybody knows there’s only one good single on an album.”
He’s either on too many drugs or not enough drugs. Either way, the amount of drugs he’s on is wrong.
If You Thought Us San Francisco Hippies Would Never Name Anything After Our Glorious President
by The Scene on March 31st, 2008
We couldn’t be more in favor of this.
Math Is Fun
by The Scene on March 31st, 2008
This is a link to a web page where you can play with the vote outcomes of the upcoming Democratic primaries. We’ve been messing with this for a while now and we can’t find an even remotely realistic way to end this having Hillary come out on top. Even if she wins Pennsylvania with 65% and everything else (including the increasingly unlikely re-votes in Florida and Michigan) by 60% she still comes out behind. This is giving her a 10% win in North Carolina, which is not going to happen, and she still ends up with fewer delegates. Barring the revelation that Obama brinks the blood of infants, we don’t see how he can go into the convention with fewer delegates. A brokered convention ending with the nomination of a candidate with fewer votes and delegates than the other equals a guaranteed loss in November.
So, our question is this: can any HRC fans figure go on the site and play with numbers (in a way that even kind of makes sense) that has Hillary coming out on top?
New Dubious Ranger Songs
by The Scene on March 28th, 2008
Friends of The Scene, Dubious Ranger, have a couple new songs up on their MySpace page. The tracks, Weapon and French Song, represent a sonic shift for the band away from the slick silliness of Even These Things Tell Stories and towards an interesting fusion 70s proto-punk of bands like Television and the 90s Brit-pop of bands like Blur.
The Government Inspector
by The Scene on March 27th, 2008
We headed over to A.C.T. for their premiere of Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector last night and, we must admit, we enjoyed ourselves. We were a bit apprehensive going in because even though it’s a great script, a madcap farce about a small provincial town in pre-revolutionary Russia that is thrown into chaos when word comes that a high-ranking government official from the capital is headed in to secretly evaluate the towns government offices, we’ve had bad experciences with the director’s work in the past. Carey Perloff, who is also the company’s Artistic Director, a number of years ago directed Tom Stoppard’s Invention of Love for the company and it was literally the worst thing we have ever seen. In any format or genre. It was worse than the novelization of Men in Black II; worse than the Wii game, The Ninjabread Man; worse than the time we were riding our bikes and saw a homeless lady screaming at the top of her lungs while masturbating at a bus stop. It was much worse than all of those combined. We still have nightmares about being trapped in the theatre for nearly three hours thinking, “how the fuck could they make Oscar Wilde the most boring fucking character in the history of everything?”. It scarred us for life. You can see why we might have been a little apprehensive going in.
But, all in all, the play was pretty decent. There’s a pretty high level of madcap silliness, the local magistrate raises geese in the courthouse and there’s a pratfall about every three minutes. The broad physcial comedy worked uniformly better than the banter, which made us think that either the translation of the script could have been better or timing was a bit off. If the problem was the latter, we’re pretty sure it’ll get better deeper into the show’s run.
Our biggest problem with the show was that, at times, it dragged. Interestingly, the more people there were onstage, the less this problem was evident. A light comedy like this needs to be snappy - the audience should never be able to catch their breath - and this most decidedly wasn’t. There we’re non-comedic pauses you could drive a truck through.
That being said, there were some standout performances. Gregory Wallace, who plays the charlatan the townspeople mistake for the real government inspector is a non-stop bundle of energy and Geoff Hoyle, who delivered one of the greatest performances we’ve ever seen when he guest-hosted Teatro ZinZanni, was a riot every time he stepped on stage.
Verdict: Go (but give it like a week or two until they iron the kinks out)
Question & Answer
by The Scene on March 27th, 2008
Q: Does the Wall Street Journal have someone that draws the dot matrix pictures by hand or do they use a computer?
A: Now they use a computer. But, until five years ago, they used a combination of Korean slaves and baby dinosaurs. Really , really cute baby dinosaurs
Best Political Video Ever (Ever)
by The Scene on March 27th, 2008
If you’re like us, you’ve probably wondered at last once in the past couple months if Mike Gravel ever officially dropped out of the Democratic presidential race or was even still alive. Apparently, he still wants to be president and is switching to the Libertarian party because the Democratic party is “no longer the party of FDR.” Why he would move to a party whose entire existence is predicated on the destruction of all the economic and social reforms FDR is famous for enacting is beyond us but when he puts out campaign videos like this we can’t complain. It’s a little hip-hop, a little psych-folk and 100% brains-splattered-on-the-wall gonzo.
Your move, Will.I.Am.
Explained
by The Scene on March 26th, 2008
This whole mortgage crisis is pretty complicated and technical but, luckily, we just found this informative little article that explains the whole situation in a very clear, concise and readable manner. We’d say its the definitive resource on the subject.
Bike Survey
by The Scene on March 26th, 2008
If you ever ride a bike in San Francisco, please fill out this SF Bike Coalition Survey. They’re using it to gauge how they’re doing in making SF a more bike-friendly city.
On a semi-related note, why have bike manufacturers stopped producing as many touring bikes? We just got a new touring bike and it’s super awesome. What’s the deal with that?
Why Is Josh Marshall The Only Democrat Going After John McCain?
by The Scene on March 26th, 2008
We are well aware that either Hillary or Obama is the worst thing to ever happen to the Democratic party but wouldn’t it be smart to at least imply that your second-favorite Democrat would be better than a Republican candidate that wants a U.S. presence in Iraq for 10,000 years?
Also, wasn’t stationing U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War Osama Bin Ladin’s #1 stated reason for being so mad at us. We know that it been the official policy of the U.S. government after 9/11 to do the stupidest fucking thing possible at every given opportunity but can we at least pretend that we’ve paying attention. Is that too much to ask?
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