So, in an effort to make this the most informative place to be, I’ve opted to start using Asides, or MiniPosts, as the plugin calls them. Asides are quick little notes that appear in the sidebars so as not to distract from the larger issues, but allow you to fill in a bit more detail when necessary.

So, my friend and sometimes-poster to this blog, John Sachelli hipped me to the fact that Milestones was changing hands a few weeks ago, but I didn’t really get a chance to blog about it. It’s probably as well that I didn’t, and there’s a great article in the latest City discussing the new owner and the outgoing owner.

It seems that, contrary to rumors, there will continue to be live music at Milestones, albeit under a new name. And what a name. “High Fidelity.” Before I get into the positives, let me just point out this one negative. The name sucks on so many levels. “Pretentious” is an adjective that comes to mind, yet despite the high-flown intentions or perhaps because of them, “lame” also comes to mind. With a name like that, you can only appeal to vinyl snobs and baby boomers, neither of which is where the money’s at in the first place.

But, OK. I’ve bitched about it. Nothing I can do to change it, anyway. Now for the good news: the new owner, Joe Gizzie, is a musician himself, and the former owner is opening a non-live music bar further down East Avenue. As I see it, this is good in a number of ways.

For one, I think most anyone I know who’s played the Milestones stage in the last few years would agree with Mr. O’Leary that the club has been in need of some new blood and new exitement. It’s been in kind of a holding pattern recently, still putting in good bands, but not really giving them any real reason to return. There is something to be said for the need for live music club owners to be almost as creative as the musicians that take the stage, and that has been missing recently.

At the same time, while O’Leary may have been losing his taste for Milestones and booking live bands (to be honest, as a musician, I think I can actually appreciate this sentiment.? We’re nothing but trouble.), he has been very active with the East End Fest planning, and having him move farther down the street might hopefully drag the Fest further down the street and open up at least one more stage.

I’m sure that I’ve lamented the East End Fest’s recent paucity of original, local bands more than once on this blog in the past, so I shan’t dwell too much on it here.? But the Milestones stage tended to be one stage that could be relied upon for at least original music, and he usually followed that up with something good inside after the Fest was over.? Granted, his contract upon leaving Milestones reportedly stipulates that he cannot have live music at the new location, but I don’f know that this will necessarily extend to an outdoor stage during the East End Fest.

So, hopefully, Milestones gets a shot in the arm that it needs - albeit with a questionable name - and so does the East End Fest, a celebration which I never used to miss until it got hopelessly lame.

I got an email late last night telling me that HaloScan had recorded a comment on one of my articles.? The article in question turned out to be “Echoes of Dagestan,” the article on the Russian former spy, Alexander Litvinenko, who recently died of Polonium-210 poisoning.? The commenter turns out to be a man by the name of Jeff Jones.

But what is really amazing and what has me so excited is that Jeff Jones is a professor of Russian History at UNC-Greensboro.? How do ya like them apples? Hee!? So, despite having missed a good bit of info which Jeff hipped me to, it seems that the article is relatively on-target.? As much as I tried to maintain some integrity by cross-referencing the facts presented by the various sources, this still could have gone quite differently.

So, yeah.? I’m proud.

OK, forgive me, but I’m going to gush like a school girl for a minute.

More than ten years ago, my friend Noel and I jumped out of the back of the band’s tour van at the onramp to route 87 at about 3 in the morning on August 13th, 1994. The band was on it’s way back to Rochester from a gig at “Cahoots,” a strange little bar/restaurant in Poughkipsee, NY. Come hell or high-water, Noel and I were on our way to Woodstock ‘94.

We hitchhiked our way there, with whatever we brought with us to the gig (most of which was, in my case at least, lamentably useless) and a stolen bottle of Jack Daniels from the bar (word to the wise: always pay the band). We got picked up by an old hippie that had been at the original Woodstock and never left. She and her girlfriend ran a flower delivery service, if you can believe it. It was my first experience hitchhiking, my really first huge festival concert. There are many, many more stories to be told from that weekend.

But the most life-changing experience for me was on Saturday morning after Joe Cocker’s somewhat boring performance, when Blind Melon took to the stage. Like most people, I’d heard “No Rain” entirely too many times, and had long-since chalked them up to another wussie band like Collective Soul. Just another ugly blip on what was an otherwise astonishing year for new music. When Shannon Hoon pranced out front in a white dress, yellow sneakers and his hair in barettes, I had little doubt that I’d misinterpreted the signs. Still, with 350,000 people in attendance, our spot might well have been the best we could have hoped for, and moving away from the stage wasn’t going to make things any easier, so we stayed.

Then they played 2×4 and from that point on, I was one of the biggest Blind Melon fans around. Noel shared my passion for the band, and so did my friend Lee. We have collected bootlegs, rareties and anything else we could get our hands on for years after the fact.

But of all our friends, only Noel and I ever got to see them live. It was a rare, fleeting moment for a couple of stoners to spend some time with an incredibly underrated band. Apparently, they played the former “Blind Melon’s” nightclub in Buffalo, but that was before we knew about them. Lee and I got the new album, Soup, as soon as it came out and listened to every single track three times that night. What an amazing, radical departure it was from the first album. Gone were the pseudo-Tesla sounds, and into that void poured a more focused yet more adventurous sound with the heart beat of New Orleans pumping through the whole thing.

Then came the moment when, ironically outside of Tippy Tina’s in New Orleans, Shannon Hoon died and the Blind Melon world went dark.

Other bands with the guys from the Melons happened, Extra Virgin, Luma, Unified Theory. In the meanwhile, the fans you might have expected to have moved on have done nothing of the sort. No one has forgotten anything. Everybody is still waiting, still watching, still holding candle-lit vigils for Shannon Hoon. In fact, there are 10,000+ fans on Blind Melon’s MySpace page, a site that only got started ten years after Shannon’s death. There is also a very active forum discussing the band and a tribute album.

And now, it appears, there is a new singer and a new album due out soon. There is a new video of the band playing one of the new tracks, as well. Certainly, the vocals are quite a departure from Shannon’s, though I suspect that is a good thing, creatively speaking. But there is much in the music that sounds just like the good old days, and I cannot wait to see where they go from here.

Oh, yes. I will see them live. Again.

OK, it’s a wee-bit early, I know.? Still, who’s going to be reading blogs on Christmas day?? Hopefully, nobody.? Go spend time with your family.

So, here’s a little something I whipped up for the holiday a few years ago.? Yes, it’s another flash animation.? One of these days, I’ll get good with the real Macromedia stuff and quit playing around with Swish!

Merry Christmas from me and Frank Sinatra!!? (The wife is distantly related to him, doncha know!)

Just browsing through the last few headlines.  Oh, my.  Time for bed.

YouTube - Sleepy Spudgy

www.spudgy.com Spudgy falls asleep while he’s sitting up. He is a 10 year old pure bred Pomeranian, and also blows bubbles out his nose. To see more of Spudgy go to www.spudgy.com

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In all the futile talk about the Iraq War going on right now, with all the Conservatives retreating into intellectual hiding holes and Democrats wring their hands, it’s just nice to hear about a well-negotiated peace accord.  Not relevant, really, but nice, nonetheless.  Take a step back thirteen years:

BBC ON THIS DAY | 15 | 1993: Anglo-Irish pact paves way for peace

After nearly two years’ negotiation the two leaders, John Major and Albert Reynolds, today stood united on the steps of 10 Downing Street.

The nine-point document gives the IRA and Loyalist paramilitaries the opportunity to take part in negotiations for peace if they first agree to observe a three-month ceasefire.

Reaction has been mixed even though this is the furthest the British Government has ever moved towards the possibility of a united Ireland.

Technorati Tags: History, Peace

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I was watching The Mclaughlin Group this evening, and easily the most interesting moment of the night was when the English conservative (whose name escapes me at the moment) dared to insinuate that Christmas had a Pagan origin.

You should have seen Tony Blankely jump out of his skin to try out the latest factoid from The War on Christmas: that the (presumptively pagan) Romans created an imperially-recognized Winter Solstice festival shortly *after* the Christians began celebrating Christmas on December 25th, therefore, the Christians are the originators of the tradition and all assertions to the contrary are dirty, dirty, filthy little lies. I made that last bit up.

In any event, I couldn’t stop giggling at the assumtion, even if the limited set of facts presented are true. First of all, the Romans were by that point in history fond of making holidays for damned-near anything. That one of those happened to coincide with the solstice is hardly relevant. But far more importantly, there are literally untold thousands of pagan cultures that exist or have existed in human cultures, of which the Romans are but one. All of those that I am familiar with have solstice celebrations. This includes the Inca, whom hardly had a stake in Christian/Roman affairs at the time Tony’s research highlights.

Sorry, dude. No. “Wrong!!!! Next question. . . .”

Well, could there possibly be anything deader than the Baker/Hamilton Report, these days?  In fact, the funny thing is: things in Washington are so boring during this post-election/mid-holiday season, the only thing there is of interest to talk about is the heaving lump on the floor that is the BHCR.  (I’m going to coin that entirely-useless acronym now.  Who’s going to stop me?  Who really cares?)

The former Knight-Ridder has some peek-sees into the new plan that Bush will unveil after the holidays, and basically, he plans to ignore the commission’s reports altogether.  JMM has some insightful and only moderately snarky comments on the article which are definitely worth reading.  Oh, Bushie wants to step up training of Iraqi forces, but as McClatchy gently reminds all of us:

McClatchy Washington Bureau | 12/14/2006 | Bush weighing deeper commitment in Iraq, officials say

Only a year ago, on Nov. 30, 2005, Bush, under pressure to show progress, unveiled a “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.” Then, as now, he pledged to focus on training Iraq’s security forces.

Oops.  That old thing, again.  Well, let’s set aside all the other concerns for now, and just focus on this one issue: training up the troops.

The bigger problem is that even if they train enough troops to fight a battle, they’re not equipping them and they’re not building the infrastructure.  An army is not simply men with guns and rockets.  It’s also an entire mobile infrastructure of food, water, clothing, shelter, medicine and countless other services which are required.  And that’s just the human element.  There’s an entire Army Corps of Engineers dedicated to making things like bridges and such happen in a war zone (and they make them disappear, too), not to mention the fact that modern military machines rely on telecommunications infrastructure that needs to be setup and maintained.  Ask General “Fightin’ Joe” Hooker about what it’s like to string telegraph lines around Chancellorsville, if you want to get a good sense of what it is to run an army.

Without the tools to provide troops the things they need on the field, you don’t have an army.  You have a bunch of dudes with guns and rockets.  Right now, most of the logistical heavy-lifting is being done by American servicemen.  Until this extremely critical need is met ~ and there does not seem to be any indication that anyone’s all that serious about meeting it ~ the rest is just details.

Technorati Tags: Iraq, ISG, Baker, Bush

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There are so many reasons to read NYCO’s blog, but every once in a while, she really surprises you with her gift for metaphor.  Below, she discusses the curious divisions within the American public on the Iraq War:

NYCO?s Blog ? Origin of the species

What?s worse is that there isn?t even any real partisan divide on it ? just lumps of people here and there who disagree with other lumps of people. America is beginning to resemble not so much a house divided but a poorly stirred bowl of lumpy oatmeal that can?t stick together. No one is eating it (if foreign citizen opinion polls about the U.S. are to be believed) and it?s growing cold. And what could be more irrelevant than cold cereal?

It is an interesting (if cinnamon flavoured) observation.  She is right at least in saying that the American people no longer appear to be uniformly divided by “Red and Blue” partisan lines, though I don’t know that the mess is as universal as she makes it out to be.

Really, I would say that the American political dialogue which has been so carefully wrought by so many Conservative think tanks over so many decades has just flat-out hit a wall, and the rest of us don’t really know what to do when they’re not bitching at us.  Whatever you might think of Conservatives, they have been carefully, patiently planning and working towards the day when they would have a majority in Congress and the White House at the same time.  I don’t think they expected to have hired a dolt for a president who would turn just about their every single aspiration into a sad farce once they got what they wanted.

So now, you have Joe Scarborough doing segments entitled “Holly-Weird,” utterly lost without an enemy to scorn, without cronies he can endorse, without vision of any kind.  In case of emergency, blame Hollywood.  Conservatives cannot even garner the support of the voters they once thought were their eternal friends (the poor, silly fools!), and they don’t have anything to talk about.

The net affect is that cold-oatmeal feeling NYCO is getting.  The feeling that everything’s just sloshing together in one barely-differentiated soup.  Democrats have three different visions of where to go from here in Iraq, Republicans have none.  The Dems’ only really strong statement so far has been on minimum wage.  Not for Iraqis, for us.

But at the risk of sounding patronizing, that’s life, man.  It’s got lots of angles.  We’ve been under the spell for the past six years of a “perfect Republican storm,” where the Republicans had but one message and anyone who disagreed with the Party Bosses was crucified.  Those of us on the Left have decried the Republican policies ~ and having already succumed succumbed to the biggest part of their game ~ insisted on offering but one contrary idea.

Situations like Iraq are going to require a lot more than one simple solution.  This time, all options really do need to be put on the table.  And used.  The whole problem is that Bush and his cronies have insisted on viewing the situation in entirely too-narrow a viewpoint with no contingency plans and no subtlety.

Frankly, a confusing reality is just what the American public needs right now, even if its the last thing we all want.

Technorati Tags: Iraq, Democrats, Politics

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