At the risk of looking like a nut, I just sent the following e-mail to Dade County’s crime lab: Continue reading
Author Archives: christofpierson
tUnE-yArDs at Terminal 5
Last Friday night, with special guests Delicate Steve and (all the way from London) Micachu and the Shapes.
It was, as expected, an extraordinary evening of far-out African-inflected and futuristic pop/dance/rock music. Great musicianship all around, as this clip of the tUnE-yArDs’ “Bizness” (one of a long series of highlights) only hints at. (I was not the photographer. I was just somewhere between the camera and the Merrill Garbus.) Continue reading
Miami “Zombie”: “Bath Salts” or Rabies….or What?
More information about Rudy Eugene, the man who was killed while “eating” three-quarters of the face of Ronald Poppo in Miami last week. His family and friends, while acknowledging he smoked marijuana, had mental health issues and had occasional run-ins with the law (what black man in America has not had those run-ins?), say he was trying to quit weed and was an avid student of the Bible. His mother says she thinks he may have been drugged and dropped off on the causeway where he committed the crime; his girlfriend reportedly blames a voodoo hex.
While police still seem to have settled on the hypothesis that Eugene’s bizarre behavior was the result of his taking the notorious drug du jour “bath salts,” they apparently have no evidence that he ever took any. His girlfriend has even said he wasn’t intetrested in drugs other than marijuana:
The man being depicted by the media as a “face eater” or a “monster” is not the man she knew, she said. He smoked marijuana often, though had recently said he wanted to quit, but he didn’t use stronger recreational drugs and even refused to take over-the-counter medication for simple ailments like headaches, she said. He was sweet and well-mannered, she said.
Of course, Eugene may have successfully hidden a secret drug habit from her, and that may prove to explain his behavior on the causeway. But unless the police are withholding privileged information until the toxicology reports on Eugene’s body come back in a few weeks, the bad drug hypothesis seems no stronger than the one I discussed here.
I only hope the Miami toxicologist intends to eliminate the possibility of rabies as well as “bath salts.”
Maybe Some Businesses Do Need a Nanny
I’m going to take a contrarian position from the Twittersphere in its reaction to news that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (who, I tend to agree, is an annoying nudge who has overstayed his welcome) intends to ban supersizes of sugary softdrinks from certain purveyors Continue reading
Was Miami’s “Zombie” Attack a Case of Rabies?
You’ve probably heard by now about the case of the naked man “eating” the face of a victim on a busy Causeway in downtown Miami. If not, here (if you aren’t too squeamish) is the story. Continue reading
Assange Grills #Occupy
Julian Assange chats (sometimes pointedly) with leaders prominent members of the #Occupy movement from New York and London, including David Graeber, Alexa O’Brien of US Day of Rage and Aaron Peters. Does Assange get Occupy? Not fully, which leads to some interesting exchanges, particularly around the subject of force and violence from without and within the movement. These are amazingly intelligent people all around, which makes for occasionally abstruse dialogue. But it’s very much worth sticking with to the end. Uncommon television. Lots and lots of food for thought.
PS: I want to point out a startling (on first hearing, but not on second thought) revelation from David Graeber during the discussion in the video’s late portion about how #occupy deals with disruptors that the NYPD “allegedly” sent newly released prisoners by the busload to Zuccotti Park last fall, telling them that there was free food and shelter available. As Graeber says earlier in the program, the United States (and its hired goons) do not act well to the threat of democracy breaking out all over.
“The Shock Doctrine” in Easily Chewable Form
The Shock Doctrine – Naomi Klein from Vj Ultra on Vimeo.
Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine is one of the most important books of the young 21st century and will likely remain so as it ages. I’ve mentioned it before and will probably have call to mention it again and again. As a public service, I’m making this film version available here for anyone who doesn’t have the time/patience/whatever to read the book. I hope it will convince you to make a plan to read the whole work.]
The Profound Beauty of Micachu and The Shapes
Here’s a new band on me: Micachu and The Shapes (with multi-instrumentalist Mica Levi, keyboardist Raisa Khan and drummer Marc Pell) have been playing and recording highly idiosyncratic pop music since 2008. I’m glad to say I’ll be seeing them with another eccentric pop band I’ve written about, tUnE-yArDs featuring Merrill Garbus, as well as Delicate Steve, about whom I know almost nothing. Of course tUnE-yArDs is my main reason for going to the show (June 1st at Terminal 5 in New York City), but researching the other bands on YouTube, I discovered this is promising to be an extraordinary evening. Continue reading
Breast Practices
I’ve been drawn into one of those sensational controversies of the moment caused by a magazine cover. To whit, this one:
I admit my buttons got pushed, but maybe not in the way Time was expecting. Continue reading
Pop Croons
I’ve been listening to a lot of Iggy Pop and the Stooges on my iPhone lately and this has reconfirmed for me that “Search and Destroy” from 1973’s Raw Power is at the very apex of great rock and roll songs. The lyrics (“I’m a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm/ I’m a runaway son of the nuclear A-bomb”) are pure poetry. I know that rock critics who say such things sound pretentious. Believe me, I know! But “Search and Destroy” is a morbidly beautiful little poem about the violence of lust, made darker and more desperate with its imagery borrowed from the Vietnam war. The sophisticated form, with its internal rhymes within the rhyming lines, is masterful. I think of Iggy in this period as continuously debauched; I don’t know if it’s true when he wrote. Whatever state he was in, this is inspired, yes, but also intensely focused–disciplined, even–poetry writing. Put together with the menacing music and performance of that music by the band, this is rock and roll of a very high order.
I bring up Iggy today because of this news report from Reuters about his new digital-release-only album Apres, comprised of old standards originally by Frank Sinatra, Serge Gainsbourg and Edith Piaf, for example. He had to go to Paris, he says, where he recorded his last album Préliminaires (2009), a collection of arty songs inspired by a novel of French enfant terrible Michel Houellebecq, because his American label (Virgin has produced his most recent titles) doesn’t know what to do with a crooning Iggy. “The American company would have preferred I do a rock album with popular punks,” Pop tells a news conference, presumably meaning bands like Green Day and Blink-182. Pop’s last rock and roll album, Skull Ring (2003), used just such a star-studded backing lineup.
Tragic Farce 