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Beige Programming Ensemble at the Whitney; The Slowes
I missed Cory & Jamie Arcangel and the Beige crew at the Whitney last night because I had to w_rk, but fortunately Thickeye is on it with an excellent report. I like his description of the line of kids wrapped around the block for free admission night, soon to be groping in the darkened video rooms, contrasted with the image of middle age people sitting at tables in the downstairs dining room, politely listening to the Beige-rs explaining their new 8-bit iPod concept.
Beige has a music download page that I highly recommend, consisting of their vinyl releases in mp3 format. Cory also recorded several songs as The Slowes, which I am pleased to offer here. The melodies are faux-dumb and very catchy. I say faux-dumb because they're actually fairly ambitious in terms of musical reach--a lot of pop music history is integrated in them (lounge, 60s-electronica, progrock, Pink Floyd...). The lo fi-ness keeps the homages from being overt or too reverent. Here's how Cory explains them in an email (edited slightly):
yeah,...the slowes is just me. most of the melodies were written by a melody writing program i wrote called "Rudy Tardy Generator Pro"..it was a cgi script. every time you went to its web page, it generated a new song and melodies (in the slowes style, which is lotsa open roller rink kinda chords) so....... i would have the program spit out 10 melodies...i would then pick the best few, turn them into a song, and go into my bedroom and record them. i used an organ, atari, drums, + guitar////The Slowes downloads:the whole myth of the slowes that I made up was that it was this guy who sat in his basement all day and worked on his atari. his name was Rudy Tardy. This was his band. For a few years, i used Rudy Tardy to sign all my art projects...[Beige recording artist] Paul [B. Davis] to this day still Dj's under the name DJ Rudy.
"Fat Bits" [.mp3 - 1.33MB]
"Starship Izod" [.mp3 - 4.12MB]
"The Anthem" [.mp3 - 2.29MB]
"Hooked on a New Thing" (cover of 3Nuff Z'Nuff) [.mp3 - 5.2MB]
Suite: All Four Songs Above [.mp3 - 13.14MB]
Wow. The March 14 Mercury News story about the Fresno polygamist child murder that Atrios originally linked to has been extensively rewritten (see my previous post about all this). I went back to look at it because it described policemen carrying dead children out of the house and weeping, and quoted a police chief holding back tears, saying "this sort of thing doesn't happen in Fresno" or the like, and was very slim on details of what actually happened. The police reactions seemed pretty over-the-top (even for such a tragic crime) and I wanted to reread the account, in light of allegations that the cops had negligently given Wesson time to go into the back of the house and shoot the children while the gendarmes stood on his doorstep, ignoring the pleadings of relatives who knew what Wesson was capable of. Well, all that detail about the crying cops is gone from the story, sucked down the memory hole, and Fresno Police Chief is suddenly dry-eyed, in control, and quoted as saying "what happened at the house is under the investigation." So much for an independent press--obviously this story was rewritten to placate the authorities. Nowadays you have to save every story you read to your hard drive. (A copy of the rewritten story is here.)
UPDATE: It looks like the article was rewritten several times after publication. Mark found another version, posted in the comments.
UPDATE 2: Mark found the "crying, child-carrying cops" version I read, slightly differently worded, on the Mercury News website, as an AP story dated March 13, under a different byline. So it's not down the memory hole (yet). I really do wonder why the article was rewritten several times, omitting more and more detail each time about the emotional state of the cops.
So far, Atrios called it correctly when he predicted, on March 14, that "the horrible case in Fresno, where a man...allegedly slaughtered his 7 children, [will get] about 1/50th of the media coverage that the Andrea Yates case did." Andrea Yates, you will recall, had a history of depression and drowned her five kids; she's now doing prison time while her fundamentalist Christian husband has remarried. Alleged cult weirdo and woman-controller Marcus Wesson has been charged by the Fresno police with shooting his seven kids and two grandkids and stacking their bodies in the back of his house, which had ten coffins in it; he is believed to have fathered the grandkids by impregnating two of the now-deceased children. Sure enough, it looks like the latter is being treated as "local news" and we won't be hearing much more about it. Atrios doesn't spell out why he predicted what he did, so please allow me to state the obvious: Wesson is a man and has the right to sire as many children as he pleases and then destroy them at his whim, while Yates is a woman and has no greater duty than the sacred trust of child-rearing. The media knows this; everybody knows this. That monster, how could she? I'm getting all upset just thinking about her case again.
UPDATE: As Barry mentions in his comment, Wesson is black and Yates is white, which may also have something to do with the disparity in coverage. A Seventh Day Adventist, Wesson lived in a reasonably affluent neighborhood but no one ever really asked what he and all those women dressed in black were doing with the schoolbus parked in the driveway (transporting coffins, among other things). Control freak to the core, he allegedly murdered the children when he became convinced the authorities might take them away from him. Hardly any ingredients of a national story here.
UPDATE 2: The story has picked up unexpected juice with the revelation that the Fresno police may have been cooling their heels at Wesson's front door while Wesson went into the back of the house and shot the children. "Fresno's police chief acknowledged Wednesday that his department is looking into whether Marcus Wesson fatally shot nine of his children while police waited outside his house, despite frantic pleas from relatives to intervene." (CNN). The google count on "Marcus Wesson" jumped from 9000 to 11,000 since this morning.
UPDATE 3: The newspaper account of the Wesson arrest was rewritten several times after publication. More here.