J Tillman - Year In The Kingdom J Tillman Tour Dates 11/10/09 Pike Room  Pontiac, MI 11/11/09 Horseshoe* Toronto, ON 11/12/09 Motore* Montreal, QC 11/13/09 Space* Portland, ME 11/15/09 Middle East* Cambridge, MA 11/16/09 Bell House Brooklyn, NY 11/17/09 First Unitarian* Phila, PA 11/18/09 9:30 Club* Washington, DC 11/19/09 UVA Chapel Charlottesville, VA 11/20/09 Grey Eagle* Asheville, NC 11/21/09 Earl* Atlanta, GA 11/23/09  Bottletree* Birmingham, AL 11/24/09 One Eyed Jacks NOrleans, LA 11/26/09 Walter’s* Houston, TX 11/27/09 Mohawk* Austin, TX 11/30/09 Modified Phoenix, AZ 12/01/09 Casbah San Diego, CA 12/02/09 Troubadour* Los Angeles, CA 12/04/09 Great American Music* SF, CA 12/11/09 "The Crocodile"* Seattle, WA 12/12/09 Mississippi Studios, OR with PGM Read More Fleet Foxes http://weheartmus... Fleet Foxes are a five-piece Seattle-based band signed to Sub Pop and Bella Union. The band came ...

J. Tillman @ The Music Box Theatre, Minneapolis, MN 11.6.09
+ abridged album review

J Tillman ♥ Music Box

Despite his minor fame with unpopular, critically-ignored Fleet Foxes, Josh Tillman has been active in the music scene since 2004.  This past September he released Year in the Kingdom, a 9-track odyssey through stoic mountain towns by way of moderate folk sensitivity.  Merely 28, Tillman evokes an image of timeless worldly servitude that befits his preferred musical genre but also confuses.  He acts the part in person—bearded, casually nondescript, a man of few words; yet once he hits that first note, it’s obvious there’s something judicious beneath the weathered layers.  For one, the quality of his voice is beautiful.  There is simply no masculine way to describe it.  The probability that Tillman drinks and indulges like a big boy is high, but you wouldn’t know by listening to him sing.  Perhaps the impressive facial shrub is actually a clever disguise, masking a sweet, even-tempered fellow who rescues kitties and bakes things for charity.  Doubtful, but my point being Tillman’s ambiguity—it’s equally believable that he wandered into town from the wide blue yonder as it is that he stumbled on stage from the local, artist-packed watering hole.

Year in the Kingdom remembers a simpler era that Tillman was not alive to experience.  Softer tracks cite 60s folk influences like Joni Mitchell, had Mitchell penned her songs in a humble log cabin, without basic comforts save for canned beans and a faithful canine companion.  The sparse “Age of Man” is a few twangs/few stringed instruments short of Americana territory, while “Though I Have Wronged You” reminds us that Tillman isn’t seriously concerned by FF comparisons.  At times matter-of-factly somber (“There is No Good in Me”), the album lulls its listeners into a false feeling of peace (albeit reflective, disquieting peace) that does not prepare the ears for the sheer force of Tillman’s live rocking.

Kingdom-the-album clashed awesomely with Friday night’s show at the Music Box Theatre in Minneapolis.  I now have a physical point of reference for the expression “it blew my mind,” as I’m pretty sure I lost a piece of my skull when Tillman blew my mind.  Similar to the structure of the studio tracks—gentle start, build-up, full instrumental progression—the show began as one would expect had they listened to Kingdom:  Tillman + band = traditional 3-dimensional engagement.  Then, maybe a third of the way into the set, all hell broke loose.  Cue roar of full instrumental capacity, skin-tingling whine of amped slide guitar, psychedelic transformation, and crazy apeshit thrashing.  On top of everything unholy, we, the audience, bore witness to grown men playing plastic recorders and finger cymbals. Surely I wasn’t the only one to lose some head mass by the end of the night.

Cerebral hemorrhage notwithstanding, strong tracks like “Though I Have Wronged You” sounded ridiculously swollen with intensity and deliberate flair.  Not showy, per se; rather, phrenic but perverted by foggy invention.  It was like walking into the Louvre for the first time—extraordinary but strangely unfocused, as if the senses were forced into overdrive.  Had I lapped a taste of Tillman’s sweat*, the experience would’ve been complete.  Unfortunately, there was no exchange of bodily fluids; there wasn’t even an encore (a mumbled “thanks” and the musicians made their hasty exit).  It didn’t matter.  How do you follow an act like yourself?

J Tillman ♥ Music Box, Minneapolis (11/06/09)

A few random thoughts without homes:  in high school, Tillman visited Crown, a conservative Christian college in St. Bonifacius, MN; Miracle Whip is the default condiment of Fargo, ND, this according to the band; Josh’s younger brother, Zach, opened the show and also played bass for the elder Tillman’s set.

J. Tillman is currently on tour in support of Year in the Kingdom.  Upcoming shows include stops in Chicago and New York.  For more information or to listen to select tracks, visit his Myspace at http://www.myspace.com/jtillman. 

* I’m not a creeper, promise.

 11/09/2009 03:26:24 ♥ lara (/lara206.vox.com) ♥ weheartmusic.com ♥ myspace.com/jtillman

http://www.crikey.com.au/

5 . Rundle: a win to Obama, but the Senate battle awaits

Guy Rundle writes:

President Obama has won a first, though hardly decisive, victory in the health care campaign, with the passage of HR 3200, the Affordable Health Care Act 2009, through the US House of Representatives.

Passage of the bill is the first stage in reforming the US non-health care system. Importantly, it contains the all-important "public option" -- a state-owned health insurer which can offer coverage at lower rates than the private carriers, thus forcing their exorbitant premiums down.

Other provisions within the 2000-page bill include a ban on excluding people with pre-existing conditions from health insurance, new controls on provider (ie doctor and hospital) charges, huge funds for integrating and computerising health care records across the country, and much more.

The bill seeks to limit the ballooning cost of health care by making cutbacks in "Medicare" -- the open-ended 65+ public care which half of the "Obamahitler" protestors are covered under -- and bringing in some controls on the ludicrous amounts big Pharma can charge the government for drugs.

However the bill only just squeaked through the House, with a majority of 5.39 Democrats voted against it, and only 1 Republican -- a Vietnamese-American from Louisiana, pretty much the unhealthiest state in the Union -- voted for it.

While getting any sort of a majority is seen as a triumph for speaker Nancy Pelosi -- the vote occurred on Saturday night after a week of near round-the-clock arm twisting -- there were serious misgivings about some of the deals that had to be made.

One in particular, which excluded abortion from public insurance or from any subsidies to private insurance, was an exceptionally bitter pill. Since non-emergency abortion is scarcely available under public provision currently, the amendment does not make coverage any worse, but it now makes termination an even more "special" case than hitherto.

Others are whackier still -- an amendment (supported by Republican Orrin Hatch and previously by the late Ted Kennedy, for negotiating purposes) that allows public funding for spiritual healing -- ie Christian Science intercessionary prayer at $20 a pop.

Mad stuff, but the bill is through, and as Mark Steyn notes -- ruefully -- that's the important thing. To get something passed in the House is further than Bill and Hillary Clinton's 1993 bill got.

Now however, there's the Senate. Pelosi had about 38 Democrats she could lose (with a 77-seat House majority), and some of them were released from the whip, so that their Big Insurance backers can be assured they got their moneys worth, but the Senate is on a knife-edge.

Ted Kennedy hasn't been replaced yet, and slimy Joe Lieberman, who usually votes with the Dems on social issues, has indicated he won't support a bill with a public option in it. He won't even support "cloture", the vote that prevents a filibuster, and allows the bill to go to a simple majority vote.

That leaves the Democrats with, at most, 58-41, against a filibuster, and needing a 60-40 split. Their best bet is to convince Maine's moderate Republican senator Olympia Snowe over, and one or two others from godknowswhere.

But that presumes a 100% Democratic whip, and that looks unlikely, with a half-dozen "blue dog" Democrats having already vowed to vote against a public option.

Should they be able to persuade the Blue Dogs to vote for cloture, and then against the bill, the bill will come to a majority vote and pass around 53-46, and the Blue Dogs' blushes will be spared.

But if they can't get them to yes on that, the Democratic leadership has another option, which is to make them perform an actual filibuster.

Currently, all you have to do to filibuster -- ie to prevent the bill from coming to a majority vote -- is for 41 senators to indicate that they would filibuster it if required.

That removed the need for senators to stay on their feet reading from cookbooks, Dickens, etc, with a series of explicit rules governing their behaviour (no leaning on surfaces, no physical support by other senators, no toilet breaks).

The automatic filibuster dramatically changed the nature of American governance, but by stealth -- the Senate became a de facto supermajority chamber, an inherently conservatising option.

However, at any time, by a simple majority vote, the automatic filibuster can be removed -- and the minority opposition would have to talk the bill out to the end of the current Senate session.

The advantage of this is that the US public would see the filibuster for what it is (the word comes from a dutch word for pirate or 'freebooter'), a mad obstruction tactic being executed by people desperate to hold back change.

Will the Dems go there? Or will they observe what has become a sort of collective Senate alignment against the House - that it is in the interest of all Senators to keep the automatic filibuster, and hence their vastly increased power within the bicamera.

The look-out is that they won't even let the bill come to the floor before the Senate breaks for 'the holidays', as the Christmas season is very multiculturally called. This will allow the Democratic leadership to craft a complex "trigger option" -- one where there is no public option immediately and lowcost health care is provided by non-profit insurance co-operatives effectively, big insurers pool resources to offer more basic coverage at cheaper prices, on a sliding scale that ensures near universal coverage of some description.

The problem with co-ops is that they would have no power to affect the prices health insurers set for their regular premiums so individuals and businesses continue to pay a mozza for cover. Worse, as Alexander Cockburn pointed out in Counterpunch, this would be combined with a mandating system, similar to car insurance, where you would be required to have health insurance -- effectively the state would be holding the gun while Big Insurance picks your pocket. Only in America.

The trigger option would allow for a rollout of a public option if, after three-five years, average premiums had not come down to set levels. Since they wouldn't, this is a public option by stealth. It would allow Republican Senators Snowe and Collins from Maine to support it, and one or two others, while able to save face with their constituents and soft-money corporate donors.

Should that fail, there is a final option, which is to abandon HR 3200, and roll it into the 2010 budget bill as a series of provisions -- it is then subject to a "reconciliation" vote, which is a straight majority in both houses, and guaranteed to pass. The White House could then argue that the will of the people was expressed in the HR 3200 and the Senate obstructed it -- reconciliation is then in the spirit of the original vote. Indeed, that may be the overall game plan.

Whatever the case, HR3200 is an enormous victory, the first serious universal health care bill to get through a House of Congress ever. The Senate will be tough, if not insurmountable, but this has months to run. Quite aside from the manifold improvements any sort of serious bill will offer in American life, it will give Obama a victory he can go back to his base with, and fire them up anew for the Herculean labour of making change in America.

Originally published at sixhours.net. You can comment here or there.

Elspeth Margaret Moore Dec. 20, 2008 @ 7:01 a.m. 7 lbs, 13 oz | 21.5 inches

More to follow when I have a chance to type with both hands.  :)

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/rupert-cornwell/rupert-cornwell-why-cant-the-us-learn-to-love-its-government-1816868.html

Rupert Cornwell: Why can't the US learn to love its government?

Out of America: Suspicion of rulers dates to the founding of the nation – and even Obama is unlikely to change that

The passions the measure has generated among its Republican opponents have been remarkable. One Republican Congresswoman has declared that health reform was a greater threat to America than Osama bin Laden and global terrorism, while John Boehner, the party's leader in the House, urged the protesters to join Republicans in "defending our freedom".

A neutral observer would not know whether to laugh or cry at this so-called "Super Bowl of Freedom", featuring inter alia a giant banner describing the proposals as "National Socialist Healthcare, Dachau, Germany, 1945". Yes, the tea-party movement, currently touring the country, contains more than its share of cranks and nutters. But the fringes, too, can express political truths. This particular truth is that Americans just can't bring themselves to love government.

When President Barack Obama came to power, the stage seemed set for government activism unmatched in decades. The parallels with the early 1930s were palpable. Talk of a second Great Depression was everywhere, economists were urging a "new New Deal", Franklin Roosevelt was suddenly back in fashion. Nine months on, however, the urgency seems to have vanished. And why this cooling of reformist ardour? True, the economy has improved (though not by much, as evidenced by the news that unemployment last month rose to 10.2 per cent, the highest level in a quarter of a century.) The huge deficits being run up by Washington are also legitimate cause for concern. A more important reason though is America's ancestral suspicion of government.

The governors' elections in New Jersey and Virginia last week, in which Mr Obama's Democrats were soundly defeated, were largely local affairs. But in so far as they sent a message to the party that controls the White House and both chambers of Congress, the message was plain: slow down, the voters said, don't force change down the people's throats. With a young and charismatic President who won power by promising change, it's easy to forget that the US is a conservative country. Mr Obama triumphed in 2008 not by harnessing a vast tide of liberalism, but by persuading the wavering centre that he was a better bet than another four years of discredited Republican policies. In Virginia and New Jersey, exit polls showed, the centrists (moderates, independents, call them what you will) changed their minds and decided to put on the brakes.

A fascinating Gallup survey last month found that despite the Democrats' victories in 2006 and 2008, fully 40 per cent of Americans, more than ever, describe themselves as conservative, while 36 per cent call themselves moderates. Only 20 per cent are avowed liberals. It's not a question of government having failed the country. It's just that Americans aren't comfortable with the beast when its role, as now, threatens to expand – even when the deficiencies of the unfettered free market have never been more glaring.

Mr Obama secured his record-breaking $787bn stimulus package last February, albeit with virtually no Republican support. But that might be it. Yes, the House will probably pass a version of healthcare reform, but the measure could yet founder in the Senate, where party discipline is weaker, and a 60 per cent majority is required to pass anything of significance. If it does fail, it will basically be for fear that the reform amounts to a "government takeover of healthcare". The most contentious part of the bill is the "public option" – whereby a publicly financed scheme would be set up to provide some competition to rapacious private insurers. But that option now hardly dares speak its name. Leading Democrats prefer to speak of a "consumer option".

And health care is but one of three massive public policy issues on the table, beside a green energy programme to combat climate change, and regulation of the financial markets, aimed at preventing a repeat of last year's crisis. But there's no guarantee any of them will get through. For Europeans, all three would be no-brainers: assured health coverage for all (or rather almost all), steps to reduce both pollution and imports of costly foreign oil, and curbs on the excesses of Wall Street. Not so in the US – because each implies a substantial increase in the role of government.

And it has been ever thus. Suspicion of government is as old as the Republic. The movement that turned up on Capitol Hill again last week takes its name, of course, from the Boston Tea Party of 1773. Americans like to see their War of Independence as a revolution against government – back then the far-away government in London that taxed the colonies without allowing them representation – and the habit has never died.

These days, one thing unites every presidential candidate: a readiness to denounce the federal government in Washington and all its works. That the candidate in question might have made a long and comfortable career in that den of corruption and iniquity makes not a scrap of difference. Usually – as now – the sentiment works to the advantage of Republicans, but not always. Sometimes, the beneficiary can be a genuine outsider like the eccentric Texan businessman Ross Perot, who in 1992 came closer to winning the White House than any independent in 80 years. Sometimes it takes on the hyperbolic aspect of the tea-party crowd, and last summer's raucous town-hall protests against health reform. And on occasion it spills over into tragedy, into the raw hatred of Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the federal government building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people.

No one is more aware of how distrust of government is part of America's collective political DNA than Mr Obama. Whether he can tame it is another matter.

Originally published at sixhours.net. You can comment here or there.

But then I'm not sure I want to get so involved... I have a tendency to lose interest when a project takes too long to complete. I may scrap this as a Web layout altogether and just make it into a print for the shop. Or maybe I'll do both! Either way, it's fun thinking up all the little bits and pieces that bring the doodle together (I'm particularly enamored with the mini clothesline for some reason) and watching each house grow into its unique personality.

(Click for a larger version!)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/health/policy/08health.html?th=&adxnnl=1&emc=th&adxnnlx=1257678374-pU9Zt054Kuxyn0nfc813hw

Sweeping Health Care Plan Passes House

Originally published at sixhours.net. You can comment here or there.

I'll be the first to admit I've been in a rut, and I know it's because I've defined my creative life by my photography, but photography isn't doing it for me lately (there's also that pesky new-baby-itis problem, but I'm recovering).  When I allowed myself to apply my creative energy to other tasks, I found I had a lot of ideas and more motivation to work on them.

So now I have a list of projects that should keep me busy for a while. I'm already working on a new look for Calobee Doodles which will hopefully be up soon. Another thing I've been meaning to do for a few months is doodle a desktop calendar/wallpaper for each month... and now is the perfect time to start those for the new year. In the same vein, I may open a new "downloads" section on Calobee Doodles. The problem is I'm always working on someone else's projects and I don't make enough time for my own (tsk tsk!)

I'm also working on a "bucket list," a la Mighty Girl, and that has me thinking about the big picture--the things I'd like to do that might seem too big or too scary to accomplish at first glance.  One thing I'd love to do is write and illustrate (and maybe publish?) a children's book. I've been thinking about that since Elspeth was born.  Even if no one else ever read it, I'd love to make something for her to enjoy when she's older.

And before I begin let me qualify my thoughts as I am a Cancerian and emotionally-driven person who cries when she's happy, cries when she's said and many times feels first and thinks second.

Don't make sensitivity a weapon.

I'm all for explaining to people that you may potentially be thin-skinned and making requests to consider your heart before entering into a potentially combustible dialogue. At all times we should take into consideration how our thoughts and expressions of them may make others feel. A defensive maneuver will almost always beget a defensive maneuver. It's the fundamental rule to conflict. You hit me, it hurts. I hit back, you hurt and the dance escalates until two people are saying or doing regrettable things. Rather than using your sensitivity as a license to kill, use it as a means to find more productive ways to speak with love. Rather than letting your sensitivity give you an unrealistic sense of entitlement and petulant expectation, try and commit to the notion that it always takes two parties to create a disagreeable relationship conflict. You are hurt...in some ways big or small, they are likely hurting, too.

Don't make sensitivity a wall to constructive criticism.

There comes a time in every adult's life when you have to suck it up and face tough talk. Especially when the tough talk potentially saves you from a choice, an action or measure that could have long-term or especially painful consequences. While I am sensitive, I expect and almost demand that the people I love, give it to me straight, particularly when I screw something up. Because I am human. I am going to do that. And yes, you can give straight talk without pulling out the clubs and knives. So keep in mind that sometimes when people speak sternly to you, it is more important to identify the value in their statement...especially when you know behind the annoyance that statement is coming from a place of love. It's nice to hear only about the wonderful things we do; but it's better to hear about the ways we can grow and elevate to keep amazing ourselves and others. Never use your 'sensitivity' as a means to avoid owning your stuff.

And you know how I feel about owning your stuff. 

Quiet days. Mildly depressed as I always seem to be every November what with a long cold winter ahead of us. 

The canal at night