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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Jan 20, 2003 | 1) The Best News of the Week: "Arrest in punk singer's '93 slaying" (Associated Press/San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 12)
"SEATTLE -- A Florida man has been arrested and charged with murder after DNA linked him to the death of rising punk-rock star Mia Zapata in 1993, police said.
"Police said Jesus C. Mezquia, 48, was arrested late Friday in the Miami area. His DNA profile matched a sample taken from the crime scene more than nine years ago, police said.
"Zapata, the 27-year-old lead singer of The Gits, was last seen alive July 7, 1993, in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood. Her beaten body was left on a street curb more than a mile away. She had been strangled with the drawstring of her Gits sweatshirt.
"Police had no leads in the slaying. The Seattle music community -- including its biggest names, Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Soundgarden -- raised $70,000 to hire a private investigator, but eventually the funds dried up."
2) Donnas, "Spend the Night" (Atlantic)
"Faster than sound," as Big Brother and the Holding Company put it 35 years ago in San Francisco, up the Peninsula from the Donnas' Palo Alto. But Big Brother didn't have Skyline Boulevard in their blood. Speed-shifting on the Skyline turns at midnight, way above the Stanford hills, is just what the Donnas' new music feels like -- except when it feels like X in 1980, the punk band burning their song "Los Angeles" into the pavement like rubber. Today "You Wanna Get Me High" jumps off the radio, as familiar as weather, as much of a shock as lightning hitting your house. "Take It Off" is right behind. This is what rock 'n' roll never forgets -- or rather it's what rock 'n' roll always forgets, until people like Brett Anderson, Maya Ford, Torry Castellano and Allison Robertson find it.
3) Alison Krauss and Union Station, "Live" (Rounder)
Fine, fine, but across two discs it's the smallest sound that cuts the deepest: "Forget About It," sung as if the singer's walking out on a fight at 4 a.m., her tiredness indistinguishable from her contempt.
4) Michael O'Dell, letter to the editor, City Pages, Minneapolis (Dec. 4)
Among pages of letters praising City Pages editor Steve Perry's Nov. 27 cover story "Spank the Donkey," in which Perry argued that people of good will should abandon the Democratic Party in favor of generations of Republican rule sufficient to produce conditions conducive to the election of Ralph Nader: "You should go back to singing for Journey."
5) Mark Halliday, "Jab" (University of Chicago Press)
Ken Tucker writes: "Pop and rock have inspired some of the worst poetry ever, from Patti Smith to Tom Clark to Jim Carroll to Exene to Jewel to Amiri Baraka (New Jersey could have avoided the controversy over Baraka's anti-Semitism if they'd just gotten an advance of the Roots' 'Phrenology' and heard him 'perform'). But Mark Halliday consistently makes music work for him as subject matter. In 'Jab' he imagines a session trumpet player during the recording of Jan and Dean's 'Surf City' in 1963:
"'I see this trumpet player (was there even a horn section in that song?/ Say there was)/ I see this one trumpet player with tie askew/ or maybe he's wearing a loose tropical foliage shirt sitting on a metal chair waiting/ for the session to reach the big chorus/ where Jan and Dean exult/ "Two girls for every boy"/ and he's thinking/ of his hundred nights on his buddy Marvin's hairy stainy sofa/ and the way hot dogs and coffee make a mud misery/ and the way one girl is far too much .../ Surfing -- what life actually lets guys ride boards/ on waves?/ Is it all fiction? Is it a joke?/ Jan and Dean and their pal Brian act like it's a fine, good joke/ Whereas the trumpet player thinks it's actually shit/ If anybody asked him, a tidal wave of shit/ Nobody's asking'"
