It's hard to think of a better or at least cleverer cinematic usage of the el than this Budweiser ad (which steadfastly refuses to be embedded on this page). It's really more of a fantastically complicated music video for the Hours' cover of the Beatles' "All Together Now" with a Budweiser logo dropped in at the end and presumably gajillions of Budweiser dollars spent creating it.

I'm not exactly going to start listening to the Hours or drinking any more Bud than I normally do, but thanks Budweiser for making the status quo just a little sunnier today.

(Via Brand Republic via Copyranter)

Maura Johnston over at Idolator has discovered that some users of Urban Dictionary--the crowdsourced slang lexicon that's helped millions of people figure out what "Superman dat ho" means, probably to the detriment of their opinion of humanity--are working to give the word "brokencyde" a different definition than simply "an unbelievably shitty band that combines the worst aspects of hip-hop and hardcore into something even worse than its constituent parts and oh yeah they're also complete misogynists." It's sort of like Dan Savage's "santorum" campaign, except instead of being directed at a troglodytic "family values" asshole in the Senate it's aimed at terrible dudes who wear shutter shades and hate women.

I won't ruin Maura's scoop, but let me just say that "apt" barely begins to cover it.

In early May the Metro hosted a top-notch weekend of hardcore to help promote the recent book Burning Fight: The Nineties Hardcore Revolution in Ethics, Politics, Spirit, and Sound (Revelation Books), which local author and high school teacher Brian Peterson spent six years researching and writing. Each of the two shows was chock-full of past and present hardcore mainstays (Unbroken, Converge, Bane, Reach the Sky, Disembodied, Trial, 108, et cetera) and sold out in what seemed like eight minutes. My roommate and I put up three Aussies who'd flown in specifically for the event (another installment took place in Pomona, California, shortly after the Chicago dates).

On Thursday at 12:15 PM in the Chicago Authors Room of the Harold Washington Library Center (400 S. State), Peterson will give a free reading from Burning Fight. It's currently out of stock at Amazon--I hope because hardcore fans are passionately seeking it out, not because his publisher has dropped the ball--so this is a good opportunity for you to pick up a copy from the man himself.

This week's Sharp Darts is online. It's a slightly reworked version of the blog post I wrote after hearing that Michael Jackson had died, expanded to include a bit about the trip I took out to Gary to the vigil in front of the Jackson family home, where I took these photos.

I took the trip with Jessica Hopper, and her account of it for the Village Voice is also online now.

The Illinois Attorney General's office today announced that AG Lisa Madigan has reached a settlement with Rolling Meadows-based ticket-resale operation TicketsNow, a subsidiary of Ticketmaster, after an investigation stemming from complaints by Hannah Montana and Bruce Springsteen fans (among others) who felt the sellers had misled them.

The investigation showed that TicketsNow was using a series of sock-puppet Web sites that gave users the impression that (a) they were buying directly from the concert promoters or the venue itself and (b) they were paying face value for the tickets. In truth they were buying basically scalped tickets at a significant markup. As part of the settlement, TicketsNow has already taken down 100 (!) such sites.

Other terms of the settlement include a $50K fine, a requirement that TicketsNow let customers know that they're buying secondary-market tickets at what may be much more than face value, and a ban on non-sporting-event sales by TicketsNow until after Ticketmaster has made face-value tickets available to the general public.

The damage to Ticketmaster's reputation from this settlement? I figure it'll be like putting a ding in the bumper of the rusted-out abandoned car in the empty lot on your block that no one can get the city to take away. 

Like I said on Twitter yesterday (I like to imagine I'm the only person in the world with a Twitter account but no cell phone), Sky Saxon, front man for 60s garage legends the Seeds, sure picked a terrible time to die. Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon got more coverage than he did during the early part of Thursday--and then news of Michael Jackson's passing broke, promptly becoming to the Internet what Godzilla is to Tokyo.

But if there's one person in town who wasn't going to let Saxon's death go unnoticed, it's Steve Krakow, aka Plastic Crimewave--well-known to Reader readers for his Secret History of Chicago Music strip (sorry for the out-of-date Web presence). He's just posted a piece of artwork in tribute to Saxon at the Vice site, and their online editor, former Reader columnist Liz Armstrong, kindly drew my attention to it.

And while I'm at it, did you see Nels Cline's remembrances of Saxon? You've got to dig for this stuff, but I think that's the least we can do.

Joe Raglani (Saint Louis) and Steve Hauschildt (Cleveland), two experimental noise artists who come through Chicago regularly, had most of their gear stolen while on tour in May at New York's No Fun Fest. Enemy (1550 N. Milwaukee, third floor) is hosting a benefit show for them this Saturday at 9 PM. The lineup, headliner first, is Magic Missile, Kevin Drumm & Vadim Sprikut, TV Pow & Raglani, Tiger Hatchery, Face Worker, and Pisspisspissmoanmoanmoan. Admission is a suggested donation of $5 to $10. 

Raglani had this to say on the Chondritic Sound message board shortly after the robbery:

On Tour with Steve Hauschildt in NY and our van was broken into and our gear was stolen when I went to get some pizza with Keith Fullerton Whitman at 4 in the morning. When I got back to the van a guy had our shit in his car and when I ran towards it, he tried to hit me with his car.

Here is a list of the stuff that was stolen. I will have serial numbers when I get back to STL. Please help spread the word. I am screwed without this gear.
thanks

If you want to help out with a donation but can't make Saturday's benefit, visit the Root Blog for contact info and ways to donate.

I got a text from one of my friends: "Do you believe Michael Jackson died?"

Of course I didn't believe it. Or more correctly couldn't. Or more correctly can't.

Michael Jackson doesn't just up and die, right? Michael Jackson doesn't just have a heart attack and get driven in an ambulance to a hospital to die. It's too normal, maybe even too human.

The idea of Michael Jackson as a mythological figure isn't anything new. No one gets as universally famous as he did without attaining something close to demigod status. The many eccentricities that he personally confirmed only fed rumors of other, weirder eccentricities that may or may not have been real--and his unwillingness to definitively address them led the public to consider every tale equally true. In turn that made Jackson seem all the more mythological.

In the 80s and 90s certain countercultural types liked to riff on the concept of a Church of Elvis, but when you get right down to it, Elvis's mythos is too tame to support a church--even a fake church. Aside from the interior design at Graceland and the massiveness of his pill habit, there wasn't much supernatural or bizarre about the guy. As far as kinks go, girls in white cotton panties barely even registers. And who wouldn't like a deep-fried peanut butter and banana sandwich?

But Michael Jackson, on the other hand, has barely been recognizable as a human being for decades now. Even before he started looking like an alien, he seemed to act like one. You had to wonder what kind of person has a chimp for a best friend, fathers secret children that he hides behind veils, and frolics in a personal amusement park fraught with dangerous psychological implications ("Neverland") while dressed as an implausibly fabulous military dictator--which why not, because he was richer and more powerful than any banana republic autocrat.

He was too bizarre, too far off the map. It's telling that, though Jackson denied it, the rumor about him sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber never really went away. No one could quite believe that he was human.

Maybe it's because he was so inhumanly good at what he did. A lot of people literally couldn't believe the moonwalk when he debuted it. They thought it was a special effect. And while there were many Elvis wannabes who were better at being Elvis--or at least better at the singing and dancing and acting parts, if not the je ne sais quoi--no one was a better Michael Jackson than Michael Jackson. Countless people have been emulating him for decades now, and nobody's ever done it better.

The first person I thought about after I accepted the news was this Michael Jackson impersonator I remember performing every weekend in this one little alleyway in downtown Ann Arbor. He didn't really do the costume thing too seriously--no sequined military jacket or anything--but he had obviously studied Michael's movements so deeply and practiced them for so many unimaginable hours that every one of his moves, even simple gestures, was uncannily Michael-like. You could watch him for hours, literally. He was there all day--every Sunday, I think it was.

I don't know what to call that kind of devotion except religious. That impersonator's obvious spiritual dedication and the physically demanding form his worship took were like something out of a medieval monastery. He probably had more in common with holy men on the other side of the globe than with those of us who stopped on the sidewalk to watch him for a minute. I wonder how many more guys like that are out there, and I wonder what they're feeling tonight.