Author: Chris C.

WREK was named critical favorite radio station by Creative Loafing in their Best Of Atlanta issue this week. Congratulations to WREK! But …

This is utterly fascinating to me, having been a WREK insider for most of the past 20 years (note: I have been out of WREK pretty much since 2002). WREK today, to me, is a mess. Just utterly painful to listen to. A world-class institution like Georgia Tech, supposedly with a world-class student body, should be producing a student radio station that absolutely blows the doors off of anything in town. Things that WREK did beautifully in the past aren’t even a thought now. Those things that they are still doing are purely on the basis of inertia.

Back in 2000-2001 or so, when there was first serious talk about the WREK studio moving from its location in a remote corner of campus to a location that was in the dead center of campus, I was a loud (and lonely) protesting voice. WREK would A) die during the move, and B) have its musical mission diluted to pointlessness.

I had predicted that the move would kill WREK, because there was literally nobody around besides me who was making a serious effort to engineer the place, and completely ripping up a studio and rebuilding it at a new location is the most violent thing that you can do to any engineered facility like that. However, they did in fact pull off the move in 2004, and it is wholy due to the fact that two people (Thomas Hildebrandt and Jim Evans) came to WREK in the 2001-2002 timeframe and took over for me. Thomas was the first active, productive student Chief Engineer that WREK had had in nearly a DECADE. Without Thomas and Jim, there is no doubt in my mind that, at best, what WREK would have become is a couple of folding tables with an iPod and some microphones. No joke, that is what some college radio stations basically run on.

As for my 2nd prediction, that of devolution into musical and cultural irrelevance, I do think that is in fact happening. It was already happening years ago. WREK is now little different from any other 100-1500 watt college station that you will find in any US city, with virtually nothing left to make it truly unique. There are simply forces greater than WREK (that’s a whole other screed that I’ll post some day, yay!) that are working to make WREK a hollow shell of what it once was. So what you get now are average students, uninspired and uncreative, slouching their way through the day feebly crapping out something they call a radio station, and the listenership that used to be there is now on the internet. It’s a complete joke. The upside is that with WREK going more mainstream and having the more visible campus profile, they are in a better position to weather the attacks from the Georgia Tech administration, whether in the form of the Athletic Association’s desire to bring “professional” commentary to sports events, or in the form of the President’s office desire to satisfy a wealthy donor and muscle professional public radio into WREK’s powerful signal. I think WREK is going to beat both of those threats back, because more and more people know what WREK is and appreciate the principled stance that they take on their programming.

Which leads back to the CL accolade. Every year as far back as I can remember, CL routinely declares that WRAS is the best station. For the average reader of (and worker at) CL, I’m in complete agreement that WRAS’s tired corporate-wannabe college-fluff pop rotation programming is perfect, and WRAS runs an incredible tight ship. Occasionally CL would break things up and throw the award to WRFG. But this year CL was aware of the threats to WREK, having done two or three brief article s over the past year about them. So I think they decided to throw a bone to WREK, because I am certain that WREK could make great use of a “Best Of Atlanta” accolade right now to fend off the attacks, and CL probably knew that.

Props to WREK student management in running their defense. They’ve been doing exactly what I would be doing in that regard, namely getting the word out by raising their profile with the student body, exercising their alumni base, and engaging the press. I’ve said many times that the only way that WREK will win this is in the court of public opinion.

And godspeed to them in that.

At long last, after 5 years of thinking about it and 2 years of actually doing it, my migration to Linux is complete. The last step was to get my Palm handheld device (a Samsung i500 cell phone with integrated Palm capability, with a core group of rabid fans) syncing with the desktop machine, and I got that working in the past week.

Since 1998 I’d been running Windows 95 on a 350 MHz Pentium. Six years later it was barely hanging in there but working. In 2004 I started researching hardware and Linux distributions, having decided that Win95 was going to be my first and last foray into the wild world of Windows (prior to Win95 I was running OS/2 and DOS before that).

By December 2004 I had decided on and bought the hardware for the computer and was testing out Ubuntu Linux on it. Ubuntu Linux is perfect for me because of two critical design decisions: 1) they use the Debian platform, and 2) they standardized on Gnome instead of KDE. Linux folks will know what that means, and I’m not saying the alternatives are inferior, but it’s what I decided I needed to see in a distribution. As a result I was looking at Libranet for a while, but they were a really tiny operation with limited resources, and in 2004 Ubuntu popped up with exactly what I was looking for.

So, for pretty much all of 2005 I had Ubuntu running on the new computer, but it was banished to the floor under my desk and the Windows machine remained my primary machine. I was waiting for Ubuntu to mature, and for me to have the time to tackle the huge disruption to my workflow that this migration would be. Over the 2005/2006 New Years holiday I tackled the conversion and had migrated pretty much everything over to the new Linux machine by mid-January 2006, in particular my email. All that remained on the Windows machine was the Palm Desktop application, because there weren’t any Palm sync/desktop applications available in Linux that satisfied me. In April June 2006 Ubuntu came out with their 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support) release and I upgraded the machine to it (that was a real nail-biter, I normally don’t do OS upgrades ever, but my data survived it).

Palm sync still didn’t work, so I was stuck with keeping the Windows machine running solely so that I could support the Palm. FYI, I live by my Palm device — everything I know is in there. So I used VNC and a KVM to maintain quick access to the Windows machine.

And there it stayed until this week. Since Oct 2006 I’ve been occupied with a family matter (discussed occasionally here) and so there was no way I was going to tackle moving this along. A few weeks ago I decided that I had a window of opportunity in early August to give it another shot. I’d also thought up a way to get around the sync problem. Last weekend I tried it and it worked. It worked!

So for the past week I’ve been trying out these new shoes and they fit well enough. I got the last of the Palm data (encrypted account passwords) transfered over to the Linux platform yesterday, and late last night I shut down the Windows computer. If nothing bubbles up by Wednesday, then it’s going in the basement and at long last we will have foot room under the desk!

Why Linux instead of Windows? I really have no patience for the crap that Microsoft pulls every time they release a new version of Windows, or even a “security update”. Applications suddenly work differently, multimedia functions break, file association get stolen by MS products, and so forth ad nauseum.

In a free / open source environment, I don’t have to worry about losing capabilities. For example, I have been tracking my finances since 1987 with the exact same Lotus 1-2-3 software package, first on DOS and then on OS/2. I see no compelling reason to migrate and have lots of reasons NOT to migrate (macros, menu familiarity, etc.) Windows dropped support for running DOS applications starting with XP (I think, might be 2K). On Linux, I spent 30 minutes dorking around with DosBox and now can run 1-2-3 just fine.

Firefox is great. Thunderbird (for email) is just OK, but is vastly configurable and expandable and certainly will continue to improve. VPN connections into work go smoothly. Security updates are exactly that: updates necessary to maintain the security of the machine, and nothing else. Multimedia can be a pain, but honestly I don’t care that much about it. Flash 9 finally works on Linux and that right there takes care of a lot.

In fact, that brings up the biggest problem with Ubuntu. Since they made the early design decision to only include completely free software in their basic distribution, that means that they can not include codecs for popular proprietary media formats. So the basic Ubuntu installation can not play mp3 audio, play Quicktime movies, play Window Media files, et cetera. You have to figure out how to add those things, and the process has been frankly ugly for me. Two add-on systems have popped up to try to address this: EasyUbuntu and Automatix. I did not use either of these when building my system, because they frankly scare me, and in fact this analysis of Automatix appears to confirm my fears. Hopefully by the time I get to doing the spring update, Ubuntu will have made this process a lot smoother.

Now I’m looking forward to Ubuntu’s next LTS update, version 8.04 in April 2008, when I’ll do a complete upgrade of the system (keep the /home partition and wipe/reinstall everything else). In that process I hope to clean up a lot of the multimedia crud that I’ve kludged together over the past two years just to get it minimally functional.

Nearly 3 years after buying the hardware and installing the software for the first time, and 9 years after I bought the Windows computer, it’s finally going into the basement. Hooray!

Update 28-Jun-2009: WREK repeated this show last week! Click here to listen (after Tue 30-Jun 7:30pm ET, click here). I checked with Allan and he’s working with Jim Pribble to put together a reunion show later this year, possibly including Tim Campion!

Also, since I posted this, one of the guys has created a Clobber page on MySpace, were you’ll find a handful of their studio recordings plus links to other folks and event news — www.myspace.com/clobberatlanta .

Last Tuesday night WREK aired a December 1996 performance of Clobber on the weekly show The Underground Recordings. UR is a show where they dig up old Live@WREK recordings out of the “underground” basement storage room and play them on air.

WREK has an automatic mp3 archive system, so I loaded those archive files up in a computer and edited it out the incidental crap before and after the show, and you can download that edited show here: http://www.eyedrum.org/clobber.mp3 (50 MB download)

Clobber was a great Atlanta band formed by a friend of mine, Allan Ross. Allan was (and probably still is) a master of the crunchy punk guitar sound favored by the likes of Jawbreaker, J Church, Jawbox and other J-named bands of the mid-90’s. And while Allan’s screamed vocals were a weak spot (he’s too big of a personality to share frontman roles onstage), the band was otherwise flat out incredible, with really good bass and drums backing Allan up front. Clobber started out with Allan and bassist Shannon Mulvaney teaming up and then luring drummer Tim Campion out of his post-Insane-Jane retirement to create the power trio. Shannon quickly left (probably due continuing demands of his other more, uh, popular bands) and was replaced by Jim Prible on bass. To itemize the bands that these guys had been in would take too much space, so suffice it to say that this was practically a supergroup in the Atlanta scene.

Here they are playing in WREK’s old studio, with Joe Whitaker doing his usual fantastic job of mixing the show. (Joe used to tell me that really good bands made mixing sound easy) I’m pretty sure of the lineup of Clobber playing here; of course it’s Allan on guitar and screaming, and Jim on bass, but while I thought it was Tim on drums at this point in time, it doesn’t quite sound like him to me and so it’s probably Joel Suttles (formerly of Mercyland, another great band) who came on board when Tim’s family duties mandated a final retirement from indie rock. Joel was OK but Tim was just about the planet’s most entertaining drummer to watch, kind of Keith Moon flailing with a Ringo Starr moptop bouncing around. Tim had a snappier drum style than Joel, but Joel still gets the job done. [update: it WAS Tim, see below]

As usual, they are absolutely smoking in this recording. I can just see Allan careening around with his heavy vintage Gibson guitar swinging, stomping on pedals and colliding with Prible. Jim is tearing through his bass lines, but he just stands there like Ox as if nothing’s happening with that shiteating grin on his face.

The first song and the 2nd half of their set were songs that made it to their CD released on Amy Potter’s Half Baked label (Crash Course In Humility), but the first half is mostly songs that weren’t released and which I’d forgotton about. Somehwere in the middle they cover a Chris Lopez song, perhaps from the Rock*A*Teens or maybe from his prior band. Allan’s guitar control is just incredible, typical for this kind of pop-punk band, rejecting the drunken bloozy Stones style favored by your average bar bands for a tighter, sober, workmanlike stop-start dynamic. Allan will probably claim he was drunk to excuse the mistakes that only he can hear, but I don’t buy it — it’s just on. Only occasionally does he resort to a gratuitous pick slide 🙂

This is actually one of their last performances. They played their last show a couple weeks later at Dottie’s, then the guys went their separate ways (Allan moved to Seattle).

In an odd coincidence, I will actually be meeting up with Allan in New York next week, seeing him for the first time since he moved away from Atlanta a decade ago to become a rock star (or at least be very close to rock stars). I’ll update this post with corrections when I get back.

[update: Allan’s doing great. He said that at the time of this show, Joel had just left the band, so Allan talked Tim into coming back and just helping finish out the last few shows of the band’s career. Cool. Allan says they knew this would be essentially their last recording session so they used the first half of the set to capture songs that hadn’t been recorded yet. And to bust ass on the performance in general.]

Listen to the show!

A recap of the festival … in short, most of the screenings I attended were rather good, with just a few real stinkers among them. In past years it’s been more of a spectrum between good and bad, but this time it was pretty stark. On the other hand, I have to say I wasn’t just blown away by anything, but that could be the exhaustion speaking.

IMAGE continues to have one central problem with the festival: they don’t use thir own email list to notify members of cancellations! There were at least two screenings cancelled that I know of, and there was not a peep on the IMAGE mailing list about it (which I am on). I heard that their email guy quit on the eve of the festival start (nice way to burn your bridges, dude) so perhaps that played into it. However they’ve NEVER done this (notified of cancellation of sreenings) so I doubt it.

They had lots of aspect ratio problems early on (and not just in the fancy Sony theater) but about halfway through the week those seemed to be resolved. By the way, the Sony 4K projections in Landmark’s theater #8 were gorrrrrgeous.

It was flat out great to have the whole festival in one place (Landmark Midtown) and have that place be among restaurants and a short walk from Piedmont Park. The downside is that they had to move the festival up to April to get that much of the Landmark for that long, and it sucks sitting in a theater during the best weather that Atlanta offers (April).

Some highlights:

Narratives:

TV Set: AFF / IMDB / website Murder Party: AFF / IMDB / website Killer Of Sheep: AFF / IMDB / website Hamilton: AFF / IMDB / website The King And The Clown: AFF / IMDB / website La Vie En Rose: AFF / IMDB / website

Documentaries: The Blood Of Yingzhou District: AFF / IMDB / website Sari’s Mother: AFF / IMDB / website The Paper: AFF / IMDB / website Sacred Sights Of The Dalai Lamas: AFF / IMDB / website Kamp Katrina: AFF / IMDB / website Someone Else’s War: AFF / IMDB / website

[my comments assume that you’ve already read the AFF description that I link to in each movie title]

The Killer Within — A really great documentary, perhaps the best I’ve seen at the whole festival. There’s nothing inventive about the filmmaking, it’s just a well-crafted telling of the story of a man who decides to stop keeping his secret, and the complicated results of his decision to go public with it. Fascinating insights into a complex situation. It’s been winning awards, so should appear on PBS this year, I’d hope.

Documentary Shorts 2 — Nearly a complete waste of time. Projection problems on top of a remarkably weak slate of material.

American Fugitive — Put me to sleep, and I think that may be a lifetime first for me! Could have been at least 30 minutes shorter; valuable historical context came far too late. I’m fascinated by the political history of Iran, so it was nice that this turned out to be essentially about the late 70’s / early 80’s Iranian revolution. If the filmmaker can figure out how to edit around the mindnumbingly slow pacing of the principal’s speech, and cut it down to less than an hour, he might have something worth picking up on PBS.

La Vie En Rose — good biopic; I was concerned about its length (2.5 hours) going in, but I didn’t notice it, which I guess is a pretty good endorsement. I was familiar with Edith Piaf’s singing but not a single bit of her story. This will be in theaters in the summer — go see it!

The Insurgents — I’ve been really conflicted about this narrative. On the one hand, I’m right with them on the politics, how reasonable and intelligent people can just get so pissed off about the raping of our democracy that they decide to resort to terrorism as a means of expression. But on the other hand, the actors that they cast for this were so impossibly attractive it pushed it over into cheesy. There’s no way I’m going to believe that Hottie Chick and Ripped Dude are going to form a terrorist cell and smash the state. Made for a nice sex scene though. Ha!

[my comments assume that you’ve already read the AFF description that I link to in each movie title]

Milk In The Land — I don’t see how anyone can take this seriously when they’ve selected obvious crackpots as their talking heads, don’t have enough functional intelligence to spell “concise” correctly, use “its” and “it’s” improperly, and can’t do the most basic sound mastering (leveling) so that the audience doesn’t have to stick its fingers in its ears half the time. A fascinating story of corporate distortion, propaganda and profiteering, unfortunately buried in a pretty badly executed documentary.

Our Land, Our Life — I think this is the point when I really started to feel worn down by the endless string of documentaries showing us, in detail, how our own government is screwing us. In this case, the victims are the Western Shoshone native Americans, and the root cause is mining concerns wanting to tear up the land that the Shoshone happen to own and live on.

Soldiers Of Conscience — This felt a little weird, what with the flags and stirring music and all. I’m guessing that it was produced by a church, since it seems to show the soldiers (who have decided to become Conscientious Objectors) coming to their decisions by way of Christian theological arguments. If you can ignore the slight schmaltz that results from a serious documentary being made by Ned Flanders, it’s a good doc.

The King And The Clown — A ton of fun and an entertaining window into medieval Korean history and the imperial courts. The acting was a bit broad, and this is no Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon or even Farewell My Concubine, but it was worth watching.

[my comments assume that you’ve already read the AFF description that I link to in each movie title]

Hamilton — this is one of those unique films done in the narrative style where there simply isn;t much dialogue on screen; you just set up the shots and situations and let it play out over long, quiet scenes. You are left to wonder what’s happening exactly, try to fill in details yourself, a lot is left to imagination or conjecture, with an occasional morsel of information to narrow down the possibilities of what’s going on, your imagination at work. Beautiful and meditative, shot by Jeremy Saulnier who also directed the completely different Murder Party, also well done. Watch that name.

Kamp Katrina — a couple opens their N.O. backyard as a tent city; poor white trash, surrounded by drugs and alcohol, all trying to hold onto the creaky but stable life that they’d managed to eke out for themselves pre-Katrina, but many find themselved descending into despair and homelessness. Government support utterly nonexistent. It was nearly over before I realized it was just white people they were showing, no blacks. Yet another facet to the Katrina story.

Documentary Shorts I — six shorts, I’ll only write about three:

My 9/11: at this point I guess it’s pretty hard to NOT do a 9/11 documentary that has sweeping emotional power. This one, by established Dutch filmmaker Tjebbo Penning, is a simple personal video letter to his family and friends (ostensibly to his future grown son), where he takes the simple footage of that day at home in Lower Manhattan and adds voiceover. While the reality of the situation was right outside his window, he still was drawn to watch and get confirmation of that reality from the TV set in the other direction. And how watching the hole in the building with his naked eyes didn’t really evoke emotion, but the later litanies of victims did. But that was after it all had been confirmed as real by outside agents.

Someone Else’s War — excellent documentary about “Third Country Nationals” (TCNs) that are hired as laborers by military contractors to do the dirty work (literally) that U.S. troops used to do. Sure, American contractors are making $75K and up, but these imported labors are making a tiny fraction of that, and often are defrauded of even that. Coming primarily from India, Nepal and the Philippines, these are basically poor people who are tricked by local agents into going to Iraq to make money, but find themselves trapped in situations that at best get them back home with no more money than they left with, and at worst get them killed and buried in a foreign land, far from the families that need them.

The Fighting Cholitas — hilarious! I find it hard to believe that it’s true, but it certainly looked real. Poor Bolivian women take on careers as professional wrestlers, skirts and all.

[my comments assume that you’ve already read the AFF description that I link to in each movie title]

Red Without Blue — I just didn’t see much unique or compelling in this; it does makes you think about how people need companionship to survive, and shows what kinds of things can happen when that companionship is removed. Not one of the best I’ve seen, but I didn’t ever have the urge to walk out either.

Revolution ’67 — The Newark riots of July 1967. A mismash of facts and interviews, chaotic flow, stupid graphics, and a severe POV problem, like a push poll. In 90 minutes I saw just one really interesting point about how the police distorted the facts about the presence of black snipers — used to justify their ugly response which resulted in over 20 bystander deaths, all at the point of police bullets. Makes the point that the urban riots of 1964-1968 (500 of them) have been suppressed in historical views of the 60’s and civil rights era as not being relevant, and this documentary serves to try to correct that. As with nearly all docs, I’m glad I went and learned something, in this case about late 60’s urban politics and police lies, but on balance this was a pretty bad doc.

[my comments assume that you’ve already read the AFF description that I link to in each movie title]

My Mexican Shiva — I was running a tight schedule on Sunday and this would have fit if they had started the screening anything close to on time. I bailed when it was 15 minutes after start time and they hadn’t even let us into the theater yet. I was really only going to see this on the pedigree of Sayles and Renzi. Instead I went to go see a couple laps of the last stage of the Tour de Georgia zipping through the streets of Midtown. Got a sunburn. Killer Of Sheep — booked into the festival as a “classic”, and wow it sure qualifies. I’ll admit I’d never heard of it, but it’s deserving of it all. A loose narrative view into the lives of poor and lower middle-class blacks trying to claw their way out of the LA ghetto in the 70’s.

Sacred Sights Of The Dalai Lamas — someday the Chinese will loosen their stranglehold on Tibet a little bit and allow a real film crew to go in and document all these sights, but in the meantime this is about as good as it gets. Notwithstanding the shaky handheld shots, a beautiful introduction to the temples of Tibet and Buddhist practice itself.

Salud! — Cuba trains doctors and send them to needy developing nations (Gambia, South Africa, Honduras) and makes the U.S. look like chumps in the process. Our health care system is so hopelessly screwed up. But it’s nothing that Congress can’t fix, right?

Taxidermia — screening cancelled. Any email alert to IMAGE members? Nope!

[my comments assume that you’ve already read the AFF description that I link to in each movie title]

The Blood of Yingzhou District — AIDS orphans scraping out lives for themselves in huts; orphaned toddlers ostracized by their own extended family and wandering outside with the farm animals; a total lack of AIDS education means that people are afraid to even attempt to care for the orphans. An astonishing local practice that led to this problem: blood brokers would come to a village, buy blood donations from the villagers and then collect it in a single vessel, extract the plasma and then reinject the blood back into the villagers so that they could donate again more quickly. Oh my god.

Sari’s Mother — by James Longley. Long, beautiful, meditative shots of the poor in rural Iraq, dealing with a completely non-functional health system. I really need to see his Iraq In Fragments.

The Paper — Even though it’s “just” a newsroom for a college paper, it’s still a real pressure cooker environment; they have the same pressures and constant debating of ethical issues, what to print, circulation concerns. Fast paced, well edited, energetic soundtrack, fast moving like the newsroom itself. Single-man crew allowed him to really get in there in the middle of the newsroom situations.

Third Monday of October — There are few things as painful as listening to 8th graders talk about national politics. That itself nearly drove me from the theater (well, that and the lady next to me who delighted at length in every little kernel of humor tossed out). Fortunately both let up after 15 minutes or so. These are the kids that will, later in college, assume the form of what I call “resume stuffing SGA goons”. Also reminded me of the great TNR article about College Republicans and how their abuse of each other in CR campaigns (Rove, Norquist, Reed, etc.) gives them the balls to pull off the dirty tricks in the big campaigns when they grow up. Anyway, I could have lived without seeing this doc.

Dante’s Inferno — a bit sillier than I expected; dragged a bit; lots of current partisan political satire integrated in; it’s certainly entertaining to see Cheney embedded in the ice of Dante’s lowest level of Hell, various figures of history being subjected to various tortures for eternity. Cheney’s soul was already in hell because he’s undead or something like that … A unique and brisk treatment of the 700-year-old classic.

Murder Party — an entertaining diversion. I generally couldn’t care less about this gorefest stuff (e.g. Shaun of the Dead and all that) and this didn’t change that opinion much. It was fun enough to watch and I didn’t walk out … The quiet sodium amytal scene at the center of the movie was pretty funny. I just see a lot of this stuff as endlessly derivative, and at the indie level it just feels like all of these kids are making this garbage as their calling card just so that they can get into the Hollywood machine and make proper big budget gore crap. Seems like kind of a waste to me, but it was definitely entertaining and well put together. This was directed by Jeremy Saulnier, the same guy who shot Hamilton, which was a completely different movie but also beautifully shot.