Scientology defector Jason Beghe on Scientology spokesman Tommy Davis: "You see the eyes, the lying that he’s doing. Anybody can see that this guy is not clean. It’s clear as day."
Last week, John Roberts of CNN grilled Tommy Davis, a Scientology spokesman, who was predictably evasive about what L. Ron Hubbard’s wacky minions are up to. ‘Disconnection,’ the church policy of splitting up families in order to shun critics of the church? Never happens, Davis claimed. And as for that high-priced stuff about removing alien souls with lie detector machines? “It’s unrecognizable to me,” Davis told Roberts.
But it was Davis himself who was practically unrecognizable, Jason Beghe tells the Voice.
If only the competing needs of bar owners and aggrieved neighbors could be satisfied as easily as the urges of a liquor-primed patron.
“I have women outside my window screaming, ‘Fuck me! Fuck me!’ at three o’clock in the morning,” said Union Street resident Roberta Lehrman. She attributed the salacious ruckus to intoxicated pedestrians leaving Union Hall, the popular bar and entertainment venue across the street from her at 702 Union Street near 5th Avenue in Park Slope.
Lehrman and other Union Street residents voiced their complaints last Wednesday in Brooklyn during a special hearing of the Landmarks/Land Use Committee of Community Board 6 concerning Union Hall’s application for a liquor license renewal. One woman even claimed that sleep deprivation caused by living near the bar had triggered her autoimmune disorder. To the surprise of many in attendance, the committee approved by 6 to 2 a motion, curiously introduced by a local bar owner, not to recommend the renewal of the liquor license unless Union Hall takes measures to alleviate noise, such as ceasing alcohol sales after midnight.
Coney Island’s cheap, sure, but keeping it around ain’t. That’s why multitudes of tireless seaside talent—mermaids, roller girls, and so on—will be swallowing swords, spinning from ropes, and generally raising hell next Wednesday at the Coney Island USA Spring Gala, at the Angel Orensanz Center.
Mountain Goats guru John Darnielle, long hailed as among the most literary of indie-rock songwriters, has penned his first novel. Whether you can describe one of those 33 1/3 tomes—a pocket-book series, each title dedicated entirely to one album—as a "novel" is debatable, of course. But Darnielle's deft way with words, vividly hard-nosed but humanizing and sympathetic, is not. He's applied those gifts to a fictional ode to Black Sabbath's Master of Reality, which hears the album, as the 33 1/3 blog explains it, "through the ears of Roger Painter, a young adult locked in a southern California adolescent psychiatric center in 1985; deprived of his Walkman and hungry for comfort, he explains Black Sabbath as one might describe air to a fish, or love to an android, hoping to convince his captors to give him back his tapes."
It's out now, and John's reading from it Saturday night at Housing Works. Stop by, soak it all in, and perhaps discuss with him the enduring majesty of "Sweet Leaf."
Can you guess which one of these girls pulled meat from her genitals?
You no doubt missed funk carioca hipsters Bonde Do Role's own take on Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search for the Next Doll on MTV Brazil's Overdrive, wherein Pedro D'Eyrot and Rodrigo Gorky replaced founding MC Marina Ribatski with Ana Bernardino and Laura Taylor. According to Wikipedia, the latter entrant won when she pulled "a piece of meat from her genitals," which in Pedro's estimation emphasized "the spirit of the band." Not sure what openers the Death Set might pull out of their genitals, but the duo's Worldwide, a manic debut of spazz-fuzz, gets expanded live via a five-piece. Also: Holy Hail, Gang. — ANDY BETA
BONDE DO ROLE+THE DEATH SET, Europa Night Club, 98-104 Meserole Ave., Greenpoint. Tickets here. Tomorrow at the Bowery Ballroom, tickets available here.
Indian Jewelry
These Are Powers
Death by Audio
Tuesday, May 13
photos by Rebecca Smeyne
Austin psych mutants Indian Jewelry have gone from thorny drugpunk to beautiful dronepunk in the course of two years. The music's bright, chuggy, and weird, full of references to birds and heaven and water—a good proposition for anyone who considers Deerhunter to be “subtle.” — CHRISTOPHER WEINGARTEN
Posted by Sarah DiGregorio at 3:04 PM, May 14, 2008
A knowledgeable reader wrote in to enlighten me that West Virginia does indeed have its very own food stuff—the West Virginia pepperoni roll. According to West Virginia Pepperoni Rolls website, these are composed of "a few thin slices of pepperoni baked in a soft, golden oval of slightly sweet dough, smaller than a dinner roll."
Things I have learned since yesterday: West Virginians like pepperoni rolls and also they are racist.Very.
Posted by Sarah DiGregorio at 1:34 PM, May 14, 2008
We here at the VV (Our Man Sietsema and myself) are trying to keep our dining guide current by re-visiting places that we haven't been to for a while, to see if they merit a change of heart in one way or another. Today, I got this nice note from Our Man Sietsema, who has recently been back to Una Pizza Napoletana.
(That gorgeous, mouthwatering shot of the pizza was not, sadly, taken at Una Pizza Napoletana, but at a pizza joint that's much less convenient to get to. In Naples.)
Quoth Our Man:
Hey Sarah –
Just got back from revisiting Una Pizza Napoletana in the East Village, which I reviewed – but did not particularly like – almost four years ago. The joint was founded by a pizza wrangler from the Jersey shore who worshipped the pies made in Naples, Italy, the original home of pizza (though a good case can be made for pizza as we know it being invented at Lombardi’s, in Manhattan). To this end, he mounts a very spare menu, comprising only four pies. And, really, that’s the extent of it – no salads or antipasti whatsoever. As in Naples, the pies are personal-size and intended to be eaten with a knife and fork. It seems like pizzaiolo at Una Pizza Napoletana goes out of his way to make his pies uneven in size and shape, as if rebelling against the very circle itself.
The place looks Naples-ish enough, all tile and off-white paint, very plain except for a few tasteful prints recalling Campania’s religious heritage, with the austerity broken only by a string of Xmas lights up near the ceiling. A giant beehive wood oven commands the back of the room, waiting to be fed. The pies arrive literally smoking, with charred dough on one side or the other. I ate the standard margherita, which shocked me with its $21 price tag, Sicilian sea salt or not. It was good, but a little too substantially charred for my taste, and the “bone” (the thickest part of the crust) was a little too doughy. Still, as an example of the Naples style, it was about 95% there.
The other pizza I tried, the bianca, was a white pie (well, duh!) with a heavy dose of buffalo mozzarella on top. To begin with, Naples pizzerias almost never use buffalo mozzarella, preferring the fiore di latte that is the equivalent of our Italian-American mozzarella. While I don’t usually argue with dairy generosity, this pie had too much cheese, lending a rubbery quality to the pie. In Naples, when they apply cheese, it is in small chunks, as you can see below in a picture I took at Da Michele in Naples not too long ago:
In conclusion, while I find the pies at Una Pizza Napoletana interesting from an intellectual and historic perspective, and a worthy addition to the amazing pizza landscape of New York City, when I crave pizza, I’m likely to go elsewhere.
The goal was to find eateries good for a quick bite or take out no more than a few blocks away from the stadium, places that you don't have make an extra subway stop to get to. (That left out delicious Flushing, which I realize is only one subway stop from Shea.)
I found plenty of good stuff—from amazing curried goat at the Feeding Tree in the Bronx, to Ecuadorian ceviche and empanadas at La Ambateñita in Queens. And I found the place that supplies the Mets clubhouse with its after-game meal, and where you can sometimes find players or coaches hanging out.
All of it lightyears better, in my opinion, than overpriced ballpark fare.
After you read the column ("La Dolce Musto"), you often come across a little note demanding you swing over here to the blog ("La Daily Musto"). Well, now that you're here, I'm begging you to get right back to the column! (It's called cross-pollination, folks. You can do both. After all, I did both—and I'm not even tired.) This week, the column's particularly dripping with creative and other juices, seeing as it's the first half of "the Daddy Diaries: Hot Sex in the Golden Years," about my own sexploits as an aging, raging stud in adult diapers. See, some time ago, I finally decided to cash in on my mid-level notoriety and get some unspeakably raunchy action out of it. It felt like my last chance to do so, so I gamely started dropping all sorts of defenses (and other things) and letting it fly with a vengeance. And now, having had so much remarkable late-life sex in public, I've decided to bring my whoring to an even wider audience by writing about it in scintillating detail. The least you can do is add to my humiliation by reading it!
People are getting so antsy for Hillary to get the fuck out of the race already that this quest has even inspired a slew of epic poems. Well, all right, just one epic poem. But I have it right here for you, in all of its passion and ire, and it'll SEEM like a bunch of epic poems because it says everything that needs to be said about how extremely over the Hill we are. As an extra bonus, it's inspired by the Dr. Seuss classic, "Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!"—but I'm sure you knew that.
So I wanted to clear the air about my departure from the withering 'Hot Mess' party [Sundays at Porky's]. I saw it written in some gay rag that I was fired for stealing money. Actually, I was the first of a long list of people to quit the party. Acid Betty, Logan, Preston, and now James Coppola have quit without getting paid. That almost happened to me too, but I went into the register and got my pay before leaving."
So before you all call someone a hot mess for getting out of Hot Mess, please check out the REASONS why they went into the register.
Kanye West + Rihanna + N.E.R.D. + Lupe Fiasco
Madison Square Garden
May 14, 2008
A few years back, I read an interview with Dr. Dre in which he talked up his next big touring idea: a bastardized rap musical. The idea was that the songs would somehow fit the show's narrative logic; an undercover cop would get shot, say, and Snoop and Dre would emerge to do "Deep Cover." "It could work," said Dre, and I remember thinking No. No, it couldn't. Needless to say, it never did, and maybe the sheer galling logistics of the challenge were what ended up driving Dre into permanent semi-seclusion. But on his ridiculously ambitious new Glow in the Dark tour, Kanye West is trying something analogous, delivering his set in the form of a loose narrative and waiting until the very end to break character. That Kanye's tastes tend toward stylized sci-fi rather than grimy gunplay only renders the very concept more insane. And yet there Kanye was, standing alone amid dry ice and elaborate lights, talking with an on-board spaceship computer named Jane rather than the thousands assembled to see him. In a show-opening voice-over, Kayne outlined the story's relevant details: Earth is dead, and so Kanye and his spaceship leave to search the universe for inspiration, crashing on an alien planet as the narrative begins.
This looks almost nothing like the band I saw last night
TV tapings are weird. They're not so much live shows as simulations of live shows, and even if you're legitimately amped to be there, you can't help but feel like an extra in someone else's movie when people are telling you to applaud on cue. Before last night, I'd only ever been to one of these things: Jay-Z's episode of VH1 Storytellers, which I've never written about at length because the VH1 people who let me in told me that they wanted me to sit on a review until the episode was about to air. At that show, Jay ran through about half of American Gangster with his touring band, telling stories about how these songs related to scenes from specific gangster movies, not scenes from his actual life. When he finished his set, he restarted it from the beginning and did the whole thing over again so the cameras could get some different angles. That night, I was totally happy to be there. It was a Jay-Z show, after all, and I was hearing most of these songs for the first time. It was only sort of boring in retrospect. The Roots, who taped an episode of VH1 Soul's SoulStage last night, can't coast on that sort of mysterious starpower. They've got the tightest, most furious live show in rap, but it's exactly the sort of show that the intangibles of a TV taping might derail. It's hard to build up any sort of momentum, after all, when you have to make room for commercial breaks every ten minutes or when an assistant director might run onstage mid-song, waving his hands and asking you to start it over from the top.
Reasons that Scarlett Johansson would want to record an album of Tom Waits covers abound. From the most cynical possible angle, she's an indie-film actress who needs to ramp up her cool-chick bona fides after getting engaged to Van Wilder and appearing on every lad-mag hottest-chicks-ever countdown and making a Michael Bay movie (though The Island, I'll argue, was a whole hell of a lot better than Match Point). More to the point, though, I know at least five people who, given the money, time, and fame necessary to record Tom Waits tribute albums, would do the exact same thing. And in any case, Johansson proves on Anywhere I Lay My Head that she's a better junk-blues weirdo than Waits is an indie-film actor these days; see Wristcutters: A Love Story, or don't. Even the most sympathetic critics have to concede that Anywhere I Lay My Head Johansson's Waits love-letter, is a fundamentally ridiculous enterprise, almost stunning in its total lack of need to exist. (Sean Fennessey: "This album is sort of like if the 25-man roster of the New York Mets came to my office and rapped the Pharcyde’s 'She Said' at me. Two things I love dearly coming together - and it’s not quite right.") It also seems guaranteed to vengefully piss off a certain segment of the population; when I mentioned that I really like the album at the Voice editorial staff meeting today, a howl of protest went up. The people who people who deeply love Waits's bruised, scraggly rambles, after all, are generally exactly the people who won't take kindly to a rich and famous and mindbendingly pretty actress offering her interpretations of these songs. But there's something to be said for the sheer ballsiness of the exercise, and something more for the fact that the end product sounds nothing like a Tom Waits record.
Jim Dolan makes Rupert Murdoch seem like Jesus H. Christ. And that's why Cablevision's apparently successful attempt to swallow up Newsday is making us gag.
Blessed with the huge cash flow of a monopoly cable company (thanks only to cities long ago giving up a public utility to private companies), the Dolan family has enough gelt to spend $650 million to buy the behemoth Long Island newspaper. For a while, it looked as though Murdoch was going to land the whale, but call me Ishmael if the Dolans didn't sink their hooks in deeper.
No matter that the Dolans (Jim's rich daddy is Chuck) have no experience in the news business — Cablevision's News 12 operation doesn't count. At least Murdoch knows the business. When he owned the Voice years ago, he was too smart to turn it into a right-wing rag. The Dolans will further blandify Newsday.
Wall Street's not exactly enthusiastic about the match, which makes about as much sense as the Dolan-owned New York Knicks spending a fortune to hire as coach Mike D'Antoni, who can't coach defense and inherits a roster ill-suited to his run-and-gun style.
Jim Dolan is the slack-jawed yokel who has screwed up the Knicks with his meddling into things he doesn't know about. His only experience with journalism is to squelch it. Colleagues have reminded me that the Knicks' policy toward reporters is unusually repressive and controlling.
When there's bad news brewing in the bowels of Madison Square Garden, Jim Dolan and crew make sure to clamp down hard to keep any of it from leaking out. Sure, every company does that, even newspaper companies, but the Knicks' operation is particularly harsh toward journalists.
Yes, these are the hard-hitting, courageous people we want running our newspapers.
You have to feel sorry for Newsday editor John Mancini (whom I used to work for at a now-defunct paper) and the other fine journalists who still have jobs there. That's because the Dolans' operations are relentlessly mediocre.
As a I said before, Wall Street's not particularly gung-ho. A story earlier this month in Newsday noted:
Louis Ureneck, chairman of the journalism department at Boston University, said bringing Newsday reporting into the mix at Cablevision's news channel certainly will add appeal, but he added, "The question is how do they monetize the strategy? Is there enough here to justify the kind of price they're offering?"
Wall Street doesn't appear to think so.
"The company needs to stick to its core business and not go out on entrepreneurial pursuits that are far away from its core expertise," said Richard Greenfield, an analyst at Pali Research in Manhattan.
David Joyce, who tracks Cablevision for Miller Taback & Co. in Manhattan, said he thinks Newsday is better-matched to Murdoch and his News Corp.
"Murdoch knows newspapers," Joyce said. "The Dolan family does not."
No matter. The newspaper business may be ailing, as its owners all over America keep moaning, but the New York Timespointed out yesterday that Newsday produced more than $80 million last year in profits on $500 million in revenue.
The Dolans will now have two cash cows, even if one of them is relatively sickly from eating too much newsprint.
The question is: What changed aging Chuck Dolan's mind? As Newsday's own Thomas Maierwrote Saturday:
Over the years, Charles Dolan, the billionaire founder of Cablevision Systems Corp., always seemed a bit coy when asked about the possibility that one day he might own Newsday.
"I have often thought it," Dolan told Newsday in 2006. "I thought it would be a wonderful thing to do, but I've also been smart enough not to try it."
Son Jim apparently isn't smart enough. But that's no surprise.
High-tech horror: Widespread cell-phone violence against women in Iraq and the Congo.
The downside of the 21st century's high-tech age is lower than you can imagine: Cell phones and cell-phone technology are prime culprits in a growing epidemic of rape, beatings, and murder of women in the Congo and Iraq.
A war over "coltan," a crucial ingredient in the manufacture of cell phones and other electronic devices, has helped cause the ongoing tragedy of rape and murder by the millions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The DRC horrors far outstrip even Darfur as a tragedy, as I noted in June 2005.
Go to Seeing is Believing: Handicams, Human Rights and the News, the website of Czech-Canadian Katerina Cizek's documentary film series of that name, to read "Cell Phones Fuel Congo Conflict." . The series explains how the fight over coltan, only one of the treasures in the resources-rich Congo, is directly responsible for much of the savage war in which millions have died and hundreds of thousands, at the very least, have been raped and otherwise brutalized.
Eve Ensler, famous for the Vagina Monologues, is one of the few Westerners to latch onto the rampage against women in the Congo and try to publicize it. Incongruously, her monologue on the violence, gleaned from a trip there, can be found in Glamour. Here's the second paragraph of Ensler's in-your-face August 2007 article:
How do I tell you of girls as young as nine raped by gangs of soldiers, of women whose insides were blown apart by rifle blasts and whose bodies now leak uncontrollable streams of urine and feces?
Meanwhile, in Iraq, cell phones as finished products are prime weapons — in a high-tech fashion — for brutalizing women.
Amanj Khalil, a young journalist for the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, described on May 2 one recent incident in Iraq's northern Kurdish area:
Salma trusted her boyfriend enough to speak freely with him about romance, love and even sex.
But she has paid a high price for her candour. Salma, who asked that her real name be concealed because of the sensitivity of her story, is hiding in a women’s shelter in the northeastern city of Sulaimaniyah, her body battered and bruised.
Her boyfriend recorded their intimate conversations on his phone and passed them onto her family through a friend when she refused to marry him. Salma’s body still bears the scars of her family’s response. The 28-year-old’s hand was fractured during one of the beatings from her brothers, father and uncles.
“They started to beat me without even letting me speak,” she said. “They beat me so severely that I fainted several times."
Salma's just one of many Iraqi women being brutalized in a high-tech way by lower-than-low scumbags.
It's worse in the Congo. Natural disasters, like the cyclone that ravaged Burma, are one thing. Manmade disasters are another. And no manmade disaster is as unnatural as what's going on in the DRC, surely the rape capital of the world.
Here's a grim fact: In the Congo, "vaginal destruction" has become an official term of medical art used by beleaguered doctors and nurses to describe war-related injuries.
Western governments and the mainstream press usually, but not always, ignore the DRC. (Certainly, Western corporations don't ignore it the country's rich natural resources.) So you have to go elsewhere to find out about the situation. Thanks to the Web, the upside of high-tech, you can.
One of the best pieces, and I've referred to it previously, is Sarah J. Coleman's June 2005 article on Beliefnet, "Congo's Conflict: Heart of Darkness." Her lede is worth repeating:
How do you measure the horror in the Democratic Republic of Congo? Add up all of the American deaths in every single war we've fought in since 1776, including World War II and the Civil War (1,540,665). Now add to that the estimated deaths from the recent tsunami (169,752 confirmed dead, 127,294 missing). Next, add to that the estimated death toll in the conflict in Darfur (400,000). Then, add to that the victims of genocide in Rwanda, one of the most horrific slaughters of the 20th century (937,000).
Add all of the deaths together — and you still have a smaller number than the 3.5 million people who have died in the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) since 1998.
The toll's up to an estimated 5 million now — that's the scope of the Holocaust. Read Stephen Lewis's April 12 speech at Ensler's V-Day Celebration in New Orleans.
“As a result of the systematic and exceptionally violent gang rape of thousands of Congolese women and girls, doctors in the DRC are now classifying vaginal destruction as a crime of combat. Many of the victims suffer from traumatic fistula — tissue tears in the vagina, bladder, and rectum.
Additional long-term medical complications for survivors may include uterine prolapse (the descent of the uterus into the vagina or beyond) and other serious injuries to the reproductive system, such as infertility, or complications associated with miscarriages and self-induced abortions. Rape victims are also at high-risk for sexually transmitted infections.”
I won't apologize for the graphic nature of this, because we need to face the unexpurgated facts.
The Congo violence is the biggest war tragedy, but of course it's far from the only manmade disaster. Among the many battlegrounds of violence against women is Kurdish Iraq. That northern region of Iraq has long been thought to be the most civilized area of the war-torn country (aside from the increasing number of skirmishes between Turkey and the Kurd separatists). But Salma's story is far from unique.
Here's the intrepid reporter Khalil again to give the broader view of cell-phone-induced violence in Iraq:
Mobile phones have become a new threat to young women’s safety in Iraq’s northern region, members of parliament and women’s rights campaigners warn.
Men are using them to take photos and record audio and video clips of women and girls who are breaking social codes by having sexually explicit conversations or intimate relations with their boyfriends. In many cases, the conversations and videos have been widely distributed, damaging women’s reputations and, in doing so, putting their lives at risk.
In 2007, nearly 350 women were the victims of violence in mobile-phone related cases, according to statistics compiled by women’s organisations and the Sulaimaniyah police directorate. In 2006, 170 cases were recorded.
However, experts believe that the actual number of incidents is much higher.
The Rooskies are rolling out the hardware once again.
Everybody's talking tough these days. Hillarythreatens to nuke Iran and now Vladimir Putin is launching the kind of "Victory Day" parade on Red Square that hasn't been seen since the Soviet Union collapsed.
Here's how France 24's Nick Colemandescribed it today:
Fighter jets circled over Red Square on Monday as Russia prepared a huge patriotic display around this week's presidential inauguration, amid rising tension with pro-Western neighbour Georgia.
MiG fighter jets together with strategic bomber planes thundered over the capital in a rehearsal for traditional World War II commemorations on Friday featuring a show of military hardware unprecedented for the post-Soviet era.
Vlad the Paler may be stepping down as president, but he's still the prime minister, in every sense of the word. He ain't giving up anything.
He's rolling out the big guns, just like in the bad old days when thousands of missiles, troops, and weapons paraded in the square before the doddering conservatives who called themselves Communists.
Coleman's story goes on to note Putin's explanation of how the current display of planes, trained soldiers, and airplanes isn't anything other than peaceful:
The military parade is part of the dramatic backdrop to president-elect Dmitry Medvedev's inauguration on Wednesday, following Soviet-style May Day parades last week.
President Vladimir Putin, who is to step down after eight years but retain power in the prime minister's post, said the pumped up display was not intended as a threat.
"For the first time in many years heavy military equipment will be used. This is not sabre-rattling. We are not threatening anyone.... This is a demonstration of our growing defence capability," Putin said.
Posted by Nina Lalli at 1:17 PM, February 19, 2008
The brand new blog A little Honey has come across some awesome customized Obama Air Force One low-top sneakers. "Oh wow" is really all that can be said.
Posted by Nina Lalli at 12:26 PM, February 14, 2008
Rather than Valentine's Day, which is lame no matter where you stand on the spectrum of involved-ness, let's think of today as Barney's Warehouse Sale Day. Yes, folks, it has begun, and we will drink to that, but let's not lose our heads. Racked has a report from the front-lines this morning, (actually, they have about six posts so far) where shoppers were lined up, waiting to get inside. People! The sale goes until March 2.
Posted by Nina Lalli at 3:41 PM, February 13, 2008
Photo courtesy MAO
If you've ever attended the shows at Fashion Week, you know that reading Lynn Yaeger's diary about that experience is a lot more fun that partaking in it first-hand. This time around, Yaeger gets distracted by Forever 21, dissed by Diane Von Furstenberg, sees a boob at Betsey Johnson's show, and witnesses the unbelievable at the Sean John show: a model makes it all the way down the runway with toilet paper trailing from her shoe! Oh, the horror. It's too good. (This reminds me of when my sister would pray for the baton-twirlers to drop their stick during the Macy's parade.)
