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Some fans of SF's The Residents are up in arms about a video that surfaced after a Shoreline Amphitheater performance on Friday.
The 17-second video shows 22-year-old pop singer Kesha Sebert (Ke$ha) performing her song "Blah Blah Blah" with six backup dancers dressed in The Residents' iconic imagery of tuxedo wearing eyeball heads, complete with top hats.
The Residents first debuted that look with the release of their Eskimo album in 1979.
After about two decades, the group retired the outfits for live performances, but still uses the image as a logo of sorts, with merchandising on their recent Wonder of Weird tour leaning heavily on that unmistakable icon.
The video was sent to The Residents' facebook page by Chris Mathew on Sunday, and has since inspired a spirited debate over Ke$ha's use of such imagery.
Some fans think it's an outrage, including Sara Creamcheese Brandau. "I'm not a naturally litigious person but if you can sue her you really should. Unless you guys are, honored by this tribute? Alright, I gotta throw up," Brandau posted.
Others, like John H. Felix, don't see a problem. "Fans of a band who have been maniacally appropriating pop culture for their own needs complain about musician appropriating band for her own needs, film at 11," Felix posted.
Rick Gawel said, "She's using the eyeballs and tuxes, so what? If it were Primus, who are huge Residents fans and have played with them, people would probably be OK with it."
Chris Mathew, who shot the video, said he thinks Ke$sha is a Residents' fan herself. "If I had to guess, Ke$ha's secretly a fan of their [The Residents] stuff… the way she introduced everything, it sounded like she was trying to shoehorn eyeballs into the equation. And then, viola! Residents dancers," Mathew said.
"They were so accurate that, for a second, I thought it was really The Residents onstage and this was just their latest stunt. But then they started moving wayyyy too young-like for that to be the case."
The Residents recently celebrated 40 years of releasing music, films and multimedia projects, and throughout their storied career, they have remained anonymous, always performing in disguise, and have been known to pull pranks and use misdirection and mistruths to keep the public guessing.
This isn't the first time Ke$ha and The Residents were mentioned in the same breath.
On April 25, The Residents' facebook page posted a screen shot from Ke$ha's MTV reality tv show showing the pop star sporting a "Duck Stab!" t-shirt from the group's 1978 album, with a caption that read, "Let's get this woman interviewed for the documentary!"
A documentary film called "Theory of Obscurity: a film about The Residents" is in production now about the group (FULL DISCLOSURE: I am helping to produce and shoot this film), and a better shot of Ke$ha's song was posted on the film's facebook page which much more clearly shows the eyeball dancers as seen from the front row of Nikon Theater in New York.
On the Theory of Obscurity facebook page, the debate raged on, with more people suggesting lawsuit. Mark Favro said, "Devo sued McDonalds for ripping off their Red Hat design that was on a Happy Meal toy so The Residents can and should sue sue sue!"
On the other hand, Neal Burgess countered, "Wow, a lot of holier than thou hate coming from the nerds… I didn't realize the Residents had any kind of trademark on their now retired costumes, aren't they in the process of selling the eyeballs? Maybe Kesha bought 5 of those Ultimate Boxed Sets."
Burgess brings up an interesting point. At Christmas last year, The Residents released a video with their singer, Randy Rose, standing next to a refrigerator full of every release The Residents have put out in the last 40 years. Included in the deal was one of the original eyeball heads. They were calling it the "Ultimate Box Set" and a U.B.S. could be yours for $100,000.
However, something I've yet to see anyone bring up is the offer at the end of the U.B.S. video, where Randy holds up a "1 of a Kind" item in a small black box covered with question marks.
Perhaps Ke$ha drove up in an armored car and dumped $5,000,000 in Randy's garage.
Stranger things have happened in the world of The Residents.


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University of California, Berkeley │ Berkeley, California
- Subject:
- Award:
For the discovery of nucleoprotein viruses and the development of an effective influenza vaccine.
Wendell Meredith Stanley was born in Ridgeville, Indiana in 1904. He began his advanced education at Earlham College and graduated with a B.S. in 1926 when he entered the University of Illinois, gaining an Master of Science degree in 1927 and a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1929.
Shortly after completing his degree, Stanley left to do research at Munich as a National Research Council Fellow. In late 1931, he returned to the United States to take up a post as Assistant at the Rockefeller Institute. He remained with the Institute until 1948, becoming an Associate Member in 1937, and a Member in 1940. In 1948, he was appointed Professor of Biochemistry and Director of the Virus Laboratory, University of California; during 1948-1953 he was Chairman of the Department of Biochemistry, and in 1958 he became Professor of Virology and Chairman of the Department.
Stanley was responsible for much important work on lepracidal compounds, diphenyl stereochemistry, and the chemistry of the sterols. His researches on the virus which causes the mosaic disease in tobacco plants led to the isolation of a nucleoprotein which displayed tobacco mosaic virus activity. The virus appeared to act like an inanimate chemical but it presented evidence of being a living and growing organism. His later work on the preparation and investigation of influenza and similar viruses has led to his development of the centrifuge-type influenza vaccine.
Information as of 1948

subset: commoncrawl


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Nonprofit leaders across the nation are lamenting the inability to fill open positions in their organizations. Organizations need to be known as a great place to work.
Significant change, like, say, a new chief executive officer, can have an impact on an organization's culture, as well as other aspects of a nonprofit. Stability in the C-suite is usually helpful while consistent turnover at the top is not likely to enjoin success.
Among the 50 organizations in the 2017 edition of NPT's Best Nonprofits To Work For report, the highest ranking official or CEO has been in the position for almost a decade, more than two years longer than the average among employers that did not make the list.
Nonprofits compete each year to be declared a Best Nonprofits To Work For. The NonProfit Times partners with The Best Companies Group for an online survey to determine what employees think of where they work, what outsiders think and how that marries with what managers believe.
It costs nothing to participate. Please take a few minutes to look at the website and pass this along to whomever in your organization (and throughout your network) is involved with the human resources department. Here's the link to the website: https://bestnonprofitstoworkfor.com/


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Resultados de la búsqueda
Conference paper (published)
Arabic dialect identification in the context of bivalency and code-switchingIn this paper we use a novel approach towards Arabic dialect identification using language bivalency and written code-switching. Bivalency between languages or dialects is where a word or element is treated by language users as having a fundamentally similar semantic content in more than one language or dialect. Arabic dialect...
El-Haj, Mahmoud ; Rayson, Paul ; Aboelezz, Mariam
Arabic, machine learning, dialects, language identification, NLP, and bivalency
Conference paper (unpublished)
Assessing the Impact of OCR Quality on Downstream NLP TasksA growing volume of heritage data is being digitized and made available as text via optical character recognition (OCR). Scholars and libraries are increasingly using OCR-generated text for retrieval and analysis. However, the process of creating text through OCR introduces varying degrees of error to the text. The impact of...
van Strien, Daniel ; Beelen, Kaspar ; Coll Ardanuy, Mariona ; Hosseini, Kasra ; McGillivray, Barbara …
Natural Language Processing, Optical Character Recognition, digital humanities, OCR, information retrieval, and NLP


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French broadcaster TF1 said it had axed the 2013 season of the show, called "Koh Lanta", after 25-year-old Gerald Babin fell ill on Friday during filming on Koh Rong off Cambodia's southwestern coast.
Cambodian Tourism Minister Thong Khon said the TV crew had planned to spend five months in the kingdom.
"The contestants have already gone home," he told AFP on Tuesday. "The family members have arrived in Cambodia to collect the body."
According to Adventure Line Productions, which was filming the show for TF1, Babin complained of cramps during one of the challenges set for contestants and received emergency medical care from the show's doctor.
It did not say exactly what he was doing at the time.
Babin was airlifted to hospital in nearby Sihanoukville but later died, according to Cambodian police, who said there were no suspicious circumstances.
"There will be no further investigation because he died from a heart attack," local deputy police chief Kol Phally said.
According to TF1 – one of France's top private national TV channels – Babin had undergone a medical examination during the show's selection process, like other contestants.
Koh Lanta – named after an island off Thailand's Andaman Coast – drew more than seven million viewers for its previous series, which was the 15th since its launch in 2001.
It is based on the British show "Survivor" – which brings together contestants to fend for themselves in the wilderness and compete for prizes and money.
The original show has since been adapted for dozens of international versions, some of which have also been struck by tragedy in the past.
In 2009, a 53-year-old contestant on the Bulgarian version of the show died of a heart attack during filming in the Philippines, while the same year a 32-year-old participant on the Pakistani adaptation drowned in Thailand.


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Blog Archives
Watch The New Captain America: Civil War Trailer
Waking up to see this waiting for me was like waking up on Christmas Day! Based on this trailer, the movie will be everything we hoped for and more. I know the saying was it would be Avengers 2.5, but I don't think we're going to get too many jokes this time around. Read the rest of this entry


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Getting started with Grails 1/2
IntelliJ IDEA tightly integrates with Grails , and makes it possible to work with Grails applications from within the IDE, sparing you from the need to use a command line. Grails support in IntelliJ IDEA lets you do the following:
Before you start
Before you start creating your Grails project, make sure that you have Grails SDK downloaded on your machine. You can download the latest SDK version from the Grails page. Also, make sure that you are working with IntelliJ IDEA ultimate edition, version 9 or later. See the latest available version.
Creating Grails Project
Do one of the following:
If you are going to create a new project: click Create New Project on the Welcome screen or select File | New | Project.
As a result, the New Project wizard opens.
If you are going to add a module to an existing project: open the project to which you want to add a module, and select File | New | Module.
As a result, the New Module wizard opens.
Project SDK that you are going to use.
Grails SDK Home - select a local Grails installation that is represented by a library.
Create create-app or create-plugin - select one of these options depending on what you want to create.
Options - specify additional options.
Click Next.
Specify the name and location settings.
Click Finish.
Since we chose to create an application, IntelliJ IDEA executes the create-app target, which generates the directory structure of a Grails application. All output information is displayed in the Console:
Exploring Grails Application
IntelliJ IDEA enables you to explore your Grails application from two different viewpoints:
The Project tool window shows the typical Grails directory structure.
The Grails tool window shows the logical set of Grails application elements (Domain classes, Controllers, Views, etc.)
Creating Elements in your Grails Project
To illustrate IntelliJ IDEA abilities, let's start developing a very basic library management system.
- Create a domain class for the library system. This class will represent a book within a library.
There are two possible ways of doing that in IntelliJ IDEA:
Execute a Grails target. Press Ctrl+Alt+G, and enter Grails target name.
Note that code completion Ctrl+Space is available in the Run Grails target dialog box:
Right-click the Grails tool window background, and choose New | Grails Domain class on the context menu:
Domain class Book.groovy
Test class BookTests.groovy
For the purposes of our tutorial, we will work with the domain class Book.groovy.
Now it is just a stub, and we'll add the following fields:
Book title
Author name (may be two author names?)
Date published
Reader name
Date taken
Open Book.groovy for editing (F4), and type these fields in your code, using the code completion Ctrl+Space:
- Provide a controller and views.
You can do it in two ways:
run the Grails target generate-all Book
use Scaffolding - the handy tool that you can find at the top of the domain class editor:
IntelliJ IDEA works hard (you can see that in the console), and produces the BookController.groovy class: Next, create views the same way: For each method of the controller, IntelliJ IDEA generates a file with the .gsp extension (create.gsp, edit.gsp, list.gsp, show.gsp).
Running the Application
There are more things you might want to do to make your application useful, but let's try to run it straight away with the default settings. To do that, press Shift+F10 and after a turmoil of messages in the Console, your application starts in your default browser, with the following URL in the address bar: http://localhost:8080/GrailsDemo.
On that page, you will see something like this: Click the controller link to open the list of books, which is empty by default. Now, you can try to fill out the entries of your library management system, for example, click the New Book button to add a book: As you see, our basic library management system is ready. If you want to extend its functionality or you are not very happy with the code generated by Grails, you can modify the files in the IntelliJ IDEA editor to fit your particular needs, and rerun the application.
Finally, if you want to evaluate your effort for creating and running your Grails application under IntelliJ IDEA, view the number of files and lines of source code.
Press Ctrl+Alt+G, type
stats in the popup, and see the results in the Console:


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What Are the Cleanest Lakes in America?
The BBC rates Crater Lake in Oregon as the cleanest in the United States, and one of the cleanest in the world. The United States Environmental Protection Agency considers Lake Tahoe one of the cleanest lakes in the country, and MSN states that Lake Coeur d'Alene in Idaho also tops the list.
Crater Later in Oregon lies in the crater of the ancient volcano Mount Mazama and reaches nearly 2,000 feet deep. Part of its pristine clarity comes from the fact it is fed only by rain and snow and remains uncontaminated by streams and rivers. Its deep blue color is proof of its cleanness; clean water doesn't absorb blue wavelengths of visible light.
Lake Tahoe is also considered one of the cleanest lakes as evidenced by its clarity and dark blue color. This lake is nearly 2 million years old and covers almost 200 square miles, reaching to depths of 1,600 feet.
MSN touts Lake Coeur d'Alene in Idaho as another of the cleanest, clearest lakes, calling it a national treasure. This lake rests in a basin carved by an ancient glacier. Not only is the lake considered beautiful, but it is rife with recreational fun, from boating and fishing to golfing.


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Check, Please! Bay Area Season 6: episode 6 airs Thursday September 15 at 7:30pm on KQED TV 9. View other airtimes and channels.
You can watch individual restaurant segments as well as view the entire episode online. The website also provides restaurant information not specified on the show, written reviews from the guests and restaurant recipes. If you have opinions on the restaurants featured please feel free to share your thoughts. This season, Leslie Sbrocco will be sharing wine tips with each episode.
The sixth episode of the season features these restaurants: Rhea's Market and Deli (San Francisco), Sauce (San Francisco) and the girl and the fig (Sonoma).
Leslie Sbrocco: Wine Tips -- Think About Texture when Pairing Food + Wine


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I've read your advice about adding organic matter to the garden, but I've got some physical issues which make it hard to bring in wheelbarrows of compost or manure into the garden. Any other way to improve the soil? I love to garden and do it organically. — Cindy from Nebraska
Cindy, this is the perfect time to plant a cover crop or what we call a green manure. There are many different plants used which are planted now, then turned into the garden next spring. Winter rye and buckwheat are two of my favorites, as they are easy to find and germinate well in cool fall temperatures. Look through the Baker Creek catalog to find the cover crop which is right for you.
Cover crops also stop winter erosion of the garden soil and can often times be habitat for beneficial insects.


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December 11, 2018, Cairo –At a ceremony held at The American University in Cairo (AUC) Tahrir Square campus, the AUC Press awarded the 2018 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature to the Saudi Arabian writer Omaima Al-Khamis for her novel Masra al-Gharaniq fi Mudun al-'Aqiq (Voyage of the Cranes in the Cities of Agate). Presented by AUC Provost, Ehab Abdel-Rahman, the award was decided by the members of the Award Committee: Tahia Abdel Nasser, associate professor of English and comparative literature, AUC; Shereen Abouelnaga, professor of English literature, Cairo University; Mona Tolba, associate professor of Arabic literature, Ain Shams University; Humphrey Davies, renowned translator of Arabic fiction, historical and classical texts, AUC and Rasheed El Enany, emeritus professor of modern Arabic literature, University of Exeter.
The award ceremony at AUC's Oriental Hall in Tahrir Square Campus was attended by many writers and other distinguished personalities of Egyptian cultural life.
In their citation for the award, the judges described Masra al-Gharaniq fi Mudun al-Aqiq as "a serious novel that speaks to our time through history. It takes the form of a journey from Arabia northwards and westwards to Andalusia, through the great cities of the Arab world in the eleventh century during the titular rule of the weakened Abbasids in Baghdad, the Fatimids in Cairo, and the warring factions of Islamic rule in Spain." They went on to say, "Al-Khamis's language exquisitely traces a route through beleaguered cities in a novel that speaks to the importance of culture, imbuing them instead with rare and precious knowledge… Omaima Al-Khamis has succeeded in capturing the essence of cultural and religious diversity in the Arab world between 402 and 405 Hijri.. For the Western reader, the clearly presented controversies over issues such as the acceptance or rejection of rationalism will bring to mind much that is familiar in his or her own history."
In her emotional acceptance address, Omaima Al-Khamis began by paying tribute to Naguib Mahfouz, "Our great writer who taught us the magic and craft of the story." She thanked her parents for shaping her consciousness. "The book was . . . a staple of our house," said Al-Khamis, reminiscing about the piles of books that surrounded her when she was growing up. "At the beginning I was enamored with language, and perhaps it was my luck to be born with letters and words around me." She recalled "the flavor of evenings that my father and mother used to spend under the jasmine tree in our house's garden, absorbed in reviewing a book, my father reading and my mother writing, or my father writing and my mother reviewing."
"The novel is the more mature form in the journey of human creativity and the most complex and intricate of all artistic forms," said Al-Khamis. "[It is] an attempt to recover the original material of the world, to break it down into its smaller parts," she added.
The American University in Cairo Press, which established the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 1996, has been the primary publisher of Naguib Mahfouz's English-language editions for more than 30 years, and has also been responsible for the publication of some 600 foreign-language editions of the Nobel laureate's works in more than 40 languages around the world since the author won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988.
With some 50 new publications annually and more than 800 titles in print, The American University in Cairo Press is recognized as the region's leading English-language publisher. Nominations and submissions for the 2019 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature are welcomed at any time until 15 February 2019. Arabic novels published for the first time in 2017 or 2018, and not yet translated into English, are eligible. For details, see "Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature" at aucpress.com.
For more information about the university news and events follow us on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/aucegypt
And Twitter @AUC


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News Archive
Ty Clark
The USA played Germany in the World Cup today. It was a critical game for the USA, which needed a win, draw, or close loss plus help to advance out of the "Group of Death" and into the second stage of the tournament.
The game started at 12:00 noon, right as lunch began at Boys State. Our lunches run on a staggered schedule. Each county arrives, gets their food, sits down and eats, then leaves so the next group can come in. Today, we added "watching the World Cup" to that list.
Delegates and staff everywhere were glued to TVs for as much time as physically possible during the lunch period. I ate early, left about halfway through the first half, and went back to the dorm to catch the rest of the game. A group was watching the match as they waited for their scheduled time.
With about eight minutes left in the half, the counselor turned off the TV. Time to go. "C'mon," said a delegate. "Let's line up quick so we can get over there and watch it."
I've never seen a group of fifty delegates get lined up and move to lunch so quickly. It was efficient like a German run from the midfield. Thirty minutes later, the group was back for the start of the second half.
About forty people were in the group. Thirty-four delegates, four staff members, one marine, and two Rider cleaning staff all focused on the TV as the Germans relentlessly pressed the wings and controlled possession. The USA got a couple excellent chances in the waning moments of the game, moving everyone to the edge of their seats and drawing collective exclamations.
This is new. World Cup soccer hasn't been this big a deal at Boys State since I've been here. News of Landon Donovan's goal in 2010 spread throughout Boys State quickly but it didn't command the attention of the entire state. Some counselors remember listening to games on transistor radios back in the 1980s with only one or two other friends. Three-fifths of a city watching together? Very unusual.
But sports are unusual in today's culture: they're the one thing we can't tape-delay. Everything else can be experienced later by individuals alone. Even TV shows, one of the other final bastions, are increasingly watched online, asynchronously. Sports are different. They happen live, and there's no good way to catch up later. If you want to see a match, you have to watch it at that moment. In the whatever-you-want, whenever-you-want world of 2014, sporting events are scarce resources.
Boys State is also scarce. It's also about to end. By the time this article is posted, there will be less than twenty hours remaining in the program. In that time, we've still got two debates, two votes, two large manuals, a test, graduation, time with families, and other things to do.
There isn't a lot of time left for delegates to spend time with each other. They might be together, in the same location, but they won't be interacting much. If they want to enjoy each other's company more, they won't have long to do that.
But there are a few times that they can. Meals are a given, and tonight, each city will share a late meal together. These meals are bittersweet. We've been together for a week. In that week, we've gotten to know each other, work with each other, and have fun together. The city meals remind us that we've enjoyed each other but also that it's coming to an end. Soon, goodbye will be all we have.
And then what?
That question is hard to answer and it's hard to ask. Maybe that's why many counselors don't address it tonight. But it's there, lurking behind us. What comes after Friday at 4:30 P.M.?
Quite a lot, actually. After the end of Boys State, the delegates will go back home, finish their summer, finish school, go to college, graduate collehold on, I'm getting ahead of myself.
The reason we don't always bring up that question is because the city meals are the last extended time we have together and we want to enjoy each other's company rather than think about not having it. There is a time to laugh as well as a time to mourn. Today, tonight, and tomorrow are for laughter and friendship. We'll do it together, sharing a meal and our time, just like we'll share hugs and goodbyes tomorrow. Both times, we'll think about what it would be like if Boys State was a full-time thing and not just a week and about how the friends we've met here have enriched our lives. (If you want an answer to that question, come back on staff!)
Endings are always hard but they get weird once you've experienced them many times. You feel sad to see people leave but also have anticipated it. The emotions aren't as vivid as they were before. But when you're a teenager, those emotions are powerful, and the goodbye is hard. What carries you through are the memories of good things past and the prospect of more good things ahead. Tonight, we'll add a few good things to that list with our friends. Hopefully, that will be enough.


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This is a censored video from an August 26 incident where a Griffin Police officer told a citizen to 'suck my d**k'.
Did You See This?
Miami-Dade Police Sergeant Accused Of Kicking Handcuffed Suspect
For the second time this year a South Florida police officer is being charged after kicking [...]
Miami Police Take $20,000 Cash From Stripper During Traffic Stop
she going to have to pay a lawyer and still take an L
Cop Pulls Gun on Children, Threatens Them With Baton
damn. the kids? smh
The 75th – (Police Corruption Documentary)
2014 documentary directed by Tiller Russell, and produced by Eli Holzman, Aaron Saidman, and [...]


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Martin Delabano: Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise
Martin Delabano is a wealthy man. A life rich with art, family and spirituality has instilled in him an unrelenting zeal for creativity and compassion, along with wisdom to realize his inner vision by sharing it through outward expression. Art has surrounded Delabano all his life, not simply by default, but as a conscious choice and true calling.
Delabano's assemblages are born from his vast collections of stufff, both physical and psychological. A self-described pack rat, he constantly accumulates objects for his work. Such items as religious icons, picture frames, and children's blocks speak to his life and interest, while others serve to enhance visual balance and composition. Layered, stacked, and packed into the frame, life's discarded minutiae coalesce into a singular narrative. It is abstract yet deliberate, full but not chaotic.
The many layers present a visual history, paying homage to the past even as they transform it into the present and preserve it for the future. The overall effect is one of abundance, of visual wealth. These high-relief pieces break the visual plane and beckon to the viewer with an invitation to look, think, and absorb the opulence therein. Of his art, Delabano once remarked, "I want my work to inspire, to intrigue, to set one's imagination into play."
In addition to enriching the community aesthetically, Delabano also contributes to its creative and intellectual wealth and physical well being. His art appears in numerous private and public collections throughout Texas, including those of the Dallas Museum of Art, the Grace Museum of Art in Abilene, and the Texas A&M University Art collection in College Station. As a teacher, he shares his knowledge and passion for art with children, instilling in them a fundamental belief in the power of self-expression. this devotion to his students is evidenced by the lifelong relationships he forms with them, acting as a mentor long after they leave his classroom. And, as a platelet donor for Carter Blood Care, he has given some twenty-one gallons over the years. As he puts it, "Health has always been one of my blessings….it seems only right to pay that forward."
For Delabano, art functions as much more than a vehicle for his own gratification; it allows him the freedom in invest in the success of others. He makes art, and in turn, art makes him. It is this intrinsic wealth of talent and character that sets Martin Delabano apart as the 2010 Distinguished Texas Artist.
Elizabeth Delaney


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This week we found a key in our wallet. We don't know where it came from or what it opens, and we don't recognize the silver shape. Last week we noticed a cookbook missing from our shelves, and we haven't found it since. Two weeks ago we saw a dead squirrel on our walk to work—a common sight in the neighborhood, except the body was twenty feet away from the road, splayed on a sidewalk at the base of an oak. Had she miscalculated a jump and fallen to her death? Later, when we walked home, the squirrel had been laid under a trio of rocks: an improvised burial. Our lives are filled with small mysteries. What happened to the squirrel? Where did the cookbook go? How did this key work its way into our wallet, unnoticed for years? Lucky for us, the Internet now has someone to answer these questions. Starlee Kine, producer of "Mystery Show" by Gimlet Media, is on the case. She's made it her mission to solve one mystery a week, and so far she's succeeded. Catch up on her current detective work here. Pair with Kine's Longform podcast, from the early days of that show.
The June issue of Poetry is a treasure trove, and presents new poems from several past contributors to this magazine, including Yusef Komunyakaa, Michael Klein, and David Tomas Martinez. And while we're always overjoyed when OA poetry editor Rebecca Gayle Howell publishes new work, this month we're especially proud of her Poetry debut. Rebecca has two beautiful pieces in the June issue, "Something's Coming but Never Does" and "Every Job Has a First Day." The latter was selected to be read in the magazine's excellent monthly podcast. In the discussion, editor Don Share singles out a stunning line—"He wore those rubber boots, though the sun was / an anvil, and very little wet . . ."—inspiring us, yet again, to dive into Render, Rebecca's powerful collection from 2013.
Perhaps you've heard of Leon Bridges, the rising rail-thin "new soul" musician from Fort Worth, Texas. He sounds a lot like Sam Cooke—at least according to nearly every outlet that's covered Bridges in the past year. We'll admit that the comparison's getting tired, though we get it, too. Maybe it's Bridges's soft Fifties pop grooves, the rhythmic catch of the guitar strings on second beats, the harmonized doo-wops in "Better Man," or the scratch at the edge of the tenor vocals that makes his voice sound like it was recorded by a 1955 cardioid mic. Whatever it is, listeners the nation over have responded to Bridges's act with cultish admiration. We ourselves saw him play a show at Little Rock's White Water Tavern not long ago, performing to a near-empty room while we watched in quiet awe. (By the time we caught his return trip, the word had gotten out: it was standing room only.) Since then his listeners have grown from tens to dozens to thousands—seemingly in the time it might take for a space rocket to launch in front of a world of screen-pressed faces. Bridges's expanding fan base is at odds with the fact that he's had only two songs available online until just this month. NPR premiered the "First Listen" of his album, Coming Home, on June 14. It dropped on Tuesday. We're partial to the title track.
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