UPDATE: Commentroversy: Dead Milkman Tells A Tale

It is here that we ask you: If there’s a goddamned Larry Fine mural, where,
pray tell, is our Dead Milkmen mural?

Imagine our surprise and honor when Dean “Clean” Sabatino of the Dead Milkmen chimed in on yesterday’s post about that time the Dead Milkmen played on MTV and made Downtown Julie Brown cry:

We took our friend along with a large bag of rubber fishing lure worms. We positioned him behind the stage and he hurled them over us onto the “kids” as they were referred to by the crew while they “danced” and stage dived. At the end of our “performance” Julie came up and introduced us. Rodney produced the handcuffs, attached himself to Julie and then threw the key into the audience. She began to get upset that “her kids” were picking up the worms and pelting her with them.

Dean claims there are a box of old VHS tapes in his basement where video evidence of this may lurk, but as we did yesterday, we still implore anyone who has definitive footage of this historic and proud Philadelphia Moment to please get in touch with us. For their part, the Dead Milkmen will be playing out on the West Coast in May, and their latest LP, The King In Yellow, is available here.

Update: The stakes have been raised. The co-author of I Want My MTV has offered a free copy of the book, acclaimed as one of the best of 2011 all over the place, for anyone who can find the clip and upload it to Youtube. We would like to add that if you are afraid of the MTV scouts finding it and taking it down, you can also send it to us, or upload it on Vimeo. Game on.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 26th, 2012 at 7:18 am.

Rain threatens to move Ivies Concert indoors

April 27, 2012
By Dylan HammerORIENT STAFF


A questionable weather forecast for the weekend may change the location of the Saturday Ivies Concert.

In an email to the student body, Director of Safety and Security Randy Nichols stated that inclement weather would relocate the concert to Farley Field House.

According to Ruiqi Li '13, E-Board co-chair, the decision to move the concert inside will not depend on the weekend's weather alone, as last night's rain will be a factor too.

"Unfortunately, the rain call will not only be contingent on whether it will rain on Friday and Saturday, but also on whether the field is soggy from rain on Thursday," Li wrote in an email to the Orient.

According to Li, the final decision will be made today by Nate Hintze, associate director of student activities.

"Setup for the show begins on Friday, a process that involves all of student activities, Moonlighting Production Company, and the Entertainment Board," Li wrote.

According to Li, an indoor Ivies would mean a number of production changes.

"If the concert moves inside, production becomes a very different process in which the stage will be much smaller and will not have to travel up from Boston," she said.

Li wrote that the advantage to an indoor concert would be "Milkman's lightshow," an extravagant laser production by mashup artist Milkman, one of the three performers.

The last time it rained on the Saturday of Ivies was five years ago. The rain location in previous years has been Morrell Gym.

This year's merchandise is going to change. The junior class will not sell water bottles for this year's Ivies, according to Class of 2013 president Sarah Levin. She cited a number of factors that influenced the Class Council's decision.

"I think the junior class really wanted to do a gift that was specifically for the junior class," she said.

Typically, the entire junior class receives free Ivies-customized water bottles for a class gift, and charges other classes for them.

"We wanted to do something that was a little more special," Levin said.

The junior Class Council has instead opted to order sweatpants for its class.

Eco-friendly concerns also swayed the council's decision. "It's pretty unsustainable to order 1,000 water bottles, 800 of which end up...at the end of the concert all over the field," Levin said. "A lot of plastic goes to waste."

The council also took logistics into account. Levin cited the minor mishap caused by the 2010 Ivies bottles sold by the Class of 2011, which featured misprinted volume measurements. That year, a line on the bottle denoting four shots of alcohol actually measured six shots.

"We didn't want to have to deal with that aspect of it either," said Levin.

Professor of Art Mark Wethli has created a design for this year's Ivies posters and apparel.

"This is the first design I've done for Ivies," Wethli wrote in an emial to the Orient.

Wethli wrote that he was approached by Nick Riker '12, a member of the E-Board, to do a T-shirt design, one of three selected by the E-Board.

"I was delighted to say yes," Wethli wrote.

The design features the heads of this year's three performers worked into the branches of a tree, with "Ivies" spelled out in the roots.

"The first challenge was representing three such different acts in a single design," he wrote. "Somehow the image of a tree and its roots popped into my head."

Wethli said that he worked on the design while on a trip in Paris.

"The great thing was that the trees in Paris are pruned exactly like the tree in my drawing—a pruning technique called 'pollarding'—so there was plenty of inspiration everywhere I went," he wrote. "I actually modeled a few of the limbs in the Ivies design on trees I saw in the Tuileries in Paris."

Wethli wrote that the design and type was all done in Photoshop, after adapting Internet photos of the three acts and placing them into the tree limbs.

"At a later point I decided to add the names of the performers as well, mainly to round out the top of the tree, but also to create more visual balance and complexity, with 'Ivies' at the bottom balanced with the names of the bands at the top," Wethli wrote.

Though the design missed the E-Board's deadline to make it onto most of the shirts, it appears on the official posters and some "limited edition" apparel.

Racers 3rd At OVC Women's Golf Championship MSU's Delaney Howson and Alexandra Lennartsson earn OVC All-Tournament Team honors.

A final round comeback didn't materialize for the Murray State Racers Tuesday at the 2012 Ohio Valley Conference Women's Golf Championship in Dickson, Tenn., at Greystone Golf Club. MSU started the day five shots behind leader Jacksonville State and finished with a team 928 and behind champion JSU who finished 910. Morehead State finished second at 923.

Murray State's Delaney Howson closed by tying the lowest round of the event with a 1-under-par 71 to finish third to earn a spot on the OVC All-Tournament Team. Howson was the Racers' top performer in the 54-hole event with rounds of 78-75-71=224. Alexandra Lennartsson took home fifth place and also a spot on the all-tournament team with scores of 75-73-79=227.

“I'm proud of our team and the way they competed the last three days,” MSU Head Coach Milkman said. “I'm also happy that Delaney and Alexandra played their way onto the all-tournament team.”

The Racers say goodbye to senior Morgan Cross who finished eighth after scores of 75-80-78=233. Cross and the Racers fell short this season, but she leaves with two OVC titles and two appearances in the NCAA Tournament while a Racer. She was also a two-time All-OVC pick and made the All-OVC Tournament Team as a junior last season.

“Morgan has been a big part of our program since she arrived as a freshman,” Milkman said. “She is such a tremendous competitor and always gave her best for Murray State.”

“I've enjoyed my time at Murray State,” Cross said. “It seems like these four years playing golf for the Racers has gone by so fast. I'm happy that I got to play for Coach Milkman and I'll always be a Racer.”

The Racers were looking for their ninth OVC title and their first since winning the last of three straight in 2010. Milkman's coaching peers thought enough of her to honor her with the Bobby Nichols OVC Coach of the Year award. This marks the ninth time she has been named the OVC Coach of the Year.

After the Racers' third place showing, Eastern Kentucky (942), Austin Peay (967), Tennessee Tech (978) and Eastern Illinois (985) rounded out the OVC field,

For the week, the Greystone course played 5,964 yards and to a par of 72.

Morehead State's Marisa Kamelgarn and JSU's Ornella Arrizon shared medalist honors each with a 222 total.


The women's event was just the beginning of collegiate golf this week in middle Tennessee as the OVC Men's Golf Championship moves into Greystone Wednesday as the participating schools have their practice rounds. The first round of the men's event begins Thursday morning and runs through Saturday.

ECCC12: CASEY AND ADLARD RETURN TO "ROCK BOTTOM"

These days, comic readers best know Joe Casey and Charlie Adlard for their work on projects like "Butcher Baker: The Righteous Maker" and "The Walking Dead" respectively. And some savvy fans may know the pair's collaborative work on titles like "CODEFLESH." But one of the projects the pair is most proud of has been out of print and out of sight under the radar for a number of years: the graphic novel "Rock Bottom."

Originally published in 2006 by AiT/PlanetLar, the stripped down story of a rough and tumble Rockabilly musician who's slowly turning into stone presents a different side of both creators' work, and as announced today at Emerald City Comic Con, the book will be returning this fall in a new hardcover edition from Image Comics.

It's the second such project for Casey who recently announced the return of he and Steve Parkhouse's "The Milkman Murders" through Image, but the writer is quick to point out the uniqueness of "Rock Bottom." "This thing kind of exists on its own," he said. "I really can’t think of anything else that Charlie and I have done that connects to this. From the way it was written to Charlie’s approach to the art, it seems to stand alone. It’s a singular piece of work. Which is what I like about it."






Drawn by Adlard in a sparse, clean-line style, the book is a departure for the artist, but one he'd like to return to if not on his ongoing, chart-topping gig with the undead. "I doubt that I'll ever do 'The Walking Dead' like that," the artist explained. "As Joe said, 'Rock Bottom' is a singular stand alone piece of work and that style suits and works for that project. I may return to that style at a later date for another project, but it won't be for a certain zombie series.

"The art, for me, still stands up - there's obviously bits and pieces here and there that I might wince at, but that's just "old" artwork - I'd like to think I've improved since then. When I do other projects away from 'TWD,' I like to do something different - to experiment a little - and that's why I'm still very proud of what I accomplished here."

The story of Thomas Dare stands out for the creators in a number of ways. Outside the premise of musician turns to stone, a much more personal story simmers. "There’s a fair amount of dread permeating throughout this story, much more so than I would ever consider writing today," Casey said. "It’s just not where my head is at. I’m not quite sure what I was on about when I came up with the initial idea, way back when. Clearly, it’s a metaphor for terminal disease… which is not something that I personally have a lot of experience with. But I must’ve been curious about exploring it, on some level. Maybe it’s the hypochondriac in me, demanding to be heard. At the very least, it’s a story where I was able to get a few things out of my system."

Adlard added, "From what Joe's just said there - the book sounds like a real downer. But, the reason I was attracted to it was that it was the most uplifting book I'd ever read. It's the only script I read first hand where I just felt that I HAD to draw this - no one else."

When it hits comic shops, the book will contain some extra material and a new cover by Adlard, though it won't quite be a process-piece blowout for one simple reason. "Funnily enough, Charlie’s not much of a sketch guy, so it’s not like there’s a ton of development material available," Casey said. "I’ll probably end up doing some sort of retrospective flim-flam where I spout off endlessly about shit that only I’m interested in. Y’know, my usual dance move." Adlard added of the cover, "I'm looking forward to it. It'll give me the chance to do something a bit more design oriented."






As for why Image and why now, the wrier revealed,"It’s an age old story, but basically, the original contract for the book expired. Similar to 'The Milkman Murders' hardcover I’m doing this summer, Charlie and I simply had to be patient until the 'Rock Bottom' was free and clear and back in our sole possession. Personally, I’d been counting down the months for us to be able to do it, because I’m proud of the work we put into it. It’s a very human story, very down to Earth, not at all like the comicbooks I’ve been known for doing recently. So I can’t think of anything more punk rock that laying 'Rock Bottom' on anyone that’s been reading my work on things like 'Officer Downe' or 'Butcher Baker.'"

"May I add that I think it's the best work Joe and myself have done in our collaborations," Adlard noted. "I'll go as far as to say I think it's the best work I've seen of Joe's, and it was some of the best art I had also done up to that point. So anyone that's interested in GOOD comic books should really read this. I'm not normally interested in self promotion - but I believe passionately about this project."

Over six years after the initial release of "Rock Bottom," its creators aren't surprised that there haven't been more Rock N Roll stories told in the form of late. "Plain and simple, it’s hard to convey music in purely visual terms," Casey said. "Sound is the one real limitation in comic books. I think Charlie did a great job of depicting that aspect of Thomas Dare’s life. And, in the context of the story itself, I wanted Thomas to have a skill that would be directly affected by his affliction. Both Charlie and I are musicians ourselves, so I think we could both relate to it on a more personal level."

"Plus the fact that it was an excuse for me to draw drums RIGHT," Adlard laughed. "No one in the comics industry ever drums correctly.. I just had to address the balance."

The artist added, "It's just a book that deserves a wider audience. Out of everything I've done, THIS is the one." And Casey backed him up, saying, "I think it’s some of Charlie’s best work as an artist, so it’s cool to put it out in a more permanent, hardcover edition. Anyone who reads 'The Walking Dead' and thinks they know the range of Charlie’s talent should take a look at this motherfucker. And I’m glad to see this thing being published by Image Comics. It’s exactly where this book belongs."

BRASSAÏ: PARIS BY NIGHT reviewed by Vivian Thomas

BRASSAÏ: PARIS BY NIGHT

reviewed by Vivian Thomas

April 25, 2012

A beautiful new edition of Brassaï’s classic book of urban photography, Paris by Night, shows both the bright and dark sides of Paris as seen through the eyes of a talented young artist who fell under the city’s spell.
When 25-year-old Gyula Halász arrived in Paris from his native Hungary in 1924 he’d been trained as an artist and soon found his way into the circles frequented by Picasso, Miró, Dalí and Henry Miller. Continuing his work as a sculptor and painter, he supported himself by working as a journalist, adopting the pseudonym of Brassaï, derived from the name of his native city, Brassó. Obliged to use photography for his assignments, he initially disliked the medium, but eventually started to appreciate its aesthetic capabilities. Roaming the city at night, he brought his camera along and began to capture the unique flora and fauna of nighttime Paris.

A kiosk offering magazines in every language and for every taste

A homeless woman on the quais of the Seine

While his images reflect the glitter and gaiety the city was famous for—the brilliantly lit grand staircase of the Opéra on a gala night, the Eiffel Tower blazing with lights in the shape of shooting stars, cancan girls doing high kicks at the Bal Tabarin, Brassaï also included the grittier side of Paris by night: a row of clochardssleeping under the colonnade of the Bourse de Commerce; an elderly homeless woman dressed in the tattered remnants of her former finery; a ragpicker crouched on the cobblestones, digging through a trashcan.
He also chronicled the city’s nocturnal workers: night-beat policemen, their capes billowing over their bicycles; workers at Les Halles unloading the vegetables brought into the city on farm carts or special little produce trains; workmen polishing tram tracks; a milkman loading milk cans onto his horse-drawn cart.
Shooting at night was a technical challenge, and the photographs display an intriguing variety of light sources—gas lamps and their reflections in the Seine, a glowing brazier, the sparks of a workman’s grinding tool, a burning building with silhouetted firefighters, a checkerboard of lighted and dark windows on a facade.
In 1933 Brassaï published 64 of these scenes in his first book of photographs, Paris de Nuit, which became an immediate hit. For that book, which was designed by Brassaï himself, the photographs were reproduced using a process called heliogravure.
This new edition gives us the same images and, according to the publisher’s statement, “uses the latest engraving technology to reproduce faithfully the quality of the original photographs”. The black-and-white photographs, printed on matte black pages, have a misty, dreamlike, almost magical look, a perfect match for their poetic content. Brassaï himself described it best: “The surreal effect of my pictures was nothing more than reality made fantastic through a particular vision. All I wanted to express was reality, for nothing is more surreal.”
Brassaï: Paris by Night. Flammarion, 2012. Foreward by Paul Morand. 64 duotone illustrations, 96 pages. Distributed by Rizzoli New York

Home, By Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison's novels never happen in the here and now. They take place after the Great Depression or during the Jazz age, in 19th-century Ohio or in pre-slavery north America, as was the case in her last and ninth novel, A Mercy.

Yet these pasts are not simple African American histories. They are unresolved, uncontained and they insinuate themselves into the present like the eponymous ghost child in Beloved, who haunts the living with such force that she becomes flesh and blood. The unresolved past in Home is 1950s America, and Morrison's central character, Frank, has just returned from the Korean war to begin his transition from fighting in a desegregated army to living in a segregated America.

There is no hero's welcome. Frank is still America's second-class citizen, even if he has killed in its name. Home, for him, is a hard-faced, indifferent land, in which he must heal his own scars. The post-traumatic stress disorder he suffers can hardly be more topical as America's military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan rages on.

Neither can the subject of institutionalised racism, given the political furore over the recent shooting of a black teenager, Trayvon Martin, in Florida. Frank's emotional fall-out - and the reader's immersion in his semi-hallucinatory inner monologue at the start of the book - could be that of a soldier returning from the Helmand front today.

But Home is not about war as much as its aftermath. Morrison has said that Barack Obama's election was the first time she felt "powerfully patriotic". This tenth novel by the Nobel Prize-winning writer can be read as an examination of patriotism – the idea of belonging to, and fighting for, one's country, and what this means for an ordinary African American man.

For Frank it means freedom of sorts, because it offers him escape from his mean existence in Lotus, Georgia, the type of town where "there was no future, only long stretches of killing time". We meet Frank half-dressed and fleeing from a hospital ward to make his Greyhound bus migration to the South. He has lain handcuffed in his hospital bed, we are told, and his arrival from Korea is a symbolic return to bondage from which he must break free.

A sympathetic minister who harbours him after his hospital escape expresses the racial outrage that Frank never articulates: "An integrated army is integrated misery. You all fight, come back, they treat you like dogs. Change that. They treat dogs better."

It is interesting that Morrison chose the Korean War as her backdrop. A closer parallel to Iraq, if she had wanted it, might have been Vietnam with all its moral murkiness and internal opposition. Korea is perhaps understood as a more just war, and its homecoming for troops an ostensible return to the land of the free, though Frank's story highlights the injustices of the country in whose name the just war was fought.

Morrison excels at presenting a raw and moving portrait of fractured masculinity, just as she did in Song of Solomon with Milkman, her first fully-developed male protagonist, in an effort to "de-domesticate the landscape" and bring "a radical shift in imagination from a female locale to a male one." She won critical plaudits and her men have, ever since, been as complex and as compassionate as her women. So it is with Frank, although his journey never achieves the depth and dimension of Milkman's epic progress, with its wider explorations of family, friendship, racial violence and love.

Comparing Home to the extraordinary achievement of Morrison's past works, this is a less dazzling, more incomplete novel, though it is fast and fluid in its storytelling. The sibling migration – Frank and his younger sister Cee's journey back to Georgia – which leads to transformation and healing, seems all too brief and anticlimactic, lacking the complexity we have come to expect of Morrison. Frank's interior world is a devastating place to be, yet there is a slight sense of his voice tapering off by the end. There is so much more he could say, particularly about the shooting of a small Korean girl, inspired by the shock of illicit sexual craving for her. Perhaps Home is a deliberate attempt at brevity – this, like her last novel, is more a novella in size. Morrison might also have pared down her prose as a rejoinder to those critics who label her writing poetic -– to her chagrin, when she has stated her intention to capture an earthier street vernacular. The lyricism appears sporadically – in a striking preface poem; in the first few pages of vividly recaptured childhood trauma.

Whereas in her first novel, The Bluest Eye, the Ohio town of Lorain was uncompromisingly inhospitable, cruelly stratified along class and caste lines, here Lotus transforms into a place of salvation on the siblings return, with its community of benign womenfolk who act as Cee's healers. Her recovery from a serious condition, with the help of these women, shows that new homes and havens can be re-forged from old.

The narration is split between Frank, Cee and Frank's lover, Lily. It hops from present to past, and from interior to exterior perspectives. Despite this narrative democracy, Home is really Frank's story. Both siblings experience a rite-of-passage but Cee's inner transformation is dealt with relatively briskly. She speaks, by the end, in generic phrases, as a woman whose consciousness has been raised ("I'm not going to hide from what's true just because it hurts).

Her back-story is predictable – a girl marooned in a small town and made timid by her grandmother's bullying – but it takes an unexpected turn after her marriage breaks down. She becomes a domestic servant to a doctor who asks Cee, on their first meeting, whether she has "had children or been with a man". Cee does not pick up on his tone or his dubious conduct, though Morrison makes his sinister intentions glaringly clear. Studying the doctor's books on race and heredity, Cee "promised herself she would find time to read about and understand 'eugenics'." Sadly, this potentially macabre and fabular subplot is left under-developed by a writer who would normally have woven its threads richly.

The surprise of the final few chapters is the emergence of a split voice within Frank that sounds like transgressive meta-fiction. These are brief flashes in which Frank assumes a voice that exists beyond Morrison's control, and directly challenges the author. "I don't think you know much about love. Or me", he concludes, and later advises her of an earlier lie: "You can keep on writing, but I think you ought to know what's true."

This could be evidence of Frank's further fracturing, a sense of a self dividing in two, or it might be a character's rebellion against his creator. These challenges are flecks, tacked on to passages, yet they are also signature-marks of Morrison's stylistic audacity. It is not simply that they puncture the suspension of disbelief. They are potent, angry.

Before writing Beloved, which was based on the true story of Margaret Garner, a mother who murdered her daughter to save her from slavery, Morrison saw a vision of the child: "She walked out of the water, climbed the rocks, and leaned against the gazebo. Nice hat. So she was there from the beginning, and except for me, everybody (the characters) knew it." Frank's mutinous commentary leaves the reader thrilled. We are on classic Morrison terrain which could go anywhere, from the real to the supernatural to the mythic; but the confrontation is momentary, and goes nowhere at all

Milkman digs out land scam

RAJPARA (BHAVNAGAR): Why buy a cow if you can get milk for free? This is exactly what a politically influential person did using government land as his own and earning money by allowing a private firm to construct a telecommunications tower there. But Right to Information used by a humble milkman, Raju Hadgarda, exposed him.

However, what's more shocking than the money siphoning revelation is that nine notices by district development officer, an IAS officer, to lodge a criminal complaint against the errant person, have remained buried in the files since August 2009.

As per case details, Dolu Bharwad had forged a land document in connivance with village talati Chandrasinh Zala and showed the government school's land in Rajpara village of Bhavnagar district as his own. In 2008, he rented the land to New Delhi-based Indus Towers Ltd, an infrastructure provider which establishes, maintains and operates telecommunications tower structures. Bharwad started drawing a monthly rent of Rs 4,100 from the company. Bharwad, who is said to be close to a top Koli community politician, signed a 20-years lease agreement with the firm.

"This land belongs to government and it is proved by documents accessed under RTI Act. The village panchayat issued a no-objection certificate (NOC) saying that land is owned by Bharwad. But truth was different,'' says Raju Hadgarda, a milkman from the village who has been fighting this battle for last 6 years.

On the basis of facts revealed by Raju's RTI applications, village sarpanch Shailendra Rajyaguru and talati cum mantri Zala were suspended. "Bharwad is still drawing money from the company. Government has ordered to file criminal complaint against him and recover the money but nothing is happening,'' he said.

Since August 2009, DDO, Bhavnagar has issued nine notices to the taluka development officer of Talaja to initiate criminal action against Bharwad, the RTI information reveals.

Raju earns his daily bread by selling milk from his village in Bhavnagar. He, in fact, borrowed money to fight against Bharwad and is trying to bring the guilty to justice.

"These people have been trying to harass me through various ways since I started using RTI. I am the only one in my village to have spoken against them. But I will fight till the end as people should have faith in truth and not surrender to corrupt people," he added.

"Every week, I go to the DDO office to inquire about the action they have taken and return empty handed. I have been doing this since the scam surfaced. I will continue to do it until they initiate criminal action against the accused,'' he said.